Abraham Cykiert

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Abraham Cykiert (born April 26, 1926 in Łódź , † March 2009 in Melbourne ) was a Polish-Australian writer and journalist.

Life

Abraham Cykiert grew up in a textile worker family. After the German occupation of Poland, the Jewish population of Łódź was deported to the Litzmannstadt ghetto in February 1940 and forced into forced labor . The young Cykiert got a job as an errand boy for the Judenrat in the ghetto administration. His first attempts at lyrical writing were supported by Miriam Ulinover (1888–1944) and printed in the ghetto newspaper Naye Folksblat , which was only tolerated in the first year .

When the ghetto was dissolved in August 1944, Cykiert came with the few survivors to the Auschwitz concentration camp and, after a fourteen week stay, from there to the Buchenwald concentration camp , where he was liberated in April 1945. His parents and five siblings were gassed in Auschwitz.

He also tried to write during the time of his imprisonment in the concentration camp; a long poem was published in 1947 in an English translation in South Africa . The British newspaper Manchester Guardian published an interview with Cykiert on May 14, 1945. Cykiert was heard as a witness to the work of the concentration camp doctor Josef Mengele on the ramp at Auschwitz.

Cykiert and a surviving sister were housed by the Jewish Agency in a group of Jewish Holocaust orphans in a sanatorium in Lugano in Switzerland until 1948 , from where they were able to emigrate to Australia and arrived on October 21, 1948. There he worked as a journalist for the Yiddish press. Since then he has published various smaller literary contributions, poems and ghetto records in Yiddish newspapers in London, Paris, New York and Montreal. Since 1993 he has also been writing in English. Cykiert wrote two plays, one about the Jewish elder of the Chaim Rumkowski ghetto and his dilemma. The Emperor of the Ghetto was performed 150 times by Alan Hopgood in 1994 and was also broadcast as a film by the Australian Broadcasting Corporation .

In 1976 he stayed in Jerusalem for a year . In 1994 he was invited to the Hebrew University as a visiting professor and later also to the University of Krakow , which awarded him an honorary doctorate.

There is no printed edition of Cykiert's poems.

Deportation of children from the Łódź ghetto to the Chelmno extermination camp, September 1942

Contributions

  • The last summer days . Friends of Schneider Children's Medical Center of Israel. Tel Aviv 2010 (autobiographical writing)
  • The Uniqueness of the Lodz Ghetto and Rumkowski . In: Paweł Samuś / Wiesław Puś : Fenomen getta łódzkiego . Łódź 2006 pp. 129-134
  • The Emperor of the Ghetto . Video. Melbourne, Vic. : Seven Stars Productions 1992. With an interview.
  • The Emperor of the Ghetto . Stage manuscript 1990
  • Leon Wolowski; Abraham Cykiert: Memories of the shtetl: sculptures . Fitzroy: Globe Press, 1982
  • Contribution to: Souls in the wilderness . Songs, Yiddish. Jerusalem: PAC Records, 1977

literature

Web links

Remarks

  1. ^ Memorial plaque in Tel Aviv. Abraham Cykiert - A Dear Friend of Schneider Children's at Schneider's Medical Center
  2. ↑ Manchester Guardian, May 14, 1945
  3. ^ Cykiert statement on October 10, 1945. Document in the Wiener Library
  4. ^ The Emperor of the Ghetto ( Memento of April 9, 2013 in the Internet Archive ), Alan Hopgood as Rumkowski.
  5. ^ Abraham Cykiert - A Dear Friend of Schneider Children's at Schneider's Medical Center
personal data
SURNAME Cykiert, Abraham
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Polish-Australian writer and journalist
DATE OF BIRTH April 26, 1926
PLACE OF BIRTH Łódź
DATE OF DEATH March 2009
Place of death Melbourne