The Pit and the Trap: A Chronicle of Survival

Leyb Rochman

1949

Today is Wednesday, February 17, 1943. Exactly twelve weeks have passed since we went into hiding here at Felek’s. Twelve weeks are eighty-four days and, if my arithmetic is correct, 2016 hours. That’s my count. All of us are constantly reckoning the time. We count even the individual minutes and seconds.

Felek hid us as soon as we arrived here…

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Creator Bio

Leyb Rochman

1918–1978

Leyb Rochman was born to a Hasidic family in Minsk-Mazowieki, Poland. He moved to Warsaw in 1930 and studied at a yeshiva. In 1936, Rochman left the Hasidic world and became a Yiddish journalist, a career he continued after the war. His confessional diary, kept while in hiding, which also described the liquidation of the ghetto in Mazowieki, became an early classic of Holocaust literature. In 1950, he moved to Jerusalem and became the Israel correspondent for the New York–based Yiddish daily Forverts and a Yiddish broadcaster for Kol Israel. He was awarded the President’s Prize for Literature in 1975.

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