Book Review: I Have Lived a Thousand Years

Livia Bitton-Jackson was once Elli Friedmann, a carefree 13-year-old who is just becoming interested in boys, who experiences typical relationship difficulties with her mother, who adores her father. But in March 0f 1944, she became one of millions of Holocaust victims, and this is her story of unbelievable survival in the worst of circumstances. From "Hey Jew Girl, Jew Girl" to "Can I Keep My Poems, Please" to Auschwitz to "Mommy, There's a Worm in Your Soup" to "It's an American Plane," the chapters are short, gripping, graphic, and heartbreaking.

I came away from this book astonished, once again, at the ability of someone to maintain faith, hope, and perseverance in the face of cruelty and suffering. In the ghetto, before concentration camps, Elli sees the good:

"For the first time in my life, I am happy to be a Jew. And I am happy to share this particular condition of Jewishness. The handsome boys, lively women, beautiful babies, gray-bearded old men—all in the same yard of oppression, together."

In other places, Elli thanks God for respite from tragedy: the ability to drink filthy water, her mother's healing, a breath of air. Truly remarkable.

This book listed for young adult readers, but adults should not pass this up. This book, Zusak's The Book Thief and Elie Wiesel's Night, make a powerful trilogy of Holocaust reading. Another Holocaust memoir I've read in the past year is The Nazi Officer's Wife, which tells the story of how the author became a "U-boat": an Austrian Jew who went underground and emerged in Munich as an Aryan. All of these memoirs are painful, heartwrenching reads, but I think they are essential. We cannot become complacent; we cannot relegate these events to history.