January 27 is International Holocaust Remembrance Day. Auschwitz-Birkenau, the largest concentration camp was liberated on January 27, 1945. The United Nations General Assembly in 2005 designated this as a day of remembrance for the six millions Jews and eleven milllon other innocent victims of the Nazis.
This is the second part of our observation of Holocaust Day.
Since 2016 this has day has been observed on The Reading Life.
This year I am sharing with you six short stories set in the Holocaust, four by Holocaust survivors. Several of the stories can be read or heard online. Where I can, I have included links.
I am breaking this up into two posts
Two of today's three stories can be experienced online.
“The Key” by Ida Fink - A Short Story set in the Zbarazh Ghetto
Ida Fink
Born November 1, 1921 - Poland
Her father was a physician, her mother a music teacher. She grew up speaking Polish and German.
1941 to 1942- Confined to the
Zbarazh. Ghetto, she escaped with forged papers1948 - Marries Bruno Fink, an engineer. He was a Survivor of four concentration camps, all of his extended family died in The Holocaust
1957- Immigrated with husband and son to Israel
1971 - publishes her first short story
2008 - receives the Israel Prize, the nations highest cultural award.
September 27, 2011 - dies in Israel, age 89
Luckily I was able to find one of her stories online
Click here to read “The Key Game”
In just a few pages we see how hiding in fear of the knock on the door from the Nazis impacted the lives of Jewish children. The young son in a family of Jews has been taught what to do when someone knocks. He has been taught a routine of noises he can make and things he can say through the door that will give his Father Time to hide and he has been given a hard role to play if the Germans ask him about his father.
I don’t know much about the publication data on this story. I would guess around 1985 and I do not have information on who translated it from Polish.
“The Shawl” by Cynthia Ozick - 1980 - Winner of The O. Henry Prize
" The Shawl”, described in The New Yorker as “a miniature masterpiece”, is available in the open archives of the magazine and also as a podcast on YouTube, read with great feeling and elegance by the multi-awarded British actress Claire Bloom. I first listened to Bloom read it, then the next day I read it, then this morning, far from feeling I’m close to the full depth of this story I listened to Bloom’s Reading again.
I listened then to Ozick talk about how she came to write the story. (She also talks about growing up loving to read and how the Holocaust impacted her thinking. This podcast is only eight minutes but it is glorious).
Still feeling I must go deeper, I was delighted to find a New Yorker Fiction Podcast in which Joyce Carrol Oates reads the story and talks about the story with the fiction editor of The New Yorker, Deborah Treisman.
As the story opens, Rose is being marched to a concentration camp, to be interned. The woman’s age is indeterminate, she is carrying her baby, Magda, wrapped it in a shawl to hide it from the Germans who killed all babies of Jewish Women. Babies have no labour value to the Germans. With her is her niece Stella, in her teens. Rose tells us both women are suffering terribly from malnutrition, months ago they stopped menstruating, their legs are like “tuber covered sticks”. They can barely walk but if they falter they know the Germans will shoot them. Rose has no milk to feed her baby. She wants to give Magda to a woman in a Village they pass through but how does she know if a stranger will accept her baby. She also fears if she steps out of line the guards will shoot her and the baby.
Once they are in the concentration camp the level of terror, fear and madness becomes incredible. Rose descends to madness, she fears her niece wants the baby to die so she can eat her. The ending is the stuff of pure evil. How do people become this horrible, so full of hate.
In just a few masterful pages Ozick has evoked the Holocaust.
This is a deeply disturbing story. In an interview Ozick, normally a very methodical writer, said she felt almost as if a spirit inhabited her and helped her convey the story of Rose, Magda, and Stella.
