Even when I’m not writing—and now is not a very productive time for me—I live with my writing and feel it is my anchor, my support. - Chava Rosenfarb

The girl possesses a carefree lightheartedness that makes Barukh feel more acutely the weight of the despair that he carries within himself.

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.

Poems were created in the ghettos, and even at the threshold of the crematoria. As long as there is life, the human heart will never cease singing of its joys and sorrows.