Alice Ehrmann - Terezín Ghetto

Alice Ehrmann - Terezín Ghetto

  • Submitted By: Yaacov
  • Date Submitted: 05/10/2013 9:00 AM
  • Category: Book Reports
  • Words: 1309
  • Page: 6
  • Views: 157

Introduction

Alice Ehrmann portrays a writer with a level of maturity beyond her age and her diary works very well in translation. This is a teenager who through difficult times offers compelling and deep existential commentary of the circumstances forced upon her, “We shatter in eternal flight between dream and cruelty upon the rocks of a reality that is shrouded by eternal night. It is too late for everything. Does anything remain that might make sense in this senselessness?” (p. 418). Her writing is at time forceful, scathingly critical and often hostile toward her enemies. For example, “I am permitted to hate all of them, and since I can expect nothing except death and torture at their hands, I never have to be grateful. Never” (p. 411). Given her style, I was drawn in to her narrative, appreciated her intellect, and reminded of a sensibility, a style, an existence more related to my grandfather than of my post-modern American pop culture.

Vita

Alice Ehrmann was born on May 5, 1927, the second daughter of an upper-middle-class family in Prague. Her father, Rudolf Ehrmann, an assimilated Czech Jew, was an architect by profession. Pavla Ehrmann, Alice’s mother, had been born into a Catholic family in Vienna, but after her marriage she did not practice any religion. Alice and her sister, Ruth, did not have a Jewish upbringing, nor did they attend religious school, but she recalled many years later that she “always knew [she] was Jewish.” She attended a Czech primary school in Prague and completed two grades of high school before, at age thirteen; she was forced out of school. (p. 395)

She appears to be acutely aware of centuries long European Christian anti-Semitism: “…are they not the ones who instigated torture upon torture upon us for thousands of years; bloodbath upon bloodbath, humiliation upon humiliation for hundreds of years? Are they not the ones whose children will become the carriers of a new Jew hatred?” (p.411). This is a prevalent...

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