I Have Lived a Thousand Years

Bitton-Jackson describes her mother as having a “[h]igh forehead, large blue eyes, classic nose, shapely lips, and elegant cheekbones” (70). Before the war, Bitton-Jackson sees her as distant and critical. Laura believed too much affection would leave her daughter unprepared to face life’s challenges when they came. This proves prophetic in the memoir.

At the beginning of the war, she is pragmatic and optimistic, focused on supporting and encouraging the family. In the camps at Auschwitz and Plaszow, starvation and hard labor take their toll. After she and Bitton-Jackson return from Plaszow to Auschwitz on a three-day train trip with no ventilation, food, or water, Laura wants nothing more than to lie down, insensible to the implications of telling Nazi camp guards that she cannot work. She has lost her will to live, and Bitton-Jackson assumes the role of parent, urging her mother to pull herself out of her apathy. An accident in their block results in Laura being partially paralyzed and sent to the infirmary. Bitton-Jackson enlists help to spirit Laura out before she can fail a selection, and the two are sent to work in a German factory, where Laura recovers.

When the Friedmanns return to their hometown after the war, Laura supports the family by sewing dresses for female Russian soldiers. She communicates with her brother-in-law to arrange the Friedmanns’ emigration to the United States. Her relationship with Bitton-Jackson undergoes “a transformation” (191). Though she recovers her “strong, no-nonsense yet sympathetic, guiding hand,” she treats Bitton-Jackson with “respect” and even “lavish praise” (191). 

Before the war, Bitton-Jackson remembers her father as a tall, thin, humorous man who admired Bitton-Jackson’s ambition and assured her it was more important than talent. At the outset of the war, authorities shut down Markus’ store and confiscated his inventory. They staged raids to find contraband enemy items—for example, English tea or French soap—as a pretext for detaining him and forcing him to sign confessions of his crimes. When Hitler’s radio broadcasts panic Bitton-Jackson, her father comforts her, but as the war drags on, he becomes increasingly quiet and distant. His only pleasure is studying the Talmud. During his final moments with his family in the Nagymagyar ghetto before his deportation to a labor camp, he and Bubi study the Talmud together. Markus tells Bubi to “[r]emember this passage when you remember me” (50). He does not want to be remembered in isolation but as part of his Jewish faith. After the war, the three surviving Friedmanns learn that he died in Bergen-Belsen, two weeks before liberation.

Laura’s older sister Serena is “a gentle, frail widow in her late fifties” who “suffered from poor healthy most of her life” (55). Bitton-Jackson calls her “kindly, soft-spoken, delicate” and recalls Serena pampering her “with a thousand little attentions” (56). Britton-Jackson remembers the food Serena prepared, especially candy she made from oranges, a rarity in their country. In the ghetto, rumors cause the once good-natured, patient Serena to withdraw emotionally. Once fond of singing, she becomes “like a singing bird snatched from her nest and locked up in a cage” (44). Britton-Jackson’s mother tries to comfort Serena, saying “all this will pass, like a bad dream,” but her words fill Britton-Jackson’s heart with fear (44). On their last night in the ghetto, Serena rages against what is happening to them and smashes her dishes and crystal, determined that the Nazis will not have them. When they arrive at Auschwitz, Mengele sends Serena to the left, and the Friedmanns never see her again.

Bitton-Jackson describes Bubi as good looking and obedient, their mother’s favorite for his industriousness and talent. At the start of the war, Bubi attends a Jewish school in Budapest. He returns unexpectedly, having fled the city after seeing German tanks and swastika flags. Because the news carries no reports of an invasion, Markus assumes Bubi misread the situation and sends him back to Budapest. Bubi obeys. When the news finally reports the invasion, which they refer to as a liberation, the family fears Bubi has been rounded up with other Jewish residents of Budapest, but he manages to make it home. When authorities begin placing restrictions on Jewish residents, Bubi responds with compliant defiance. He wears the star but as a badge. He covers a piece of cardboard with yellow fabric and “marches about the streets with a smile of triumph” (30).

After their father is deported to a labor camp, Bubi wears his father’s overcoat. At Auschwitz, he joins the men and does not see his mother and sister again until a year later, in Dachau, as the war draws to an end. His face is that “of a skeleton with parchment like skin covered with patches of light fuzz, and scabs” (156). Bitton-Jackson says his face “resembles the faces in the science fiction magazines” he used to read (156). He is further injured during the American strafing of their transport train but eventually recovers and immigrates to America.

In Chapter 7, titled “A Miracle,” Bitton-Jackson sees “a buxom peasant woman […] angrily scolding” a young guard for refusing to let her into the ghetto. Observing the altercation, Bitton-Jackson recognizes Márta Kálmán, a Somorja schoolmate who she helped with math and German, and calls her name. Mrs. Kálmán sees Bitton-Jackson and “practically charges the fence,” thrusting “her arms through the bars” and forcefully shaking her hand (46). The guard tells Mrs. Kálmán she is breaking the rules but stops when he notices Bitton-Jackson, to whom he has been friendly. He allows the women to speak, and Mrs. Kálmán explains to Bitton-Jackson that she and Márta have been searching for her, but no one would tell them where to find her. The guard tells the Kálmáns they must leave. Mrs. Kálmán asks if she can give Bitton-Jackson the things they have brought, saying, “She’s my daughter’s best friend” (47). He is afraid, but consents, if they do it quickly. She and Márta run to their cart and pass through the bars “at least two dozen eggs” and a live goose and toss a “sack of flour” over the fence, before reaching through the bars to embrace Bitton-Jackson. As Márta weeps, Mrs. Kálmán says, “God be with you, Miss Friedmann. God be with you!” (47). 

Pista is the Hungarian guard who befriends Bitton-Jackson in the ghetto despite communication between guards and Jewish residents being forbidden. He notes that she reminds him of his sister, though his sister’s eyes are brown while Bitton-Jackson’s are blue-green. They exchange plans and hopes for their post-war futures, and Bitton-Jackson confides in him about her poems and asks if he will keep them for her. He promises to keep them safe, and she says she will return for them if she survives. After the war, Bitton-Jackson wonders if Pista still has her poems, but she no longer wants them. They are part of a past the Holocaust has burned away. To care about preserving her poems, her individual creations, would be a violation of the horrors the Jewish people have been through collectively. Neither she nor Pista, if he survived, try to find each other.

Herr Zerkübel is the factory division director who oversees their work at Augsburg. He is a “heavyset man with short-cropped, flaming red hair” (135). He has eyes “blue as ice and just as cold,” and his face “is a frozen mask of unsmiling gravity” (135). He measures the distance between the women’s “eyes, eyebrows and cheekbones, and the height and width of foreheads” (135). He assigns inmates their tasks based on how fair and tall they are, giving blond, blue-eyed women (and redheads) the most challenging work. Though always present, he communicates only when displeased, delivering his reprimands “to a point above the unfortunate creature’s head, in scathing negation of her existence” (137).

One of a handful of German civilians who work in the factory, Mr. Scheidel oversees the accuracy of Bitton-Jackson’s work and eventually befriends her. When he first sees her in civilian clothes, he is surprised and pleased, and his “look of approval validates” Bitton-Jackson’s “new self-image” (142). One day, he leaves a small bag of bread crusts at her station. His gift emboldens her to ask him for paper. The request makes him nervous, and he questions what she wants with paper. When she explains it is to write poems, he begins bringing her “a few yellow slips of paper wrapped in crumpled brown paper” (152). She regrets that she is unable to say goodbye or to thank him before the inmates are transported back to the concentration camps towards the end of the war.