The Shawl

Ozick, Cynthia. The Shawl. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1989. 

Ref Article:

• SIVAN, MIRIAM. “Crossing the Abyss: Language and the Holocaust, in Cynthia Ozick's ‘The Shawl.’” Studies in American Jewish Literature (1981-), vol. 24, 2005, pp. 42–59. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/41206026.

This short story is about a woman named Rosa Lublin, who watches a concentration camp guard murder her daughter, Magda. This same woman appears 30 years later as a mad woman in a Miami hotel clutching on to a shawl as she was doing in the death camp also… Spanning two pages, it describes, in spare and unflinching prose, the desperation of a young woman in a concentration camp as she tries to keep her baby hidden from Nazi guards.

What comes through so dramatically in this short story, of The Shawl is the immediacy of the deathcamps. The language is terse and abrupt. It renders apart the heart as we are taken completely into the Holocaust and into the horror of a mother's aborted attempt to keep her infant daughter alive…

Page 46. Sivan article quote: 

Magda is a baby who has survived against the odds for so long, sustained by the "magic shawl [which . . . ] could nourish an infant for three days and nights" (5). And since the time that her mother's milk supply vanished, she who could have cried out in hunger, chose silence. While searching for her shawl, her umbilical chord, her "surrogate mother" (Gordon 6), she lets out her only cry in the story, a "Maaaa . . . aaa!" (8), alerting the soldiers to her existence. This whine guarantees her death. Like Ozick's mute golem, Xanthippe, in the The Puttermesser Papers, who also finds language minutes before her demise, baby Magda's "fall into language" becomes death's conduit.6 For Xanthippe though, language does not provoke death, it merely accompanies her recognition of it. In fact, she uses language as a last-ditch effort to prove to her maker that since she possesses the all too human gift of speech she must be more than a mere golem. And if she is indeed more than a mere golem, she cannot simply be "undone." To unmake a speech-utilizing creature is tantamount to murder. For Magda, it is this very humanity, that, once exposed, must be denied…”

Diamonds of the Night

Lustig, Arnošt. Diamonds of the Night. Translated by Jeanne Nemcova. Northwestern University Press, 1986.

• Von Kunes, Karen. “World Literature Today.” World Literature Today, vol. 61, no. 2, 1987, pp. 313–314. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/40143198. 

Stylistically Lustig’s prose is much like to Hemingway's. The author writes about emotional subjects unemotionally or sparingly.

This is a collection of 9 short stories about the plight of Holocaust victims in the Jewish ghettos and concentration camps. Lustig recounts almost plotless stories through the eyes of children and young adults. He provides an intensive insight into their lives without dwelling on their suffering. Rather he focuses on the spiritual angle – how these youngsters are sustained somehow and still feel their actions can affect their fates. As Von Kunes says, “They search for their identity and a new, unconventional meaning of life; they experience fear and awkwardness, discover the beauty of true friendship in critical moments of death and life, and preserve endless hope in escaping death.” Von Kunes P. 313.

Night and Hope

Lustig, Arnošt. Night and Hope. Washington: Inscape, 1976. 

Key reference article 

• Trucks, Rob, and Arnošt Lustig. “A Conversation with Arnošt Lustig.” New England Review (1990-), vol. 20, no. 4, 1999, pp. 68–76., www.jstor.org/stable/40243769. 

Arnošt. Lustig spent most of his adolescence in Nazi concentration camps including Theresienstadt, Auschwitz, and Buchenwald. He escaped imprisonment by jumping from a transport train bound for Dachau. For the next twenty years, the author lived in Prague, leaving after the Soviet invasion of 1968. Eventually he emigrated to the United States and settled in Washington, D.C. where he taught at American University.

When asked about how much education he had had, in an interview (see reference article below) Lustig commented that he had attended the ‘university about man, that he could not have learned better’ [Sic inside the concentration camps during the Holocaust.]. He said:

I learned about goodness, about evil, about the character of man, about the possibilities of man, about the weaknesses of man. I knew people who in one hour were heroes and who in another hour failed. And I learned that you cannot underestimate or overestimate anyone because anyone can be important for your life, especially when your life is on the brink of existence and non-existence. So with very little exaggeration I can say that everything I learned about man, or the character of man, about the fate of man, I learned in camps, until I was seventeen years old.”      (Trucks, P.68-69) 

Page 71, Trucks article quote:

Lustig writes of the concentration camp experience -He focuses on young adolescents -who just happen to be Czech Jews. and incidentally - he draws him into the world of the Holocaust. By “amalgamating universal problems of maturation with the day-to-day horrors of the concentration camp, he shines new light on the former and makes the latter more real, more accessible to those who did not live through it.”

