Friendship and Solidarity

“I sometimes feel so solitary in the world.” (Erich Kästner) 


Friendship and Solidarity in Times of Persecution




In 1941, in the Warsaw Ghetto, Teofila Langnas gave her 21-year-old fiancé, Marcel Reich-Ranicki, an edition of Erich Kästner’s Lyrischer Hausapotheke [Lyrical Medicine Cabinet] that she had herself copied out and illustrated. In Auschwitz in 1943, Zosia Spiegelman gave her friend Isabella Rubinstein an 18th birthday present: a poem and a piece of bread that she had saved from her own rations. Isabella Rubinstein’s name is now Batsheva Dagan and, 30 years later, she composed an answering poem: in memory of this unforgettable gift of friendship.
 Across the ghettos, poems were created and given as gifts. The detainees also used resistance songs or ancient melodies, set with new texts, as a source of comfort. Together they sought means to express an almost indestructible yearning, making use of vociferous laments or quiet joy and songs of protest or of mourning.

At the heart of this event are poems and songs that promoted friendships and strengthened solidarity. They have stories to tell – stories that are curious and thrilling, tender and sad, of people persecuted by the Nazis; stories that, despite everything, speak of human dignity and solidarity.