I Have Lived a Thousand Years Read online

  ALSO BY LIVIA BITTON-JACKSON:

  Sometime during the fourth night,

  the train comes to a halt. We are awakened by the awful clatter of sliding doors being thrown open and cold air rushing into the wagon.

  “’Raus! Alles ’raus!”

  Rough voices. A figure clad in a striped uniform. Standing in the open doorway, illuminated from behind by an eerie diffused light, the figure looks like a creature from another planet.

  “Schnell! ’Raus! Alles ’raus!”

  Two or three other such figures leap into the wagon and begin shoving the drowsy men, women, and children out into the cold night. A huge sign catches my eye: AUSCHWITZ.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  I wish to express my gratitude to Toni Mendez and Jeanette Smith. Their expert guidance and personal warmth transcended the confines of their function as literary agents and served as a continuous source of inspiration.

  My thanks to my editor Stephanie Owens Lurie, and her editorial team, for handling the material for this book with sensitivity and insight and thoughtfulness.

  First paperback edition March 1999

  Copyright © 1997 by Livia E. Bitton-Jackson

  Simon Pulse

  An imprint of Simon & Schuster Children’s Publishing Division

  1230 Avenue of the Americas

  New York, NY 10020

  www.SimonandSchuster.com

  All rights reserved, including the right of

  reproduction in whole or in part in any form.

  Also available in a Simon & Schuster Books for Young Readers hardcover edition.

  The text for this book was set in Adobe Garamond.

  Printed and bound in the United States of America

  20 19 18 17 16

  The Library of Congress has cataloged the hardcover edition as follows:

  Jackson, Livia Bitton

  I have lived a thousand years: growing up in the Holocaust/

  by Livia E. Bitton-Jackson

  ISBN 0-689-81022-9 (hc.)

  1. Jews—Persecutions—Hungary—Juvenile literature. 2. Holocaust, Jewish

  (1939-1945)—Hungary—Personal narratives—Juvenile literature.

  3. Jackson, Livia Bitton—Juvenile literature. 4. Auschwitz (Poland: concentration camp).

  5. Hungary—Ethnic relations—Juvenile literature. I. Title.

  DS135.H93J33 1997 940.53’18—dc20 96-19971

  ISBN 0-689-82395-9 (Pulse pbk.)

  eISBN-13: 9-781-4391-0661-7

  Dedicated to the children in Israel who, unsung and unacclaimed, risk their lives every day just by traveling to school on the roads of Judea, Samaria, and Gaza, for the sake of a secure peace in Israel—the only guarantee that a Holocaust will never happen again.

  CONTENTS

  FOREWORD

  Chapter 1: The City of My Dreams

  Chapter 2: “Hey, Jew Girl, Jew Girl…”

  Chapter 3: The Tale of the Yellow Bicycle

  Chapter 4: The Tale of the Yellow Star

  Chapter 5: Farewell, Old Mr. Stern

  Chapter 6: The Ghetto

  Chapter 7: A Miracle

  Chapter 8: Daddy, How Could You Leave Me?

  Chapter 9: Can I Keep My Poems Please?

  Chapter 10: Aunt Serena

  Chapter 11: Oh, God, I Don’t Want to Die!

  Chapter 12: Auschwitz

  Chapter 13: Arbeit Macht Frei

  Chapter 14: Born in the Showers

  Chapter 15: The Riot

  Chapter 16: Teen Vanity

  Chapter 17: The Dawn of New Hope

  Chapter 18: “Mommy, There’s a Worm in Your Soup!”

  Chapter 19: Alien Heroes

  Chapter 20: The Uprising

  Chapter 21: Hitler is Not Dead

  Chapter 22: Tattoo

  Chapter 23: The Broken Bed

  Chapter 24: Is it True About the Smoke?

  Chapter 25: The Selection

  Chapter 26: The Transport

  Chapter 27: A Handkerchief

  Chapter 28: This Must Be Heaven

  Chapter 29: Herr Zerkübel

  Chapter 30: Leah Kohn, Forgive Me …

  Chapter 31: The Bowl of Soup

  Chapter 32: The Bird of Gold

  Chapter 33: An Echo in the Fog

  Chapter 34: To Face the World

  Chapter 35: The Lost Game

  Chapter 36: Its an American Plane!

