I’ve long felt that one of the most immediate of the numerous challenges confronting me as a relatively new teacher in the Holocaust Studies classroom is the question of the students’ role.[1] Perhaps excepting the few students who will be initially attracted to this grim subject for the voyeuristic journey into human suffering, most students will want to immediately consider some form of moral situatedness in relation to the grim narratives of atrocity that are intrinsic to such courses. And, even in the event of the former, I have often been deeply moved to see that students can be startled—in the course’s very first day—into glimpsing a new paradigm of readership, gaining insight into participating in an ethical role that can be described as ethical witnessing for the witness, or readerly agency, particularly after a close encounter with the lyrics of Dan Pagis.

First, a little background. Often considered alongside Aharon Appelfeld and Paul Celan, Dan Pagis (1930-1986) is representative of a unique generation of post-Holocaust writers who were born in the polyglot and culturally rich environment of the Bukovina area of Romania (formerly Austria, now the Ukraine). Born in 1930, Pagis had already experienced severe disorientation and loss even before the Holocaust, first with the emigration of his father to Palestine in 1934, then the early death of his mother not long after, culminating in his deportation at the age of eleven. Years later it emerged that, after his mother’s death, the family in Bukovina were convinced that the widower in Palestine would be unable to support the child. Unable to find foreign haven—unlike Appelfeld and Celan who were fortunate enough to escape the camps—Pagis was incarcerated by the Nazis for three years. He never learned the fate of his grandparents. After spending his early adolescence in concentration camps in Transnistria, Pagis reached Palestine in 1946 where he was reunited with his father (though reportedly years of estrangement followed into adult life) and taught school on a kibbutz. Eventually, Pagis began to write and publish poems in Hebrew, closely mentored by the poet Leah Goldberg (1911-70). Whereas it has often been argued that Paul Celan remained committed to an enigmatic language of his own making, perhaps unsure until his eventual suicide of its destination or audience, Pagis had to cope with the challenge of addressing a clearly defined audience of Israelis who, though engaged in a collective act of repatriation, were perhaps somewhat ambivalent in their response to the presence of Holocaust survivors. And yet by the end of his life, he enjoyed literary celebrity as one of Israel’s most popular poets, whose radical skepticism reconnected the Israeli imagination to the ever-disruptive past. Pagis died in Jerusalem in 1986. Precisely because he avoided both conventional forms of commemoration as well as the archetypal role of witness embodied by Elie Wiesel (and never spoke for Israel in the widely popular and officially recognized ways that Yehudah Amichai did), Pagis’s poetry, as Sidra DeKoven Ezrahi, one of Pagis´s most attentive and eloquent readers, argues, “blast[s] a hole in the culture so large that it exposes and undermines its deepest structures [to] claim a radical public presence”(“Variable Directions Book Review,”37). Like Ezrahi, my students and I have gradually awakened to the disturbing awareness that his poetry denies the consolations of conventional narratives of finding security after catastrophe, not least in its radical unease over any safe definition of homeland. As I will explain shortly, in this and other ways, Pagis utterly disrupts the reader’s own world.

            I like to teach with Lawrence Langer’s Art from the Ashes: A Holocaust Anthology (Oxford), particularly for its scope and attention to the various ways that genre contributes to the students’ encounter with narratives of trauma. Langer’s anthology encompasses excerpts from ghetto diaries, essays by Levi and Wiesel, short fiction by Ida Fink and many others, novels and novellas by Sobol and Appelfeld, and even haunting reproductions of art created in Terezin. But I am most impressed by the space alloted to  the often neglected testimony of poetry, especially the judicious gleanings from Abraham Sutzkever, Paul Celan, Miklós Radnóti, and Nelly Sachs. An additional strength of the anthology is Langer’s sober-minded attention to the demands that each genre makes on its grim subject matter. Teachers who may be somewhat ill at ease in approaching this material for the first time couldn’t hope for a better guide, particularly in Langer’s cautionary approach to the relation between poetry and trauma: “Holocaust  poetry should not be mistaken for a renewal of the spirit or used as a reason for redressing the cruelty of the doom it reflects. Its true legacy is a tribute to the resilience of language and the ability of the artistic imagination to meet a chaoric challenge and with sheer inventive skill change it into durable, if often difficult and unfamiliar poetic forms”(Art From the Ashes 559). In this regard I should add here that I am especially drawn to the collection because it happens to contain the best representation of Pagis’s shorter lyrics currently available in any Holocaust anthology and Langer’s illuminating introductions to each poet provide students with engaging and informative contexts. Though the Pagis selection appears toward the latter half of the weighty volume, it is here that my class always begins.

