I Am Ella

Ella Blumenthal’s story of surviving the Holocaust and building a new life in South Africa could easily be mistaken for fiction. From the ashes of the Warsaw Ghetto uprising to the fires of Majdanek, Bergen-Belsen and Auschwitz; from the abandon of post-war Poland to the refuge of Paris, Palestine and getting married and moving to Johannesburg and eventually Cape Town; from stateless refugee to displaced immigrant, Ella’s 101 years of life have been nothing short of herculean. Together with her niece Roma Rothstein, five years her junior, Ella survived three concentration camps before being liberated by the British Army in 1945. They made their way across Europe to join their last surviving family member in Palestine where Ella met the South African man she would marry after just thirteen days. She followed Isaac Blumenthal to the tip of Africa where they settled in Brakpan, outside Johannesburg where Ella and her husband built a business and raised their four children.

With an academic background in English and Psychology, and a brief but formative stint in managing consulting, JOANNE JOWELL began writing professionally at age 28. Her first book, Managing the Quarterlife Crisis: Facing life’s choices in your 20s and 30s, was published in 2003. Over the course of a Masters degree in Creative Writing and numerous subsequent books, Joanne has created a signature style of creative non-fiction which examines the multiple voices that collide in any single life story, and sets the author as character too, voicing the reader’s thoughts and exploring our own access points to a story which, at first glance, may seem entirely different to our own. In this way, Joanne explores our shared humanity and celebrates the extraordinary lives of ordinary people. Joanne’s bestselling biographies include On the Other Side of Shame: An Extraordinary Account of Adoption and Reunion and Zephany: Two mothers, one daughter. An astonishing true story. She lives in Cape Town, South Africa with her husband and three children. I am Ella is her seventh book.

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