Song in my Heart

A memoir of days spent with Moshe Ha Elion, a Survivor of the Shoah¹

By Judith Lin²

When Moshe Ha Elion sings, his clear, strong voice intones the rise and fall of a life lost too soon. His younger sister, Nina, was only fourteen when she died after a treacherous journey by train from their native Thessaloniki, Greece, to the furnaces at Auschwitz. The opening line of his Sephardic ballad falls out like a sigh: “La linda djovenika…” The beautiful, young maiden, or as Moshe loves to say in English, “pretty girl” rolling the “r” with a faint smile. Blonde, blue-eyed Nina, perished the first day she arrived at the camp, but surprisingly, despite many harrowing events, illnesses, and a nearly crippling depression, Moshe survived. Now he lives to remember the loss of his sister through writing poetry and setting it to music.

I first met Moshe at his home in Bat Yam several years ago, while studying the ancestral language of the Sephardic Jews, commonly known as Ladino, as a part of my Ph.D. The Sephardic Jews originally hailed from the Iberian Peninsula until they were expelled from Spain in 1492. For more than  five hundred years, the Sephardim have lived all over the world. Before World War Two, the majority lived in the Balkans, Turkey, and Greece, like Moshe’s family.

True to his habit, Moshe first greeted me with song, but initially, it was not his ballad about Nina. I had made some off-handed joke in French when suddenly his eyes lit up and his hands flew to his face: “Alouette, gentille alouette…..” He would not stop singing except to recount stories about his experiences in French kindergarten. As a researcher, I recognized in that moment that music provided the perfect way to learn more about his life, but at that point, I still did not know the role that music was going to play in our growing relationship.

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When Moshe was a boy, he looked up to his father as his role model. Moshe remembers that as a child, he would watch his father, Eliau, write day after day. He knew that his father was educated; he was one of the only people in Thessaloniki that could speak German. His father loved to read German philosophy, but since he was also a rabbi, he studied the mystical teachings of the Kabbalah. Eliau was consumed by discovering the meaning of a passage from the book of Daniel when the prophet encounters a man clothed in linen standing over the rivers of water. Daniel is astonished at the sight of this Divine messenger and tries to ask him when the end of time would come. In Daniel 12:11, the messenger responds: “From the time the regular offering is abolished, and an appalling abomination is set up—it will be a thousand two hundred and ninety days.”

Moshe remembers that his father used this text to predict the Nazi invasion and the extermination of the Jewish people. The word, tamid, in Hebrew, translated as “sacrifice” or “offering,” refers to the symbolic burnt offerings regularly offered up by the Jews in the Temple. It is curious that the English word, “holocaust,” refers to an offering by fire, reminiscent of the way that the Nazi Germans would burn their victims’ bodies in large furnaces. Because of his ability to interact in German, Eliau was one of the few people able to understand the severity of the threats to the Jewish people. He tried to warn the Salonikan community, but the people were mostly poor fishermen. How could they afford to leave their livelihood? How could they imagine escaping to another land?

.

The Nazi Germans invaded in April 1941, and immediately re-located the Jewish community to a neighborhood outside of the city borders. They promised the Jews that they would be sending them to Poland to get new jobs. Better employment sounded like a good idea to many families. They were already impoverished. The change in the climate worried them though. Many families bought heavy winter coats, mittens, and boots thinking that they would need them for surviving the cold Polish winter. Moshe also got his first pair of boots with the rest of them. His father was convinced that the Nazi German campaign boded ill, but Moshe needed to have the proper clothing regardless.

Moshe remembers that his father became very ill soon after the Nazi Germans moved the Jewish community outside the city. His father’s time was consumed with writing all of his thoughts down about the prophecy; he began to accumulate a large stack of papers. At night, Moshe would listen to his father read aloud from his manuscript. Then, one day, his father couldn’t get out of bed. He died a few days later. Moshe thinks that his father’s grief over the impending fate of the Jewish people was too much for him to bear. Days and nights of writing led his father to die of exhaustion and a broken heart.