In this interview, Lustig describes his thoughts and feelings about Literature: “In literature you have to be noble because literature is the most noble expression of human memory, emotions, and history 

A Scrap of Time and Other Stories

Fink, Ida. A Scrap of Time and Other Stories. New York: Pantheon Books, 1987. 

Ida Fink was born in Poland in 1921. She lived in a ghetto through 1942 and then was in hiding until the end of the war. In 1957, she emigrated to Israel with her husband and daughter.

A Scrap of time brings in to sharp focus her own experiences as a young woman – describing the horrors of alienation, persecutions and destruction of her world around her. The terror and the horrors of the roundups (actions); ghetto life, life of being hidden and being forced to listen to what others had witnessed as their fellow Jews were rounded up and taken away to dig their own graves and be murdered nearby – men women and children – old and the youngest. Other stories talk of witnessing and others about the very few who managed to return from the camps – complete ghosts of their former sells, staying silent in their ‘screaming’…

Page 34. Fink's starts this work by wanting to talk about a certain time not measured in months and years. she says that for so long I have wanted to talk about this time, and not in the way I will talk about it now, not just about this one scrap of time. I wanted to, but I couldn't. I didn't know how. I was afraid, too, that the second time, which is measured in months and years, had buried the other time under a layer of years, that the second time I've crushed the first and destroyed it within me.

Digging around in the ruins of memory, I found it fresh and untouched by forgetfulness. This time was measured not in months but in a word, we no longer set "in the beautiful month of May" but "after the first 'action' or the second or right before the 3rd." We had different measures of time, we different ones, always different, always with that mark of difference that moved some of us to Pride and others to humility. We, who, because of a difference were condemned once again, as we had been before in our history, we were condemned once again during this time measured not in months nor by the rising and setting of the sun, but by a word - " action," a word signifying movement, a word you would use about a novel or a play. 

This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen

Borowski, Tadeusz. This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen. New York: Penguin Books, 1997. 

Reference book: 

• Alvin H. Rosenfeld. A Double Dying: Reflections on Holocaust Literature.

Page 72-75 Rosenfeld. – He writes of Borowski’s account in This Way for the Gas, as written from the point of view of an “accessory to the crime”… “complicitous criminality.”

In this work Borowski manages to emphasize the abominations of Auschwitz by using his creative writing skills to ‘embed horror chips –“like chips of mosaic in a clay of commonplace behavior.” (Langer Page 89. 

(see Page 122 of This way to the Gas…for an ‘exchange of pleasantries’ in Auschwitz Langer P.90

Seen through the eyes of a Polish gentile prisoner, as Borowski himself was, "This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen" describes a typical day at Auschwitz. 

The narrator joins in the task of unloading thousands of Jews from the cattle cars and sending them to their death in the gas chamber, all to acquire food and maybe a pair of shoes.

Tadeusz Borowski was born in Soviet Ukraine in 1922, in a Polish community that would, under Stalin’s rule, become the first national minority targeted during the Great Terror, ultimately resulting in the death of 600-700 thousand Poles. When Borowski was four years old, his father was arrested and sent to the Gulag; four years later, his mother was arrested and sent to Siberia. Borowski and his brother were placed in an orphanage until 1932 when the Polish Red Cross succeeded in getting them resettled in Poland. His parents were eventually released and repatriated to Poland where, in poor health and in poverty, they strived to establish a family life again.

Tadeusz was only 17 when Germany invaded Poland. He continued his studies in underground schools and began writing poetry published in the underground press. At 21, he was arrested by the Gestapo, stepping into a trap when looking for his fiancée, Maria, who had just been arrested as well, along with a friend, another student. After the war, he returned to Poland and began writing again, but this time in prose because his experiences made poetry impossible. His stories about Auschwitz were published under the title, Pożegnanie z Marią (A Farewell to Maria), later published in English under the title, This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen.

 In his introduction to the English translation of This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen, Jan Kott writes of Tadeusz Borowski's decision to render his Auschwitz stories in the first person: "The identification of the author with the narrator was the moral decision of a prisoner who had lived through Auschwitz—an acceptance of mutual responsibility, mutual participation, and mutual guilt for the concentration camp." Indeed, in a review for another author's book about the concentration camps, Borowski stated, "It is impossible to write about Auschwitz impersonally." He defined as the "first duty of Auschwitzers ... to make clear just what camp is." It is where survival depended on a prisoner's taking part in the murder and degradation of their fellow victims. "But write that you, you were the ones who did this," Borowski intoned. "That a portion of the sad fame of Auschwitz belongs to you as well."

Borowski offers his readers “no theories, and not a single redeeming possibility. Unembellished, because, as he wrote, “there can be no beauty if it is paid for by human injustice, nor truth that passes over injustice, nor moral virtue that condones it.” …Cosmopolitan Review: A Transatlantic Review of Things Polish in English. http://cosmopolitanreview.com/this-way-for-the-gas-review/