  Chapter 37: Freedom, at Last

  Chapter 38: Homecoming

  Chapter 39: “America, Will You Be My Home?”

  Chapter 40: The Statue of Liberty

  APPENDIX A

  APPENDIX B

  GLOSSARY OF TERMS

  FOREWORD

  On April 30, 1995, I took an El-Al flight from Tel Aviv to Munich. From the terminal I took the S-Bahn to Tutzing, and from there I was driven to Seeshaupt, a small Bavarian resort. This was not an easy journey to take, and I took it after some weeks of deliberation. I was going back to Germany—fifty years later.

  It was in Seeshaupt on this very day fifty years ago that the American army had liberated me, along with my brother and my mother and thousands of other skeletal prisoners. Some leading citizens of Seeshaupt had decided to commemorate the event. They formed a committee and dispatched letters of invitation to possible survivors all over the world. One such letter reached me in my New York home, and here I was, making a detour, on a Tel Aviv-New York flight, to Seeshaupt.

  The former mayor’s son, then a nine-year-old boy, remembered how the victorious Allies had led his father and his family and all other members of the local elite to the Seeshaupt train station, where they witnessed a most horrifying picture of human suffering. The sight of thousands of disfigured corpses and maimed, dying skeletons left an indelible mark on his awareness.

  Now he is a doctor in Seeshaupt, and when his patients, members of the post-war generation, refused to believe his account of what he saw, he decided to bring back survivors of that ghastly liberation as living proof that the unbelievable did happen.

  The sky was overcast and a light drizzle veiled my view as my host, Dr. Peter Westebbe, one of the local organizers of the commemoration, drove me through the streets of Seeshaupt to the dedication ceremony.

  Eighteen survivors had arrived for the ceremony from all over the world. Some were from the United States, some from South America, some from Israel, and one from Greece. The townspeople were there—about three hundred, mostly young. The present mayor of the town officiated at the dedication of a monument to those who had died and those who had survived to be liberated here—over two thousand five hundred, according to records. Young children from the local school planted trees, danced and sang, and the pastor of the local church blessed the monument. The local audience was visibly moved.

  We, the eighteen survivors who had returned to Seeshaupt, men and women in their sixties and seventies, briefly reminisced about that liberation day fifty years ago, and as we looked into each other’s eyes, we saw that the years had not faded the pain of memories. The pain was intact. And so was the sense of overwhelming burden.

  A celebration followed the dedication ceremony. Several hundred guests filled the local beer hall, where tables were set up for a festive meal and musical entertainment by the local band.

  Quietly I slipped out of the hall, and slowly made my way to the train station. Late Sunday afternoon stillness enveloped the small town. I walked along the tracks to the colorless, deserted, memorable platform. No trains. No passengers anywhere. Total emptiness. Only an incessant, light drizzle.

  But for me the platform was full. It was brimming with a disarray of sights, hundreds upon hundreds, a bleeding carpet of dead and dying
. I saw Greco, the fifteen-year-old Greek boy with enormous, feverish eyes, begging for water. I saw Lilli, the sixteen-year-old brunette with her leg blown off, sitting in a pool of blood. I heard Martha, blinded in both eyes, calling to her mother. And Beth, and Irene … ageless faces, skeletal limbs filled the gray, translucent mist.

  “There are no more trains today.” I turned around, startled. The woman with the unmistakably Bavarian accent had a pleasant, nondescript face. “There are no more trains today from this station.”

  “Thank you. I’m not waiting for a train.”

  She waited, wondering; then, with a hint of suspicion lingering in her manner, she reluctantly walked on.

  But the moment was gone. The half-century-old visions were no longer retrievable onto the screen of my present reality. A cold, opaque haze enveloped the tracks; the platform and the grim two-story station house were empty.