True to his father’s worst fears, the Nazi Germans began sending the Jewish people away in train cars. Moshe decided to take his father’s manuscript to a non-Jewish neighbor for safekeeping. All the Jews had to leave town, and he was afraid that his father’s legacy would be destroyed if they took his papers with them. Shortly after safeguarding the manuscript, Moshe, his mother, uncle, and little sister, Nina, were rounded up, put onto the train, and sent to Poland. Moshe was only seventeen years old when his life was changed forever.

.

When Moshe arrived at Auschwitz, he was put into a line of men destined for a labor camp nearby, called Birkenau. His new boots were perfect for helping him trudge through the mud and snow. He was assigned the task of digging ditches in a field from morning until night. About midday, soldiers would come and give the men a small cup of tea and a bowl of soup. At night, they received another bowl of soup and a piece of bread. Moshe remembers that the tea was only something like light brown-colored water, and the soup rarely even had a potato in it. Despite the intensive labor, Moshe often wondered what happened to his family.

He never got to say goodbye to his mother and sister. Moshe imagined that they were probably digging ditches like him or maybe doing some other kind of work. Most of all Moshe wondered what kind of factory Auschwitz was. While out in the fields, in the distance, he could see the smoke that billowed up from large chimneys all day long. What were they making? What were they cooking? Sometimes it smelled like food. Moshe was so hungry that he couldn’t bear it.

.

Over the few years of conversations that Moshe and I shared drinking café turkit seated on his doily-covered couch, I learned that he had a dream of translating his musical piece, “La Djovenika al Lager,” into English and having it performed. He pleaded with me to translate his epic poem of eighty-eight couplets into rhyming verse, so that the three-part melody scheme would still correspond. “La kero en inglez, Kiki” he would repeat to me, calling me by my love-name, “Ke se aze en inglez.” And in English he would have it.

I returned to the States and began researching funding sources that would send me back to Israel so that I could spend time with Moshe at his seaside apartment in Bat Yam. I had never done fundraising before, but I realized that there were probably some families of Greek Holocaust survivors who would be interested in supporting the cause. It turns out that I was right. After only a few weeks of spreading the word, I had received enough donations to officially plan a trip back to Israel to work exclusively with Moshe’s translation. Then, I was awarded the Jules Roos and Samuel Grunfeld Award for Jewish Studies at the University of Virginia. Everything was set. I dreamed of creating an annotated English version that could be sung with his melodies.

I have always been interested in untold stories of resilience and heroism, and Moshe’s story was unique in that he used his experiences to fuel his creativity. Moshe has written poetry, theatre, and a biography in both Hebrew and his native language, Ladino. I wanted to learn more about what motivated him to keep living and writing. His artistic output was more than most people, and he was in his mid-nineties. His insatiable drive to write inspired me.

I had always fancied myself a writer (after all I was in a Ph.D. program) so I assumed that taking on this translation piece would be a fairly simple way just to get to know Moshe and help him achieve his dream. I had learned Ladino with relative ease; having grown up speaking Spanish; I didn’t struggle much to acquire it. I already knew French from studying it throughout graduate school, so adding another Romance language wasn’t that hard. Linguistically, I thought that Moshe’s poetry wasn’t complicated to understand, so how hard could it be to write a translation? What could be so hard about writing melodic verse in iambic heptameter?

.

Every morning at Birkenau, the Nazi Germans would wake up the men by playing a marching beat outside of the barracks. Tak, tak, tak. Moshe’s eyes were distant as he imitated the sound for me. Tak, tak, tak. His right arm hit the beat into the air. Tak, tak, tak. After hours of singing and speaking different versions, I began to disassociate. Observing the contortion of his face, I saw him remember the fear of imminent death. If he marched out of line with the strict rhythm of the Nazi band, he would be shot.

