I Have Lived A Thousand Years Pdf Download
Also BY LIVIA BITTON-JACKSON:
One-time during the fourth dark,
the railroad train comes to a halt. We are awakened by the awful clatter of sliding doors being thrown open and cold air rushing into the wagon.
"'Raus! Alles 'raus!"
Rough voices. A figure clad in a striped uniform. Standing in the open doorway, illuminated from behind by an eerie diffused light, the figure looks like a animate being from another planet.
"Schnell! 'Raus! Alles 'raus!"
2 or three other such figures leap into the wagon and begin shoving the drowsy men, women, and children out into the cold dark. A huge sign catches my eye: AUSCHWITZ.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I wish to express my gratitude to Toni Mendez and Jeanette Smith. Their expert guidance and personal warmth transcended the confines of their function as literary agents and served equally a continuous source of inspiration.
My thanks to my editor Stephanie Owens Lurie, and her editorial team, for handling the textile for this book with sensitivity and insight and thoughtfulness.
Starting time paperback edition March 1999
Copyright © 1997 by Livia Eastward. Bitton-Jackson
Simon Pulse
An banner of Simon & Schuster Children's Publishing Partitioning
1230 Avenue of the Americas
New York, NY 10020
www.SimonandSchuster.com
All rights reserved, including the right of
reproduction in whole or in role in any form.
Also available in a Simon & Schuster Books for Young Readers hardcover edition.
The text for this book was set in Adobe Garamond.
Printed and bound in the Us of America
20 19 xviii 17 16
The Library of Congress has cataloged the hardcover edition every bit follows:
Jackson, Livia Bitton
I have lived a k years: growing up in the Holocaust/
by Livia East. Bitton-Jackson
ISBN 0-689-81022-9 (hc.)
1. Jews—Persecutions—Hungary—Juvenile literature. two. Holocaust, Jewish
(1939-1945)—Hungary—Personal narratives—Juvenile literature.
3. Jackson, Livia Bitton—Juvenile literature. 4. Auschwitz (Poland: concentration camp).
v. Hungary—Ethnic relations—Juvenile literature. I. Championship.
DS135.H93J33 1997 940.53'18—dc20 96-19971
ISBN 0-689-82395-9 (Pulse pbk.)
eISBN-thirteen: 9-781-4391-0661-7
Dedicated to the children in Israel who, unsung and unacclaimed, risk their lives every day but by traveling to school on the roads of Judea, Samaria, and Gaza, for the sake of a secure peace in State of israel—the only guarantee that a Holocaust will never happen again.
CONTENTS
FOREWORD
Affiliate one: The City of My Dreams
Chapter 2: "Hey, Jew Girl, Jew Girl…"
Chapter 3: The Tale of the Yellow Bicycle
Affiliate 4: The Tale of the Yellow Star
Chapter v: Farewell, Old Mr. Stern
Affiliate vi: The Ghetto
Chapter 7: A Miracle
Chapter 8: Daddy, How Could You Get out Me?
Chapter 9: Can I Keep My Poems Please?
Chapter 10: Aunt Serena
Chapter 11: Oh, God, I Don't Want to Die!
Chapter 12: Auschwitz
Chapter thirteen: Arbeit Macht Frei
Affiliate xiv: Built-in in the Showers
Chapter xv: The Riot
Affiliate xvi: Teen Vanity
Chapter 17: The Dawn of New Hope
Chapter 18: "Mommy, At that place's a Worm in Your Soup!"
Chapter 19: Conflicting Heroes
Chapter twenty: The Insurgence
Affiliate 21: Hitler is Not Dead
Chapter 22: Tattoo
Chapter 23: The Cleaved Bed
Chapter 24: Is it True About the Smoke?
Affiliate 25: The Selection
Chapter 26: The Transport
Affiliate 27: A Handkerchief
Chapter 28: This Must Be Sky
Chapter 29: Herr Zerkübel
Affiliate 30: Leah Kohn, Forgive Me …
Chapter 31: The Basin of Soup
Affiliate 32: The Bird of Gold
Chapter 33: An Echo in the Fog
Chapter 34: To Confront the Globe
Affiliate 35: The Lost Game
Affiliate 36: Its an American Airplane!
