110 pages • 3 hours read
Livia Bitton-JacksonI Have Lived a Thousand Years
Nonfiction | Autobiography / Memoir | YA | Published in 1997A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more. For select classroom titles, we also provide Teaching Guides with discussion and quiz questions to prompt student engagement.
ForewordChapter Summaries & Analyses
Foreword Summary
On April 30, 1995, Bitton-Jackson returns to Seeshaupt, Germany, the site of her liberation by American soldiers. Fifty years ago, the liberation left “an indelible mark” on the then-mayor’s nine-year-old son (11). The Allies had led prominent town residents to the train station to witness “a most horrifying picture of human suffering…thousands of disfigured corpses and maimed, dying skeletons” gathered on the platforms (11).
Eighteen survivors and three hundred locals attend the ceremony. The presiding mayor dedicates a monument. A pastor blesses it. Schoolchildren sing, dance, and plant trees. The audience is moved, but survivors remain feeling pained and burdened. Bitton-Jackson slips away from a post-ceremony celebration held in a local beer hall to return to the train station, where she remembers the victims. When Bitton-Jackson returns to the beer hall, an organizer asks her what the survivors’ message is.
Fourteen years old when the war ends, Bitton-Jackson believes “the evil of the Holocaust was defeated along with the forces that brought it about” (13). As the world has grown more technologically advanced, she worries people are becoming “more and more tolerant of terror and human suffering” (13). Though she still dreams of “a world free of human cruelty and violence,” she is afraid (14). She hopes telling the story of “past evils” will help prevent them in the future and that by hearing how “prejudice and intolerance” lead to suffering, people will “cultivate a commitment to fight them” (14).
Only a witness can tell the story. At the time of her writing, it is the third generation post-Holocaust. So far removed, it is too easy for the Holocaust’s horror to slip into history and seem less than real. She emphasizes the Holocaust is a message for the future, to prevent such atrocities from being repeated. Her stories are “of gas chambers, shootings, electrified fences, torture, scorching sun, mental abuse, and constant threat of death” but also of “faith, hope, triumph, and love” and “perseverance, loyalty, courage in the face of overwhelming odds, and of never giving up” (14).
Foreword Analysis
In the foreword, Bitton-Jackson returns to the German town where American soldiers liberated her fifty years earlier. A local committee has been formed to commemorate the Holocaust’s victims with a monument and reception. Bitton-Jackson juxtaposes the dancing, singing, and celebratory tone of the anniversary with her stark reminiscences of skeletal, blood soaked victims, many of whom died at the dawn of their liberation. Her personal commemoration is more intimate: She walks to the train station and replays the events of liberation day, remembering several victims by name, along with their specific injuries. The horrors she’s witnessed have stayed with her, and her responsibility as a survivor is to ensure what happened to the Jewish people is not forgotten. The survivor’s responsibility is a key theme she will return to in her memoir. She fulfills it both by remembering the victims and by preserving her Jewish identity.
The message she has for the future— “Never give up” (14)—is a recurring theme in I Have Lived a Thousand Lives. Bitton-Jackson’s fierce will to live drives her throughout her experiences in the concentration camps. Yet she understands that survival comes with responsibility.