Each time we read the poem, whether in Ladino or English, it was as if Moshe were marching at gunpoint once again. The veil of his memory had been lifted and I watched as he relived this torture in real-time. I witnessed the insidious convulsion of his body and the bitterness in his eye. With every beat, he relived the marching step of that unconscionable reveille. Tak, tak, tak. Shaking his head, Moshe turned away from his computer and let out a bitter sigh. For a moment, he clasped his hand to his chest. Then, looking up to me with an almost child-like face, he said, “Continue?”

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I didn’t understand him. Maybe I wasn’t paying attention. Maybe I was distracted. Maybe I just didn’t catch his garbled combination of Hebrew and Ladino. I probably dissociated. He had been describing the way that the Nazi Germans lined people up at Auschwitz, made them strip off their clothes, and put their shoes in a big pile. Then, the soldiers sprayed the mass of people with pesticides. The soldiers “disinfected” the people as if they were cockroaches under the kitchen sink. With pesticides.

Moshe saw my dazed expression. “Desenfektar. Desenfektar. Kiki. Desenfektar. Kiki. What did you think?” Moshe’s English was quiet, but distinct. “It was not America. It was the lager.”

.

The versions of each couplet seemed endless. I sat perched on a wooden chair next to Moshe’s desk. We used his desktop computer and my laptop simultaneously. I had already read the poem so much that I had parts of it memorized, but something about sitting there with Moshe for hours on end gave me a different perspective. I began to realize just how important this poem was to him. The English title we decided on was, “The Beautiful Young Maiden,” because we discussed how people might not understand what lager meant. We could have said, “The Maiden in the Lager,” but I convinced Moshe that both “lager” and “camp” were a bit confusing as well. “She was young and pretty,” I said, “so let’s have the title focus on that.” Moshe seemed to like that idea.

I began to realize that Moshe’s last look at his young, pretty sister was part of what was motivating him to write. Every time he mentioned her name, his face grew wistful. Moshe was particularly concerned about the chronology of everything that happened to her. Nina’s experience once she arrived at Auschwitz had to be perfectly accurate. He wouldn’t let me write the plot out of order, even for the sake of the rhyme. Over the course of three hours, we worked up six different versions of just one couplet before Moshe was satisfied. I always held up the original version either written down in my Microsoft Word document or in the book of his published worked I had on-hand. The Ladino reads as follows:

Sin entender del todo lo ke s’esta pasando,
Deznuda ‘sta al banyo, la ‘stan dezenfektando.

When in doubt, we would consult the Hebrew translation as well:

בלי דעת מה קורה לה לאךמי מקלחת
.בעירומה מובלתת, אל החטוי נלקחת

I would try my best to come up with creative English rhymes, but admittedly rhyming in iambic heptameter was something that I had never attempted. I had written poetry ever since I was a little girl but was never stringent about the rhyme. When I was in high school reading Walt Whitman, free verse seemed to be a natural solution to all my poetic woes. But here, with Moshe, free verse was not an option. “There is always a solution. Every word has its rhyme,” he would say to me at least twenty times a day. And so, without a word, I would continue fashioning lines like a puzzle:

Without understanding, the circumstances there,
She undressed to bathe her body, she had nothing more to wear.

The circumstances found there,³ she was never understanding
She bathed in showers naked, they brought her for disinfecting.

Without understanding, what’s happening to her there,
In showers she bathes, the disinfection […]

Without understanding, what’s happening to her there
After bathing in the showers, […]

Without even understanding, the Nazis’ cruel selection,
she goes naked to the shower, and then to disinfection.

She finds herself bewildered, as she’s compelled to action:
she goes to showers naked, and then to disinfection.

Moshe would often become petulant. With a disappointed look, he would tell me in Hebrew, “Lo, lo, lo. Not good. Lo maspik tov.” My verses were never good enough. Back to the drawing table. After days of so little success with the translation, I became antsy. Every time that I accidently picked a word that was slightly off-kilter, Moshe would tense up his entire body almost to the point of convulsing. Beginning to fear that Moshe’s dream of the translation and performance would never be realized, I would sit at his little desk and pray. Each time that Moshe would convulse because of some less-than ideal rhyme, I would grow more discouraged. My rhymes were killing him.

