Sample Sources
The sources below are those contained in our three curated collections—covering themes of Passover, Gender Roles, and Holocaust Resistance. They represent a fraction of the thousands of sources that will be available when the full site launches in 2024.
Blood
On the nights before Passover, Rosh Hashanah, and Yom Kippur, my mother would send me to the butcher with some birds to be slaughtered according to ritual so the meat would be kosher—that is, clean…
As You Die There in Agony, Brother
As you die there in agony, brother,
Don’t be calling your comrades in vain.
Let me warm my hands on your body,
Make good use of the blood from your veins.
Stop crying, stop groaning, don’t be a…
The Battle of the Ink-Drawn Flag
He had traveled to Germany once, where he visited a displaced-persons camp. He was to meet Party members in one of the small Bavarian towns, and when he arrived at the “camp,” it turned out to be a…
An Old Song
Where pain weeps, it is the Jew who weeps.
Where a bullet is fired, it is the Jew who falls.
—Why is the dog barking near the fence?
—Someone threw a rock at him, at the Jew’s dog.
We…
Conversation with Piotr Rawicz
Piotr Rawicz’s Blood from the Sky is without question the most forceful of recent novels written about the fate of Jews in Nazi Europe. There has been rare critical unanimity in this respect. To find…
A Soviet Shtetl
Like every shtetl Medzibosz has a main street, and side streets and back streets. Nowadays the old hunched little huts have mostly vanished, and there are new houses in their place—not everywhere.
Thi…
Voices in the Darkness
No one paid any attention to Aronek. He took a piece of bread from the cupboard, chose the largest carrot, and went to the neighbors.
At the widow Gitel’s it was warm and clean. From the ceiling hung…
Mixed Marriage
Shortly before Paris was occupied, Maurice had me return to my native Morocco.
My parents—my dear parents whom I loved so much and whom I never saw again—were, alas, dead. The other members of the…
Todesfuge (1944–45)
Black milk of daybreak we drink it at evening
we drink it at midday and morning we drink it at night
we drink and we drink
we shovel a grave in the air there you won’t lie too cramped
A man lives in…
Temptation
Nathan, the shoemaker from Porisov, a small Jewish village in Poland, came home one evening shortly before his departure for Colombia with a Torah scroll under his arm. With a slight shiver, he lay…
I Did Not Interview the Dead
A few days before the surrender of Germany, General Dwight D. Eisenhower, then Supreme Commander of the Allied Forces, sent out a call to American newspaper editors which may be…
Of Change and Adaptation in Judaism
Midrash [ . . . ] is not mere reference to the past: it is the enlistment of the past in the service of the present. Even more specifically, it is a reinsertion into the present of the original divine…