Chapter 37: Liberty, at Terminal
Chapter 38: Homecoming
Chapter 39: "America, Will You lot Be My Home?"
Chapter 40: The Statue of Liberty
APPENDIX A
APPENDIX B
GLOSSARY OF TERMS
FOREWORD
On April xxx, 1995, I took an El-Al flight from Tel Aviv to Munich. From the terminal I took the S-Bahn to Tutzing, and from there I was driven to Seeshaupt, a small Bavarian resort. This was not an easy journey to take, and I took it after some weeks of deliberation. I was going back to Deutschland—fifty years subsequently.
It was in Seeshaupt on this very mean solar day fifty years ago that the American army had liberated me, along with my brother and my mother and thousands of other skeletal prisoners. Some leading citizens of Seeshaupt had decided to commemorate the consequence. They formed a committee and dispatched letters of invitation to possible survivors all over the world. One such alphabetic character reached me in my New York domicile, and here I was, making a detour, on a Tel Aviv-New York flying, to Seeshaupt.
The onetime mayor's son, then a 9-yr-old boy, remembered how the victorious Allies had led his father and his family and all other members of the local elite to the Seeshaupt train station, where they witnessed a most horrifying flick of human suffering. The sight of thousands of disfigured corpses and maimed, dying skeletons left an indelible marker on his awareness.
At present he is a physician in Seeshaupt, and when his patients, members of the mail-state of war generation, refused to believe his account of what he saw, he decided to bring back survivors of that ghastly liberation every bit living proof that the unbelievable did happen.
The heaven was clouded and a light drizzle veiled my view as my host, Dr. Peter Westebbe, one of the local organizers of the commemoration, drove me through the streets of Seeshaupt to the dedication ceremony.
Eighteen survivors had arrived for the anniversary from all over the world. Some were from the The states, some from South America, some from Israel, and one from Greece. The townspeople were there—nigh three hundred, mostly young. The nowadays mayor of the boondocks officiated at the dedication of a monument to those who had died and those who had survived to be liberated here—over two yard five hundred, according to records. Young children from the local school planted trees, danced and sang, and the pastor of the local church blest the monument. The local audience was visibly moved.
We, the eighteen survivors who had returned to Seeshaupt, men and women in their sixties and seventies, briefly reminisced about that liberation day fifty years agone, and as nosotros looked into each other's eyes, we saw that the years had not faded the pain of memories. The pain was intact. And so was the sense of overwhelming burden.
A celebration followed the dedication ceremony. Several hundred guests filled the local beer hall, where tables were fix for a festive meal and musical entertainment by the local band.
Quietly I slipped out of the hall, and slowly made my mode to the train station. Tardily Sunday afternoon stillness enveloped the minor boondocks. I walked forth the tracks to the colorless, deserted, memorable platform. No trains. No passengers anywhere. Full emptiness. Only an incessant, calorie-free drizzle.
But for me the platform was full. It was brimming with a disarray of sights, hundreds upon hundreds, a bleeding carpet of dead and dying
. I saw Greco, the 15-year-old Greek male child with enormous, feverish eyes, begging for water. I saw Lilli, the sixteen-year-old brunette with her leg blown off, sitting in a puddle of blood. I heard Martha, blinded in both eyes, calling to her mother. And Beth, and Irene … ageless faces, skeletal limbs filled the gray, translucent mist.
"There are no more trains today." I turned effectually, startled. The woman with the unmistakably Bavarian accent had a pleasant, nondescript face. "At that place are no more trains today from this station."
"Thank you. I'm non waiting for a train."
She waited, wondering; then, with a hint of suspicion lingering in her manner, she reluctantly walked on.
But the moment was gone. The one-half-century-onetime visions were no longer retrievable onto the screen of my present reality. A common cold, opaque haze enveloped the tracks; the platform and the grim 2-story station house were empty.
I walked dorsum to the beer hall, where the commemoration was winding downwardly. "What message exercise you have for us?" one of the committee members asked me. "What lessons?"