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Every morning for weeks, I arrived at his door at 9:30 am, and he would greet me with a list of errors that he had found the night before. Before I even could set down my backpack or sit down, I would see his Microsoft Word document riddled with red letters. To Moshe, red letters meant that there was an error. We were not allowed to continue onto another couplet without first addressing these mistakes. Most of the time, the red sections he highlighted weren’t really mistakes. I began to suspect that he didn’t want our work together to stop. Ever. I realized that Moshe was living for this type of work. As long as he was writing her story, Nina lived on.

.

We continued to work until one day, something didn’t seem quite right. Moshe’s countenance was clouded when I came into to his little office. He seemed to have reached a point of unusual stress. I had no idea what was wrong, but I resolved to remain calm. Moshe was only half-interested in going over the “mistakes” from the day before. This was not like him at all. When Moshe began to read the next four lines aloud, something in his voice frightened me.

La povre no savia, lo ambezo mas tadre,
Ke dizde el primo dia kedo sino padre i madre.
I entindio estonses de ke se espandia
Un guezmo de asado de noche i dia.

I started to give him some options. We made a list of words that he liked and eliminated the ones that he didn’t like. Every time I would start to put the words together, Moshe would raise his voice. “Lo, lo. Lo.” He would start to rant in Hebrew, and I wouldn’t catch all of it. Instead of explaining to me the problem he had with what I had written, he would just read the lines over and over and over again. He wouldn’t stop repeating them. I tried ignoring him for a while. I needed to solve this problem, and clearly, all he would do was repeat the verses again and again. So, I sat there and worked out some possibilities:

The poor thing didn’t realize; she had to learn it later
The burnt smoke all around her, bespoke of her lost...

The poor thing did not know; she knew it only later
Her parents died already, from the first day hereafter.

The poor thing did not know; but later she first heard
Her parents died already, the first day they were murdered.

The poor thing did not know; after their separation,
she knew it only later, they went to extermination.

The poor thing knew only later, […]

The poor thing did not know, she heard that only later
Her parents were both murdered, they would no more await her.

The poor thing did not know, both were exterminated,
she heard that only later, after they were separated.

The poor thing did not know, she knew it only after,
Her parents were both murdered, soon after they had left her.

I could barely work with Moshe talking over all my thoughts, but one detail caught my interest. The researcher inside of me perceived something of a clue to his behavior. Instead of focusing on two lines at a time, as Moshe always did, this time, he read all four lines every single time. I began to perceive a connection. I was trying to fit together only two lines, but Moshe was seemingly obsessed with all four of them together. To my relief, the second couplet was easier. I quickly came up with an option:

And that, she knew the reason, why was the smell of roasting,
It was the smell of burnt flesh, by day and night was spreading.

I interrupted Moshe’s repeating of the verses to tell him I had an idea. I read him my selection and explained the meaning of the words in Ladino and Hebrew.

"Flesh?” Moshe looked at me perturbed. “Lo, lo. Lo, ‘flesh.’ Ech omrim…. regga.” He told me to wait as he searched for a different in a word in the Hebrew to English Google translator. “Ken, ken.” Moshe had found the word. “Steak.” He told me confidently.

I was appalled, responding right away in English. “No, Moshe, you don’t want that word. It’s not the right one. ‘Flesh’ is much more appropriate.” Moshe kept typing in the Hebrew-English dictionary.

"Lama lo?”

He couldn’t understand why I disagreed.

“‘Steak’ is only a word for meat that you eat. For food. It cannot be used here. Ze lo nahon po, Moshe. ‘Flesh’ beseder gamut.”

I tried to finish off convincing him in Hebrew.

"I know.”

Moshe always spoke his English almost inaudibly.

"You know? Bemet? Porke keres ‘steak’ malagré ze lo nahon?”

I couldn’t help code switching into Ladino at the end. Communicating with Moshe was always a mosaic of different languages on both our parts.

