Harry Houdini a boarding house on East 79th Street. He was joined by the rest of the family once Rabbi Weiss found permanent housing. As a child, Ehrich Weiss took several jobs, making his public début as a 9-year-old trapeze artist, calling himself "Ehrich, the Prince of the Air". He was also a champion cross country runner in his youth. When Weiss became a professional magician he began calling himself "Harry Houdini", after the French magician Jean Eugène Robert-Houdin, after reading Robert-Houdin's autobiography in 1890. Weiss incorrectly believed that an "i" at the end of a name meant "like" in French. In
Elsa Ehrich operation, more than 79,000 prisoners were murdered at the main camp alone (59,000 of them Polish Jews) and between 95,000 and 130,000 people in the entire Majdanek system of subcamps. On 3 November 1943 some 18,000 Jews were killed at Majdanek during the largest single-day, single-camp massacre of the Holocaust, named Harvest Festival (totaling 43,000 with 2 subcamps). In February 1943, Ehrich became ill due to typhoid. On 5 April 1944, she was the Oberaufseherin in the Kraków-Płaszów concentration camp, and from June 1944 to April 1945 she was assigned to Neuengamme. After the war, in May 1945, she was