Ida Fink

Ida Fink in 1985

Ida Fink (Hebrew: אידה פינק‎, 1 November 1921 – 27 September 2011) was a Polish-born Holocaust survivor and author who moved to Israel in 1957. She wrote stories in Polish that are set during the Holocaust.

Quotes

Traces: Stories (1997)

translated into English by Francine Prose and Philip Boehm

• Once again it was quiet, too quiet after what had happened.
  • "The End"

• She went back into the room and carefully locked the door to the balcony, as if she could lock out all the evil events of the night.
  • "The End"

• She watched him lying there, defenseless as a child and, like a child, unconscious of the evil that had been unleashed.
  • "The End"

"Cheerful Zofia"

• She went for so long without talking that silence became a habit.

• Finally she says, "What I remember best is the silence. But you can't talk about silence. Silence is the opposite of talk," she explains.

• She says, "Other people suffered so much.... But no one beat or tortured me.... I never saw a German.... But still it's as if they killed me. Because I'm not the same person. My name, my date of birth-they're not mine. The doctor said it's shock. I don't know what happened before then, or what I was like. So it's as if I didn't exist."

• Tiny drops of moisture bead up on her forehead. She wipes them off with the back of her hand and with this gesture seems to wipe away the thoughts that torment her, because once again she smiles and says, "Did you ever see someone who was killed in the war but who is still alive?"

A Scrap of Time and Other Stories (1985)

Translated from Polish by Francine Prose and Madeline G. Levine

• It was then-the old men of our town were already on their way and were passing their homes and the children and grandchildren hidden behind their windows-it was then that the door of one of those houses opened and we saw a woman running across the marketplace. She was thin, covered with a shawl, carrying her huge pregnant belly in front of her. She ran after those who were walking away, her hand raised in a gesture of farewell, and we heard her voice. She was shouting, "Zei gezint, Tate! Tate, zei gezint!" And then all of us hidden in the darkness began to repeat, "Zeit gezint," bidding farewell with those words to our loved ones who were walking to their deaths.
  • "*****"

• They were saying that we had eaten up all our fruit while it was still green, and that we were right to do so, because who knows what would happen to us by winter. What they were saying was absolutely true.
  • "The Garden that Floated Away"

• Father called us to his office, to the animated Mrs. Kasinska, who, once the price was agreed on, promised to make Kennkarten for us so we could be saved, so we would not be killed.
  • "The Garden that Floated Away"

• And what will you say when they ask you about your parents?" "Mama's at work." "And Papa?" He was silent. "And Papa?" the man screamed in terror. The child turned pale. "And Papa?" the man repeated more calmly. "He's dead," the child answered and threw himself at his father, who was standing right beside him, blinking his eyes in that funny way, but who was already long dead to the people who would really ring the bell.
  • "The Key Game"

• The moment when the silhouette of an SS-man appeared in the pointed arch of the pigsty and his hand carelessly brushed the apple tree, dried by the summer heat-that moment gave us a taste of suspension in that limbo between life and death.
  • "A Dog"

• It was silent in the forest. There were no birds, but the smell of the trees and flowers was magnificent. We couldn't hear anything. There was nothing to hear. The silence was horrifying because we knew that there was shooting going on and people screaming and crying, that it was a slaughterhouse out there. But here there were bluebells, hazelwood, daisies, and other flowers, very pretty, very colorful. That was what was so horrifying-just as horrifying as waiting for the thundering of the train, as horrifying as wondering whom they had taken.
  • "Jean-Christophe"

• The girl who had been crying was now sobbing louder; all of us were aware that every passing minute brought the train's thunder nearer, that any moment now we would hear death riding down the tracks. One girl cried "Mama!" and then other voices cried "Mama!" because there was an echo in the woods.
  • "Jean-Christophe"

• ...everybody thinks I'm crazy, but I'm not. I know-every crazy person says that, but really, there's nothing wrong with my head. If only God would make me crazy! It's my heart that's sick, not my head, and there's no cure for that.
  • "Crazy"

• Again she reaches for the photograph, raises it to her nearsighted eyes, looks at it for a long time, and says, "You can still see the traces of footprints." And a moment later, "That's very strange." That's the direction they walked in. From the Judenrat down Miesna Street. She looks at the footprints, the snow, and the stalls once again. "I wonder who photographed it? And when? Probably right afterwards: the footprints are clear here, but when they shot them in the afternoon it was snowing again." The people are gone-their footprints remain. Very strange. "They didn't take them straight to the fields, but first to the Gestapo. No one knows why, apparently those were the orders. They stood in the courtyard until the children were brought." She breaks off: "I prefer not to remember..." But suddenly she changes her mind and asks that what she is going to say be written down and preserved forever, because she wants a trace to remain. "What children? What trace?" A trace of those children. And only she can leave that trace, because she alone survived. So she will tell about the children who were hidden in the attic of the Judenrat, which was strictly forbidden under pain of death, because children no longer had the right to live. There were eight of them, the oldest might have been seven or so, although no one knew for sure, because when they brought them over they didn't look at all like children, only like...ach...The first tears, instantly restrained. They heard the rumbling, a horse cart drove up to the yard, and on it were the children. They were sitting on straw, one beside the other. They looked like little gray mice. The SS-man who brought them jumped down from the cart, and said kindly, "Well, dear children, now each of you go and run to your parents." But none of the children moved. They sat there motionless and looked straight ahead. Then the SS-man took the first child and said, "Show me your mother and father." But the child was silent. So he took the other children one by one and shouted at them to point out their parents, but they were all silent. "So I wanted some trace of them to be left behind."
  • "Traces"

