It is our souls that are naked, exposed, violated.”īitton-Jackon’s memoir is a relentless barrage of tragic images and scenes, such as the first night in the barracks at Auschwitz when a young girl loses her wits and begins to scream, starting a panic. We feel no nakedness without our prison uniforms as we felt no clothedness in them. The stares of the SS guards to longer matter. I spit it out and begin to vomit.”īut with time, they slowly acclimatize in their grim struggle for survival: It has grains of sand in it, just like the bread, and something else – pieces of glass … and wood … and cloth. The edge of the bowl is rusty and cracked and uneven with dried-on smut. The dark mush smells and looks repulsive. You tilt the bowl until the mass slides to the edge, then gulp. It is a dark green, thick mass in a battered washbowl crusted with dirt. “When the bowl of food is handed to me, I am unable take a gulp. She takes another bite, swallows it, and promptly throws up.” Mommy takes a bite and tears spring into her eyes.
‘This is bread? It looks like a cake of mud.
“Aunt Celia reaches into her bosom and takes out a lump of black substance tied on a string around her neck. ‘To drink from this? It’s putrefied! It’s filthy! It stinks!’ I look at my cousins with horror. “Suri and Hindi lead us to a puddle, a large hollow in the ground filled with murky water. Starving and parched after the interminable journey by cattle-car, Elli and her mother are at first repulsed by the water and food offered to them: The strange creatures we saw as we entered the camp, the shaven, gray-cloaked bunch who ran to the barbed-wire fence to stare at us, we are them!” “As we emerge from the other end of the building and line up quickly in rows of five, shivering wet in shapeless gray sacks, with heads clean shaven, the idea strikes me. Only a short time later, she realizes the truth behind those strange faces crowding at the wire: This is probably an asylum for the mentally ill.” “Clusters of people linger on both sides of the road, beyond the fence,” she writes of her arrival in Auschwitz. “I have lived a thousand years” is the powerfully written account of how 13 year old Livia Bitton-Jackon (born Elli Friedman) was rounded up with her family and community from her home in Slovakia and transported from ghetto to ghetto, concentration camp to work camp, losing her father and many of her family members, managing to endure through the last fourteen months of the war until liberation.Īsked “What message do you have for us?” at a 1995 commemoration event in the German town of Seeshaupt where she was liberated, she decides to write her memoir as her answer, taking the reader on the horrific descent into madness and evil.
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