After Such Knowledge by Eva Hoffman

Author:Eva Hoffman [Eva Hoffman]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Random House
Published: 2005-03-03T05:00:00+00:00

V

FROM MORALITY TO MEMORY

During a recent trip to Poland, I had occasion to visit the concentration camp of Majdanek, near the city of Lublin—one of the well-marked sites in the closely charted, late post-Holocaust geography. I went there specifically to see an exhibit, put together by an interesting group of young Poles, called “Grodzka Gate” (after the gate that used to lead from the Polish to the Jewish neighborhoods of Lublin), and based on materials recently rediscovered in Majdanek’s archives and elsewhere. Some of the archives contained accounts of daily life in this labor camp turned death factory, documents left behind by its child inmates, or collected later from people who had been children there.

The exhibit is somber and dignified. In a small entrance space, a Polish children’s song, its tune ballad-like and wistful, is continuously played. This was the melody that a nine-year-old girl named Elźunia (a diminutive of Elizabeth), had specified for a verse she had written in Majdanek. The verse (in my own, approximate translation) is this:

There was once little Elźunia,

She’s dying all alone now.

For her daddy’s in Majdanek,

Her mummy in Auschwitz-Birkenau.

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