Free I Have Lived a Thousand Years by Livia Bitton-Jackson Page A

wait outside. Why are our wet, traumatized bodies, wearing only a single cotton cloak, hurled out into the cold for an endless, senseless wait?
    Finally, a smartly stepping, brisk, German military staff member appears. With the tip of an authoritarian stick on the shaven head of the first girl in every row of five, we are initiated into the camp. We have become members of an exclusive club. Inmates of Auschwitz.

B ORN IN THE S HOWERS
    AUSCHWITZ, MAY 31, 1944
    Newborn creatures, we marched out of the showers. Shorn and stripped, showered and uniformed, we marched. Women and girls from sixteen to forty-five, rent from mothers and fathers, brothers and sisters, sons and daughters, and husbands—transformed into a mass of bodies, we marched toward the barracks of Auschwitz.
    An abyss separated us from the past. The rapid succession of events this morning was an evolution of aeons. Our parents and families belonged to the prehistoric past. Our clothes, our shoes, our hair—had they been real? The homes we left only recently were in distant lands, perhaps of make-believe.
    We were new creatures. Marching expertly in fives at a rapid, deliberate rhythm, we were an army of robots animated by the hysterics of survival.
    We survived the entry into Auschwitz. Unknowingly, we survived the selection of the diabolical Doctor Mengele, the handsome psychotic monster who had tenderly stroked my “golden hair” and in a kindly voice advised me to double-cross his SS machinery and lie about my age so as to save my life.
    As we march in a deliberate, rhythmic, robodike manner toward our future in Auschwitz, a heavy cloud of smoke rises from the stacks of a low, gray building on our left. It wasonly much làter that we found out about the smoke. By then we knew all the faces of death. By then we had lived long enough in the realm of death to believe what we found out about the smoke.
    But now, as we march from the showers toward the camps, we know only of survival. We sense its sinister significance. Survival is programmed in every fiber of our muscles, and with those muscles we march, not understanding, not even wishing. We march on, driven by instinct. We march, steadfastly avoiding German whips, growling German shepherds, and poised German guns. With inexorable drive we march silently on and on. That quality, born in the showers, that new, mystical compromise with death, bids us to move on. Our secret pact with death animates our march toward the camps.
    When we reach C-Lager, the sun is high. It scorches my freshly shaven scalp. It parches my lips and throat. My shoes, two sizes too small, are pressing on skinned toes and ankles. My own mystic march against death is turning into a graceless limp. Relentless heat, suffocating dust, and the monotonous drone of marching feet. Thirst. Unbearable. God, let me faint.
    It is Sunday. We have not had anything to drink since Thursday morning. I had wet my lips in the shower, but the whole thing was too sudden and ended too abruptly. I had had no chance to drink. Now I am unbearably parched. The sun is blinding. As I touch my smooth scalp it burns my palm. Gun butts glare. A motorcycle whizzes by soundlessly, as if in a dream. What a sparkling sight! Everything is flooded with brilliance, even the white, brilliantly white, rising dust. Oh, God. Is this a dream? A nightmare?
    The camp is a huge barren enclosure fenced in by barbed wire. Half-built barracks stud the horizon. Deep craters block our advance toward the barracks, and we are ordered to reroute our path around them.
    “Zählappell!” With automatic speed we line up by fives in front of a flat, narrow brick building under construction. No windows or doors. This is our barrack. The entire camp is under construction. Was there water in the barrack? No, there was no water in the barrack. There is no water in the entire camp.
    After Zählappell we are permitted to disperse. News of our arrival has spread like wildfire. Large numbers of young