I Have Lived a Thousand Years

On her 10th day at Auschwitz, Bitton-Jackson and her mother find a woman in another barrack willing to trade places with Celia. They hope to find exchanges for Suri and Hindi so the family can stay together. Before they can put the plan into effect, guards march Laura and Bitton-Jackson to be shaved and showered. They no longer care about undressing in front of the guards because “[i]t is our souls that are naked, exposed, violated” (88). Guards order them to march out of Auschwitz and board trains. Bitton-Jackson feels “curiously elated” as the train carries her and her mother away from “Auschwitz’s morning fog” (89). She tells her mother they should “thank God that we’ve left Auschwitz behind” (89). Her mother is silent and worried for Celia, who has had diarrhea for three days.

The train stops for the night in a dense forest. At morning light, it resumes moving. The cattle car is not crowded, and there is room to lie down. Five sisters lead the women in singing a familiar song, and “soon the memory of Auschwitz dissipates in the dawn of new hope” (89). Bitton-Jackson recites poetry. The train stops at a station that reads “KRAKOW” (89). Bitton-Jackson recognizes it as a province in Poland called Galicia, where her father’s family originated. Krakow had been home to a large, prominent Jewish community, and Bitton-Jackson wonders what has happened to it. The women are taken off the train and driven in open army trucks past a sign that says, “CAMP PLASZOW,” “the most notorious forced-labor camp in Poland” (90).

After a brief Zählappell, thousands of inmates line up. Kapos, or prisoner-guards, the “supreme authority over life and death,” arrive to select several hundred workers each for a “commando,” work crew (91). The Plaszow kapos enjoy wielding their “absolute power” with “brutal beatings and torture to the death” (91). Kapos oversee the inmates’ work, whips in hands, and dispatch assistants to lash anyone who rests. Anyone who cries out in pain receives double the lashings. The inmates “learned to stifle even our whimpers. In time we learned to endure in silence” (91).

They work twelve-hour days preparing the hilltop for construction. The work is difficult at the beginning but becomes more bearable as their hands grow calluses. They dig and shovelwithout rest. A young kapo’s assistant hits an elderly woman in the head with a rock after she stops to rest. She falls unconscious. The assistant is terrified, but the kapo chuckles, saying the assistant failed because she only fainted. He “should have struck her dead” (92).For lunch, they receive a bowl of pottage (cabbage soup with grain). The food arrives early and is left to fester in the sun, becoming “putrefied and alive with worms” (92). Bitton-Jackson sees worms on Laura’s spoon, but Laura shrugs it off and tells her to eat. Bitton-Jackson does not understand why her mother, who has always been so finicky about food, is furious that Bitton-Jackson persists in pointing out the worms. Laura asks if Bitton-Jackson wants her to die of hunger and continues eating. Bitton-Jackson spills the contents of her bowl and runs to a boulder in the distance. She cries, “My dear God, is this actually happening?” (91).

About three weeks after Bitton-Jackson’s arrival, a covered van drives into the camp’s main square. Soldiers herd well-attired civilian men and women into the SS command barrack. An SS man pushes one of the civilians with the point of his gun, and the civilian pushes back. The SS man shoots the civilian, who first collapses but then rises and runs. The SS man shoots him repeatedly, but still the civilian crawls, “drawing a line of red across the dust” (94). The SS soldier empties his gun into the civilian and kicks him “uncontrollably” (94). Guards take the rest of the civilians into the command barrack at gunpoint, leaving the dead man in the dust. Witnessing this from the hilltop during lunch, inmates continue eating their soup.

Bitton-Jackson hears the interrogation, the “shouts of the SS and the shrieks of pain” throughout the night (95). At morning Zählappell, sixty civilians—now “haggard, disheveled” line up like “doomed souls”at the flagpole (95). From the hilltop later in the day, Bitton-Jackson sees groups of ten marched into the square, lined up against a wall, and shot, one by one. The bloody bodies “remain scattered about the square” (95). One man crawls towards the “departing Germans” and tackles a soldier (95). Two other soldiers free their comrade and all three shoot the civilian. The act shatters the “indifference” of Bitton-Jackson’s fellow inmates “for the rest of the afternoon” (95). She calls this is her first encounter with death but then wonders if what she witnessed— “dead bodies strewn in the dust, gray, indifferent, colored by pools of blood”—is something “much more inexplicable” (96).

When the inmates return to camp that evening, the bodies have been removed, but the pools of blood remain. Bitton-Jackson’s group is ordered to wash and sweep the blood. As she sweeps the victims’ blood, she feels “a curious bond with the fallen victims” (96). She feels the “grief, compassion, and fear” that she suppressed while working on the hilltop (96). She wonders who the civilians were, what they had done, and what their final defiant gesture meant. She hurts for these “alien heroes” and “the futility of their heroism” (96). She asks, “What is death all about? What is life all about?” (96).

In mid-July, a diarrhea epidemic breaks out in camp, reducing inmates to “raglike dolls barely able to walk” (97). Bitton-Jackson feels dizzy and suffers from cramps, but the routine carries on. On a cold rainy day, inmates seek shelter from a sudden downpour under a nearby barrack. A team of SS officers arrives to survey their work and is indignant. They brandish their whips, and the women resume working. They are told they have committed sabotage and that at dawn they will be decimated—lined up before a firing squad, with an SS officer shooting every 10th inmate. No one knows where the count will begin or end.

Bitton-Jackson is terrified of being shot but even more terrified that her mother will be shot. She cannot eat, weeps hysterically, and will not leave her mother’s side, afraid they are sharing their final moments together. At night in the barracks, two sisters recite Psalms. Bitton-Jackson and her mother join in with the rest of the women in the barrack. As dawn light filters into the barrack, the chanting stops, but a woman urges them to continue until the guards come for them. No one comes. They go to Zählappell as usual. The kapos arrive to take their commandos to work. Bitton-Jackson revels in feeling alive. She had anticipated, imagined, and feared for both her and her mother’s death. Now she is alive on “a clear, beautiful day” (100). “Basking in a miracle,” she no longer feels afraid (100).

She wonders why they were not shot and whether the delay is intended to torture the inmates with uncertainty. Throughout the day, there is “feverish activity” in camp (101). Trucks bring in hundreds of civilians, some “in dark green overalls, or are they uniforms?” (101). They are taken into the command barrack in handcuffs. The SS ignores the camp inmates. After Zählappell, guards order the women to stay indoors. The decimation is never mentioned again. Rumors swirl through the camp. Some say an entire factory staged an uprising, others that the prisoners are partisans (underground fighters) who planned to attack the camp and free the inmates. Bitton-Jackson imagines if the liberation had succeeded, like Purim (which commemorates the salvation of the Jewish people from a plot to annihilate them in ancient Persia). Though it failed, it was a miracle for the inmates. It saved them from decimation.