I have been thinking about the profound pedagogical potential that Dan Pagis’s lines can offer the literature classroom ever since first encountering Sara Harowitz’s explication of the poem in a Holocaust Educational Foundation workshop where we wrestled with much the same existential questions that the poem continues to raise for my students. I remain inspired by her rigorous questioning on that ocassion, and so, almost invariably, I like to begin the first or second day of class with Dan Pagis’s famous poem of incomplete witnessing, “Written in Pencil in the Sealed Railway-Car” (“Katuv b’iparon bakaron hehatum”) where humanity’s sense of progress is undermined as the ominous beginnings of human community glares through present history like a murderous palimpsest:[2]

                                                 here in this carload

                                                 i am eve

                                                 with abel my son

                                                 if you see my other son

                                                 cain son of man

                                                 tell him that i

There are few works of art that so successfully crystallize the problem of testimony, commemoration, and conscience; no reader escapes its call for their involvement. Since at times, the only concrete connections in Pagis’ work are those that the individual reader creates, I like to begin by allowing students to approach it from the grounds of their own unfamiliarity, in meditative isolation. Then, following that quiet first reading, I provide classroom time for collaborating on an explication in small groups (to encourage those who are inhibited); finally I draw from those responses in the framework of a large class discussion. Not only does this strategy encourage students to provide a direct, interpretive role (certainly an empowering paradigm for any lower-division literature classroom to embrace), but the experience, so powerfully divested of formulaic resolution—insures that as a community of readers we have a powerful touchstone for experiencing the shocks of subsequent texts without anticipating consolatory conventions.

Students are naturally confused about what they are supposed to “get” out of the bad news that the Holocaust poem, memoir, witness account, or fictional narrative invariably delivers. Certainly I have occupied their position (and continue to do so at troubling moments). Often nearly traumatized by the bleak material they confront, they reasonably assume that they are expected to somehow wrest meaning from atrocity. Some students (particularly those students influenced by Christian traditions) expect some form of spiritual consolation from the text—that the witness, especially the victim, will offer them a redemptive message that otherwise soothes, strengthens or redeems their own moment in history.

            In contrast to such expectations, Pagis´s poem, blending the formal Hebrew of antiquity with the colloquial moment of the poem’s composition, rightly puts the burden of meaning on the reader who is not merely liberated to make her or his own sense of the text’s message, but compelled to do so by the way the poet situates his unknown audience. Recently I have come to realize that one of my more difficult goals in the Holocaust literature course is that my students will grapple with creating their own version of Kaja Silverman’s unsettling insistence that “If to remember is to provide the disembodied ‘wound’ with a psychic residence, than to remember other people’s memories is to be wounded by their wounds”(Threshold 189). To begin a process that might lead to such a revelation about the unexpected forms of such commemoration, I ask my students to discuss three simple questions that the poem raises (and it is always gratifying to learn from their responses): who is the speaker in this poem?; who is being addressed?; and most challenging, what is the message? And as mentioned above, it seems to me important that, rather than immediately address this as a class, students work on these questions in small groups, where their ignorance of the poem’s context, or my intentions, will not inhibit discussion.

Students immediately have to contend with the disturbing notion that someone else’s utterance (often long dead) has made a distinct claim on them as otherwise autonomous beings. In this regard my pedagogy embraces the uses that Emily Miller Budick makes of Stanley Cavell’s unique invocation of acknowledgment, a trope that addresses “the doubt of skepticism that argues we cannot ´know´ the world and other people in it. Rather than dismiss the skeptic’s worry as either perverse or not fully intended…Cavell [grants] the skeptic’s insight that we cannot attain knowledge as certainty…According to Cavell, when we say, for example, that we ‘know’ another person’s pain we do not mean that we ‘know’ it as a certainty. Instead we mean that we understand and respond to a claim made on us by that individual’s expression of that pain.” In this interpretive mode, teachers of indeterminate works like “Written in Pencil”—will appreciate Budick’s striking assertion that denial of “this kind would be to refuse to acknowledge that pain...not the legitimate expression of one’s skepticism but what Cavell calls ‘disowning’ knowledge” (“Acknowledging the Holocaust” 329). In my experience teaching the “Literature of the Holocaust,” primarily to non-Jewish undergraduate students, no other text so readily rewards their perception that the true work that awaits them is to respond to the course as if implicated. Not at all of course, in the sense of a counterproductive “guilt,” but rather as bearing the moral burden of the broken transmission of millions, of striving to form an ethical relation to fragmented texts and broken lives. And the title’s discomfiting reference to a “sealed railway-car” often stirs students to raise appropriate questions about the culpability of “onlookers” and “bystanders” who experienced the quotidian phenomenon of trains carrying men, women, and children to their deaths in the European countryside.

