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The Last Day

Summary/Abstract: I am incapable of telling all this and explaining anything. I am even unable to come close to the experiences of the children from the Medema sanatorium and their carers, regardless which one of the women accompanied them on the last way. Joseph Conrad once wrote: “I have given up expecting those last words, whose ring, if they could only be pronounced, would shake both heaven and earth”. In an excellent essay about the Ringelblum Archive Krzysztof Środa declared: “A few hours of reading suffice to understand that this man of, it seemed, excellent taste – I am not sure I can handle the topic – is compromising. After all, what would have happened if Emanuel Ringelblum started to wonder whether he could manage to rise to the topic? If all those people who helped him started to think about this? If Rachela Auerbach contemplated this? It is obvious what would have happened. They would have acknowledged that they could not manage. And no Archive would have come into being”. I take the risk, therefore, of ceasing to look for Conrad’s “last” words and Adina Blady-Szwajger’s words that shout, and attempt to build sentences simple and free from the “pathos of adjectives and the pomposity of epithets”, as Bruno Schulz wrote. It would be best of all if adjectives and epithets simply did not exist. It is also extremely important to completely avoid adverbs. And not to say: “They went passively”, “they went of their own free will” or “like sheep to the slaughter”. When the world was coming to an end there were no other words than the ones we know so well. Only they can help us to evoke those who passed through life so rapidly and quietly that history almost failed to notice them: those children from the Medema sanatorium and their carers – dark haired Tola, fair haired Hendusia, and Rozalia, who in her youth was known as Rejzele.

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