Elli's Coming Of Age In The Holocaust

ELLI- Coming of age in the Holocaust. Elli, her mother and all of the prisoners they meet all have to undergo numerous physical and psychological hardships when they are forced into the concentration camps. They are treated like cattle on their way to the slaughterhouse when they are taken from their houses to the ghetto, then to the synagogue, and eventually to Auschwitz, the death camp. The majority of suffering that was inflicted on Elli and her associates was physically inflicted, this was in the various forms of: beatings, rapes, murders, hard labor, and also subjective forms such as being exposed to diseases. The Germans also toyed with different ploys to beat the Jews, such as sterilization. This is demonstrated in Chapter Twenty
She has to witness people being shot, beaten, executed, demoralised, tortured, and tormented. Many times it is her who is the victim in these scenarios, such as in Chapter Twenty-seven when Elli tries to protect her mother from being beaten by the female guard. Elli loses all common sense at this point and lets her emotions take over her, and as her punishment she is savagely beaten by the guard as well. After witnessing so much death, pain, and suffering Elli would have been scarred for life. We see a classic example of this when we meet “Felicia the Blockalteste.” The German’s that killed her family tormented her and later she started to work for them. She was trying to get some blood redemption by being so harsh to the Jewish prisoners, even though she was Jewish herself. In the death camps, as well as much physical abuse, they were also the victims of constant moral abuse. For example, the male guards were always calling them “Blode Lumpen” which means “Idiotic Whores”, also “Blode Schweine” meaning “Idiotic Swine”, finally to “Blode Hunde” meaning “Idiotic Dogs”. They found the latter the easiest to cope with, although none of them ever did much for their confidence or self-esteem, which was probably the intended
First of all they are moved into the ghetto, the synagogue, and finally the camps. At the start families are forced to live in just two rooms, then the space of one room in the synagogue, and then the space of each other when they are travelling in the cattle-wagons. Later in the camps they are given space but this time it is not their space, because they are always being watched and observed. They are never given the chance to socialise (even though they do) and they are hardly even living a life- just a monotonous cycle of work, sleep, eat (If that’s what you want to call it)- they are turned into robots and not humans with emotions and