"I have lived a thousand years"

This message is based on a presentation by Livia Bitton-Jackson, retired
Professor of Judaic Studies at CCNY, who is one of our favorite lecturers
and in this case was talking about her experiences during the Holocaust.
She described sections of her three books, that cover her early years in the
Holocaust, her subsequent experiences in DP camps and her eventual journey
to freedom in the USA. The title of her first book was "Elli: a Holocaust
childhood," which was her given name, which was later reprinted with the
evocative title: "I have lived a thousand years."
She grew up in a small village only a short distance from Bratislava, that is
now the capital of Slovakia. The area was mixed with Slovaks, Hungarians and
Germans as well as Jews. During the war when she was 12 years old her family
was transferred to a small Ghetto in a nearby village, and they lived there
for several months. Her father got a notice to report for transportation the
following morning since he was 45, which was the cutoff age. That night he
sat with her brother and read Torah, and asked his son to remember their study
together. She could not overcome her emotion to speak with him, but asked her
mother to wake her the following morning at 4.30 am before he was due to
leave. But, her mother did not wake her, and suddenly she awoke and saw that
everybody was gone and she ran in her nightdress down to the entrance of the
Ghetto, and she saw the back of her father disappearing into the distance.
She was devastated and that was the last time she saw him.
Several months later she, her mother, brother and aunt were also transported
to a transit camp and from there to Auschwitz. At Auschwitz, of course, they
knew nothing about the selection process. As they were marching along her
friends and their families were sent to the left. This included mostly older
people and children. They thought that this would be going to a settlement
where they would not have to work, while the people going to the right were
the able-bodied men and women. They were told that all those between 16-45
should go to the right, but no-one checked the actual age, an SS officer made
the final selection. Since at this time she was 13 and her mother 48, they
followed their friends to the left. At this point it is necessary to digress
because Livia/Elli, unlike the rest of her family, is a natural blonde, and
because her mother did not like her hair (it was so "gentile") she had it tied
in braids, and she was also tall for her age. Suddenly an SS officer, who she
later learned was Mengele, pointed at her and asked "Are you German?", she
replied "No, I am a Jew." Whereupon he grabbed her arm and moved her into
the right column. He said to her "Such beautiful hair, how old are you?" She
replied truthfully "13." Then he said, "No, you are 16, if anyone asks you,
say that you are 16." Seeing her daughter being removed by an SS officer, her
mother began to scream. He asked her "Is that your mother?" and when she
replied "yes," he waved to her mother to join her in the right column and she
took her son with her. Whereupon her aunt began to scream to join them, but
he waved her away and a soldier came and knocked her to the ground and she
was forced to continue in the left column. Later on they learnt that that was
the column to the gas chambers.
She skipped her year in Auschwitz, but then told a story from the end of the
war in 1945, when the Germans put all the camp inmates into trains and
transported them Eastwards. They were in the train for 4 days without food
and water. Finally the train stopped and Red Cross representatives began
giving them soup through a small aperture in the side of the wagon. As they
were collecting their soup suddenly fierce shooting by automatic weapons was
directed at the train. Bullets pierced the wooden sides and people were cut
down. Her brother who was just about to collect his soup was shot in the head
and arm, but miraculously the bullet was tangential and did not pierce his
skull. Another friend of hers had her leg partially shot off, and Livia held
it in place for hours, but the girl died. They had no idea why the shooting
occurred, but the train left and they were still locked in for a further two
days, without food or water lying in the blood with bodies all around. On the
seventh day the train stopped and the door was opened at a station and an
American officer stepped in. He asked in English "who are you?" Then he asked
again in halting German, and someone answered, "we are women." So he asked
again "where are you from?" and someone answered "we are Jews." Then he said,
"So am I a Jew," and he had them placed on stretchers, and taken out onto the
ground. Half of the people in the carriage were dead, and many near death.
After they had been cleaned up and given something to eat, he had about 30
leading members of the nearby town brought up to see the carnage, and he made
a speech to them saying, "Look, this is what your people have done." But they
said, of course, "we really knew nothing about it." One woman came over to
Livia and asked her if she had had to work, and she replied "yes, of course,
12 hours a day without food," to which the woman said it must have been
difficult at your age." and she asked "how old do you think I am?" and the
woman replied "60 or 65." At the time she was 14!
From her second book, "Bridges of Hope," she related a story about how she
became the sole madricha (leader) of a group of 16 young girls in a Jewish
(Agudah) camp up in the Tatra mountains in 1947. On Partisan Day, when the
local Slovaks were celebrating the victory against Germany, a rumor swept the
local town that there were Jews up in the mountains. So the celebrants came
with pitchforks and clubs in order to kill them. Fortunately they were warned
in time and escaped down the other side of the mountain and managed to catch
a train back to Bratislava. When they got there the organizers of the camp
were angry with her for leaving early and thought that she had been unable to
control the girls, but half a day later a group of boys who had been in a camp
in a nearby valley arrived back with the same story, and they had nearly been
caught by the mob. So much for the attitudes of the Slovaks.
Finally, in her third book "Hullo, America," she describes how after she
arrived in the US, she was mistreated by American Jews, because the rumor had
got around that Jewish women who survived the Holocaust must have been
whores, and someone who tried to set her up with a young man told her "women
like you should not expect too much." When she was teaching in a yeshiva
school a child asked her what was the number on her arm, and she explained that
the Germans had used the number to count and keep check of the Jews. A few
days later she was called into the office of the Principal and told off for
telling horror stories about the camps to the children. She replied that she
had done no such thing, she had just told one child what the number was for,
and he said "you should have told him it was you telephone number." How could
American Jews be so insensitive to the terrible suffering that survivors of
the Holocaust had been through. But things were different then, people were
reluctant to tell their stories because they weren't believed, there were no
courses or museums about the Holocaust as we have now, and fortunately in that
respect things have improved. But, in relation to the future safety of the
Jewish people, the resurgence of anti-Semitism and the madness of the
Islamists in Palestine, Iran and around the world, nothing much seems to have
changed.