Sara Zyskind

Sara Zyskind, also Sara Plager-Zyskind (b. 26 March 1927 in Łódź; d. 1 January 1995 in Tel-Aviv), was a prominent PolishIsraeli writer on the Holocaust. She was a survivor of the Łódź Ghetto, and of the Auschwitz, the Mittelsteine concentration camp, and the Grafenort Nazi concentration camps. Her style as a writer on the Holocaust has been praised for its effective literary technique that allows the reader to identify with the reality of the period. Her writings constitute valuable primary sources in Holocaust historiography.

Life Sara Zyskind was born in Łódź to the family of Anschel (Anszel) Kalman Plager (18971943), a native of Drohobycz, and his wife Mindla, née Biederman (19001940), who came from a well-known family of Łódź in­dus­tri­al­ists. (At least on some occasions, Zyskind will spell her maiden name "Sala Plagier": see External links below.) Zyskind's child­hood in Łódź was a very happy one, as she was swaddled in love and support from family members. thumb

At age 12, the German occupation radically altered the conditions of her childhood and family life. Within three months the town's residents of Jewish origin were required to move into a newly designated Ghetto, which was subsequently declared off limits to outsiders on 8 February 1940 and sealed to the outside world on 1 May 1940. Her mother, whom Zyskind later remembered for her composure during this period, died later that year. She and her father mutually supported each other during the following years, successfully evading arrest and de­porta­tion, until he died during the Passover of 1943. Upon the "liquidation" of the Ghetto Zyskind was deported to Auschwitz in August 1944. At the age of 16, she was deported to Auschwitz and registered as prisoner number 55091. She was later sent to Mittelsteine, an all-female Gross-Rosen subcamp located about 17 kilometres northwest of Kłodzko, then known as Glatz. She subsequently was moved to the Grafenort Nazi concentration camp, 27 kilometres away (12 km south of Kłodzko). At the end of the war the hundreds of pris­on­ers held there (virtually all Jewish women deported from the Łódź area) were forced to march under brutal conditions, building trenches to fortify the Nazis' retreat against the advancing Soviet forces. Zyskind concluded that she would not be able survive her wartime ordeal. The work was far beyond our capacity. We were nothing but living skeletons, unable to lift the shovelfuls of heavy soil above our heads, let alone work at the speed demanded of us. In the spring of 1945, after the liberation, she returned to Łódź only to find that deportations and killings destroyed much of the family and social network in which she had grown up. She eventually decided to emigrate to Palestine and left Poland on forged wartime papers with a group of other refugees from Łódź. Because of British restrictions on Jewish emigration, they wandered across Europe for two years, crossing national frontiers aided by a Jewish relief group called Escape. She finally reached Palestine on 15 May 1947. Zyskind would not return to Poland until 1988.

During the 1948 Arab–Israeli War, Zyskind served in armed combat alongside Eliezer Zyskind, whom she married in December 1948. Born in 1925, he was from Brzeziny, near Łódź. Her brother was a co-founder of the first textile mill in Tel-Aviv.

In his monograph about the memoirs of Holocaust survivors, David Patterson wrote about Sara Zyskind : The essence of Nazism was murder, and the target of Nazi murder was the image and essence of the human being; it was the image of the divine that makes this being human, which is to say, it was the being-for-the-other of human being. (...) Sara Zyskind remembers, "Our friendship and our care for one another enabled us to preserve something of our humanity..."

Works (1977) העטרה שאבדה : בגיטו לודז׳ ובמחנות Stolen Years (1981; translation of ha-ʻAṭarah she-avda), Signet. Bet loḥame ha-geṭaʼot (1985) Struggle (1988; translation of Maʾavako shel naʻar), Lerner Pub Group. Światło w dolinie łez (1994)