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Blessed Be Imagination - May It Be Damned! About the Life Testimonies of Batsheva Dagan

Contemporary Witness Testimonies, Persecution of Jews after 1933
Batsheva Dagan: Gesegnet sei die Phantasie – verflucht sei sie! Erinnerungen von "Dort" überLebenszeugnisse [Blessed Be Imagination – May It Be Damned! Memories of "There" through Life Testimonies], 120 p. Metropol Verlag: Berlin, 2005, 16,- € (with a postface on the author's biography by Constanze Jeiser)

Bathseva Dagan's poems are memories of her concentration camp experiences as a young girl. Even though poetry and concentration camps seem to exclude each other, many persecuted people have attempted to express the terrors that they lived through during their imprisonment in this special form. Batsheva Dagan's poems, written in a imaginative, direct language that is well understandable for young people, are memories of her experiences in ghettos and concentration camps when she was a young girl. Looking back, she tries to answer the question what it was like to live under the conditions of persecution and concentration camps.

She was born in Łodz in 1925 as Isabella Rubinsteig. Together with her family, she fled from the Germans to the Soviet Union, where she was taken to the ghetto in 1941. While her parents and one of her sisters were killed in TreblinkaKilling center on the Bug River northeast of Warsaw in the General Government (occupied Poland). Opened in July 1942, Treblinka was the largest of the three killing centers of Operation Reinhard. Between 700,000 and 860,000 Jews and several thousand Gypsies were killed there. A revolt of the inmates on August 2, 1943 destroyed most of the camp, and it was closed in November 1943. after the ghetto had been dissolved, she managed to escape with forged documents and sent as a Polish forced labourer to Schwerin in Mecklenburg to work as a maid. After a denunciation she was arrested by the GestapoSecret State Police established in Prussia in 1933, by 1936, its authority extended throughout Germany. Together with the Kriminalpolizei, i.e., the nonuniformed detective forces, the Gestapo constituted the Sicherheitspolizei or Security Police. and taken via a number of prisons to AuschwitzA complex of concentration, labor and extermination camps located approximately 40 miles west of Cracow in Upper Silesia (Poland). Established in 1940 as a concentration camp, it became a killing center in 1942. Auschwitz I was the central camp. Auschwitz II, also known as Birkenau, was the killing center. Auschwitz III, or Monowitz, was the IG Farben labor camps, also known as BUNA. In addition, there were numerous subsidiary camps. Auschwitz was liberated by the Soviet Army on January 27, 1945.-Birkenau when she was eighteen years old. She survived until the evacuationNazi euphemism for deportation. The forced relocation of Jews and Gypsies as well as Slavic native populations from their homes to other localities, usually to ghettos or concentration camps, labor camps and killing centers. Nazis referred to deportations as "evacuations" or "resettlements" to disguise this component of mass murder. of the camp and was taken on one of the "death marches" back to Mecklenburg, to the Malchow camp. (See the project "Dig Where You Are Standing" – Malchow, and extension camp of Ravensbrück" on this website at [node:4290] (Text in German).

She was freed by the British Army on May 2nd at Lübz. Since 1946, Batsheva Dagan has lived in Israel. Of her family, only few survived the Holocaust. She became a psychologist and works with young people and teachers in Israel, Europe and the United States as a contemporary witness. Among other things, she developed a methodology to familiarise children with the topic of "ShoahDer Begriff stammt aus dem Hebräischen und bedeutet Unheil bzw. große Katastrophe. Er bezeichnet den Völkermord an den 6 Millionen Juden durch die Nationalsozialisten. Dieser Völkermord zielte auf die vollständige Vernichtung der europäischen Juden. Er wurde mit dem staatlich propagierten Antisemitismus begründet und im Zweiten Weltkrieg seit 1941 systematisch, ab 1942 auch mit industriellen Methoden durchgeführt. ".

The illustrations by Yaakov Guterman accompanying her descriptions create a personal dialogue of poem and image that make the outrageousness of the Holocaust perceptible.