Spring 2011 Issue - Lehman College

Making a Difference
Livia Bitton-Jackson’s Story of Survival
Professor Bitton-
Jackson (left)
with Professor of
History Emerita
Ruth Zerner.
Lehman Professor Emerita Livia Bitton-
Jackson tells an old Hassidic tale about a peddler
who comes to a village late at night. It is pitch black outside, and he
peers through the shutter of a closed window. Inside, people are
dancing wildly. The peddler thinks they are insane.
“If he heard the music, he would understand the dance,” she explains.
And Professor Bitton-Jackson, a Holocaust survivor, hears
the music.
“It is my faith,” she says. “I don’t hate—and whom should I hate anyway?
The Germans for their death camps? The Poles who turned
us over to the Germans? The French who collaborated? The British
who closed the gates of Palestine?”
Professor Bitton-Jackson taught Hebrew at Lehman in what was
then the Department of Classical, Oriental, German, and Slavic
Languages—as well as the history of Jewish communities in the
History Department—until her retirement in 1995. Then she continued
to teach at Lehman during the summer months.
She was thirteen when Nazis rounded up her Hungarian Jewish
community and sent every man, woman, and child to Auschwitz. In
her haunting memoir I Have Lived A Thousand Years, she tells the
story simply and directly, as it happened to a young girl. The book
has been translated into German, Dutch, French, Italian, and Japanese.
It is used as a textbook in many German schools.
The title refers to her conversation with a German woman shortly
after liberation. She writes:
“We had no idea,” the woman says. “Did you have to work hard?”
“Yes,” I whisper.
“At your age, it must have been difficult.”
At my age? What does she mean? “How old do you think I am?”
She looks at me uncertainly. “Sixty? Sixty-two?”
“I am fourteen years old.”
But she had lived a thousand years.
Last spring, the Dachau International Committee invited all the
survivors of the Dachau Concentration Camp from around the
world to attend a 65th anniversary of the camp’s liberation by the
American army.
“We could take along a young person for support,” says Professor
Bitton-Jackson. “I took Len, my forever-young husband, who was
ninety at the time.”
At the Dachau commemoration, she was interviewed for Suddeutsche
Zeitung, one of the major newspapers in Germany. The
editor-in-chief was familiar with her books and invited her to return
in the fall to speak to German audiences, including many groups
Barbara Greenspan Shaiman ‘68: Her Parents’ Ordeal Inspired Her to Help Change the World
It was on a trip she made with her parents in 1989—to Auschwitz,
just outside of Krakow, Poland—that Barbara Greenspan Shaiman
experienced an epiphany. After coming face-to-face with the
depravity that her parents, both Polish Jews, and millions of others
had endured during the Second World War, she decided then
and there that she would devote her life to changing the world,
any way she could.
“As the daughter of Holocaust survivors, I was taught that you
have to stand up and speak out when you are confronted with
injustice,” says Greenspan Shaiman, who was born in Germany
but raised in New York. She graduated from Lehman in 1968,
when it was still Hunter-in-the-Bronx, with a B.A. in psychology.
“We all have to try to make this world a better place. Those are
the lessons my parents taught me.”
14 Lehman Today/Spring 2011
Their story played a central role in her life. Her mother survived
Auschwitz-Birkenau, Stutthoff, and Therensienstadt, while her
father, who initially worked in Oskar Schindler’s factory in Krakow,
was ultimately sent to Theresienstadt, where he was liberated by
the Russians.
Those experiences inspired Greenspan Shaiman to enter the
education fi eld so she could teach students to treat each other
with respect, show caring and compassion, reduce violence, and
promote positive change. In Daytona Beach, Fla., she worked in
one of that city’s worst-performing schools—always focused on
“giving back,” as her parents taught her. Eventually, she explored
her entrepreneurial side and became a partner in an executive
search fi rm specializing in the healthcare business. In 1984, she
started her own company, Eisenbud & Associates, recruiting
physicians and senior healthcare executives nationally.