Tikvah
Editors’ Pick

June 13, 2022

A Year after the Holocaust, a Survivor’s Poem

"From the Depths."

In 1946, the Yiddish poet and novelist Chava Rosenfarb found herself in Brussels after having spent the previous years, successively, in the Lodz ghetto, Auschwitz, and Bergen-Belsen. While in Belgium, she wrote the poem Mi-ma’amakim (“From the Depths”—after Psalm 130), subtitled “For the ruins of the Lodz ghetto.” Hannah Pollin-Galay offers a new translation of the poem into English, which begins thus:

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