PEOPLE
Only those who survived can remember for they alone know the smell of burning flesh and a day is coming when no one will actually remember this smell, it will be nothing more than a phrase, a literary reference, an idea of an odour. Odourless therefore. - Jorge Semprun.
For the survivors of unspeakable horror, the act of transmission offers evidence of a 'before' and an 'after.' Their stories are thus a declaration of ongoing survival. The ten individuals presented here are among the last living Litvaks to have known a pre-Holocaust world. Glimpses of the personal -- a tiny bottle of perfume stuffed into a coat pocket before fleeing the ghetto, a silent promise whispered beside a mass grave, an amber pendent purchased as a symbol of eternal loss at a market stall -- typically absent from the historical record are afforded prominence here. Through them we grasp how history is lived and experienced from the inside. Each of the following segments invite you into the narrators' world, illumating the lives they have constructed on the debris of history.
When the pressure abates for just moment we utter a cry. Its importance should not be underestimated. Many a time in history did such cries resound; for a long time they resounded in vain, and only much later did they produce an echo. - Gustawa Jarecka, written in the Warsaw Ghetto.
For the survivors of unspeakable horror, the act of transmission offers evidence of a 'before' and an 'after.' Their stories are thus a declaration of ongoing survival. The ten individuals presented here are among the last living Litvaks to have known a pre-Holocaust world. Glimpses of the personal -- a tiny bottle of perfume stuffed into a coat pocket before fleeing the ghetto, a silent promise whispered beside a mass grave, an amber pendent purchased as a symbol of eternal loss at a market stall -- typically absent from the historical record are afforded prominence here. Through them we grasp how history is lived and experienced from the inside. Each of the following segments invite you into the narrators' world, illumating the lives they have constructed on the debris of history.
When the pressure abates for just moment we utter a cry. Its importance should not be underestimated. Many a time in history did such cries resound; for a long time they resounded in vain, and only much later did they produce an echo. - Gustawa Jarecka, written in the Warsaw Ghetto.
