Different Voices: Women and the Holocaust

How is this possible? I pondered. On one side such bestiality, and on the other unselfish love toward another creature.

SARA NOMBERG-PRZYTYK

Sara Nomberg-Przytyk was born in Lublin, Poland, in 1915. Growing up in an Orthodox Jewish environment, she experienced Polish antisemitism early on. She attended the University of Warsaw, spent several years in Polish jails because of her leftist political activities, and fled east to Bialystok when the Germans invaded Poland in 1939. Caught in the Bialystok ghetto in 1943, she was sent to a camp at Stutthof and then deported to Auschwitz. Danuta Czech Auschwitz Chronicle mentions a transport that reached Auschwitz from Stutthof on January 12, 1944. It contained nearly 1,000 prisoners--male and female. Only 120 men and 134 women were spared from immediate death. Probably Nomberg-Przytyk was among that "lucky" 134, because her Auschwitz: True Tales from a Grotesque Land notes that she became a Zugang (a new arrival) on January 13. About a year later, along with hundreds of other women, she was force-marched to Ravensbrück.

Returning to Poland to "build a socialist society" after her liberation in late April 1945, Nomberg-Przytyk married in 1946, started a family, and worked as a journalist in Lublin. She also took time to write about her Holocaust experiences. In fact, Auschwitz: True Tales from a Grotesque Land was accepted for publication and was about to go to press when Poland's Communist government instigated an outburst of antisemitism following Israel's victory in the 1967 Six-Day War. Nomberg-Przytyk was told that her book would be published only if she eliminated all

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