Episode 3 - Chava Rosenfarb - July 12 & 15

Chava Rosenfarb wrote her first poem when she was eight years old, in her hometown of Lodz, Poland. She developed her literary voice in the Lodz Ghetto during the Second World War. Later in the Nazi concentration camps, she continued to write poetry in her native Yiddish, scribbling the words on the ceiling above her bunk bed with a stub of a pencil. Chava managed to survive Auschwitz and Bergen Belsen. After the war, she moved to Montreal. Yet even as she raised her family and built a new life, she was compelled to relive her old one, to bear witness to the Holocaust and its effect on her beloved Lodz and its Jewish residents. Her life, her art, were dedicated not just to preserving those memories and the people who were lost, but to preserving Yiddish, the language of that lost era.

The documentary on Chava Rosenfarb was by Susan McKenzie in Montreal.