For this Yom HaShoah, I’d like to bring attention to the Yiddish author Chava Rosenfarb.
Rosenfarb was a survivor of the Łódź ghetto, Auschwitz, and Bergen-Belsen. She’s best known for her magnum opus The Tree of Life which is a trilogy that chronicles the lives of 10 characters from just before the war to the liquidation of the Łódź ghetto. While Rosenfarb’s writing is widely known in the Yiddish world, outside of it, she is practically unheard of.
While I highly recommend reading The Tree of Life and her other published works, I understand that not everyone has the time or energy for that. So below I have linked two shorter pieces of her writings. One is an essay of her literary mentor Simkha-Bunim Shayevitch who perished during the Shoah, and the other is her diary of being liberated from Bergen-Belson.
I promise you will not regret reading them.
This essay, by the Yiddish author Chava Rosenfarb, appeared in Yiddish in 1991 in Di goldene keyt. This is the first publication of the Engl
Bergen-Belsen was liberated by the British Army on April 15, 1945. Conditions at the camp were so horrendous that the British burned it down




















