I Have Lived A Thousand Years: Growing Up In The Holocaust Review

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(More customer reviews)If you've read a lot of books about the Shoah, sometimes it seems like they all start to sound the same, only with different names and locations, but most good memorable books and memoirs on the subject have things setting them apart. This book, for example, is the only one I can remember having read so far where the subject (Elli) went through the camps with her mother; all of the other books I've read so far have been about siblings or friends or cousins sticking together in the camps. Sadly, there aren't more books about the mother-daughter relationship in the camps because most of the girls who went there with their mothers were immediately separated from them.
Besides having the little-represented angle of how a mother and daughter supported and loved one another in the camps (particularly after Elli's mother has her injury), there are also other things in here making it a unique story. The family in this book is also smaller than most of the other families in books about the Shoah, with only Elli, her brother, their parents, and their aunt, as opposed to large families with several sisters or brothers. There are also many details about everything that happened to them in the various places they were in, instead of just giving vague descriptions of what they went through or just focusing on how they stuck together instead of dwelling on the specifics of what they went through. It's definite that Elli and her mother had their chances for survival improved because they were selected for the transport to the factory in Augsburg, where they got better food and treatment as opposed to being forced to do the type of things they did in Plaszow. However, since there are so many horrific details and specifics given, this wouldn't be the type of book for a younger reader, but rather a mature teenager. And I love books written in the present tense; it draws you right in and makes the action even more compelling, wondering what's going to happen next. Reading or writing in the past tense just doesn't have that same deep emotional impact.

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