Yiddish-speaking Jews recorded the events of the Holocaust in memoirs, journals, articles, dispatches, pamphlets, poems, novels and plays. 

In the Warsaw Ghetto, historian Emanuel Ringelblum organized journalists, writers, and scholars into Oyneg Shabes (“The Joy of the Sabbath”), a clandestine network that documented daily life under Nazi occupation.  Two caches of their works, buried in tin boxes and milk cans, were excavated after the war; a third has yet to be found.
 
When the war came to Vilna, the lyric poet Avrom Sutzkever hid books from the Nazis, smuggled arms into the ghetto and fought with the partisans.  His mother and his infant son were killed; he was forced to hide in sewers and, once, in a coffin.  Through it all, Sutzkever continued to write; years later he told a reporter, “If I didn’t write, I wouldn’t live.”  He went on to edit the most famous Yiddish literary journal of the post-war world, and died in Israel in 2010, at the age of 96.

After the war, a young Hungarian Jew named Elie Wiesel recalled his experiences as a boy in Auschwitz and Buchenwald in the memoir Un di velt hot geshvign (And the World Kept Silent), published in Yiddish in Buenos Aires in 1955.  He later rewrote the novel in French as La Nuit (Night), intended for a wider audience.  It appeared in English in 1960. 

Eventually survivors published thousands of memoirs in Yiddish and other languages, as they sought to bear witness and make sense of what had happened. 

For further information, watch our video interviews about Yizkor Bikher, meeting Avrom Sutzkever and more by clicking here.

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  Title:

  Emanuel Ringelblum. Notitsn fun Varshever geto. (Warsaw, 1952).

  Description:

  Notes from the Warsaw Ghetto

  Credits:

  Photograph by Pivot Media

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  Title:

  Abraham Sutzkever. Vilner geto, 1941–1944. (Buenos Aires, 1947).

  Description:

  Vilna Ghetto, 1941– 1944

  Credits:

  Photograph by Pivot Media

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  Title:

  Elie Wiesel. Un di velt hot geshvign. (Buenos Aires, 1956).

  Description:

  And the World Kept Silent

  Credits:

  Photograph by Pivot Media