Pagis’s poem is also a useful introduction to a genre often neglected in Holocaust courses. More than prose narratives, particularly Holocaust memoirs, the lyrics of numerous survivor poets discourages the reader from dismissing the Holocaust as “past,” but instead underscores the present, both temporally and spatially. Thinking about Pagis’s searing lyric, I have found Amir Eshel’s reading of Benjamin’s angel, bearing on the particular challenge of Holocaust poetics, to be a most instructive paradigm for students as they continue to evaluate their own orientation toward the Holocaust as “past” event:

Just as Walter Benjamin’s angel is “propelled” into the future while his present sight is focused on the “pile of debris,” the past portrayed in this poetry is evoked from the perspective of poetic presence. Analogous to Benjamin’s notion that the angel’s spatial and temporal viewpoint (“His face is turned toward the past”) reflects the core of Jewish remembrance (Eingedenken), the temporal dimension inscribed in this poetry can best be described as facing the Shoah...these particular “piles of debris” that can never be eradicated. (“Eternal Present” 143)

Hence, as students come to realize, in its sheer fragmentariness it is difficult to think of this poem as a “work” or a “text.” Instead, invoking “here,” it is a place they are urgently summoned to. In their own terms and language, students confront a “script” that dissolves “the temporal and spatial distinction between ‘inside’ and ‘outside,’ between those who are part of the events and those who ‘just’ read about them from the safe distance and comfort usually associated with reading poetry and indulging in aesthetic pleasure” (Eshel 148). Or in other words, the burden of “freedom” in this post-Auschwitz universe means being exposed to this closed space of exile. In my own experience, by the time they return to reexamine the text at the end of the course, students often discover that they have grown to appreciate Pagis´s incomparable genius for conveying horror through sheer allusion, without shrillness or hysteria.

            Over years of reading this poem, I have also acquired a respect for Pagis’s stoic refusal to succumb to conventional constructions of the child as the quintessential emblem of vulnerability and innocence, a trope that has often generated trivialization and oversaturation of the Holocaust, in ways that, as Geoffrey Hartman warns, can gradually etherize our responses. The lost children of the poem certainly do not invite the easy empathy with Anne Frank or other manifestly familiar images of vulnerability such as the well-known photograph of the Warsaw ghetto child in a peaked cap and upraised hands joining other Jews herded by German soldiers with automatic pistols. Instead, the missing child invoked here is Cain; both “son of Adam” and ben adam, a 20th century human being fully capable of unleashing atrocity. Some point after the students’ first raw foray into the text, teachers will find it useful to draw their attention to the fact that, besides being the son of Adam, the Hebrew phrase denotes a human- or more literally “earth-being.” Though the immediacy of that powerful syntactical feature is lost a bit in translation, few students will miss the way that, in its symbolic reference to the first family of humanity (which chillingly collapses the distance between the first human murder and the worst atrocities of our own age), the poem eloquently refutes our desire to take comfort in a linear notion of civilization’s progress. Though poignantly calling out to resolve the exigency of their ephemerality (“Written in Pencil”), these lines etch themselves indelibly on the students’ conscience.

            Readers invariably awaken to the poem’s moral challenge to them, as a text that presupposes a community of readers who will struggle to complete its “failure” of transmission. After they have become acquainted with the English version in their own terms, it is worth alerting students to a critical translation problem. John Felstiner is representative of a number of critics who have cogently noted that in English “the plural addressee of Pagis’s tagidulo gets lost: ‘tell [ye] him.’” Students need to be made to understand that a crucial translation problem arises here since, unlike translators and poets like Felstiner, most will not be immediately aware that our English “you” was originally used nominatively as the plural of “Thou.” Under the rules of contemporary usage, the translator’s English can no longer inflect the verb to show that “Eve has something to tell a great many people, even unto the present generation, about her son’s murder.” Felstiner and other readers of the Hebrew original are well aware that, in Pagis’s intertextual imagination, the “you” addressed is the second person plural, “im tiru…tagidu” forming an imperative which demands the moral participation of both male and female witnesses.  Felstiner is observantly discomfited by the translation of the poem’s silence: “Does the silence cutting short her last words tagidulo sh’ani, do our questions suspended in that silence after ‘tell him that I,’ resound the same in English as in Hebrew?” (“Jews Translating Jews” 344).