But he didn’t want to answer. Moshe just stared straight at me like he wouldn’t change his mind. I had reached my limit. How could I explain to him that “steak” was a disgusting, debased way to refer to burning bodies? I started to feel nauseous. Just then, Natalie, Moshe’s aide, came in the office and interrupted us to come eat lunch. The morning had flown by and we hadn’t accomplished even two lines.

We went into the kitchen and sat there at his little table like always. Usually, I would make small talk with Natalie, who only spoke Russian and Hebrew, but this time I was depressed. Moshe, too, seemed to be in a terrible mood. We quickly ate our soup, and Natalie passed out the main course: meatballs. I couldn’t believe it. Just when I was feeling so nauseous, we had to eat beef for the first time in a month. I closed my eyes, trying to breathe deeply. I must be thankful. Some people have no food at all. Some people suffer hunger. This was perfectly good food. Just because people during the Shoah had nothing to eat and they were killed in droves did not mean that I could afford to skip a meal. I took a bite, and chewed slowly, willing myself to eat. Then I opened my eyes. Moshe was staring at me. He gave me a knowing look and lifted up his fork with a piece of meatball on it.

“Roasting flesh.” he stammered in English, rolling the “r.” “Roasting fle----”

I interrupted him by getting up from the table. “Ani lo beseder—Hazina. I’m sick—sorry.” I could barely made it to the bathroom sink. Dousing my face with water, I realized that I was holding my breath. I had to get out of the apartment and get some air. I left Moshe and Natalie still at the table. When I went down the elevator and out the door, I could not get out to the sidewalk fast enough.

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Some days, it was as though Moshe’s comfortable little office had been transformed by the anguished notes of his song into something sinister. Maspik. “Enough,” Moshe would say after a long day’s work. He went off to repose on the couch in silence, but often, I was more restless than ever, feeling like the crystalline water and silky sands of Bat Yam could not stretch far enough before me to run the course of all my thoughts.

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so many questions that the sea answers with the same slow whoosh. the irony is that you look out, and that vastness invites you to wonder. you can’t even help yourself from asking questions, but the sea always answers with the same incomprehensible, primordial roar. Life. Life. Life!

we were at one time submerged in water. water makes us grow in our mothers’ wombs. water gives us life. we are all born from water…it’s the air that confuses things; it’s the air that finally suffocates us until we breathe no more.

.

Her life becomes much harder, the days are passing slowly.
Her heart is growing bitter, while hours are passing sadly.

And every single moment recalls to mind this one thought:
The frightful death her parents, they suffered as their sad lot.

Sitting there day after day with Moshe, I would see his body sway with the rhythm. His face would light up every time he felt like the meaning he intended had come across clearly. For as many times as he rejected my verses, his pleasure over a correct verse became more and more pronounced as we continued. I realized suddenly that Nina had never lived beyond one day at Auschwitz. The story that Moshe was so intent on telling was, indeed, his own.

This realization was heightened when we were working on a passage in which Nina is considering harming herself in order to escape the brutal life she has been living. We had started talking out the meaning of each couplet before I started writing a translation. That way, I got an idea of Moshe’s intended meaning first. I didn’t want to cause him any more unnecessary pain with my rhythmic blunders.

"So, in this line, Nina is considering committing suicide to escape her fate. She is going through the different options of how she might do it, and—"

Moshe interrupted me. “No, no, no.” He had started recently speaking a little more English. My hunch was that he thought he could argue better with me if he used the English, “No,” he said again firmly.

"No?” I replied, “Dize aki ve-ladino, ‘Se ferira el puerpo. Se kedara echada./ Se fuyira del rango. Ensultara soldada.’ Kere dezir: pensa suisidarse.’ She could self-harm, she could stay in bed, she could march out of line, or insult a soldier. All of those things would kill her, si o no?”

Moshe was silent. I had a feeling that he didn’t want to admit that he had considered suicide. Nina, the character, had not considered suicide because, in fact, Nina was a stand-in for Moshe himself. Nina wasn’t a coward because that would mean that Moshe was a coward. I tried again, but softer this time.

"Moshe, Nina did not want to kill herself?”

"No.”