I pondered the question. I was fourteen when the war ended, and believed that the evil of the Holocaust was defeated along with the forces that brought it about. 6 years later a new life began for me in the New World. A new life, free of threat. A new world, full of promise.
In America I grew from traumatized teen to grandmotherhood. And equally the world grew more than and more advanced technologically, it seemed to grow more and more tolerant of terror and human suffering.
My fears accept returned. And however my hope, my dream, of a world costless of human being cruelty and violence has non vanished.
My hope is that learning about past evils will help us to avoid them in the hereafter. My hope is that learning what horrors tin can result from prejudice and intolerance, we tin can cultivate a commitment to fight prejudice and intolerance.
It is for this reason that I wrote my recollections of the horror. Merely i who was at that place can truly tell the tale. And I was there.
For y'all, the 3rd generation, the Holocaust has slipped into the realm of history, or legend. Or, into the realm of sensational subjects on the silverish screen. Reading my personal account I believe you will feel—you will know—that the Holocaust was neither a legend nor Hollywood fiction but a lesson for the future. A lesson to help future generations forbid the causes of the twentieth-century catastrophe from being transmitted into the twenty-first.
My stories are of gas chambers, shootings, electrified fences, torture, scorching sunday, mental abuse, and constant threat of decease.
But they are also stories of faith, hope, triumph, and love. They are stories of perseverance, loyalty, courage in the face of overwhelming odds, and of never giving up.
My story is my message: Never surrender.
THE Metropolis OF MY DREAMS
SOMORJA, SUMMER 1943-MARCH 1944
I dream of enrolling in the prep schoolhouse in Budapest, the upper-case letter city. Budapest is a big, beautiful metropolis with wide streets and alpine buildings and xanthous streetcars whizzing effectually corners. All the streets of Budapest are paved. In our boondocks we have only one paved street, the primary street. And information technology is not wide. We accept neither tall buildings, nor streetcars, just horse-drawn carts and 2 automobiles. One of them belongs to my friend's begetter.
Ours is a modest farming town at the edge of the Carpathian foothills. The lovely hills loom in a blue haze toward the west. To the south, the Danube, the cool, rapid river, pulsates with the promise of life. How I dear to swim in its clear blue, surging ripples, and prevarication in the shade of the fiddling forest hugging its banks.
We children splash all summer in the Danube. Families picnic in the grass, the local soccer team has its practice field nearby, and the swimming squad trains for its annual meet. Even the army camp empties its sweaty contents in one case a day, hundreds of recruits, into the cool, cleansing waters of the Danube.
When the sun moves beyond the hills and the piffling forest casts a long shadow over the pasture, herds of cattle and sheep arrive at the Danube. The shepherds drive first the sheep, then the horses and cows into the water, cursing ever louder, and bulldoze us children out. The mosquitoes arrive, also, with the dusk, and it is time to go home.
The walk through the open pasture is pleasant and cool, but the town is hot and dusty when we reach home. The sheep go far earlier us and it is they who churn up the dust. But soon the dust settles, so does the dark. A dark, velvety blanket of silence wraps the boondocks snugly against the intrusion of the outside globe. The stars, ane by one, calorie-free up the dirt roads and the single paved street of the town. By nine o'clock all is quiet. Hither and there i hears the bark of a restless dog. Soon the canis familiaris, as well, will be asleep.
And then the orchestra of insects begins its overture, its harmony disrupted past the discordant husky of a frog, an inhabitant of a small swamp merely across the concluding houses of our street.
I dearest to lie and fantasize for hours later on dusk. Life is an exciting mystery, a sweet secret enchantment. In my daydreams I am a celebrated poet, beautiful, elegant, and very talented. My poems open the world'due south heart to me, and I loll in the world'south embrace.
I yearn for my female parent's cover. When, on Sabbath mornings, my friend Bonnie and I bring together our mothers in the synagogue, Mrs. Adler takes Bonnie in her arms and calls her meine Schönheit, my dazzler, in German. Mrs. Adler ever says High german endearments to Bonnie. Mommy merely greets me with a hello and a smile, no hug and no words of endearment.
