I Have Lived a Thousand Years

Before the war, Bitton-Jackson’s dream is to become a poet. She was “discovered” at age eight and performed her poems at public functions. Her poems “open the world’s heart to me, and I loll in the world’s embrace” (15). She looks forward to studying in Budapest, as her brother is doing at the memoir’s outset, and sees life as “an exciting mystery, a sweet secret enchantment” (15). She is thirteen when her family is deported first to a ghetto and eventually to concentration and labor camps at Auschwitz, Plaszow, and Dachau. At war’s end, a German civilian mistakes Bitton-Jackson for an elderly woman, prompting her to say that she is 14 but has lived “a thousand lives” (179).

She describes herself as tall, blond-haired, and with blue-green eyes—all Aryan physical ideals. She believes her arms and legs are too long, and she is clumsy and talks back to her mother, qualities she fears her mother finds unattractive in her. Ultimately, these qualities help enable her survival. Her physical characteristics appeal to Hungarian and later Nazi guards, including the notorious Dr. Mengele, who violates his own system to save her life. Her fierce will to live and to ensure her mother lives compel her to sneak her mother out of the camp infirmary, join a transport bound for a German factory, and fight against starvation and despair.