Attitudes to Death during the Holocaust: writings from the ghettos

This study explores perspectives on death from ‘within’ the Holocaust, works written in the midst of suffering which were not tempered by or influenced by survival and its traumas. The focus on thinking during the Holocaust will look at two categories of literature written during the Holocaust, which were hidden or distributed by their authors who did not survive. The first involves secular diarist accounts of life in ghettos and the second is the ‘theological’ writing of religious leaders writing for their followers (Rabbi Shapiro'sEsh Kodesh (The Holy Fire) from the Warsaw Ghetto and Rabbi Tiechtall'sEm Habanim Smecha (The Happy Mother of Children) from Budapest). This literature is studied in relation to a number of key questions: how death was recorded; evidence of religious rituals concerning death; how the rituals helped people to cope with death; and the nature of theological debate at the time.