"That's all nonsense," Mommy would respond to my complaint. "Practise y'all want me to call you meine Schönheit? Bonnie'southward mother makes a fool of herself. Why, everyone tin can meet how plainly looking her daughter is!"
What does it thing whether Bonnie is pretty? I care only that Bonnie'southward mother thinks she is beautiful. And what about the hug?
"I don't believe in cuddling," Mommy explains with a smile. "Life is tough, and cuddling makes you soft. How volition y'all face life's difficulties if I keep cuddling yous? You're also sensitive as it is. If I would take y'all in my lap, y'all'd never want to get off…. You'd become as soft as butter, unable to stand up to life's challenges."
Mommy's explanations are unconvincing. I believe she does not hug me because she does not think I am huggable. I believe she does non telephone call me cute because she does not think I am pretty. I am besides alpine and ungainly. My arms and legs are also long, and I go on upsetting things. When I acquit a tray of drinks, Mommy shouts at me not to walk so awfully. That'south the reason why everything spills. "Look at Eva. She's a twelvemonth younger than you lot, withal how deftly she carries a tray." Or "I was in your friend Julie'southward business firm yesterday. Yous should run across how skillfully she helped her mother serve!" Or "Meet your brother Bubi? He'south a boy, and see how much more he helps out, and how much better he is around the kitchen?"
This I know is the hugger-mugger of my mother's disapproval: my brother. He is the favorite. He is skilful. He never answers dorsum, my mother says. And never asks "Why practice I have to?" whenever she tells him to exercise this or that. Why tin't I be like him?
Why can't I look like him? My brother is adept looking, and I am not. I am far from being pretty. He has curly hair, and I don't. My hair is directly. In that location is not even an inclination of a wave. "What a shame!" I hear my mother say to a neighbour. "Who needs such practiced looks in a boy? I mixed these two up. My son should've been the girl. And my daughter, her looks would exist fine for a boy."
And there is another thing. My brother Bubi looks like my mother'southward iv brothers. Mommy refers to them as "my-beautiful-brothers." The three words as one. Bubi talks similar them, he walks like them, and he acts like them. And he is brilliant similar they are.
I am like my begetter'due south family. They are okay, simply they are less dazzling. They are made of much plainer material.
Bubi has ability, and I only accept appetite. You see, I get skillful grades considering I like to written report, but my brother gets good grades without ever opening a book. Mommy is very proud of him. Daddy praises me for my ambition. He says appetite is sometimes more of import than power. Y
ou tin can sometimes accomplish more with ambition than ability.
I wonder: Does the fact that I have ambition mean that I accept no natural ability? Or talent? How will I ever become a celebrated poet without talent? Can I get there by ambition alone?
"Wait, Elli," Mommy explains, "you take a pretty smile, and when you smile, your face becomes quite pretty. Whenever you meet people, say hello with a smile. And people will take you for a pretty girl."
I listen, and smile whenever I tin.
The summer passes and my brother Bubi leaves for Budapest. He is a pupil at the Jewish Teachers' Seminary there, and how I hope and pray that my dream of joining him next year will come truthful.
Nighttime, rainy days of fall freeze into glistening white wintertime. The gloom of the Hungarian occupation, the slow drag of the state of war, and increasing food shortages thicken the winter chill. Hitler's shrill radio broadcasts, especially one of his oftentimes-repeated promises, "Nosotros volition play football with Jewish heads," strike panic in my eye. Daddy reassures me. "Don't worry, little Elli. Information technology's only a style of speaking. Don't take it literally, God forestall." Sharp lines of pain etch his square, handsome confront as he lets his hand rest on my shoulder. "Don't even recollect nearly these things, Ellike. Just forget you e'er heard them."
Merely I cannot put the vision out of my mind. Bloody heads rolling on the local soccer field become a recurring nightmare.
Every bit the winter wears on, my male parent's erect posture begins to stoop somewhat. His silences go longer and the shadows nether his cheekbones deeper. Ever since the Hungarian occupation iii years agone, when our business was confiscated, Daddy has go more and more distant. His famous wit has become caustic; his laughter, a rare treat. He seems to derive pleasance only from study, and the endless wintertime evenings detect him poring over huge folios of the Talmud.
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