Joseph Kirman

Joseph Kirman (* 1896 ; † 1943 in Treblinka ) was a Polish- Yiddish poet in the Warsaw ghetto and was a victim of the Holocaust.

Life

Kirman was a factory worker who worked in social welfare for writers from 1940 and worked for the underground archive of the Warsaw Ghetto.

It is known that he was deported to the Warsaw ghetto. Here he was suddenly grabbed by a Jewish police officer and taken to a “transshipment point” despite strong resistance. On a piece of paper that has survived, he asked his friend Yitzhak Giterman to help him and thus save his life. This actually brought him back from Treblinka.

The writer's works, collected in the ghetto's underground archive, contain moving texts about the death of children. He once describes how a terminally ill child asked to be admitted outside the hospital. After it had already been refused several times, it began to undress in front of the entrance, "on the street, in front of the eyes of the indifferent". A doctor then let it in. Kirman wonders if the child was saved, but he comes to the conclusion: “Hardly, it has only won one thing with its impression-like game: the grace of a silent death - not on the pavement, not in a pool of blood of pus and feces, naked on melting snow - but in a bed, under a blanket, deloused. "And yet there is an almost optimistic moment in this devastating observation:" The grace, in the last hour of his short life, no longer the hunted, pursued to be tortured head of cattle, but - almost - a human. "

Publications

Milton Teichman (Ed.): Truth and Lamentation: Stories and Poems on the Holocaust
Center for political beauty (ed.): To posterity. Latest news and testimonies from Nazi victims against forgetting , Berlin 2019, p. 11, ISBN 978-3-00-064453-5

literature

Samuel D. Kassow: Ringelblum's Legacy: The Secret Archives of the Warsaw Ghetto , Rowohlt, Reinbek bei Hamburg, 2010, ISBN 978-3-498-03547-1 .

Individual evidence

↑ Klaus-Peter Friedrich (Ed.): Poland: Generalgouvernement August 1941 - 1945 , De Gruyter Oldenbourg, Berlin, 2014, ISBN 978-3-486-71530-9 .
↑ Andrea Löw, Markus Roth : The Warsaw Ghetto: Everyday Life and Resistance in the Face of Destruction , Beck, Munich, 2013, ISBN 978-3-406-64533-4 .

personal data
SURNAME	Kirman, Joseph
BRIEF DESCRIPTION	Polish-Yiddish poet and victim of the Holocaust
DATE OF BIRTH	1896
PLACE OF BIRTH	Second Polish Republic
DATE OF DEATH	1943
Place of death	Treblinka

[1] Klaus-Peter Friedrich (Ed.): Poland: Generalgouvernement August 1941 - 1945 , De Gruyter Oldenbourg, Berlin, 2014, ISBN 978-3-486-71530-9 .

[2] Andrea Löw, Markus Roth : The Warsaw Ghetto: Everyday Life and Resistance in the Face of Destruction , Beck, Munich, 2013, ISBN 978-3-406-64533-4 .