Yitzhak Katznelson
Song of the Murdered Jewish People
transl.: Kostas Vrachnos
ed. LOGIA, 2022, p. 152

I haven’t read Primo Levi, I haven’t read Homer Pella’s “Stalag VI C” or Borovsky’s “Ladies and Gentlemen from Here for Gases”. I didn’t study Masauer and didn’t see the whole nine-hour Shoah Lantzman. The reason I decided to write about “Song of the Murdered Jewish People” is because my wife lost her family from Thessaloniki to Auschwitz. Only the grandmother survived. He hid in Axios. He got married and had children. And he had grandchildren.

On the one hand, you are depressed, on the other hand, you want to close the book and leave because you feel guilty for living in a state of constant ingratitude.

This little book with its fifteen songs of death is not a book. It should not normally be published, read, or commented on like the rest of the books on the market. They are more like smoke signals or a message to the sea. In addition, the manuscript was found in a glass bottle buried in the shade of a pine tree. It was a time when people were burned, not trees.

The “Song” was written from the autumn of 1943 to January 1944, when Katsnelson headed for the ashes. Therefore, any critical reaction, even retribution, to a work that arose from incurable pain, horror and anguish, would be cynicism. Even Salamov’s “Stories from Kolyma” were written after being in the labor camps of the Soviet Union. Even diving into a wound requires self-control.

But let’s think about what other meaning this hidden text would acquire – hidden because not all paths to it are open – if we did not know what happened in the cells. That is why Katsnelson found the strength to squeeze his poems into cut notebook sheets, which look more like tombstones and can be seen in the prints of the edition. There are times when the words are no longer letters and become a pile of black bones stuck to the white page, screaming “help the reader,” as a Thessalonian, coincidentally born in 1944, once sang. And you don’t know how to react.

I spoke about this the other day to the Asmaty translator Kostas Vrachnos. You read three stanzas and you can’t stand it, you freeze. On the one hand, you are depressed, on the other hand, you want to close the book and leave, because you feel guilty for living in a state of constant ingratitude, wasting everything that you have. You want to accept the poem or avoid it, as if someone is following you who needs you, but you don’t stop listening because you’re afraid to disrupt the safe flow of the day: home, work, shopping, family. Where is the place for death.

The last time Katsnelson saw his wife and two younger sons was in April 1942. She stayed with her first child, participated in the uprising in the Warsaw ghetto, together with fake passports, they fled to the north-east of France, but were eventually deported to Auschwitz. I also try to keep track of the above elements to understand something more, leafing through an album with a yellow cover, yellow as a star, pinned to the lapel, which contains photographs of Jews who lived in Greece and died in the Holocaust.

I see the faces of Gabriel’s family again: my father’s lips, my mother’s nose, Esther’s jet-black eyes, Sarah’s unruly hair as my wife wanders around the house, the same nose, the same eyes, the same hair, the same mouth. “How to sing? How to raise your head with blurry eyes? A tear froze in my eyes, “says Katsnelson in the very first song, and I, in turn, conclude, with all – or not at all? – respect, the words from the song I was listening to for a while to repeat: “Let’s let’s meet in the ruins of the old city and have fun again.” I keep writing. The writing is absurd. Like life.

“What do you think;” I ask my wife just before I submit an article to the newspaper. “We live, and this is more important than every text and every word.”