I Have Lived a Thousand Years: Growing Up in the Holocaust

Livia Bitton-Jackson

1997

The shaving of hair has a startling effect. The absence of hair transforms individual women into like bodies. Indistinguishable. Age melts away. Other personal differences melt away. Facial expressions disappear. In their place, a blank, senseless stare emerges on the thousand faces of one naked, unappealing body. In a matter of minutes even the…

Please login or register for free access to Posen Library
Register
Already have an account?
Engage with this Source

Creator Bio

Livia Bitton-Jackson

b. 1931

Livia Bitton-Jackson spent her early childhood in Šamorín, Czechoslovakia (now Somorja, Hungary), and survived Auschwitz during World War II. She immigrated to the United States in 1951, where she received a doctorate in Hebrew culture and Jewish history from New York University. She taught at Herbert H. Lehman College of the City University of New York and then immigrated to Israel. Bitton-Jackson writes about the Holocaust and other Jewish topics for adults and children.

You may also like

Memoirs

[ . . . ] Let us return to my maternal grandmother, Matte, of blessed memory. After she married off my late aunt Ulk, she was left penniless with the fatherless child my mother, may she live…
View Source

Simple Gimpl

Once, at night, after the seven days of mourning, while I lay on the sacks dozing, someone came to me, the Evil One himself, and said to me, “Gimpl, why are you sleeping?” “What should I be doing,” I…
View Source

Counting the Omer

Leiba recognized that Fraydel was in danger of disappearing down the well of her own thoughts. Fraydel was a secret keeping herself from the world. When she spoke, it was yet another way of keeping…
View Source