Chanukah in the Ghetto

Oskar Rosenfeld, a novelist, journalist, translator, and diarist, was born in Korycany, Moravia, and studied in Vienna, where he became an active Zionist. Rosenfeld wrote about literature, art, and theater for several Jewish newspapers and published his first novel in 1910. In 1927, he was one of the founders of the Jüdische Künstlerspiele, a theater that presented Yiddish works in German. Rosenfeld was also editor in chief of the weekly Die neue Welt. In 1938, he fled to Prague, where he was a correspondent for a Jewish newspaper until he was deported to the Łódź ghetto in 1941. In the ghetto, he worked in the statistics department. Hoping to expose the conditions under which Jews suffered, he kept copious notes in school notebooks. He died in Auschwitz.