            Still, whether read in English or the original Hebrew, this profoundly incomplete poem requires the intervention of a reader, who has been ethically summoned to respond linguistically. As Ezrahi memorably remarks, “ lack of closure here is the absolute refusal of art as triumph over mortality” (Booking Passage 162). The poem disrupts too easy a resolution of the absences it commemorates. In this regard, it may be useful to raise issues of public memory and commemorative space for the students’ consideration. For example, some students may find it is fitting that Pagis´s lines, composing one of the shortest lyrics in the modern Hebrew language, were carved onto an actual transport car of a train that has been made a part of the Transport Memorial at Yad Vashem (1995), Israel’s national memorial to the Holocaust, to serve as a textual meditation on the foreboding surface on which they are inscribed. But for others (particularly in the wake of the Israeli response to Palestinian aspirations) it will be clear, as it is to me, that Pagis´s disturbing paean to deathly silence can not be easily confined within the monological thrust of national or officially-sanctioned commemorative narratives, and indeed transcend any efforts to contain them. For all readers, it may be worth pondering Ezrahi’s sense of the manifest capacity of these lines to remain “disruptive, unassimiliable, even after being ‘safely’ embedded in commemorative public space reflects the poem’s resistance to the sanctities and proprieties of ritualized speech” (Booking Passage 162).

            Here I should only add that not only is Pagis’s poem a powerful work to begin a course with; it can perform a very special role at the very end, as a sort of textual touchstone, at least for some approaches. Invariably most syllabi I have seen ensure that students will encounter all sorts of narratives; prose, poetry, memoir, and fiction. Often, the cumulative effect of encountering these various forms of the testimonial and witnessing process that is intrinsic to such courses, is to make students more aware of the roles of resilience and adaptation in the writer’s act of self-representation. As Shoshana Felman has rightly noted, survivor narratives often stir the Holocaust classroom with the liberating “rebirth to speech...the very eloquence of life, with ‘striking, vivid’ examples “of the liberating vital function of testimony”(Testimony 416). For at the very least, Pagis’s six lines deprive us of such consolation, returning us to the shadowy silences of the dead, for whom no one can speak. Rather than a triumphal sense of having worked through and overcome loss, the poem paradoxically insists on its own atrocity as an event still to be communicated, still trapped in speechlessness. As a reminder of unspeakability, Pagis haunts us with a Holocaust that remains an event without a witness or narrator, which depends on each subsequent reader’s struggle—to witness and narrate. Students who may have confronted their own loss of language, their startling discovery of the inadequacy of the university-trained intellect, while confronting the wounding texts of Holocaust courses will understand that the polarities of both paradigms are intrinsic to the narratives of atrocity and endurance they have witnessed.

In Canada, a woman can have an abortion without fear of prosecution or imprisonment - for the simple reason that there is no abortion law. For more than 20 years, that state of affairs has set us apart from the rest of the developed world. Canadian women enjoy the right to safe and legal abortions largely because Henry Morgentaler fought a long battle on their behalf.

For his trouble, the unflappable Dr. Morgentaler stood trial, languished in prison and received numerous death threats. What drove him to take such risks? "The realization that a terrible injustice was being done to women and the conviction that it was necessary to change the situation to provide help for those who needed it," replies the retired physician via email.

Anyone who didn't live through the 1960s and '70s may find it hard to imagine the legal and moral strictures that once dictated abortion policy in this country. Dr. Morgentaler, 87, isn't shy about taking credit for making Canadians realize that back-alley surgeries are hardly the hallmark of a civilized society.

"On the issue of abortion, I see myself as a leader," he says. "The women of Canada, who lobbied relentlessly and supported me not only emotionally but also through campaigns and fundraising for my trials, deserve a lot of credit as well."

Born and raised in Łódź, Poland, Dr. Morgentaler is a survivor who has suffered great injustice himself. After the invading Nazis killed his father, a member of Poland's Jewish socialist party, he was imprisoned at Auschwitz and other concentration camps near the end of the Second World War. Dr. Morgentaler and his wife later immigrated to Montreal, where he earned his medical degree.

"My experience during the Holocaust showed me the depth of depravity that human beings can become involved in," he says. "It made me, more than ever, conscious of the inherent evil that human beings can descend to, and that it is our duty not to ever allow this to happen."

Before he joined the abortion fight, Dr. Morgentaler spent two decades as a general practitioner. Then in the late 1960s, he joined the call to change Canada's existing abortion law and began performing abortions at a private clinic in Montreal. After the Trudeau government loosened the law in 1969 to permit abortions - but only if approved by hospital committees - Dr. Morgentaler remained openly defiant.

