I Have Lived a Thousand Years by Livia Bitton-Jackson Read Free Book Online Page B

brother is next in line. He dumps our books and quickly steps aside. I am carrying our documents, my parents’ marriage certificate, our birth certificates and report cards, paper clippings, my father’s business books, all my best notebooks saved throughout the years, and the honor scroll I had received just a few weeks ago.
    There is one special notebook among them. Into this notebook I had carefully copied all my poems—one hundred and five in all. I am going to plead, politely, for my poems. I am going to smile sweetly, and ask the tough Hungarian policeman with the waxed mustache to let me keep my poems. But when I hear his rough reply to the young mother’s plea for her baby’s picture, when I see his face as he reassures her, I change my mind. Would we indeed get all this back? How would all this be sorted out? Even if his reassurance was sincere.
    Quickly I thrust the notebook with my poems inside my blouse. With my right elbow supporting the notebook under my blouse, I hand the papers to the officer and hurry on.
    My hurried footsteps carry me to our crowded little room in the far corner of the synagogue compound. I have to hide the notebook before anyone sees it. Even Mommy is not allowed to know. She would worry about the grave infraction. Quickly I tuck it deep into my knapsack all packed for departure. With suppressed excitement I run back to the yard.
    I stop, paralyzed. Oh, my God! Wild flames are dancing about the pile of books. A column of dark smoke is rising from the middle of the heap. They are burning our books!
    I walk as if in a dream. Ash particles are flying in the hot breeze. The pungent smell of smoke fills the air. Men, women, and children crowd about the conflagration as the flames leap higher and higher, churning up blinding clouds of smoke.
    The Torah scrolls! The fire is dancing a bizarre dance of death with one large scroll in the middle, twisting in an embrace of cruel passion. Aged folios of Jewish wisdom and faith tumble and explode into fiery particles, spluttering pellets of ash. Volumes of the Bible, leather-bound Psalms, phylacteries turn and twist and burst into myriad fragments of agony. Pictures and documents flutter as weightless speckles of ash, rising, fleeing the flames into nothingness.
    “Almighty God, forgive our sins! Woe to the generation witnessing its Torah burnt to ashes! Woe to the generation witnessing its sacred trust trampled to the ground!”
    It is the rabbi’s voice. He stands with flaming eyes, tears rolling down his long brown beard. “Woe to us, my friends, we have witnessed the burning of the Torah! Woe to us! Woe to our children! God, forgive our sins!”
    The rabbi grips his overcoat and rends a tear in it. The sound of the ripping cloth jars my insides. All the men who stand near follow his example. They rend their clothes one by one, and begin the chant “El mole rahamin ...” The chant for the dead.
    Below my feet the flames are dancing no more. Only a huge, flat heap of gray ashes remains, a fluttery, flat heap framed by a wide edge of scorched earth. The accumulation of hundreds of lives. Mementoes of the past and affirmations of the future. My brother’s tefillin, my diploma, and my honor scroll. My grandparents’ picture that hung above mybed, and the novel I had been writing. My father’s letters and all his Talmud. All transformed into this light fluttery gray mass.
    My poems! My poems are safe. They alone escaped the fire. Did it matter now? A stab of devastating guilt pierces my insides. Am I entitled to them?
    Oh my God, can I keep MY poems?
    The taste of ashes in my mouth is laced with a sudden surge of nausea. I reach the public latrine in time.
    I vomit, again and again. But the taste of ashes is not extricated from my insides.

A UNT S ERENA
    NAGYMAGYAR, MAY 20, 1944
    “You cannot carry all that. It’s more than a hundred pounds. It’ll break your back.”
    Bubi overcomes Mommy’s objections, and she helps him swing the loaded