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.
Themes
Jewish Identity
Prior to her experience in the ghetto, Bitton-Jackson says she had not considered whether she was proud to be Jewish. Sharing the fate of the Jewish people in the ghetto changes this, and she feels “happy to share this peculiar condition of Jewishness” (41). Throughout the book, Britton-Jackson, her family, and her fellow Jewish inmates find solace in their faith and strive to observe its laws. After Markus’ business is shut down, he finds comfort reading the Talmud. The night before authorities transport him to a labor camp, he studies the Talmud with Bubi and tells him to remember these passages when he thinks of his father in the future. Britton-Jackson observes fasts for both Yom Kippur and Passover, despite the physical risks in her malnourished condition. Inmates recite Psalms in the camps. After Beth’s sisters are killed during an Allied bombing, Laura reminds her of the Hebrew date of her sisters’ deaths. Bubi rends his and his sister’s garments when they learn of their father’s death and reminds her they must observe Jewish law by sitting shiva.
Bitton-Jackson also explores the importance of preserving Jewish culture and community through times of persecution. In Chapter 11, when Jewish communities are deported from the ghetto and prepared for transport to Auschwitz, Bitton-Jackson refers to The Wandering Jews, Joseph Roth’s non-fiction book about the mid-1920s displacement of Jews and other refugees. The outcomes of World War I, the Russian Revolution, and the Treaty of Versailles led to European boundaries being redrawn. Many Jews fled from the Baltic States, Poland, and Russia to the west, resettling in cities and towns where they were unwelcome strangers.
Early in the book, Bitton-Jackson also draws connections between her experiences being deported and displaced with the condition of Jews in the Dark and Middle Ages. Depending on the regime in power, Jews could rise to prominence and be treated as equal to their Christian neighbors, or they could be accused of crimes, forced to convert, executed en masse, and driven out of communities and/or countries. Authorities in some nations required Jews to be distinguishable through dress, wearing either a badge (the “Jew badge” Britton-Jackson refers to in Chapter 4) or pointed hat (30). They are subject to the whims of those in power, who can be either benevolent or sinister. Bitton-Jackson experiences a 20th century repeat of this, which she expresses at the end of the book when she says her motherland “brutally expelled us from its womb” (188). For the surviving members of her Jewish community, the “future lies far away from our birthplace” (188).
Her experiences change her relationship to her poems as well. When the Hungarian guards burn the Jewish deportees’ documents, books, and religious texts, she feels dismay that only her poems survive because they are singular and small compared to the magnitude of what has been lost. After the war, she does not attempt to recover them. The Nazi machine decimated Jewish communities across Europe. To invest importance in her poems would, she believes, be an act of “self-gratification” that would “violate the agony of Auschwitz” (191).
The Survivor’s Responsibility
In the foreword, Bitton-Jackson shares the message of the Holocaust for future generations: never to forget the suffering that “prejudice and intolerance” caused, and to cultivate commitment to fighting them (14). Future generations cannot afford to become complacent. As a survivor, Bitton-Jackson’s responsibility is to remember the victims and tell their stories. Her memoir does that both by sharing her own experience, as a Holocaust victim, and by being a voice for the victims who did not survive. She immortalizes the anonymous girl who disappeared during the riot on Bitton-Jackson’s first night at Auschwitz and whose shriek survivors carry “in our souls” (83). She narrates in painstaking detail the aerial attacks on the train in the final days of the war, naming the victims who died so close to liberation and describing their specific injuries and final moments.
Hitler’s Nazi machine sought to annihilate the Jewish population, a goal expressed in his book Mein Kampfwell before World War II and reiterated in his speeches and rallies before and during the war. Bitton-Jackson shows how his regime created an impossible paradox, turning Jews against themselves and making survival complicit in destruction. The former is exemplified through the forced labor camps, when Jews were compelled to aid the war effort against the Allies who liberated them. Similarly, Bitton-Jackson and her fellow inmates are enlisted to work in factories that produce the machinery of war. Her instinct is to take pride in the difficult and complex work she does, but it is a trap because she is “toiling against” herself and the Jewish people (138). Bitton-Jackson feels complicit in “Nazi crimes” when she realizes the dress that restores her to normal girlhood and the coat that keeps her warm mean she has benefitted “from pillage and perhaps even murder” (143). She asks herself how she dares wear them, saying, “Leah Kohn, forgive me” (143).
The Loss of Innocence
Before the war, Bitton-Jackson is like any young girl: She has dreams and aspirations for the future. She takes pride in her accomplishments and pleasure in her personal possessions and creations. When the Friedmanns receive the order that they must deliver their vehicles to police, Bitton-Jackson cannot comprehend why she must give up her beloved Schwinn bicycle, her parents’ birthday gift to her, without explanation. When the authorities require ghetto residents to surrender their personal documents, books, and photos, Bitton-Jackson sees an opportunity to save them and takes it. She cannot bear to give them up. By the end of the war, she—and the Jewish people—have lost so much that her bicycle and poems seem like trifles. She cannot bear that her poems survived when so much else was lost.
Bitton-Jackson’s blond hair and blue eyes appeal to Mengele, and this saves her from the fate of the children who arrived at Auschwitz in her transport. If not for her Aryan features, her fate would have mirrored theirs, but she is thrust into the adult world with women sixteen and older. Guards force her to undress in public, in the presence of male guards. She is afraid, but when she hears a gunshot, she understands the stakes: comply or be executed. She is shocked that the only source of water in camp is a muddy puddle but, after days without water, is so thirsty that she must drink it to survive. She balks at eating worm-infested soup, though her mother, once so finicky about food, eats it and snaps at Bitton-Jackson to do the same.
Over time, she grows insensitive to undressing in public, because it is her soul that is “naked, exposed, violated” (89). This exemplifies that what Bitton-Jackson loses during the war are her illusions about the world. Laura is injured because adults ignore Bitton-Jackson’s warnings about a cracked plank on the bunk above theirs. The bunk crashes down onto Laura, partially paralyzing her. Bitton-Jackson is forced to take on her mother’s role, urging her through her apathy and risking her own life to ensure her mother is saved. Paradoxically, she is a child who needs her mother and does not believe she can survive without her, but she must take on her mother’s role to save her. Later in the book, as Bitton-Jackson anticipates the end of the war and liberation, she tells Bubi her plan to travel through Germany and find their family members. Bubi gently explains that there will be no one to find, telling her about his friend’s experience in the Sonderkommando. Workers removed bodies from the gas chambers, stripped their bodies of all valuables, and put them in the ovens. Bitton-Jackson realizes she will be released into a world “in which children were gassed with their mothers”: “My God. My God. I have just been robbed of my freedom” (161). There can be no return to her pre-war illusions of “loll[ing] in the world’s embrace” (16).