Although several juries acquitted him of performing illegal abortions, he spent several months in jail during the mid-'70s. Such pressure failed to deter Dr. Morgentaler - and as he persisted, Canada's abortion rights movement gained strength. In 1988 - reversing a Morgentaler conviction - the Supreme Court of Canada struck down the federal abortion law as unconstitutional.

"First of all, I can think of all of those women that I have been able to help who were desperate to have an abortion," Dr. Morgentaler says when asked how he changed the lives of others. "The act of civil disobedience demonstrated that a cause of this nature could mobilize so many people to create change overall."

As for his foes in the pro-life camp, he gives them no quarter. "I have nothing but contempt for people who wish to deny women one of the fundamental rights to control their reproduction," says the 2008 Order of Canada recipient.

Dr. Morgentaler, who now owns three private abortion clinics, thinks he has accomplished most of his goals by establishing facilities and training other doctors to continue his life's work. However, he adds, regional disparities are still a problem in Canada when it comes to accessing abortions.

Another challenge facing pro-choice advocates is that most Canadians are ill informed about abortion's legal status in their own country - and many are unhappy with it. In an August poll by Angus Reid Public Opinion, just 21 percent of respondents knew that Canada has no abortion restrictions. Meanwhile, 30 percent wanted to see the abortion debate revisited. But Dr. Morgentaler doesn't sound worried about the future. "[I am]pretty confident that the rights acquired by women in Canada will remain valid and legal," he predicts.

Then there's Ottawa's recent refusal to fund abortions through a G8 maternal health program - a move condemned by aid organizations and women's groups. "I think the right to safe medical abortions should be reaffirmed and safeguarded throughout the world," Dr. Morgentaler says.

Today we remember in the Salesian FamilyBlessed Joseph Kowalski. Blessed Joseph was born at Siedliska, Poland, on March 13, 1911, the seventh of nine children. After primary schooling, he entered the Salesian school at Oswiecim (Auschwitz). Joseph immediately distinguished himself for his commitment to study and service, and for his cheerfulness.

As a young student he began to keep a diary, from which we learn of his devotion to Mary Help of Christians and the Eucharist. He made his first profession in 1928 and was ordained a priest on May 29, 1938 at Krakow and was appointed provincial secretary. In the parish he looked after the youth choir and became interested in young people with problems. Poland had been occupied, but the Salesians continued with their educational activity with the young. This was why his dramatic arrest came about on May 23, 1941 along with eleven other Salesians working in Krakow.

They were taken to the prison in Montelupich and then on June 26 to the concentration camp in Auschwitz. He secretly took up an apostolate, strengthening his prison friends with the will to struggle for survival. He underwent suffering and humiliation.

When he was discovered with a rosary, he refused to trample on it, thus hastening his martyrdom, which occurred on July 4, 1942. His body was first thrown into a refuse dump, and then was burned in the camp’s crematorium. His countrymen began to venerate his memory, maintaining that his sacrifice made vocations in Poland more fruitful. Pope John Paul II was of the same opinion, and became interested in the cause of various Polish martyrs. Joseph was beatified in Warsaw on June 13, 1999.

Irena Sendlerowa , also known as Irena Sendler was born on 15 February 1910 in Warsaw, is a former social worker in Poland. During World War Two she was an activist in the Polish Underground and she helped save approximately 2500 Jewish children from the Warsaw ghetto by smuggling them out of the ghetto, and providing them with hiding places and false papers.  

As a member of Zegota, a secret organisation set up by the Polish government in exile in London, to rescue Polish Jews, she organised a small group of social workers to smuggle Jewish children to safety.  

She worked in the Warsaw health department and had permission to enter the ghetto, which had been created in November 1940 to segregate the Jewish population.  

She and her team smuggled the children out by various means, such as hiding them in ambulances, or guiding them through the sewer pipes, wheeling them out on a trolley in suitcases or boxes, or taking them out through the back door entrance in the Court House on Leszno Street.

She noted the names of the children on cigarette papers, twice for security, and sealed them in two glass jars, which she buried in a colleague’s garden.

The Warsaw Ghetto

After the war the jars were dug up and the lists handed to Jewish representatives. Attempts were then made to reunite the children with their families, but most of them had perished in the death camps, particularly Treblinka, which was used to exterminate the Jews of Warsaw. 

Irena was arrested in October 1943 and was taken to the Gestapo Headquarters on the Aleja Szucha, where she was held before being driven away to be executed.

