110 pages • 3 hours read
Livia Bitton-JacksonI Have Lived a Thousand Years
Nonfiction | Autobiography / Memoir | YA | Published in 1997A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more. For select classroom titles, we also provide Teaching Guides with discussion and quiz questions to prompt student engagement.
Symbols & Motifs
Blue Eyes and Blond Hair
Nazis believed the Aryan race was superior and valued physical characteristics typically associated with Aryans: blond hair, blue eyes, and a pale complexion. The Nazi regime also valued women who were tall and thin. In appearance, Bitton-Jackson exemplifies this Nazi Aryan ideal. Ironically, her mother wished for “dark-haired, dark-eyed children,” though during their time in the ghetto, Laura grows to appreciate Bitton-Jackson’s blond hair, saying, “Nobody has hair […] as brilliantly blond” (43). Her aunt Celia compares it to “the rays of the sun” (43). A Hungarian soldier who befriends Bitton-Jackson notes her blue eyes, prompting her to recall a Hungarian folk dance that “made blue eyes the standard of beauty” (61). The woman who shaves Bitton-Jackson’s head in Auschwitz refers to her hair as a “heap of gold” (70).
Dr. Mengele conducts Bitton-Jackson’s first selection at Auschwitz, sending women either to the right (life) or left (death). As she stands before him, he exclaims, “Goldene Haar!” (66). He asks her if she is Jewish and what her age is then comments, upon learning she is thirteen, that she is “tall for [her] age” (66). He sends children under sixteen to the left but tells Bitton-Jackson to go to the right with her mother and to remember that from this point forward she is sixteen. Bitton-Jackson believes he made this exception because of her appearance. Her blond hair and blue eyes saved her life, but they also separated her from Serena, who alone was sent to the left.
At the factory in Germany, the factory director selects women for the most challenging tasks based on their complexion and hair and eye color. The lightest women receive the most difficult tasks and the best housing, while the women with the darkest features receive the more simplistic tasks. Bitton-Jackson notes that these dark-eyed, dark-haired women included “a noted physicist, a doctor, and college professor” (136).
Leah Kohn’s Coat
Bitton-Jackson spends a combined four months in Auschwitz and Plaszow before being transported to the factory in Augsburg. When she arrives, guards take her clothes and replace them with a shapeless gray prison dress that renders her anonymous. She notes even her gender is indistinguishable. In Augsburg, the Oberscharfürer orders proper clothes to keep the inmates warm through the winter. Bitton-Jackson delights in the dress and coat she receives, the positive attention they bring her, and the feeling of being a girl again. Delight turns to horror when she notices a name (Leah Kohn) stitched at the hem and realizes the coat likely belonged to a girl just like her. Bitton-Jackson’s warmth comes at Leah Kohn’s expense. The coat symbolizes the guilt and responsibility of surviving.
Language as Identity and (Dis)Connector
Britton-Jackson highlights the ways language can either bestow or erase identity and either connect or divide people. In the concentration camps, Jewish prisoners cannot understand the orders Nazi guards scream at them, which further enrages the guards. Soldiers burn all their identifying documents and sacred texts before transporting them to Auschwitz, where they are assigned numbers rather than names. When Britton-Jackson and her mother arrive in Augsburg, a female Wehrmacht soldier asks Laura what her name is, and Laura gives her number, but the soldier insists on a name and calls Laura “Fraü Friedmann.” For Britton-Jackson, it is noteworthy because it is the first time since arriving in the camps that she sees Jews being treated as humans, rather than objects. The American soldier who liberates the Jewish inmates speaks a “strange” Yiddish (178). He is suspect because his use of language both is and is not familiar.
Bitton-Jackson often uses passive voice to describe her experience as a prisoner. For example, “We are driven in open army trucks through a cold, dismal, rainy morning” (90), and “In quick order we are loaded onto trucks and driven out of the camp” (162). The passive voice does not name the agent of an action as the subject. In this sense, it captures the inmates’ loss of agency. They are acted upon—driven and loaded by the Nazi machine. Bitton-Jackson expresses this in physical terms in Chapter 24 when she describes the inmates moving “as if animated by a magnet pulling them into one direction, straight ahead” (117).
The Statue of Liberty
Bitton-Jackson titles the last chapter of her memoir “The Statue of Liberty.” It describes the moment she and her mother arrive at New York Harbor. As the refugee ship on which they travel approaches the harbor, she sees “the hazy outline of a statue,” the iconic image for immigrants who arrive in the United States through New York looking for freedom from the past (193). She enthusiastically points it out to her mother and suggests to the passenger they sing the American national anthem. Since no one knows it, they sing the Israeli one instead, each in their own languages. Though she had apprehensions about immigrating to America, she steps into her new life with hope.