  I walked back to the beer hall, where the celebration was winding down. “What message do you have for us?” one of the committee members asked me. “What lessons?”

  I pondered the question. I was fourteen when the war ended, and believed that the evil of the Holocaust was defeated along with the forces that brought it about. Six years later a new life began for me in the New World. A new life, free of threat. A new world, full of hope.

  In America I grew from traumatized teen to grandmotherhood. And as the world grew more and more advanced technologically, it seemed to grow more and more tolerant of terror and human suffering.

  My fears have returned. And yet my hope, my dream, of a world free of human cruelty and violence has not vanished.

  My hope is that learning about past evils will help us to avoid them in the future. My hope is that learning what horrors can result from prejudice and intolerance, we can cultivate a commitment to fight prejudice and intolerance.

  It is for this reason that I wrote my recollections of the horror. Only one who was there can truly tell the tale. And I was there.

  For you, the third generation, the Holocaust has slipped into the realm of history, or legend. Or, into the realm of sensational subjects on the silver screen. Reading my personal account I believe you will feel—you will know—that the Holocaust was neither a legend nor Hollywood fiction but a lesson for the future. A lesson to help future generations prevent the causes of the twentieth-century catastrophe from being transmitted into the twenty-first.

  My stories are of gas chambers, shootings, electrified fences, torture, scorching sun, mental abuse, and constant threat of death.

  But they are also stories of faith, hope, triumph, and love. They are stories of perseverance, loyalty, courage in the face of overwhelming odds, and of never giving up.

  My story is my message: Never give up.

  THE CITY OF MY DREAMS

  SOMORJA, SUMMER 1943-MARCH 1944

  I dream of enrolling in the prep school in Budapest, the capital city. Budapest is a big, beautiful metropolis with wide streets and tall buildings and yellow streetcars whizzing around corners. All the streets of Budapest are paved. In our town we have only one paved street, the main street. And it is not wide. We have neither tall buildings, nor streetcars, only horse-drawn carts and two automobiles. One of them belongs to my friend’s father.

  Ours is a small farming town at the edge of the Carpathian foothills. The lovely hills loom in a blue haze toward the west. To the south, the Danube, the cool, rapid river, pulsates with the promise of life. How I love to swim in its clear blue, surging ripples, and lie in the shade of the little forest hugging its banks.

  We children splash all summer in the Danube. Families picnic in the grass, the local soccer team has its practice field nearby, and the swimming team trains for its annual meet. Even the army camp empties its sweaty contents once a day, hundreds of recruits, into the cool, cleansing waters of the Danube.

  When the sun moves beyond the hills and the little forest casts a long shadow over the pasture, herds of cattle and sheep arrive at the Danube. The shepherds drive first the sheep, then the horses and cows into the water, cursing ever louder, and drive us children out. The mosquitoes arrive, too, with the dusk, and it is time to go home.

  The walk through the open pasture is pleasant and cool, but the town is hot and dusty when we reach home. The sheep arrive before us and it is they who churn up the dust. But soon the dust settles, and so does the night. A dark, velvety blanket of silence wraps the town snugly against the intrusion of the outside world. The stars, one by one, light up the dirt roads and the single paved street of the town. By nine o’clock all is quiet. Here and there one hears the bark of a restless dog. Soon the dog, too, will be asleep.

  Then the orchestra of insects begins its overture, its harmony disrupted by the discordant croaking of a frog, an inhabitant of a small swamp just beyond the last houses of our street.

  I love to lie and daydream for hours after dusk. Life is an exciting mystery, a sweet secret enchantment. In my daydreams I am a celebrated poet, beautiful, elegant, and very talented. My poems open the world’s heart to me, and I loll in the world’s embrace.

  I yearn for my mother’s embrace. When, on Sabbath mornings, my friend Bonnie and I join our mothers in the synagogue, Mrs. Adler takes Bonnie in her arms and calls her meine Schönheit, my beauty, in German. Mrs. Adler always says German endearments to Bonnie. Mommy only greets me with a hello and a smile, no hug and no words of endearment.

