Storm Against the Innocents: Holocaust Memories and Other Stories

As a 15-year old carefree, normal Romanian Jew, Elly Gross, along with her family, was swept away -- first by a wave of Nazi-inspired anti-Jewish Hungarian pogroms, where she and her family were herded into a ghetto -- and then eventually cart off by cattle cars into a dark and frightful nightmare at Auschwitz-II/Birkenau. Upon arrival she was "selected to the right" and separated from her mother and brother, who (unbeknownst to her) were "sent to the left" and immediately to the gas chambers. From Auschwitz-II/Birkenau she was sent to a slave labor camp where she worked as a slave in a German fabrication plant. Allied soldiers eventually rescued her, as they closed in on the plant and the concentration camps. Back home in Romania, she found hostile strangers occupying the family home, which she quickly abandoned. She got married and she and her husband struggled for years to first reach the U.S. and then Israel. They eventually achieved both and now live successful lives with their daughter's family and their two grandchildren. This multi-media presentation "as book" is a fitting tribute and witness testimonial to the horrors incurred by Elly Gross-Berkovits and her family during the European holocaust. Mrs. Gross-Berkovits recalls, recounts, and then skillfully retells her experiences in the form of unembroidered narratives, songs, poems, musings, daydreams, nightmares, pictures, interviews, recollections, gestalts, and carefully repeated refrains that build up progressively to a crescendo of the horrors and then is resolved in the salvation of her rescue by American soldiers. However, as is usually true of most survivors of deep traumas, her story does not end in the bright sunlight of her rescue just before death from starvation. In the aftermath of her horrors, she struggled to survive psychologically. First learning the truth about what had happened to her mother and brother innocently and only accidentally through a public Nazi poster showing her mother holding her brother as they were being "ushered to the left" to their final trip and fate of death in the crematorium. Before she found her footing in her new life course, Elly too, as had many other survivors of the holocaust, had interrogated and then cursed the God that allowed it all to happen. For a book picked up out-of-the-blue at the Kiosk of the Holocaust Museum in Washington D.C., this was altogether, an inspiring story of what the human spirit can endure, how resilient it can be, and then how quickly it can rebound and recover to a state of normalcy. Four Stars