But Zegota managed to bribe the Gestapo for her release and she was knocked unconscious and left by the roadside. During the war Irena was sentenced to death by the Right Wing Polish Underground for rescuing Jewish Children. Elzbieta Ficowska was smuggled out of the ghetto by Mrs Sendlerowa in a toolbox on a lorry, when she was just five months old, said: Irena who now lives in a Warsaw nursing home, insisted she did nothing special. In an interview she said “I was brought up to believe that a person must be rescued when drowning, regardless of religion and nationality. The term ‘hero’ irritates me greatly – the opposite is true – I continue to have pangs of conscience that I did so little.”  

“In the face of today’s indifference, the example of Irena Sendlerowa is very important. Irena Sendlerowa is like a third mother to me and many rescued children” referring also to her real mother and her Polish foster mother.

*Irena Sendlerowa died on the 12 May 2008 in a Warsaw Nursing Home.

Hana Pravda was born Hana Beck in 1916 into a well-off Czech Jewish family and she first trod the boards as a teenager. Her niece, the Prague-based journalist and translator, Eva Munk, picks up the story:

“She started shortly after her mother died. It was a terrible blow to her and so, to bring her back into life, her father finally agreed to give her acting lessons with a very famous Czech actress. Shortly afterwards she was sent to Russia, where the most avant-garde theatre was going on, for a year. Then she came back. I think she acted in the Kladno theatre for a while and she did occasional visiting performances in the National Theatre. Of course that was all cut short by the war in 1939. They had to move out to Potštejn in East Bohemia.”

Hana PravdaThree years later the Holocaust caught up even with the quiet village where they had sought sanctuary. Hana and her husband Sasha, whom she had met and fallen madly in love with back in 1936, were both sent to the Terezín ghetto, and two years later, Hana went voluntarily with her husband when he was put on a list to be deported east, to Auschwitz. Sasha perished, and Hana was to survive alone.

“When she came back, the man she had married, my uncle Sasha, was dead. She returned to the theatre: she was at the very prestigious Realistické Theatre, where she met her second husband George Pravda, who was a brilliant actor. But in 1948 they had to emigrate. First they went to Paris. They couldn’t quite get a foothold there, so they emigrated further to Australia, where they lived for seven years, and – sort of as a sideline, because they really couldn’t live without the acting – she founded a theatre group at the local college theatre.

“One time, when they were performing ‘Of Mice and Men’, which Hana directed, Dame Sybil Thorndike from Britain came to see the performance and she told them, ‘Come to London – I will sponsor you.’ And they did. George went on to have a very good career playing with several prestigious theatres, and Hana got more of a toehold in television, and I think later mostly she played character roles in several movies. She also directed a lot of plays in London.”

It was an amazingly full life, in defiance of the times she lived through, but it is not just for her success as an actress that Hana Pravda is remembered. In the year 2000, she published an extraordinary book, called “I Was Writing This Diary For You, Sasha”, the core of which was Hana’s wartime diary – which was only to re-emerge over half a century after she had written it. Eva Munk continues:

“The diary was lost at the end of the war. It remained in Prague and it somehow got mixed up with the things that were left behind in Prague when they moved to Paris. Later her cousin packed up all these things and sent them to Australia, just as they were leaving for England. They ended up in somebody’s attic, where they stayed for 50 years, including this diary, which was in some old box. And finally one day her erstwhile neighbour in Australia was going through this and she found this diary. She sent it to Hana.”

Do you remember how Hana felt when she opened the envelope and there was the diary again?

“Well, she never really talked about that. She just came one day and said – look at this diary that I recently found – and she told the crazy story and she said – isn’t life crazy sometimes? – Imagine this completely ironic thing that happened - that it should show up now.”

Hana PravdaThe book “I Was Writing This Diary For You, Sasha” combines the diary itself with Hana’s later memories of her life before and afterwards. In the context of Hana’s life, the details of the diary come as a shock and this is part of the power of the book.

“She describes her life, her beautiful life before her mother died and before the war started, and then of course the horrors of Auschwitz. And then she brings you down into the terribly sad situation of finding the man she was coming back to had not survived. And then she shows you again that – yes – life actually did go on after all of this, and that it was pretty good.”

Hana Pravda’s resilience was astonishing. Towards the end of 1944 the Nazis had sent her along with several hundred other women and girls from Auschwitz to the work camp in Birnbäumel, to dig trenches to stop Russian tanks. In January 1945 their captors realized that these measures were futile, and the camp was abandoned. This is the moment when the diary begins.

