Livia Bitton-Jackson

Livia Bitton-Jackson was born Elvira "Elli" Friedmann to a Jewish family in Šamorín, Czechoslovakia, territory disputed with Hungary for years. She was 13 years old when Nazi Germany invaded in World War II. She was sent with her parents, Laura and Markus Friedmann, brother, and aunt to the Nagymagyar Ghetto. Her father was sent to a forced labor camp, and the others were transported to the death camp at Auschwitz. In June 1944, Livia and her mother were sent to the forced labor camp at Kraków-Płaszów. In August 1944, they were taken to Augsburg, Germany, to work at a factory assembly line. After this, they were sent to a subsidiary camp of Dachau, where they were reunited with her brother. Near the end of the war, as the Allies advanced, the three family members were taken by trains further into Germany. Despite the terrible conditions, they all survived. She returned to Czechoslovakia to learn that her father had died at Bergen-Belsen two weeks before liberation. In 1951, she and her mother emigrated to the USA to join her brother in New York City. She enrolled at New York University, where she earned a Ph.D. degree in Hebrew culture and Jewish history. Dr. Bitton-Jackson became a professor of history at City University of New York, where she taught for 37 years. In 1977, she married Dr. Leonard G. Jackson, an Irish-born physician, with whom she lives in Israel, commuting back to NYC. Her memoir I Have Lived a Thousand Years: Growing Up in the Holocaust, was published in 1997. She also wrote another memoir about her family, Saving What Remains (2009), and several other works of cultural history.