Livia Bitton-Jackson

Livia Bitton-Jackson is born Elvira Friedmann in Šamorín in 1930. Upon Hungarian troops occupying the Czechoslovakian town in 1938, the Jewish family is faced with ever-increasing discrimination. After German troops move into and occupy Hungary in March 1944, the family has to resettle to the Nagymagyar ghetto. Almost immediately the father is sent to the Komárom labor camp and Livia Bitton-Jackson and other family members deported to Auschwitz. The SS transfers her with her mother to the Płaszów concentration camp, where they are forced to perform heavy labor. In the fall of 1944 the two are sent via Auschwitz to the Dachau subcamp of Augsburg-Kriegshaber, a forced labor site producing armaments for the air force. As the Allies close in, the SS transport mother and daughter to the so-called woods camp near Mühldorf at the beginning of April 1945. Together with a brother already there, they are then placed on an evacuation transport without food and water. U.S. Army troops liberate the transport in Seeshaupt on Lake Starnberg at the end of April. Back in her home town, Livia Bitton-Jackson finds out that her father had died in Bergen-Belsen concentration camp. With her mother she follows her brother to New York in 1951. After gaining a doctorate in Hebrew culture and Jewish history, she becomes a history professor. In 1977 she emigrates to Israel. Her book I Have Lived a Thousand Years. Growing up in the Holocaust, the story of her persecution by the Nazis, is addressed to young readers.