Youth Writing Between the Walls
Notebooks from the Lodz Ghetto

By Avraham Cytryn
March 2005
Yad Vashem Jerusalem
Distributed by
ISBN: 9780976442516
267 pages, Illustrated
$26.50 Paper original

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When you first hold Avraham Cytryn's notebooks in your hand - notebooks filled with illegible passages, direct traces of the destruction taking place so close by - you cannot help but feel that you have come upon a precious discovery. The white patches that occasionally break up the descriptions return the reader to the source of these stories, written in the Lodz ghetto by a young boy.

That young boy is Avraham Cytryn, who was 13 when he was interned in the ghetto. In those arduous days endured by the small family - the mother and her children Avraham and Lucy - Avraham began to write. His sister remembers that he was obsessed by his writing and engrossed in his notebooks every spare hour left to him after his work. He wrote prose and poetry, both of which read like a lament on the fate of the incarcerated Jews of Lodz, doomed to starve and perish.

 

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