  “That’s all nonsense,” Mommy would respond to my complaint. “Do you want me to call you meine Schönheit? Bonnie’s mother makes a fool of herself. Why, everyone can see how plain looking her daughter is!”

  What does it matter whether Bonnie is pretty? I care only that Bonnie’s mother thinks she is beautiful. And what about the hug?

  “I don’t believe in cuddling,” Mommy explains with a smile. “Life is tough, and cuddling makes you soft. How will you face life’s difficulties if I keep cuddling you? You’re too sensitive as it is. If I would take you in my lap, you’d never want to get off…. You’d become as soft as butter, unable to stand up to life’s challenges.”

  Mommy’s explanations are unconvincing. I believe she does not hug me because she does not think I am huggable. I believe she does not call me beautiful because she does not think I am pretty. I am too tall and ungainly. My arms and legs are too long, and I keep upsetting things. When I carry a tray of drinks, Mommy shouts at me not to walk so clumsily. That’s the reason why everything spills. “Look at Eva. She’s a year younger than you, yet how deftly she carries a tray.” Or “I was in your friend Julie’s house yesterday. You should see how skillfully she helped her mother serve!” Or “See your brother Bubi? He’s a boy, and see how much more he helps out, and how much better he is around the kitchen?”

  This I know is the secret of my mother’s disapproval: my brother. He is the favorite. He is good. He never answers back, my mother says. And never asks “Why do I have to?” whenever she tells him to do this or that. Why can’t I be like him?

  Why can’t I look like him? My brother is good looking, and I am not. I am far from being pretty. He has curly hair, and I don’t. My hair is straight. There is not even an inclination of a wave. “What a shame!” I hear my mother say to a neighbor. “Who needs such good looks in a boy? I mixed these two up. My son should’ve been the girl. And my daughter, her looks would be fine for a boy.”

  And there is another thing. My brother Bubi looks like my mother’s four brothers. Mommy refers to them as “my-beautiful-brothers.” The three words as one. Bubi talks like them, he walks like them, and he acts like them. And he is brilliant like they are.

  I am like my father’s family. They are okay, but they are less dazzling. They are made of much plainer fabric.

  Bubi has ability, and I only have ambition. You see, I get good grades because I like to study, but my brother gets good grades without ever opening a book. Mommy is very proud of him. Daddy praises me for my ambition. He says ambition is sometimes more important than ability. Y
ou can sometimes accomplish more with ambition than ability.

  I wonder: Does the fact that I have ambition mean that I have no natural ability? Or talent? How will I ever become a celebrated poet without talent? Can I get there by ambition alone?

  “Look, Elli,” Mommy explains, “you have a pretty smile, and when you smile, your face becomes quite pretty. Whenever you meet people, say hello with a smile. And people will take you for a pretty girl.”

  I listen, and smile whenever I can.

  The summer passes and my brother Bubi leaves for Budapest. He is a student at the Jewish Teachers’ Seminary there, and how I hope and pray that my dream of joining him next year will come true.

  Dark, rainy days of autumn freeze into glistening white winter. The gloom of the Hungarian occupation, the slow drag of the war, and increasing food shortages thicken the winter chill. Hitler’s shrill radio broadcasts, especially one of his oft-repeated promises, “We will play football with Jewish heads,” strike panic in my heart. Daddy reassures me. “Don’t worry, little Elli. It’s only a manner of speaking. Don’t take it literally, God forbid.” Sharp lines of pain etch his square, handsome face as he lets his hand rest on my shoulder. “Don’t even think about these things, Ellike. Just forget you ever heard them.”

  But I cannot put the vision out of my mind. Bloody heads rolling on the local soccer field become a recurring nightmare.

  As the winter wears on, my father’s erect posture begins to stoop somewhat. His silences become longer and the shadows under his cheekbones deeper. Ever since the Hungarian occupation three years ago, when our business was confiscated, Daddy has become more and more distant. His famous wit has become caustic; his laughter, a rare treat. He seems to derive pleasure only from study, and the endless winter evenings find him poring over huge folios of the Talmud.