On The Nightstand Thursdays: A Wall of Two

I read this book mostly with welled-up eyes, and I cried hard when I finished the book. That heavy, deep cry we do sometimes when moments of the unimaginable and unchangeable are revealed to us. A Wall of Two, is a book of poems written by two sisters, Ilona and Henia Karmel, while first in Skarzysko-Kamienna and then later in HASAG-Buchenwald and recently translated by Fanny Howe. The poems are beautiful, heartbreaking and written with such a sense of care and love, and, in moments, simultaneous selflessness and dread, like in The Mark on the Wall:

Praxia Dymitruk, Praxia, Praxia

why did you write your name all over the walls?

Is this pain written down

or resistance to life’s passing?

Were you, too, afraid to disappear?

Without a sound? No one to miss you

because you belonged to no one?

Is your name all you owned, Praxia?

I understand you, little Russian one.

Such a sweet stem of a name.

For a girl so familiar though never known.

Praxia Dymitruk, Praxia, Praxia.

(more here)

The synopsis goes like this: Ilona and Henia Karmel were 17 and 20 years old in 1943 when they entered labor camps from the Krakow ghetto. The sisters wrote the poems on worksheets stolen from the factories where they worked by day and hid them in their clothing. During what she thought were the last days of her life, Henia entrusted the poems to a cousin who happened to pass her in the forced march at the end of the war. The cousin gave them to Henia's husband in Krakow, who would not locate and reunite with his wife for another six months.

This is the first English publication of these extraordinary poems. Fanny Howe's deft adaptations are presented with a biographical introduction that conveys the powerful story of the sisters' survival from capture to freedom in 1946.

After the war, the sisters immigrated to the United States and continued to write. Henia Karmel is the author of two novels written in English including Marek and Lisa, and Ilona Karmel is also the author of two novels written in English including An Estate of Memory.