• I Have Lived a Thousand Years
• Survivors
• The King Of Children

I Have Lived a Thousand Years - Growing up in the Holocaust

Livia Bitton-Jackson
Simon and Schuster Books for Young Readers, 1997.
216 pages

The author, whose former name was Elli Friedmann, lives a happy carefree life in her village of Somorja, Czechoslovakia, set in the beautiful Carpathian foothills. She writes of the life of any thirteen year old who has only the future to look forward to. But everything changes for her in March 1944, when the Nazis invade Hungary. Her school closes, and soon a normal existence is a thing of the past. Elli, her mother, and brother are sent to a ghetto in Nagymagyar and from there to Auschwitz, Plaszow, Augsburg, and other camps where she describes from her teenage perspective what she experiences. Livia Bitton-Jackson has written her memoir for the third generation so they should remember what happened. Hers is a story of unimaginable brutality, but also of faith, hope, and courage, exemplified by her closing message: Never give up.
There is a useful appendix at the back of the book, which chronicles the events from September 1938 when Hungarian troops occupy Somorja, to September 1945 when Elli, her mother, and her brother immigrate to the United States. There is also a chronology of historical events and a glossary of terms.
We would recommend this book for grades 10 upwards. Teachers should take note to explain to their students that there are some graphic descriptions of death and brutality in the book.

Survivors - True Stories of Children in the Holocaust

Allan Zullo and Mara Bovsun
Scholastic Inc, 2004.
196 pages

Mathei, aged ten, escapes from a crowded cattle car going to Auschwitz and becomes a partisan. Seventeen-year-old Jack Gruener survives a grueling death march, and despite terrible conditions, tries to help a fellow Jew along the way. Five-year-old Sarah is hidden by a Polish family in a small attic with her family for two years. Herbert Karliner leaves Hamburg with his family on the ship “St. Louis.” Refused entry to Cuba, they and the other passengers are sent back to Europe. Twelve-year-old Walter Ziffer always remembered his father’s words to him: “Always do your best, and never forget that you are somebody.”
Suitable for students aged 9-12 this book chronicles true stories of eight Jewish children whose lives changed forever at the outbreak of World War II. The authors have interviewed all eight survivors and state that the details though difficult to read, have not been softened because of the desire to depict the reality of the events.
Many Holocaust survivors take courses at Yad Vashem in order to learn how to give their testimonies to groups of adults and high school students. Yad Vashem encourages these survivors to end their testimony on a note of hope, continuity, and a look toward the future. Each of the stories in this book ends on such a note, thereby following Yad Vashem’s educational guidelines. The survivors in the book marry, have families, and live fulfilling lives, which is a testament to their determination to survive and overcome the tragic years of the Holocaust.
Teachers can formulate several lesson plans from the testimonies, and there is a useful, short explanation about the Holocaust at the beginning of the book, a map of Europe during the years 1939-45, and short glossary of terms at the end of the book.

The King Of Children - A Biography Of Janusz Korczak

By Betty Jean Lifton
Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, New York.
353 pages.

“Children are not future people, because they are people already.... Children are people.”
Janusz Korczak

Putting down a lifetime’s work with children in a few short lines is not possible. Here is a book, which relates the story of this Polish Jewish doctor, writer, and educator who, in the last years of his life cared for two hundred orphans in the crowded orphanage forced to move twice within the Warsaw Ghetto.
Betty Jean Lifton has put together a moving and powerful biography of Korczak by interviewing surviving orphans and teachers from the orphanage in Warsaw, and by using his diary.
Born Henryk Goldszmit into a middle class Polish Jewish family, Lifton describes his difficult and traumatic childhood, and the experiences in his life which contributed to the development of his ideas, thus leading him to become a writer, doctor, and eventually, a leading children’s educator. She explains:
“There were few who knew that Henryk Goldszmit was leading a double life. The medical student lives dutifully at home with his widowed mother, but his other self, Janusz Korczak, the tortured writer, prowled through the roughest slums of the city alone in the company of Ludwik Licinski, a friend from the Flying University.”
In 1911 Korczak traveled to London to visit an orphanage in Forest Hill. It was after this visit that he suddenly perceived his life as “disordered, lonely, and cold.” He saw himself as a shabby stranger, alienated, and alone. And it came to him with sudden clarity that the son of a madman “a slave who is a Polish Jew under Russian occupation, “ had no right to bring a child into the world.
Korczak met and befriended Stefania (Stefa) Wilczynska, known by all who knew her as Madame Stefa. Once the orphanage was completed in October 1912, they moved in. Korczak was the director, and Stefa his assistant. Was there a romantic involvement between the two? There is no conclusive evidence of this, though they were extremely dependent upon each other.
He was drafted into the Russian army as a doctor during World War I, returned to the orphanage in 1918, and drafted again in the Russian-Soviet war of 1919. He used these events to increase his research into children, even visiting an orphanage in Kiev. He traveled to Palestine in 1934 and again in 1936, even contemplating making aliyah.
On his final return to the orphanage on Krochmalna Street, Korzcak was able to implement his educational ideas, using his methodology to educate the orphans to lead responsible lives and to be responsible for each other. He believed that children should be understood, that one should enter into the spirit of their world and psychology, but that, first and foremost, children must be respected and loved, treated as partners and friends.
The final chapters of Lifton’s book describe the Nazi occupation of Warsaw. By the end of November 1940 the Jews of Warsaw had to move behind the walls of the ghetto and Korczak had to move the orphanage into new premises, at 33 Chlodna Street, also situated in the ghetto. Offers to obtain false identity papers and save himself were refused.
Though Korczak never married, and had no children of his own, he was father to 200 orphans when he, Stefa, and his beloved children took their dignified last march to the cattle cars standing at Umslagplatz in Warsaw which took them to Treblinka, their final destination, where they all perished.
The books he wrote, especially the King Matt series, should be read by young people the world over. Teachers who want to make education useful and enjoyable for children should study his educational books.
Lifton has compiled Janusz Korchzak’s uncompleted “Declaration of Children’s Rights.” Found at the end of the book, this can be used as an interesting lesson plan, or discussion with students.
Korczak left us a valuable educational legacy from a bygone era, but as relevant today, just as it was then. Educators should use his legacy in the classroom.

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