I Have Lived a Thousand Years

The next day, Bitton-Jackson remembers a dream she had about her father a year earlier. She and her father were standing in their kamra (storage area). She hated the bleak, dark space and feared evil spirits lurked in the corners. In the dream, she and her father stand with their backs to the entrance. It was still and strange. Suddenly, a bird with “an egg-shaped body covered with golden feathers and large, greenish yellow wings” flew in on “a shaft of bright light” (149). The bird flew above Markus’s head and hovered there, glowing brighter and brighter, while he and Bitton-Jackson remained “cloaked in darkness” (149).

Her father was “deeply moved by the bird,” but Bitton-Jackson was afraid to look at it. She began to tremble while her father repeated, “Look at that bird!” (15). When she looked at her father, he was “no longer a living creature but a gray statue with eyes lifted to the heights” (150). His motionless lips continued to whisper entreaties for her to look at the bird. When she woke from the dream, Bitton-Jackson “had a clear, dreadful knowledge” that her “father would be dead” (150). She never told anyone about the dream or thought of it again, until this day, when “the dream takes hold of me with the savagery of the dark, bitter cold dawn” (150).

Rumors begin circulating—that the Allies are drawing nearer, that the camp will be evacuated, that the inmates will be sent to Austria. Their routine remains unchanged until an April morning when the Oberscharfürer reads an order: the women will be transported to Dachau the following morning. They are not to discuss their departure with anyone. Bitton-Jackson regrets not being able to say goodbye to Mr. Scheidel, who has become her friend. He has smuggled her crusts of bread and bits of paper for writing poetry. As she travels through Augsburg for the last time, she notes the “bombed out streets, gutted neighborhoods” (152). The train station is in ruins, and they climb over debris to board the boxcars.

They bypass the first camp they come to, “a subsidiary of Dachau,” because it is too full, having taken in inmates from other camps (153). They disembark at Mühldorf. It is overcrowded with skeletal inmates who greet them with questions—where they have come from, what they have been doing, where they are from originally. Bitton-Jackson is shocked by how emaciated the women are. She learns typhus decimated the Dachau camps during the winter. From speaking with male inmates across a barbed-wire fence, Bitton-Jackson and her mother learn Bubi is in a nearby camp, Waldlager. They volunteer to unload supplies delivered there daily and are selected to go with the trucks. Their housing is underground bunkers, and the men’s camp is on the other side of a barbed-wire fence. They get a message to Bubi. He meets them at the fence, a skeleton of his former self, covered with scabs and bruises. Laura has brought him bread, and he asks her to throw it over the fence. It lands in the mud. He slips and falls while bending to pick it up, finally pulling himself to his feet and trudging away without looking back.

Laura is assigned to peel potatoes and carrots in the kitchen. Peelers are permitted to eat from the stores but not to remove food from the kitchen. They are frisked on their way out. In the concentration camp square, the SS has hanged a person,a peeler found with a carrot and two potatoes. Laura dares not smuggle out food. Because she can eat potatoes, Laura no longer receives a bread ration to give Bubi. She works late into the night, leaving Bitton-Jackson to visit her brother alone. He asks where their mother is and is glad to hear she is working in the kitchen, as it means food. He has been feeling stronger since his mother and sister have begun sharing their bread with him. Bitton-Jackson reports this to her mother, and they rejoice in the hope Bubi will make it.

A few days later, when Laura is working, news reaches the camp that the Americans are near, and the Germans are surrendering without a fight. Bitton-Jackson discovers the internal camp gates are open and unguarded, and she runs to find Bubi. They embrace and sit on the roof of her bunker, talking. Bubi warns her they are not free yet. The Germans are unpredictable. Bitton-Jackson cannot help looking toward the future and says she plans to travel through Germany after the war, to find their family. Bubi gently asks her who she expects to find, and she begins naming family members. He tells her she will find no one. There was never a camp for older people and children. They were gassed. Bubi’s friend worked in the Sonderkommando, removing bodies from the gas chambers and stripping their bodies of all valuables, including gold fillings, before putting them into the ovens. Bitton-Jackson realizes she will be released into a world “in which children were gassed with their mothers”: “My God. My God. I have just been robbed of my freedom” (161).

Trucks arrive to transport inmates to the train, where they board “hundreds of boxcars,” one hundred inmates per car (162). They do not know where they are going. Rumors say they will be killed, as “Germans prefer no witnesses to their atrocities” (162). Others say the Germans would not dare kill them now, with the Americans so near. Bitton-Jackson cannot fathom where tens of thousands of inmates will be housed and fed. She prays to God the rumors are not true. They travel all day and night without food or drink. She sees a dogfight and hears “a series of loud explosions” (163). On the inmates’ fourth day without food or water, the train stops in a valley near a cornfield.

Suddenly, two men in striped uniforms open the boxcar doors and tell the women they are free. Inmates shout, cheer, and whoop “with ecstasy” (164). They swarm the valley, “laughing, and crying, and embracing everyone they meet, or just aimlessly milling among the tracks” (164). Hundreds tear and eat husks of corn and corn leaves. Bitton-Jackson tells her mother they should pick some, but Laura refuses to go until they find Bubi. They walk along the tracks peering into boxcars, asking inmates if they have seen him. Just as Bitton-Jackson fears it is a futile exercise, she sees him limping towards them. His leg is bleeding, and his face is “badly bruised from a brutal kick” he cannot remember receiving (166). The three sit together on the embankment. Suddenly, rapid gunfire erupts, cutting down the jubilant inmates and painting the valley red. Guards shout for them to return to the boxcars. The shooting continues as inmates, many injured, run towards the train. The boxcars fill, and the train moves immediately. Bitton-Jackson asks, “is it our destiny to be pawns in a game?” (167). She does not understand where the Americans are, what happened to their liberation, and whether they are “being herded like cattle to the slaughter” (167). They are prisoners again. As the train pulls away, she looks out a small window at the blood-soaked bodies lying in the valley and wonders if they have lost the game or if the inmates on the train have.