At just fourteen years old, Malka Owsiany was cast into a world of hunger, humiliation, forced labor, and crushing solitude. Her adolescence unfolded in forests, nazi factories, and concentration camps.
Among the very first Holocaust testimonies to appear after the war, her voice was urgent and indispensable. First published in Yiddish in 1946, this memoir was part of Mark Turkovs landmark series of 175 narrativesenduring traces of the Jewish life and culture the Nazis sought to obliterate.
Malka remembers and bears witness. Fragmentary yet fiercely alive, her story still speaks to us today, demanding that we confront the unimaginable and refuse to forget.
Abraham Lichtenbaum, Director Emeritus, IWO Argentina.
Malka Owsiany Recounts, in Sandra Chiritescus fine translation, is a most welcome addition to the body of Holocaust narratives available in English. Soon after arriving in Argentina in late 1945, the twenty-year-old Malkas conversations with the Yiddish writer and Jewish community leader Mark Turkow led to the publication of one of the very first books devoted to an individual survivors struggles during the Holocaust. When Malka Owsiany Recounts first came out in Yiddish, just eleven months had passed since her liberation from the Ravensbrück concentration camp. This was the inaugural volume of the landmark series Dos Poylishe Yidntum, commemorating the glorious legacy of Polish Jewry. In this edition, Malka Owsianys account is fleshed out and carried forward through Malena Chinskis preface, epilogues by Malkas daughter Rosa Nirenberg and her grandson Tomįs Hachard, and in family photographs taken before and after the Holocaust.
Zachary M. Baker, Palo Alto, California (Stanford University Libraries, Emeritus)
Sandra Chiritescu's translation of Malka Owsiany Recounts has finally made this moving testimony available to an English readership. As one of the first works of Holocaust literature to be published as such, Mark Turkows documentation of Malka Owsianys story has significant literary and historical merits. It is a document that reveals much about how a Jewish diaspora encountered the young Malka not only as a Holocaust survivor but also as a surrogate for those sisters, daughters, and cousins they could not save. Expanded with ample photographs, family letters, and the story behind the story of this translation, the new edition offers important new avenues for research and teaching. I look forward to assigning this text in my courses.
Rachelle Grossman, Assistant Professor, Department of Comparative and World Literature, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
This is a unique narrative in two voices, those of Malka Owsiany and her editor, Marc Turkow, presented with empathic precision by Malena Chinski. It guides us through Malkas ordeal in the Nazi abyss, sparing us nothing: neither the despair in the face of annihilation nor the hatred of the Polish and Ukrainian concentration camp companions. Then there is the cruel question upon her return, liberated but not free: 'How come you are still alive?' Still, she tenderly shares memories of her lost family and the little joys left to her. We also find the renewal of life after destruction and the moving achievements garnered. This text is one of the first historical documents on the Shoahthe Khurbnto foreground the liberatory exercise of bearing witness. It is a fundamental book not only as a means of preserving the memory of the catastrophe, but also as a key to understanding our new dark times.
Dra. Perla Sneh, Dr. Perla Sneh, Rokhl Oyerbakh Tsenter baym IWO (YIVO) Buenos Aires. Center for Genocide Studies (UNTREF, Buenos Aires)
