Comments (0)Early Holocaust Memoir Translated Into English
Fri. Sept. 5, 2008Sydney
Dan Goldberg
JTA Wire Service
Like Primo Levi and Elie Wiesel, Rafael Rajzner was one of the few Holocaust survivors who chronicled his traumatic experience in the years soon after the war, when most survivors stayed silent.
But unlike those authors, Rajzner’s harrowing, 324-page eyewitness account of the liquidation of Bialystoker Jewry was never translated into English. His memoir, “Der Umkum Fun Byalistoker Yidntum” (“The Annihilation Of Bialystoker Jewry”), was published in Melbourne in Yiddish in 1948. It was the first memoir by a Holocaust survivor published in Australia.
Now, however, the book has come out in English.
Rajzner, who survived Auschwitz but lost his entire family, was one of the counterfeiters at Sachsenhausen made famous by the 2008 Academy Award-winning movie, “The Counterfeiters.”
The largest city in northeast Poland, Bialysok was once home to 60,000 Jews, only about 1,000 of whom survived the Nazis. Rajzner was one of them.
When he died in 1953 at age 56, all hopes evaporated that his work, scribbled into notebooks at war’s end, would ever be translated into English.
Sixty years on, the English translation was launched at the Melbourne International Writers’ Festival this past summer; a documentary about the book will be screened on Australian TV next month.
The translation was the brainchild of Henry Lew, born in the Bialystok Center in Melbourne, a way-station for Jewish refugees, around the exact time Rajzner’s book was published in 1948.
“I have no doubt that had Rajzner still been alive, and had it been translated in 1960 or 1961, it would have become a very famous book,” he said.
“Nobody looked at Primo Levi or Elie Wiesel until the 1960s.”
Levi’s book, “If This is a Man,” was first published in 1947 in his native Italian. It took Wiesel until the mid-1950s to complete his first version of “Night,” which was published in Yiddish. Neither book was widely read until they were translated into English.
Lew was first introduced to Rajzner’s book in 2001 by his 95-year-old father, Leo, a Bialystoker who said he regretted that Rajzner’s book didn’t reach a wider audience.
“Rajzner told my father how a lot of his family died,” Lew said. “When he died in 2002, I found the book.”
Lew’s Yiddish was not good enough to translate it, but the idea percolated at the back of his mind for a couple of years until he stumbled across Aaron Lansky’s book, “Outwitting History,” which describes how a secular Jewish student devoted his life to retrieving Yiddish books.
“I was very inspired by Lansky’s book,” said Lew, who emailed the author in 2004 for names of Yiddish translators. Lansky provided 55 names, all of whom received a letter from Lew asking if they would translate 10 pages of Rajzner’s book.
Lew amassed an army of 22 “righteous translators” from the United States, Canada and Australia.
This story reprinted courtesy of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency.