The Jewish author Rachmil Bryks tells about life, survival and death in the Łódź Ghetto and in the Auschwitz concentration camp. With his extraordinary narrative style, he conveys the hopelessness of everyday ghetto life, the aching hunger and the constant fear in written form – but not without defying the horror again and again with fine wit.

If you catch a cat – an important mousetrap – you get a loaf of bread in the Łódź Ghetto. Bread is priceless and essential for survival, as only cabbage and radish leaves are cooked otherwise. Procured by all means, wood is just as essential: the back wall of the cupboard, the floor, the roof, everything that is expendable, is heated to cook food and fight the cold. Life in the ghetto is determined by work, hunger and fear – feelings described in the five stories in a way that is as touchingly honest as it is overwhelming, and thereby deeply moving.

Rachmil Bryks, born in Poland in 1912, was a Jewish Orthodox writer. Trapped in the Łódź Ghetto from 1940 to 1944, he was transported after its liquidation to Auschwitz and later transferred to a labor camp in Germany. Liberated by the Americans in 1945, he began to process his experiences in writing during a subsequent medical stay in Stockholm. His works include “A Cat in the Ghetto,” “Kiddush Hashem” and “The Emperor of the Ghetto.” Bryks emigrated to America in 1949, where he died in 1974.

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Photo (c) Verlag Czernin

Source: Jewish Museum Vienna