I Have Lived a Thousand Years

The boxcar doors are left open. The guards do not seem to care if inmates, who have been a week without food or water, escape. Bubi lies with his head in his mother’s lap. Lilli is silent. Beth stares. Two sisters from a Hungarian village sleep. Judy, a Budapest girl, wheezes and gasps for air. Cousins Irene and Martha lie near Bitton-Jackson. Martha has wrapped a scarf around Irene’s injured face. Suddenly, Irene lifts her head, tears off the scarf, and screams she is blind. Her shrieking wakes the others, who try to comfort her. She describes the attack on the boxcars, growing hoarse and confused but talking “incessantly, feverishly” (176). Martha tries to soothe her, but she “is beyond hearing” (176). She talks about her family and hometown. As light filters into the boxcars, Bitton-Jackson sees that Irene’s eye sockets are empty. Irene asks if she sees the beautiful meadow then goes silent. Lilli whimpers for water then slumps over dead. Irene dies in the morning. The train travels on, another day and night.

In the morning, the train is standing still. They hear voices. Two men in unfamiliar uniforms stand in the open doorway. Bitton-Jackson cannot understand what they are saying. They leave, and a heavyset man enters. He asks “in a strange Yiddish” if they are Jews (178). Martha asks who he and the men are. He says they are Americans and repeats his question. He asks if they are men or women. The inmates ask where the Germans are, and he says they have surrendered. They tell him they are Jewish women from Dachau. He and the other soldiers help them off the train. They carry the dead onto the platform, crowded with bodies.The American officer addresses a group of German civilians gathered at the station. He asks if they have ever seen such horror, saying, “Your government ... your people bear responsibility” (179).

“A middle-aged German woman” tells Bitton-Jackson they had no idea (179). She says it must have been so hard for her, “at her age” (179). She thinks Bitton-Jackson is 60 or 62. Bitton-Jackson says she is 14. The woman shrieks and crosses herself. Bitton-Jackson is free but numb with cold, hunger, death, and blood. “I am fourteen years old,” she says, “and I have lived a thousand years” (179).

In June, hundreds of thousands wait in refugee camps for repatriation, including the three Friedmanns. A military transport takes them to Czechoslovakia. Bitton-Jackson describes freedom as “exhilarating, intoxicating, and threatening” (180). After a four-day train journey, a farmer drives them in a horse-drawn cart to their hometown, now renamed Šamorin. Their home’s rooms are bare, the floors covered in dust. A “heap of human excrement” lies in the “middle of every room” (182). Their “furniture, bedding, carpets, curtains, pots and pans” are gone, along with their well’s pump (182). Markus is not home. Bubi goes into town to inquire about him while Bitton-Jackson goes to her neighbor, Mrs. Pulitzer, to borrow a broom, and she gives them milk, eggs, and straw to sleep on.

Two weeks later, Misi Lunger, a neighbor, tells them he saw Markus on the road home with a man called Weiss from Nagymagyar. A cattle driver agrees to drive Bubi there at dawn. By 10 a.m., Bubi is back, ashen faced. The cattle dealer told him Markus died at Bergen-Belsen two weeks before liberation. Weiss and Lunger did not want to tell him, so they sent him to Nagymagyar. Bubi tells Bitton-Jackson they must observe Jewish law: He must “rend a tear” in her dress, and they must sit shiva (184).

Bitton-Jackson feels nothing is left to keep them here. Each day, they receive news of family and friends who have died. As Bubi predicted, the three Friedmanns are the only survivors, which “adds to a deepening sense of isolation” (184). Bitton-Jackson wants to go to Palestine and “live among people who share my inner void,” but Bubi will soon be leaving for school in New York (184). The three Friedmanns “vowed never to be separated again” (185). Bitton-Jackson wonders if she will find in America people who can understand the “total, irreconcilable loss,” “the compulsion to fill the void,” and “the pain of the uprooted” (185). She is not whole without “[t]he Danube, the meadow, the Carpathian foothills, and the town,” but it is not her home anymore (185).

In the fall, Bitton-Jackson returns to school. She is getting used to the “intoxicating sense of freedom” and being a normal girl. Much has changed. Russian soldiers roam the streets. A red-star flag hangs at the schoolhouse. The church bells by which she marked time are silent. Her classmates are strangers, “ethnic Slovaks ‘repatriated’ in a huge ‘population transfer’ from Hungary” (186). Her town is now part of Czechoslovakia. Bitton-Jackson is the only student who was born here, but she is an outsider.

Of the one-hundred Jewish families and more than five-hundred Jewish residents, thirty-six have returned. They meet every day in a communal dining hall and speak only of the future, which “lies far from our birthplace” (187). Many wait for permits to Palestine, Eretz Yisrael. Others have family in North America. After seeing Markus’s name on a survivors list, his younger brother in America sends a letter inviting the family to New York. After he learns the truth, he reiterates his offer to Laura. Bitton-Jackson reflects on the irony of going without her father, whose dream it was.

They find the jewelry pouch Markus buried. Laura sells a few pieces to pay for Bubi’s board at a new school. Budapest, now the capital of Hungary, is “on the other side of a rather unfriendly border” (189). Laura sews dresses for female Russian soldiers “in exchange for eggs, flour, live chickens, even light-bulbs” (189). Bitton-Jackson learns Russian in school and practices by translating for her mother. She loves the Russians because they fought the Germans, but her Slovak and Hungarian neighbors see the Russians as “crude and primitive occupiers” (190). While helping clean the synagogue, Bubi and Bitton-Jackson find English and Hebrew textbooks, and she begins teaching herself both languages. She thinks of her poems and wonders if Pista Szivos still has them. His Hungarian village is nearby, but she no longer wants her poems. Her whole world “rose up in smoke, vanished” (190). To “retain such passion” for her poems would be “self-gratification” that would “violate the agony of Auschwitz” (190).

After hearing of a secret transport to Palestine, Bitton-Jackson no longer wants to go to America, where she fears they will always be foreigners. She tells her mother, but the family agreed never again to separate. They have a family discussion, and the majority—Bubi and Laura—make the decision to go to America.

On April 7, 1951, Bitton-Jackson and her mother stand on the deck of a refugee boat as it approaches New York harbor. The Statue of Liberty comes into view, and the refugees let out a cheer. Bitton-Jackson asks if anyone knows the American anthem. No one does, so Bitton-Jackson sings the Israeli anthem. Others chime in, different languages, different anthems, “a cacophony of voices” (194). Bitton-Jackson’s heart is “brimming” (194). She looks at the faces around her, “full of awe and anticipation” (194).

The Statue of Liberty, “the grande dame of our dreams now rises resplendent against the first rays of the sun” (194). Laura suggests they get their things so they will not be the last ones off the boat. Bitton-Jackson agrees, “Let’s be among the first” (194).