“They were sent on a death march back to Auschwitz, where they were meant to be killed, and Hana walked away with a friend. What she told me was that she just kept lagging further and further behind and gradually she was able just to walk away. In the book she says that she just turned a corner and left. One thing I’ll always remember that she told me was that when you want to run away from somewhere, do it very slowly.”

How did she come in those extraordinary and very dramatic circumstances to write a diary? It’s the last thing you would imagine someone who is escaping from a death march to start doing.

“It doesn’t surprise me with Hana, because she was always a very literate and literary person. She loved to read. She was always reading something. She really lived the books she read.”

And where did she come across pencil and paper?

“Well, in the book it says that she found it in some old house. She found an old notebook and a pencil and she just started writing this diary to Sasha – to her husband.”

Suddenly I realise that nobody is watching us. I tell Vera, ‘This is our chance’ and then I find myself running – in fact not running but walking, very calmly, round the corner to the back of the factory. And Vera is following me!

Then all we can do is wait. We wait in the deep snow for what seems like an eternity. We are freezing. Will the column never move off?

We run over to the railway tracks to hide behind a big pile of bricks. By now we are completely frozen through. Vera can’t stand the tension, and keeps peeping out from our hiding-place.

At last they finish distributing the potatoes, and the prisoners begin to move slowly away.

The diary tells the story of her experiences day by day, between escaping from the death march and just after the end of the war, and one thing that makes it particularly moving is Hana’s continuing hope that she will find her beloved Sasha again.

“When I think about it, I think it was her way of being with him. Of course that was the big question. Would she find him in Prague? And I think that was her way of being close to him.”

For you as her niece it must be very moving reading about this and about the loss of that hope when she realized – and she writes about it in her diary – that Sasha was no longer alive.

“It’s tremendously hard for me to read it. The entire book is very hard for me to read, because I knew it ended badly and I knew that Sasha died I think it was five days before the war officially ended, just trapped in a railcar, sitting on a side rail somewhere on the Czech border.”

20th November 1945

I am in Prague. It’s eight years since you kissed me for the first time, Sasha.

After my show tonight we went to the U Šupů Restaurant, but it was all closed up, and inside it was completely dark.

Now I am sitting in our favourite coffeehouse, the Union, at our table in the middle room. I’m warming my hands on a cup of tea, just as I used to in the old days. The street hasn’t changed at all. You’re sitting opposite me. Your mother has just left us. You’re the only person for me in the whole world… The only one.

The world is empty and I can’t stand it. I want to die.”

The diary ends in despair with Hana sitting in Prague and the person she wants to be with is no longer there. And yet the extraordinary thing is that the rest of her life was so full of energy and optimism. She went on to have a very successful career as an actress, to have a second family. How do you think she managed that?

“I think her second husband, Jiří Pravda, had a lot to do with that. He was an amazing person, and incredible sense of humour, also very wise, a very strong personality. I think that and the acting got her through the worst parts. Imagine the situation: you came back and everybody you loved was gone.”

There are plenty of books about the concentration camps, all similar to each other, all horrifying, and different only in the reactions of each personality who lived through them. My diary was completely private – not writing as an accusation, or as the memoirs of a witness. And it was written then.

I can’t forgive the perpetrators of this evil, nor do I want to forgive. I have never obtained a mandate from all the innocent victims to do so. I want to remember the victims always, and I believe that the guilty should be punished.

But there is some hope in my heart. Vaguely, childishly, I still believe in God and in immortality, and that gives me the strength to go on living, as I hope it does for others as well.

Besides her twin sister, Mariana, she had another sister and two brothers. She discovered a love for music at the age of 3, and it has remained with her to this day. Her family home in Prague was also a cultural salon where writers, scientists, musicians and actors congregated, among them Franz Kafka, who she remembers well. He was the best friend of the journalist, author and philosopher Felix Weltsch, who married her sister Irma.

“Kafka was a slightly strange man,” Sommer recalled. “He used to come to our house, sit and talk with my mother, mainly about his writing. He did not talk a lot, but rather loved quiet and nature. We frequently went on trips together. I remember that Kafka took us to a very nice place outside Prague. We sat on a bench and he told us stories. I remember the atmosphere and his unusual stories. He was an excellent writer, with a lovely style, the kind that you read effortlessly,” she says, and then grows silent. “And now, hundreds of people all over the world research and write doctorates about him.”

