Poetry in Hell - poetry from the Warsaw Ghetto

Shared by Catherine Lee on the school library list serv:

From: Sarah Traister Moskovitz info@poetryinhell.org

Dear friends and colleages
I have just completed a new website, Poetry in Hell – http://www.poetryinhell.org, which contains the complete collection of poems from the Warsaw Ghetto's Ringelblum Archives. The poems are freely available for the first time in the original Yiddish along with my own original English translations.

The poems offer insight into the daily actions, emotions, and wisdom of people living in the ghetto. They capture a wide range of topics, presented with sensitivity, beauty, longing and raw angst. While the Yiddish language is particularly beautiful, the English translations are easy to read and will make the poems accessible to a far wider group of readers and to future generations.

The poems were rescued from the Ringelblum Archives, which were buried in three milk cans in the Warsaw Ghetto before its liquidation. Two of the milk cans were recovered in 1946 and 1950, and the third has never been found.

The project has been completed with help from my University, CSU Northridge where I am a Professor Emeritus, and the US Holocaust Memorial Museum where I worked on the project as a visiting scholar. The work is a labor of love for me, and has taken nearly ten years to complete.

I would appreciate it if you could help spread the word about this important resource. I believe that preserving and publicizing these poems is the best way to honor the poets and partisans, and protest the genocide of millions of Yiddish speakers.