I Have Lived a Thousand Years. By Livia Bitton-Jackson.  Simon & Schuster. 1997.

Young adult.  Memoire.

Very few children survived the concentration camps.  Most of them were sent to the gas chambers immediately, of course, because they couldn’t work as hard as an adult.  The author only survived because she was tall for her age, and because she had blond hair and blue eyes.  That coloring saved her life several times, as did the fact that she was with her mother.

Bitton-Jackson writes about being interned in Auschwitz, about surviving the forced labor and the selections for the gas chamber, about fighting desperately to survive the insanity of the Nazi regime.

Victor Frankl, in "Man's Search for Meaning", suggested that the difference – besides sheer luck – between those who survived the camps and those who died, was that those who lived had a goal, something that gave this terrible struggle meaning.  Bitton-Jackson’s goal was to survive the camps and be reunited with her entire family.  She mostly achieved her goal; her brother, and her mother did survive.  Her father died. 

Recommended for teens who are not over-sensitive.  The section about surviving an Allied plane attack – the train she was on seems to have been mistaken for a troop train – is particularly disturbing.