When World War I broke out, she was 11. Five years later she enrolled in the German music academy in Prague, where she was the youngest pupil. Within a short time she became one of the city’s most famous pianists, and in the early 1930s was also known throughout Europe. Max Brod, the man who published Kafka’s works, recognized Sommer’s talent and reviewed several of her performances for a newspaper.

In 1931 she married Leopold Sommer, also a musician. Six years later their only son, Rafael, was born. In 1939 the Nazis invaded Czechoslovakia.

This was a very difficult time for Sommer, who had stayed behind. The Nazis forbade Jews to perform in public, and so she stopped holding concerts and participating in music competitions. At first she was still able to make a living by giving piano lessons, but when the Nazis forbade Jews to teach non-Jews, she lost most of her pupils.

“Everything was forbidden. We couldn’t buy groceries, take the tram, or go to the park,” she said.

But the hardest times of all still lay ahead. In 1942 the Germans arrested her sick mother, Sophie, who was 72 at the time, and subsequently murdered her.

“That was a catastrophe,” Sommer said. The bond between a mother and her child is something special. I loved her so much. But an inner voice told me, ‘From now on you alone can help yourself. Not your husband, not the doctor, not the child.’

And at that moment I knew I had to play Frederic Chopin’s 24 etudes, which are the greatest challenge for any pianist. Like Goethe’s ‘Faust’ or Shakespeare’s ‘Hamlet.’ I ran home and from that moment on I practiced for hours and hours. Until they forced us out.”

In 1943, Sommer was sent to the Terezin-Theresienstadt concentration camp, along with her husband and their son, who was then 6 years old. The Nazis allowed the Jews to maintain a cultural life there, in order to present the false impression to the world that the inmates were receiving proper treatment. Sommer thus performed there together with other musicians.

“We had to play because the Red Cross came three times a year,” she recounts. “The Germans wanted to show its representatives that the situation of the Jews in Theresienstadt was good. Whenever I knew that I had a concert, I was happy. Music is magic. We performed in the council hall before an audience of 150 old, hopeless, sick and hungry people. They lived for the music. It was like food to them. If they hadn’t come [to hear us], they would have died long before. As we would have.”

In September 1944, her husband Leopold was sent to Auschwitz. He survived his imprisonment there, but died of illness at Dachau shortly before the war ended. His departing words to her at Theresienstadt saved her life, says Sommer: “One evening he came and told me that 1,000 men would be sent on a transport the following day - himself included. He made me swear not to volunteer to follow him afterward. And a day after his transport there was another one, which people were told was a transport of ‘wives following in their husbands’ footsteps.’ Many wives volunteered to go, but they never met up with their husbands: They were murdered. If my husband hadn’t warned me, I would have gone at once.”

In May 1945, the Soviet army liberated Theresienstadt. Two years later Sommer and her son immigrated to Palestine, where they were reunited with her family: her twin Mariana, who had meanwhile married Prof. Emil Adler, one of the founders of Hadassah Medical Center (their son, Prof. Chaim Adler, is an Israel Prize laureate for education), and with Irma and her husband Felix (their grandson is actor Eli Gorenstein).

I don’t hate the Germans,” Sommer declared. “[What they did] was a terrible thing, but was Alexander the Great any better? Evil has always existed and always will. It is part of our life.”

In 1962, she added, she attended the Eichmann trial in Jerusalem: “I have to say that I had pity for him. I have pity for the entire German people. They are wonderful people, no worse than others.”

For almost 40 years Sommer lived in Israel, making a living by teaching music at a conservatory in Jerusalem. “That was the best period in my life,” she recalls. “I was happy.”

In 1986, Sommer followed her son, a cellist, and his family to London. She continued playing and teaching; to this day she devotes three hours a day to practicing. She speaks lovingly of her two grandchildren, whose father, Rafael, died of a heart attack in Israel in 2001, at the end of a concert tour. He was 64.

His birth was the happiest day of my life, and his death was the worst thing that happened to me,” she notes, but manages to find a bright spot even here. “I am grateful at least that he did not suffer when he died. And I still watch my son play, on television. He lives on. Sometimes I think it will be possible someday to postpone death through technology.”

When asked in 2006 what the secret of her longevity was, she answered: In a word: optimism. I look at the good. When you are relaxed, your body is always relaxed. When you are pessimistic, your body behaves in an unnatural way. It is up to us whether we look at the good or the bad. When you are nice to others, they are nice to you. When you give, you receive.” “My recommendation is not to eat a lot, but also not to go hungry. Fish or chicken and plenty of vegetables.”

When asked whether she was afraid of dying, she replied: “Not at all. No. I was a good person, I helped people, I was loved, I have a good feeling.”