I have often remarked about my gratitude for my ancestors' decisions to come to America. Each site exhibited shocking collections of remnants of lives once lived happily and peacefully, but stolen by the Nazis, who believed themselves to be a "Superior Race".
They all have revealed similar feelings for visitors, as evident from the profuse tears seen all around me.
I have written elsewhere about my visit to the Holocaust Memorial in Washington, DC.* I have also gone to Yad Vashem in Israel and the Imperial War Museum in London. It was difficult to read many passages without crying for these poor victims. Bitton-Jackson's fear of the Nazis, her hunger and the desire to live were glaringly present throughout. Bitton-Jackson's memoir has bared the horrifying details of a young girl's experience in the sub-human conditions in railway cars, work details and concentration camps.īoth authors have imparted their thoughts and feelings, rendering disturbing visions for the reader. They had the comforts of human relationships, subsistence diet and a semblance of shelter. Although they were not placed under armed guard, nor tortured, their existence was a constant ordeal. In Shanghai, the family had chosen to immigrate to avoid maltreatment by the Nazis. Although their situations differed markedly, both were wrenched from their homes, stripped of personal properties, separated from loved ones and confined in inhumane situations. Both are written in the first-person perspective of a young teen during the Holocaust. I cannot resist the urge to compare this book with Shanghai Diary: A Young Girl's Journey from Hitler's Hate to War-Torn China, which I read prior to this one. I listened to this one on audio and the narrator was excellent. The book is informative and insightful and you certainly feel emotion on reading this account. Every memoir or account like this is unique and essential in helping us remember and experience though words a time of madness, of shocking and shameful atrocities and a time when people turned their backs while their neighbours and friends It is however the first book of a 3 parts series which I do think it is important to point out as I failed to observe this fact before reading the book and really felt the ending rushed until I realised it there are two other books in the series.Ī First hand account of the life of a young teenager in a Nazi concentration camp, a difficult but important story from a first hand view, a compelling read and as always with books written on the Holocaust an important account of what torture and cruelty human beings can inflict on their fellow citizens. I have lived a Thousand Years is a well written, candid, and deeply poignant account of survival as a teenager in the Nazi death camps.
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