Surviving Letters

A few weeks after the liberation of Bergen-Belsen in spring 1945, Chava Rosenfarb and Zenia Marcinkowska, who had been friends since childhood, went their separate ways. Rosenfarb moved to Brussels, using underground Bundist networks; Marcinkowska left for Sweden along with six thousand other survivors as part of the White Buses operation run by the Swedish Red Cross. Both went on to become celebrated authors, best known for semiautobiographical novels based on their experiences in the Lodz Ghetto. Rosenfarb wrote in her native Yiddish and Marcinkowska—who wrote under her married name, Larsson—in her adopted Swedish.

Although they didn’t see each other again until 1969, the two women maintained an intense, deeply personal correspondence in Polish, the language in which they spoke to each other as children. Thanks to the editorial resourcefulness of Rosenfarb’s daughter, Goldie Morgentaler, this remarkable collection of letters is now available in English in a single volume. It makes for emotionally wrenching and singularly compelling reading. While charting the postwar trajectories of two profoundly self-reflective survivor-writers, the book becomes a study of friendship and survival.

Rosenfarb and Larsson’s letters read like an epistolary novel, with Morgentaler’s rich annotations fleshing out events and the lives of obliquely referenced characters. It begins in late 1945 in a mood of desperation. Both writers were frantic for news of friends and family who had disappeared or been dispersed in the postwar chaos. Larsson agonized over the death of her beloved stepmother, whom she saw die just after liberation when she was given canned meat that her shrunken digestive tract could not process. This loss, compounded with her father’s suicide in the ghetto, left Larsson wracked with guilt and bereft of family. She wrote to Rosenfarb of her extreme isolation, the indignity of her Swedish quarantine, and her rage at a social worker from the Mosaic Congregation in Stockholm:

I exploded at him with all of my pent-up rage, yelling whatever came into my head, swearing and carrying on. I swore that if I was denied the opportunity to study I would escape, to the moon if necessary! With burning ears the man wrote down my story.

The consequence of my outburst was that a short time later the camp director gave me a big lump of modelling clay and I could start sculpting in earnest.

Larsson called her first works of this period “The Avenger,” “The Ghetto Mother,” and “The Somnambulist” and wrote Rosenfarb that she wanted to “raise a monument of such a magnitude that the world will never forget its crime!” Rosenfarb, she wrote, was the only person who “binds [her] strongly to life,” but it seemed unlikely that they would ever see each other again. The now nearly obsolete practice of overseas correspondence gives this collection its own undercurrent of drama, as their letters were delayed or sent to wrong addresses.

At this point in their lives, Rosenfarb’s outlook was comparatively brighter. She had reunited with her prewar boyfriend, Heniek, with whom she lived in a tiny apartment in Brussels with her sister and mother. Although the family lacked both legal status and financial means, the road ahead was not entirely bleak. Heniek was a promising medical student with a United Nations–sponsored scholarship to study in Germany. By early 1947, Rosenfarb had published her first collection of Yiddish poetry in London, Di balade fun nekhtikn vald (The Ballad of Yesterday’s Forest). She wrote to Larsson of fluctuating emigration plans and of her own haunted feelings, but her tone was more upbeat than Larsson’s. “Suffering always follows me closely,” she wrote, “but at least I’m capable of happiness,” and she urged this attitude on her friend. “Why don’t you ever mention your noble impulses, but always focus on everything that is dark?” she asked.

Over time the dynamic between the two women began to shift. Rosenfarb described her vertigo and other physical ailments, along with a sense of diminishing creative energy. In one letter, she even confessed to “miss[ing] those moments in the ghetto, when the slightest vibration of my soul poured itself out on paper, when I understood myself so well.” Beset by emotional paralysis, she described having “two souls inside me who humiliate and mock each other.” And when will Larsson write back already?

More than merely friends, the two writers sensed that they were playing out versions of each other’s lives. In 1948, Larsson thanked Rosenfarb for putting into words “the mission that fate has placed in our hands—one that we must fulfill.” In her reply, Rosenfarb implored Larsson not to feel lonely on her birthday since she had “a sister in me, and perhaps more than that.” Later she wrote of being moved by “that mysterious undercurrent” in Larsson’s life. The long letters and slow rhythm of their mailed exchanges allow for a level of emotional candor difficult to imagine in our era of emails, texts, and emojis.

