In November 1940, a secret archive was established in the Warsaw ghetto to collect and preserve documentation of the life and struggles of Polish Jews under German occupation. Only three of 60-odd members of the archive, organized by historian Emanuel Ringelblum and meeting on Saturdays under the name ‘Oyneg Shabes’ (‘the Joy of the Sabbath’), survived the war. But essays, photographs, poetry and even small markers of everyday life, like menus, tram tickets and ration cards, were preserved. Surreptitiously buried in 10 tins and two milk cans, they were unearthed in 1946 and 1950. The 25,000 or so precious documents of the Ringelblum archives went largely untouched for years. ‘The people who were fluent in Yiddish, who were survivors ‘ were just trying to get over their own stories, they were trying to put their lives together,’ says long-time Pacific Palisades resident Sarah Moskovitz, Ph.D., who spent nearly ten years translating the Yiddish poetry recovered from the cans. Much of the work in her translation, ‘Poetry in Hell,’ (available on the Internet at poetryinhell.org) had been written or recorded in the Warsaw ghetto. The largest of such locked districts in Poland, the ghetto was a 1.3-square-mile area housing more than 400,000 Jews, forced to leave their homes and livelihoods and suffer deprivation and squalor until most were systematically killed. The poems ‘range from truly great to amateurish,’ Moskovitz says. But ‘my idea was’anything that they dared to collect during the war, that they dared to write under the circumstances of starvation and disease and slave labor ‘ I’m not going to be the judge, I’ll translate it. ’I was fortunate to be born in this country,’ says Moskovitz, whose Polish parents moved to America in the 1920s. From the age of 13, she was aware of the ghetto and the concentration camps. ‘My parents talked about not having received any mail’ from relatives in Poland, and she lost aunts, uncles and a cousin, killed in Warsaw, Biala Podlaska, Treblinka and Babi Yar. She felt called to take on the translation because ‘I could do it and I maybe owed doing it,”to her family, to the poets and even to all those she didn’t know who lost their lives. ‘I felt I had a responsibility.’ She began work in earnest shortly after retiring in 1997 from her work as a teacher, psychotherapist and scholar of human development at Cal State Northridge. CSUN gave her a grant to visit the U.S. Holocaust Museum in Washington, D.C., but the bulk of the work was done at her own expense. Moskovitz learned of the archives through historian Samuel Kassow, author of a book on the Oyneg Shabes, ‘Who Will Write Our History?’ The chief cataloguer at the U.S. Holocaust Museum, Aleqsandra Borecka, a poetry lover and Polish Catholic whose mother hid two Jewish women during the war, helped Moskovitz track down documents. Many of the poems, neglected underground, were in terrible condition, missing words, lines or stanzas. Moskovitz worked from 80 to 90 reels of microfiche acquired by the Holocaust Museum from the Jewish Historical Institute in Warsaw. Her husband, Itzik, scanned each frame to look for poetry, convert it to a digital format and then make it legible, sometimes taking nearly a week to adjust a single frame. Moskovitz spoke only Yiddish until she went to kindergarten and credits her love of poetry to her father, Yitzkhok Traister, a principal and teacher in the Workmen Circle Yiddish schools in Massachusetts and Los Angeles. She grouped the poems under five headings: (1) nature; (2) home, love, life; (3) ghetto, hunger, struggle; (4) death, anger, mourning; and (5) tradition, faith and protest, in that order. ’I intuitively felt that I could not start off with the most traumatic ghetto poems,’ she says. She hopes that the sequence is ‘like diving in through warmish water to the depths and coming up and out, back to life in some way.’ One piece by the great poet Yitzhok Katzenelson, not found in the Ringelblum archives, but written in the Warsaw ghetto and included in Moskovitz’s work, called those in the ghetto to an evening of Torah study. It was written and circulated the day the ghetto was locked, in what Moskovitz calls ‘an act of resistance and bravery.’ Though Katzenelson was a secular Jew, the poem movingly speaks of God in the Tanakh, the three books of the Jewish holy scriptures”in every corner there, in every crevice you will detect and sense ‘ God!’ ’He understood that when people are isolated in tragic trouble, they need to cling to something. What better thing to rely on than studying the Torah?’ Moskovitz asks. ‘He was searching to comfort his people.’ Asked about the emotional toll of her work, she looks at her husband of more than 63 years. ‘I wasn’t alone doing it; he was really supporting me. ’I was answering a very important question for myself,’ she says. ‘Growing up, I wondered, ‘What would it be like if I were there?” She held one poem, also by Katzenelson, until last, putting off her translation for almost three years. ‘The Day of My Great Disaster’ tells of the day the poet returned home with his son Zvi to find that his wife, Hannah, and two younger sons had been taken to the trains (which would transport them to Treblinka, a death camp). Moskovitz wrote a poem of her own about that interval, which begins, ‘I did not want to go into that empty room with you.’ But some of the Ringelblum poems strike a surprisingly hopeful note, as in ‘Like a Miracle’ by Zusman Segalovitch, which recalls, ‘Even in our street, when hate swells grand with khutspa, the little lilac twig stretches out to you and me like a miracle.’ Moskovitz’s son, David, persuaded her that publishing the poems in digital form on the Internet, was ‘the democratic solution’ to distributing her work and would help the poems find their way to the most readers. The translated poetry is accompanied by images of the originals. ’I want people to know that there’s buried treasure’ Moskovitz says. ‘Even in the most oppressive circumstances, some people could care about poetry, about writing, about preserving things for others that would survive. I think there’s a lot of inspiration in this.’
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