"Then why did she consider doing all of these things?”

Again, he was silent. We kept on working for several minutes. I read the passage aloud to Moshe. He listened to me intently. Ever since the incident with the meat, his attitude had softened towards me considerably.

Will be so grave her suffering, so desperate her pain
until her only choice, would be to dead remain?

"Choice? Ech omrim ‘choice’ ve-ivrit?” Moshe was always worried about word connotation. I assured him it was fine, but he wasn’t convinced. Of course, I had the feeling that he was just fighting every line for the sake of it.

"She was considering the option of whether or not to kill herself…so she had a choice…”

"Lo, lo, einli…” Moshe stopped himself. The character, Nina, and his own experience had gotten temporarily muddled. Moshe switched to Ladino: “No tuvo opsion.” His emphasis on the third-person was obvious. “She did not have any optsia, ma…she did not suicide.”

In that moment, I couldn’t resist. He was looking at me in such a way that I saw all the tender fragility behind his often-harsh demeanor.

"You never…?”

His eyes flashed a look of surprise. With a look of indescribable pain, Moshe shook his head.

.

Occasionally, I would ignore the strident pressing forward of Moshe’s singing and just close my eyes. I would let his haunting ballad just flow over my body like a stream; time and time again, Moshe’s music would transform the surroundings. In the cool of late afternoons, his office became a sanctuary for me.

.

I don’t know why I did it. I don’t know why I asked him. I had gotten so comfortable, like he was my grandpa or something. I can’t even remember my exact words.

We were lounging half-asleep in the living room. He was in his big overstuffed chair that offered a perfect reach to all his favorite books and the daily newspaper. I was lying down on the large leather couch. Natalie had served us some rather bizarre sugarless cookies, the only kind they ever had, and had given him his afternoon vitamins with a tall glass of water. The light coming in from the setting sun cast long shadows in the room. I could make out the gentle way the golden sun glimmered on the water below. Moshe was telling me a story. I loved that.

"What did they, the Nazis, do to you?” I asked without thinking.

Moshe gave me a very strange look. He motioned for me to come closer. I slid over to the side of the couch closer to his chair. He took my hand with his soft, feathery one. He bent his head down and put my fingers into a hole in his head. My fingers touched inside a deep hole in his skull. His silver hair usually covered it up, but it was there.

"That is what they did to me” he said. A shudder went down my spine.

.

One day, a phone call interrupted our work. As Moshe talked to his friend in the other room, I heard my name “Kiki” and the familiar word, “anglit,” which means “English” in Hebrew. I was glad that he could tell his friend about our progress. His voice sounded happy.

I got up from my chair and started looking at his books. There was a shelf dedicated to all kinds of dictionaries. He had copies of all of the Greek classics, Homer’s Iliad, the Odyssey, and three volumes of Plato’s complete works. There were also a bunch of chapbooks of Hebrew poetry that I couldn’t really read, and tucked in among them, I found Moshe’s autobiography, Las Angustias del Inferno. Moshe had returned to Greece for the first time in 1984 with the goal of finding his father’s old manuscript. He managed to locate his family home and even the neighbor, but the manuscript had been lost. It had been over forty years since Moshe had been deported from Thessaloniki. He was crushed. In the words of his autobiography:

Words fail me to express my sadness at the loss of this work that each I time I remember it I cannot help recalling the sad words that someone says when a beloved person dies. I know that until the end of my days I will not be able to release the feeling of guilt for the lack of action on my part that undoubtedly made impossible the recovery of my father’s work and the perpetuation of his memory (Ha Elion, 136, my translation).

.

Moshe’s hopes had been lifted so high upon finding his home intact and locating the neighbor that he left Thessaloniki bitterly disappointed in himself. The guilt of arriving home too late to retrieve the manuscript had a profound effect on Moshe. At the close of the chapter, Moshe’s autobiography addresses the reader for the first and only time:

I hope, dear reader, that the publication of this story (which you have finished reading) will give awareness to my father’s work and his prophecy and will have the same effect: perpetuate the memory of my father. In this way, I will find a small consolation and be able to bear up under this heavy spiritual burden (Ha Elion, 136, my translation).

