At the heart of this lesson, we presented the writings of four people, two of whom survived and two of whom were murdered by the Nazis. For many survivors there …
This is Itamar Yaos-Kest’s story written in Israel fifty years after his experiences. It reverberates with much emotion on relationships within the family and the surrounding environs. After the Germans …
And now to the young boy in a concentration camp. Itamar Yaos-Kest was born in 1934 in Sarvash, Hungary as Peter (Petr) Kest and after the Germans invaded in March …
In the second video, Dr. David Silberklang, whom we met at the beginning of the first lesson, will present aspects of the prisoner experience in the Nazi camp system. Although …
And now we progress to the extraordinary story of a ten year old Jewish boy writing poems in a concentration camp in Germany and the fraught relationship of the adult, …
From Cytryn’s writing, one can sense the desperate swing of the pendulum between desolation and hope. From his poem and the two quotes from “The War” choose and discuss one …
From the title of the poem to the last line, the writing is suffused with a false bravado that underlines a feeling of helplessness prevalent in the ghetto. We know …
The Cheerful Pessimists Dear friends! To hell with sorrow What does it have to do with youth? Pessimism is worthless. Dear friends! Not every day can we laugh. Off with …
The second poet we present here was three years older than Abramek Koplowicz. Avraham Cytryn was born in 1927 in Łódź and lived through the suffering of the Łódź ghetto …
And now, to the poem itself: “The Beggar” Sad and hunched over, spent and bent over He walked the streets (dressed) in his rags The beggar. Forgotten by all, at …
The Łódź ghetto — or Litzmannstadt as the Germans renamed it in honour of the German general in the First World War, General Litzmannby — was by all accounts the …
In this step we will watch the second part of the video on the Ghettos, focusing on additional aspects such as the so called “Judenräte” (Jewish councils), the deportations to …
Before we present the poems and discussion on them, in the two following steps we will first clarify the term ‘Ghetto’ with two short videos that will provide information on …
Welcome to the second week of our course on Holocaust Poetry. As indicated at the end of the first week, we proceed to poetry written during and after the Holocaust …
Returning to Adorno, the famous Jewish-German sociologist, who with the passage of time, said the following: “Perennial suffering has as much right to expression as the tortured have to scream… …