Jane Eaglen - Letter to Warsaw - COMPACT DISCS [CD]

Daily performances at Sztuka were organized by a group of writers from the Living Journal, a satiric daily chronicle of the ghetto, written by a group of authors under the direction of Szlengel. Szpilman described these programmes as Incha witty chronicle of ghetto life, full of sharp, risqué allusions to the GermansInch. The Sztuka was considered an elite club for the ghetto's few people of any means. First-person accounts of an evening at the Sztuka note the high quality of it's black-market coffee and caviar, and of the musical, humorous and satirical offerings. Those who could gathered for brief escape from the surrounding atmosphere of death and disease. Stepping outside meant a return to the ghetto's grim realities - the starving, diseased, and lice-infested ghetto population whose despairing cries for InchBread, Mercy, DeathInch quickly extinguished the Sztuka's fleeting moments of pleasure. In 1942, during the mass deportation of 300,000 Jews from the Warsaw ghetto to Treblinka, Pola Braun was assigned to the Ostdeutsche Bautischlerei-Werkstätte (OBW), an industrial plant, where her work helped postpone her own deportation for a period. It has not been established exactly when she was transported to Majdanek. At Majdanek she was active in the women's camp, along with other Polish political prisoners involved in the cultural life. Most of the women were from Warsaw, and many probably knew Pola Braun from before the war. Braun participated in the concerts organized by Polish prisoners from Pawiak, to whom we owe thanks for remembering and collecting some of Braun's poems. Braun was murdered on 3 November 1943, in the mass executions code-named Aktion Erntefest (Operation Harvest Festival) by the Nazis - the liquidation of approximately 42,000 Jewish prisoners from Majdanek and other concentration and labour camps in the Lublin district. Two of the six poems in t