Language:
English
Year of publication:
1998
Titel der Quelle:
Judaism; a Journal of Jewish Life & Thought
Angaben zur Quelle:
47,3 (1998) 338-350
Keywords:
Holocaust, Jewish (1939-1945), in literature
;
Jewish ghettos
;
Holocaust, Jewish (1939-1945)
;
Nazi concentration camps
Abstract:
Writing in the ghetto was a form of spiritual resistance. Focuses on writers in ghettos, and even in camps, who intended to leave a record of Nazi crimes and Jewish sufferings in the hope that after the war justice would be done. Dwells on the history of the Ringelblum Archives, compiled in the Warsaw ghetto, which served as a pattern for similar ventures in Poland and Lithuania, e.g. the archives of the Bialystok, Vilna, and Kovno ghettos. Less daring, but also significant, was Rumkowski's archive in the ghetto of Lodz. Besides such collective efforts to document the horrors of the Holocaust, there were individuals who recorded events: Isaiah Spiegel, Jozef Zelkowich, and Simcha Bunim Shayevich in Lodz; Yitzhak Katzenelson, Abraham Lewin, and Chaim Kaplan in Warsaw; Abraham Tory in Kovno; Zalman Gradowski, who gave an account of life in the Sonderkommando in Auschwitz; and others. Dwells on the psychological problems of writing in ghettos and camps.
URL:
Locate this publication in Israeli libraries
Permalink