Writing is good therapy. - Chava Rosenfarb

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.

What happened after this - that is, after the amazing flowering of Yiddish culture and literature between the two world wars - was a tragedy of unimaginable proportions, when the world experienced the trauma of the Second World War and the Jews of Europe faced mass extinction. Sadly, this too is the history of Yiddish - and it is my own personal history as well. Because my own fate as a writer was so closely dependent on the fate of that beautiful, piquant, tragic language, Yiddish.