I Have Lived a Thousand Years

On April 30, 1995, Bitton-Jackson returns to Seeshaupt, Germany, the site of her liberation by American soldiers. Fifty years ago, the liberation left “an indelible mark” on the then-mayor’s nine-year-old son (11). The Allies had led prominent town residents to the train station to witness “a most horrifying picture of human suffering…thousands of disfigured corpses and maimed, dying skeletons” gathered on the platforms (11).

Eighteen survivors and three hundred locals attend the ceremony. The presiding mayor dedicates a monument. A pastor blesses it. Schoolchildren sing, dance, and plant trees. The audience is moved, but survivors remain feeling pained and burdened. Bitton-Jackson slips away from a post-ceremony celebration held in a local beer hall to return to the train station, where she remembers the victims. When Bitton-Jackson returns to the beer hall, an organizer asks her what the survivors’ message is.

Fourteen years old when the war ends, Bitton-Jackson believes “the evil of the Holocaust was defeated along with the forces that brought it about” (13). As the world has grown more technologically advanced, she worries people are becoming “more and more tolerant of terror and human suffering” (13). Though she still dreams of “a world free of human cruelty and violence,” she is afraid (14).