.

Once, I saw him smile. It was golden.

There are so many things about Moshe that I will never forget. His indefatigable persistence, his impervious stare, the softness of his touch upon my arm when he wanted me to look at something. He must have touched my elbow thousands of times. “Titzaklu, Kiki.” “Look,” he would say. “Kiki. Look.” I’ll never forget the way he said my name. And I’ll never forget all of his refrains in Hebrew and Ladino that he would repeat to me sometimes several times a day when my strength and resolve were failing.

"No hay poezia sin rima.” There is no poetry without rhyme.

Oh, how I knew it.

"Yesh kol davar. Yesh pitaron.” There is always something. There is always a solution.

Believe it. Never give up.

"Yesh efsharut.” There is always a possibility.

"Diez puntos.” Literally, ten points. What he meant was: “Wait a minute.”

"Porke estamos serka ke toma tiempo.” Only because we are so close does it take so much time.

Not so sure about this one, dear Moshe.

"Vamos a lavorar i el Dio va traer despues.” We are going to work, and God will bring it to completion afterwards.

Amén.

"No podemos estar sien diyas en una koza.” We can’t spend a hundred days on one thing.

So true.

"Kada ves, mijor ke la prima ves.” Each time, better than the first.

Only for you, Moshe, only for you.

 

---

 

La linda djovenika
By Moshe Ha Elion
Translated by Judith Lin

Introduction of the first melody

The beautiful young maiden, the most beloved daughter,
To whom always her parents, the best in life they gave her.
They bought her silken garments, with golden jewels adorned her.
And shielded her from sadness, from crying even further.⁴

Her locks of golden tresses, fell gently to her shoulders.
In baths of fragrant perfume, she bathed in pleasant odors.
Her fingers touched no water,⁵ so delicate and pretty,
Embroidery and reading, so occupied her daily.

She did not spend her time at home or with cleaning,
She occupied herself with embroidery and reading.
With her cherished school friends, she wandered many hours,
In fields and gardens picking the prettiest fresh flowers.

Packed more than eighty people: men, women, and their children
Were treated worse than dogs,⁶ the elders with their kindred.⁷
When at the final station, they came down from the train,
A group of women gathered, there they told her to remain.
She went and left her parents, not bidding them goodbye,
So sure, was she, in no time, they would reunify.⁸

Introduction of the second melody

But when to Birkenau, the camp of death arrived
Immediately, her fate, at once was then contrived.
She finds herself bewildered, as she’s compelled to action:
she goes to showers naked, and then to disinfection.

Introduction of the third melody

She only has a striped dress - her blonde hair was all shaven -
Except the shoes she brought from home, all things from her were taken.
They shout to her and beat her, each step assaults her frame,
Tattooed the number on her arm, it now becomes her name.

She’s possibly awake? She possibly is dreaming?
Her soul can hardly fathom, the terror she is feeling.
In seeing guards and soldiers, the fences and barbed wire,
The troops with dogs and weapons: The circumstance was dire.

She knew, from now and onward, her life has changed forever,
Her world has been destroyed, not liberated ever.⁹
With evening comes the darkness, two more with her are sleeping

She feels tremendous sadness, her mother’s memory keeping.¹⁰

The poor thing did not know, she knew it only after,
Her parents were both murdered, soon after they had left her.
And then she knew the reason, why was the smell of roasting,
It was the smell of burnt flesh, by day and night was spreading.

And never, ever ceasing, four chimneys smoke were blowing,
Black billows up to heaven, and flames with sparks were rising.
She lives now in a new block, when seven days went by,
They put her in komando, the work a life belies.

When then appears the dawn, with shouts: Aufstehen!
With blows and with shoving, to make all of them quicken.
From bed they throw them out, one tea, and quickly all,
Appel! Woe! she who tarries, that one will surely fall.

