I Have Lived a Thousand Years is a story of cruelty and suffering, but at the same time a story of hope, faith, perseverance and love. Her strong will and faith allow Elli to manage and adjust somehow, but what Elli doesn't know is that this is only the beginning and the worst is yet to come.Ī remarkable memoir. Then she and her family are forced to leave their house behind to move into a crowded ghetto, where privacy becomes a luxury of the past and food becomes a scarcity. First Elli can no longer attend school, have possessions, or talk to her neighbors. A life in which Elli could lie and daydream for hours that she was a beautiful and elegant celebrated poet.īut these adolescent daydreams quickly darken in March 1944, when the Nazis invade Hungary.

It wasn't long ago that Elli led a normal life a life rich and full that included family, friends, school, and thoughts about boys. And I was there.' This is a memorable addition to the searing accounts of Holocaust survivors.So wonders thirteen-year-old- Elli Friedmann, just one of the many innocent Holocaust victims, as she fights for her life in a concentration camp. She says, 'Only one who was there can tell the tale. In a foreword, the author expresses concern that, with the passing of time and generations, the Holocaust and its lessons may become depersonalized history.

Fourteen years old.' Through the unfathomable darkness of these events, Elli's determination to keep her mother alive and the rare moments of help and kindness offered by a few people at the risk of their own lives shine. She is horrified when Elli responds, 'Sixty? I am fourteen. A German woman in the train station where they are unloaded comments on how difficult it all must have been for an elderly person, believing Elli to be around sixty years old. When American soldiers finally find them, they are almost unrecognizable as human beings. As Allied troops approach, they are loaded with other prisoners onto a train hundreds of boxcars long with one hundred people to a car and no food or water, they begin an incomprehensible death journey. Near the end of the war, Elli and her mother are sent on to Dachau, where they are miraculously reunited across a barbed-wire fence with Elli's brother, a skeletal, robot-like apparition. With the insight of a poet, Elli conjures up the details of the horrors she and her family experience in a series of ghettos and forced labor camps, including the extermination camp of Auschwitz.

In 1944, when the Germans occupy Hungary, life for thirteen-year-old Elli Friedmann (the author's birth name) begins a descent into the worst nightmares of the Holocaust.

I have lived a thousand years author