“She wrote it, she says, in a way she has never written anything, before or since. "I'm not a mystic, I don't believe in any of that. I've been on the side of rationalism. I had an experience, just the first five pages – I hate to say it, it's the kind of absurd thing that I mock – that I wasn't writing it, that it was dictated. Just for those five pages." - from The Guardian
Jewish Eyes - A Short Story by Sholem Ash
Sholem Asch was one of the great novelists in Yiddish or any other language. He was extremely popular among the Jewish readership till he began writing his “Christian” novels, starting with The Nazarene. These were deeply unpopular among the Jews, and Ash was virtually “excommunicated” during the latter part of his life. ..from Yiddish Literature in America 1870 to 2000, Vol. One
“You look, we didn’t use chemical weapons in World War II. You had someone as despicable as Hitler who didn’t even sink to using chemical weapons,” Said at a conference by the press secretary for the president of the USA, apparently unaware of the use of chemical weapons in the Holocaust
Normally I refrain from posting on short stories that cannot be read online. Today I read a story by Sholem Asch (last name sometimes spelled as "Ash", 1980 to 1957, born Kunto, Poland, died London, England), "Jews Eyes" so heartbreaking, that it almost moved me to tears. I think the supreme ignorance embodied in the remark I quote above motivated me to post on this story. I have said numerous times that the Holocaust was, among many things, an attack on a people as dedicated as any culture has been, to the reading life, to study, to knowledge for the beauty of knowing.
I will tell a bit of the plot (reading time under 15 minutes). A woman from the Warsaw Ghetto smuggled her child into the Buchenwald concentration camp, after hiding her for a long time in an attic. The woman was assigned to a work group that prepared the clothes of those murdered in the camp for distribution to German citizens. The girl was the only child packed in with eighty women, almost all of their children were dead. The women hid her, gave her food from their very sparse rations and mothered her as much as she could. In repairing the clothes of the dead, one of the
women found a doll and gave it to the girl. One day the Nazi woman in charge of the group make a surprise inspection tour, she saw the doll which had been left out and thought there must be a child hidden. Accompanied by two SS men and German dogs, they find the girl. The woman is amazed by the eyes of the girl. In a scene chilling to the bone, which hurts to read, the full inhumanity of the German ideology comes through
"Mirele’s gaze fell upon the eyes of Fräulein Gertruda, and it was as if some unknown, previously unfelt sensation animated Gertruda. Mirele’s pitch-black pupils moved down to the horizons of her large, watery eye-pools, and from beneath the thinned-out, emaciated corneas they shone out with a moist, heartbreaking, pleading look. The pupils changed color with the speed of a waterfall as she gazed: now they took on the hue of a pitch-black abyss and now their borders quickly changed and manifested an orange glow, then a violet glow, and then turned to a deep blue like two large, otherworldly, water-clear sapphires. “What eyes!” Fräulein Gertruda couldn’t restrain herself and exclaimed to the two S.S. men who were standing behind her.....Her face even changed for a second —creases appeared in her smooth, white, creamed cheeks, near the corners of her mouth. Even her cool, feline, steely-sharp blue eyes shone with light. The flash of light in Fräulein Gertruda’s eyes, together with the creases around her mouth, ignited a ray of hope in the women’s hearts. “Real sapphires! I’ve never seen anything like them,” exclaimed one of the Gestapo men. “Ach, what earrings you could make out of them,” the second one said. “What?” “Jews’ eyes, of course.” “How?” “If one can petrify animal’s eyes, it must be possible to do the same with human eyes.” “Jews’ eyes.” “It’s a thought.” The entire conversation between Fräulein Gertruda and the S.S. men lasted only a minute. They conducted it quietly, as if the women couldn’t hear them. Suddenly Fraulein Gertruda shook herself, grabbed the girl that the dogs had dragged out by the feet, and turned the child’s head toward her. “A knife!” she called out to the S.S. men. And immediately the blade of a knife that one of the S.S. men had drawn from its sheath, on which the words “Blood and Honor” were engraved, glinted in the air like a sacrificial knife. “Cut with a lot of flesh,” one of the S.S. men, who was holding the child’s hand and turned her on her back, advised in a loud, indifferent tone. A shriek like the roar of an animal was heard from the women. Immediately, however, they choked back their outcry. Several of the women threw Mirele’s mother onto a shelf and stopped up her mouth with their fists."
Excuse the long quote, but as it cannot be read, as far as I know, online, I wanted to share this with you.
Gertruda makes earrings from the eyes, having them preserved by a famous taxidermist, and wears them to a German Cultural Festival where all admire the earrings made from a Jew's Eyes.
Believe it or not, the story has almost a happy ending. I think it might make a good class room story though many will find this story very intense.
This story was first published in Yiddish, in New York City, in 1948 in a collection of short stories, Tales of my People.
I read it in Volume I of Yiddish Literature in America, a great contribution to Yiddish literature, indeed to the world.
Mel u
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