They take them to work, they have to march in pace
While the orchestra plays, they cannot sway or race.
She digs with shovels, she picks the ground with hoes
Up and down, from dusk to dawn, the day never will go!

She twists her back from working, so difficult the labor!
They beat her with their cudgels, each time that she would waver.
Except a slice of bread and, beside a soup of water,
This little food she eats there, the only things they give her.

And so from day to day she’s merely skin and bones,
A muselmann became, so thin she cannot moan.
Her body fine till now, she has severe malaise.
It looks much like a dead corpse; who knows how much she weighs?

The days are passing slowly, her life becomes much harder,
Her heart is growing bitter, her hope seems even farther.
And every single moment, recalls to mind, this one thought:
The frightful death her parents, they suffered as their sad lot.

And almost every night, when in the bed she’s laying
Into the pillow crying, she’s oft their death dismaying:
"Oh, God and Lord of all things, All-powerful and mighty!
I ask, dear God, my parents, in paradise that they be!”

At times, in bed laying, assessing her condition,
The future she considers, what is the Lord’s volition.
Will she be forced at long last / to ask for death as fate?
Will the suffering increase? Will salvation come too late?

Her body she may injure, she may remain in bed,
She might the rows abandon or strike some soldier dead.¹¹
Will be so grave her suffering, so desperate her pain
until her only choice, would be to dead remain.
And thus, will come the moment, she knows this with all sureness.
They will then take her life and throw her to the furnace.

Or will the hope that one day, an end will be in sight
This tragedy will finish, she must believe it might
make her undaunted ever and strong in life become
To fight the war at hand there, and not death will not succumb?

What could be better than to, be saved from this disaster?
"But do, Oh God, not tarry, I pray that this comes faster.”
She’s musing or she’s dreaming? She’s in another sphere.
Her eyes, they close. She’s sleeping. What will await her there?

---

¹ Parts of article are excerpted from “Soundtrack of the Shoah,” by Judith K. Lang Hilgartner which appeared in Moment Magazine, April 11, 2018.

² Lin (née Lang Hilgartner) completed her Ph.D. as a Rachel Winer Manin Jewish Studies Fellow from the University of Virginia, specializing in Latin American Jewish Studies, as well as Sephardic Studies. Her work deals with issues of exile, trauma, and belonging in post-World War II poetry and global literatures.  She also specializes in issues of race and religion in early modern Iberian studies.  She thanks the Davidson College students in her course, "The Lost Children of Spain," for their feedback on the memoir before publication. Her blog profile is https://medium.com/@ladinolives.

³ The strike throughs serve to give the realistic effect of a redacted manuscript. They appear in the original this way. This is similar to a diary genre, for example, La Verdad Del Caso Savolta by Mendoza which includes fictional archival material and testimony.

⁴ The italicized stanzas are intended to be sung according to the music found in the appendix.

⁵ Moshe explained that upper class women wouldn’t do any housework. Although the Ha Elion family was not wealthy, he imagined Nina’s childhood as idyllic to honor her: “No metas las manos en la agua. A vezes lo ke kere decir, de azer en caza, ovras de la caza.” “You don’t put your hands in water. Sometimes that just means that you don’t do housework” (author’s translation).

⁶ Moshe wanted me to use the word, “anguished.” The Ladino version says, “treated like a dog.”

⁷ Moshe wanted, “considered they not human.” When I suggested anything related to “subhuman” he insisted that the Nazi German did not consider the Jews merely subhuman, but rather not human at all. I also suggested this translation: “They suffered worse than dogs, in a captivity unbidden.”

⁸ I wish to make note that Moshe’s authorial voice comes in here clearly as the demi-protagonist of this story.

⁹ I am not at all satisfied with this verse but cannot come up with anything else. Yesh kol davar.

¹⁰ Moshe was very concerned that the line reflects the idea that darkness came every night for every person at the lager.

¹¹ Another option: “She shall hurt her own body, sleep in bed will feign, / She shall the rows abandon, or some SS disdain.” Moshe pointed out that actually killing a soldier was unlikely; one only had to provoke them to be shot.