Youth Writing Behind the Walls: Avraham Cytryn's Lodz Notebooks

Avraham Cytryn was born in Lodz in 1927 and was undoubtedly incredibly gifted as a writer of short fiction and poetry. Only 13 when interned in the Lodz Ghetto with his mother and sister, he continued to write in every spare minute he had after work. The security of living within a safe community no longer existed, and perhaps writing helped Avraham and gave him the will to continue the fight for life. Even at such a tender age, he already belonged to a writer's guild. At the end of 1944, the family was deported on the last transport from Lodz to Auschwitz where Avraham perished. There is a photograph of Avraham, his mother and sister as they are boarding the train. Avraham took one notebook with him on his final journey, and left his unfinished notebooks hidden in the Lodz Ghetto. Avraham's sister retrieved them from their hiding place after the war. Reading his work, we are able to glimpse through a window of despair and hunger, and can try to understand the reality of the daily events of living in the ghetto. There are several poems which can be read towards the end of the book, but I have chosen one, in which Avraham portrays the will to survive and the personal battle to retain his humor throughout everything he was seeing and experiencing.