Because I don’t speak publicly about my experiences during the Holocaust, I earn my so-called “keep” as a Museum volunteer by translating. Over the years, my husband, Marcel, and I have done many translations. Even though the texts given to us by the Museum for translating are varied, all of them show the horrors of the Holocaust but also people’s resilience, love of family, hope, and resistance.
An example of the resistance is best shown in the 2014 book by Arthur Allen titled The Fantastic Laboratory of Dr. Weigl: How Two Brave Scientists Battled Typhus and Sabotaged the Nazis. The author of the book advertised for translators and chose us because of our survivor status. It is a story about two researchers developing the typhus vaccine—Polish physician Rudolf Weigl and Jewish physician Ludwik Fleck. Our job was to translate witnesses’ accounts describing how they were hired to provide blood for body lice, a process required to develop the vaccine. In this way, Dr. Weigl saved several members of the doomed intelligentsia, among them my pharmacy professor. The resistance was in the fact that the attenuated (weakened) vaccine was sent to the eastern front, while the regular strength vaccine was shipped to the ghettos.
The next two texts I translated not only made me empathize with the writers but also ask myself how I would act in a similar situation, such as the one faced by Hanka Piterman Gorenstein. Her diary was donated to the Museum by John Caplan, her cousin, to be preserved as a part of the family history. Translating it, we “meet” Hanka as a young student from Luck, Ukraine, enjoying her studies and friends.
It is these Polish friends who saved her life, but the joy was gone after the war, leaving her a bitter woman, socializing only with people having similar experiences and not continuing her studies. She witnessed the deaths of her siblings and parents. I could only wonder about her upbringing that allowed her to be strong and resourceful enough to pretend she was a daughter of Polish aristocrats sent to Siberia. John Caplan left a substantial contribution to the Museum in our name and gifted us with a beautiful book.
Another translated text that was sad but had a happy ending was the story of Kaja Finkler. The little girl’s story really tugged at my heart strings. As an eight-year-old, she was taken to the Ravensbrück concentration camp and two years later, to Bergen-Belsen concentration camp, from which she was liberated by the British at the tender age of ten.
Her “old soul” and incredible presence of mind, well beyond her age, amazed me. I translated correspondence between Kaja and her mother, Golda, in which Kaja’s mother, who had just returned from slave labor in Germany, finds out that her daughter is alive and living in Sweden. Golda’s joy is boundless and evident in letters so full of love and longing for reunion. I think that only the Polish language with its numerous terms of endearment is capable of expressing such feelings.
As a mother, I understood her fervent wish to be together, to start a new life in the United States. To my great joy, Kaja is alive and well, a retired professor of anthropology. We established contact and talk often, discussing more details of her and her mother’s story. This is our most cherished reward.
Another text, maybe most heartbreaking, was a diary from a concentration camp in which a group of women write to each other offering support and hope in the horrible conditions they find themselves. The quotes are painful, poignant, philosophical, but also hopeful. Here is one such quote:
“In times of the worst desperation and resignation when you lost everything, keep your heart because its loss kills your humanity. For Frima in moments of misery–Fela.”
It is impossible not to be moved in view of such suffering.
We also translated accounts of the witnesses for the Museum’s special exhibition Some Were Neighbors. One of the witnesses, a train conductor, describes taking Jews to their final destination in the forest where they were summarily killed, how it affected him, and how he tried to help them escape.
Sometimes translation is educational, such as in the case of translating a small part of the Emanuel Ringelblum papers and a speech by Chaim Rumkowski, who was in charge of the Łódź ghetto. Ringelblum’s papers were hidden in metal containers. He and other contributors exposed the tragic situation in the Warsaw ghetto by writing about it, hoping that future generations would have a firsthand account. This to me is a kind of resistance in a hopeless situation.
Rumkowski was a very controversial person in the Łódź ghetto. On the one hand, he organized the workers to make them indispensable for the German war effort, but on the other hand, he suggested giving in to Germans’ demands by selecting old people and children for deportation. It is true they had the smallest chance to survive, but it is hard to imagine anybody willingly giving up their parents or children for a certain death. This must be one of the most difficult moral questions, and from an emotional point of view, unthinkable.
Even though sometimes we translate less intense texts, the majority of the texts inform us, move us to tears, and give us a sense of pride that we help families find their history or add to the Museum’s resources.
Next diary please . . .
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