By late 1947, Larsson’s fortunes began to change. Awarded a scholarship to the Swedish Academy of Art, she fell in with bohemian artists who were charmed by the tempestuous Polish Jewish survivor. “I have grown close to the Swedes,” she wrote Rosenfarb. “I spend my time with young, talented artists who sacrifice material gain to fight for their art!” When she met a colleague’s roommate with a “peculiar attractiveness,” she hesitated before falling in love with a Swede. Despite misgivings, Rosenfarb cast her vote for personal fulfillment: “Forget your scruples,” she wrote. “Immerse yourself completely in this passion of yours.” Larsson’s marriage to the engineer Per-Axel Larsson provided a lifetime of warmth and support.

As they adapted to postwar realities, Rosenfarb’s and Larsson’s attitudes toward Jewish politics began to shift. Both had moved in Bundist circles before and during the war, but in the postwar years, Larsson disengaged from the movement. The Bundist meetings she attended in Stockholm were filled with rancor, and she felt more compelled by those comrades who had “realized the absolute necessity of the Zionist strivings.” A month after the State of Israel was founded in 1948, she lectured Rosenfarb on the need to transcend party infighting in the name of national solidarity. “The problems one has to wrestle with no longer concern some scattered factions, but all of Judaism and the future of the Jewish people.” For her part, Rosenfarb stuck with the Bund but largely for the camaraderie. She saw Larsson’s Zionism as a pursuit of an abstract ideal, a “heavenly sublime” that ignored the “mire and mud of cruel reality.” Still, she, too, found the Bundist program out of sync with postwar realities. “Old ideologies have lost their power,” she wrote.

Center stage in their correspondence was taken over by their private lives and creative aspirations. Rosenfarb married, moved to Montreal, and felt torn between the competing demands of her two children and her writing. She found Canada dull and conformist, and her connections with other Yiddish writers were almost nonexistent. In Stockholm, by contrast, Larsson was enchanted by the Swedes. “There is no antisemitism here,” she exulted. Although she mourned her inability to conceive a child, she found an all-consuming outlet in the written word, publishing a three-volume work about the Lodz Ghetto: Skuggorna vid träbron (Shadows at the Wooden Bridge; 1960), Lång är gryningen (Long Is the Dawn; 1961), and Livet till mötes (Towards Life; 1962). Throughout the 1960s, it was Larsson who was the more confident and self-fulfilled artist of the two.

Reading Rosenfarb and Larsson’s correspondence, it is clear how much of their lives depended on the quality of their respective marriages. Larsson’s husband edited her work and supported her eccentric writing schedule; Rosenfarb’s husband dove deeper into his work as a leading gynecologist and champion of abortion rights, while tormenting her with rampant infidelity. Nevertheless, Rosenfarb managed to complete her magnum opus, Der boym fun lebn (The Tree of Life; 1972), which, remarkably, was also a three-volume work focused on the Lodz Ghetto.

As this collection of letters concludes in 1971, Rosenfarb had not yet achieved the success that Larsson had (later letters between the two have not been published). But, by yet another twist of fate, Rosenfarb is today the more renowned of the two, thanks largely to her daughter’s tireless labors translating her work into English. Lodz declared 2023 “the year of Chava Rosenfarb” in honor of the centennial of her birth. Her works are treasured and studied by new generations of Yiddish scholars and enthusiasts. Larsson, by contrast, has never had work translated into English and is barely remembered today.

We are used to imagining the Holocaust survivor as a lone figure burdened by a single, overwhelming story, like the survivors whose testimonies have been preserved by the USC Shoah Foundation and others. In Letters from the Afterlife, we see how two survivors come to terms with their own experiences in dialogue with each other. Their wartime trauma never disappears, but they interpret it differently as their lives change. Most poignantly, their correspondence reveals how a truly profound friendship can shape one’s destiny. Rosenfarb and Larsson found not only consolation in each other but a model for whom each could become.