A Jewish poet, husband, and father
Ionel Abramovich
Ionel hides poems and books beneath the floor of his Paris apartment. He hopes to keep his family together. In the camp, Dr. Burg orders him to assist with work he would once have found unthinkable.
Language & survival
In the novel
Ionel Abramovich lives in occupied Paris with Esther and their daughter, Miriam. A poet with memories of childhood in Odessa, he reads European literature and Jewish religious texts. He brings home a volume of Victor Hugo and a poem of his own, then kneels beside Esther to conceal them beneath the floorboards.
Miriam wants to know why they are hiding books. Later, she asks for a familiar story. Ionel and Esther try to answer her while listening for footsteps in the stairwell. Esther urges him to consider leaving. He fears the people they would have to trust along the way and insists that the family remain together.
In captivity, Ionel is ordered to assist Dr. Burg. He must work under a man who can determine his treatment and circumstances. He continues to think of Esther and Miriam as he obeys instructions he could never have anticipated in Paris. His education remains part of him, as do his habits of observation and his need to put experience into words.
World War II and the Holocaust
The historical context
Writing as spiritual resistance
In the ghettos, Jewish teachers held lessons in secret, readers shared books, and families continued religious observances under Nazi persecution. Emanuel Ringelblum and his Oneg Shabbat group collected diaries, reports, and documents in the Warsaw ghetto so that people after the war could learn what had happened there. Members buried the collection. Researchers later recovered portions of it from beneath the ruined ghetto.
Prisoners subjected to medical experiments
Doctors who experimented on concentration-camp prisoners worked without their subjects’ consent. Camp officials controlled the prisoners’ food, movement, labor, and access to treatment. The physicians chose the procedures and the people who would undergo them. Prisoners could neither withdraw from an experiment nor leave the camp to seek help. Many died or suffered permanent injury at the hands of these doctors.
Sources
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