Chava Rosenfarb Quotes

one’s style, one’s method of writing—these, I believe, truly reveal the face of one’s soul.

Friday the first of September, at six o'clock in the morning, the Germans

The more strongly I felt the urge to write, the weaker I felt in face of the enormity of the subject. I feared it, and this fear hovers over me to this day, whenever I try to write on the subject of the Holocaust.

how can one speak of settling when your foundation has been ripped from under you? Nevertheless, one goes on.

basically, language is an inadequate and limited instrument. No matter what language a writer speaks, she always hopes that it will be universal, that it will transcend the particular ethnic barriers that language creates.

I will say no more about the horrors of the concentration camps. They are indescribable and untranslatable.

It seems to me that there is an inherent difference between being a Yiddish writer and being a writer of any other language. The difference is both psychological and linguistic. The Yiddish language, written with the Hebrew letters of the Bible, automatically places every Yiddish text within the context of Jewish history, of Jewish national and religious experience, and so endows it with a near-sacred quality. The mystical power that Jews ascribe to the Hebrew letters seems to influence the texture of even the most secular Yiddish works, endowing them with an additional lustre. As a result, the relationship between the Yiddish writer and her public is imbued with a sense of spiritual and intellectual connection.

Just like an object located in space, an event in time is subject to the laws of perspective; the object diminishes and fades the further one moves away from it. But with our tragedy, the opposite happens. The greater the lapse of time that separates us from our past, the clearer and larger our tragedy grows. Our reason cannot digest the ciphers of destruction; they become an abstraction called six million. We are young. Most of us are in our twenties. Our individual horror stories gathered together would outlast even the longest life. We crave the opportunity to tell at least some of these stories. But no one is willing to listen. So we tell them to each other. We remember. We reminisce. We forget ourselves in remembering. Steeped in our misery, we long for happiness. We live in two realities, the one that is past seeming more real, more palpable, than the actual one.

I have often been asked what message I, a survivor of the Lodz ghetto, of Auschwitz, Sasel, and Bergen-Belsen, want to transmit to those who have not been there and to their children? The question confounds me. From which bag of highfalutin, well-sounding, hollow phrases do I take my response? What response exactly will satisfy my interrogators' expectations? Would not any answer tarnish the memory of those who did not survive the bondage of the darkest Egypt that ever existed? The only answer I am capable of giving is to echo the passage in the Passover haggadah, which says that, in every generation, each individual must regard him or herself as having personally come out of Egypt. I would say that, in every generation, each individual must regard him or herself as having personally survived the Holocaust, and each individual should transmit this awareness to the sons and daughters of the next generation.

In writing about the ghetto, I wanted to find that source. I wanted to discover the essence of our humanity, to touch upon the core of the human soul and see it reflected in the soul of the ghetto Jew, who had stood stripped of every shred of artifice and pretence necessary to lead a normal life. There, in the ghetto, humans had faced humans without any embellishments or illusions; they had faced the brutality of their fellows, as well as the knowledge of what that brutality meant to their own destinies.

I was never a Sunday scribbler. Writing was never a hobby for me, a pastime to while away the hours. On the contrary, it was as necessary to me as life itself; it was a refuge, a substitute for living, a confrontation with myself, a form of confession - but always it was a necessity that allowed me to feel that my life had an accompanying motif, an underlying melody. Writing often gave me moments of such ecstasy as can only be experienced by lovers; it gave me instances of such intense spiritual forgetfulness that I truly believed that I and the cosmos were one, so that through the simple act of breathing the air in my room I felt that I was inhaling the universe itself. Clasped within the bosom of this universe, my physical self simply ceased to be. Rare moments these, but blessed.

Like most writers, I wanted to be read. But I also wanted the rest of Canada to know what I and millions of other Jews like me had lived through during those terrible war years. I wanted the non-Jewish world to recognize our pain, and I wanted to memorialize our vanished past and our lost communities. And so, I found myself once again face to face with the need to find a translator.

Writing is a lonely profession, and after the Holocaust, Yiddish writers were doubly lonely.

The air of liberated Bergen-Belsen began to resound with the familiar songs we had once sung. Near the barracks where our meetings took place, Jewish actors, who were themselves Holocaust survivors, took to the stage in a tent theatre. The golden peacock, symbol of Yiddish poetry and song, began to spread its broken tail. "Yidn shmidn zingen..." ("Jews, smiths, sing!") The words echoed triumphantly through the silent corridors of our former death camp, which was located a mere walk away from our place of entertainment.

Accompanied by my sister who had also survived the war, I wandered through all the zones of Occupied Germany. There was as yet no organized transportation system for civilians, so we hitched rides on the top of lorries loaded with coal, or on military trucks, but mostly we wandered on foot along with bands of other survivors. We made our way from the wreckage of one German town to the next. We hurried from one UNRRA office to the other, reading lists of survivors, searching for the name of our father and other dear ones.