• "I always wanted to paint. Always, before the war, that is. But I was thirteen then."
  • "Splinter"

"A Scrap of Time"

• Only the end of the war brought us the truth about his last hours. The peasant who delivered the note did not dare to tell us what he saw, and although other people, too, muttered something about what they had seen, no one dared to believe it, especially since the Germans offered proofs of another truth that each of us grasped at greedily; they measured out doses of it sparingly, with restraint a perfect cover-up. They went to such trouble, created so many phantoms, that only time, time measured not in months and years, opened our eyes and convinced us.

• There was the square, thick with people as on a market day, only different, because a market-day crowd is colorful and loud, with chickens clucking, geese honking, and people talking and bargaining. This crowd was silent. In a way it resembled a rally-but it was different from that, too. I don't know what it was exactly. I only know that we suddenly stopped and my sister began to tremble, and then I caught the trembling

• This time was measured not in months but in a word-we no longer said "in the beautiful month of May," but "after the first 'action,' or the second, or "right before the third."

• He had that horrifying clarity of vision that comes just before death.

• He stood between a lawyer's apprentice and a student of architecture and to the question, "Profession?" he replied, "Teacher," although he had been a teacher for only a short time and quite by chance. His neighbor on the right also told the truth, but the architecture student lied, declaring himself a carpenter, and this lie saved his life—or, to be more precise, postponed the sentence of death for two years.

• What our cousin experienced, locked up in that room, will remain forever a mystery.

• Once again, after the second action, a postcard turned up. It was written in pencil and almost indecipherable. After this postcard, we said, "They're done for." But rumors told a different story altogether-of soggy earth in the woods by the village of Lubianki, and of a bloodstained handkerchief that had been found. These rumors came from nowhere; no eyewitnesses stepped forward.

• The execution itself did not take long; more time was spent on the preparatory digging of the grave.

"The Pig"

• Each day and night of those weeks could fill a book, if only the pen could take on this burden of despair and helpless loneliness.

• The man made a small chink for himself in the outside wall of the barn; through this chink he could keep an eye on a scrap of the world: the meadow in front of the peasant's fenced-in yard and a strip of road.

• That day he was awakened by the sound of motors. It was gray outside and he couldn't see very much. But he knew it was the sound of trucks driving from T----- to the town. He recognized the big trucks by their heavy rumbling. He dropped onto the floorboards and after a while he could no longer hear the rumbling diesel engines, his heart was beating so loudly. He knew what they signified; he thought about how the last time, when he was still in the town, twenty trucks packed solid had driven out of there. "They're coming back for the rest of the living," he whispered to himself, "for the rest of the living."

"Jump"

• time brought all of us something quite different than what our childhoods promised.

• Some questions should not even be thought. The facts alone suffice.

• at the time, even eighteen-year-olds were nostalgic for the past.

• She had already begun to resemble her mother, and would surely have relived her mother's life-a fine home in a small town, pretty children, pretty dresses, the annual trip to a health resort-if the sentence of time hadn't made tragic heroes even of those least suited to play the part.

"The Other Shore"

• It was near the end. They had already shot my sons and my husband. I remember that people were saying, 'How can she do it? Why should she save herself? For whom?' But you know, the life force has such strong roots, you can't tear it out. Even after those we love most have died. But you are young, what do you know about that?

• One pebble had fallen; I awaited the avalanche.

• There are thoughts that wither under the gaze of others, that are wounded by the breath of others, that the slightest disruption destroys.

Quotes about

• Ida Fink's work seems to me one of the best answers offered to the question of how the artist can confront the Holocaust. The delicate motions of consciousness are traced, in all their glorious subtlety, while the unspeakable forces of massed brutality come bearing down. Only a writer of the first rank could bring this off, and the world is lucky to have her.
  • Rebecca Goldstein, blurb for Traces (1997)

• Ida Fink's haunting stories-brief and unforgettable-lead us gently into the harrowing ordinariness of wartime Jewish Poland. Through the disturbing, painterly quiet of her art we see them live again, all those doomed, preoccupied, idiosyncratic friends, families, and lovers. Traces confirms it: Ida Fink is the Chekhov of the martyred.
  • Johanna Kaplan, blurb for Traces (1997)

• I can think of no other writer on this subject who has domesticated it in quite the way Ida Fink has, conveying the banality of evil through ordinary details the smell of kasha cooking on a stove, mosquitoes buzzing, sunlight playing on water-and then suddenly, quietly, suffusing that banality with the taste of blood.
  • Daphne Merkin, blurb for Traces (1997)

External links

• Jewish Women's Archive page