Lewin, Abraham

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LEWIN, Abraham

Nationality: Polish. Born: Warsaw, 1893. Family: Married Luba Hotner (died 1942); one daughter (deceased). Career: Teacher, Yehudia Girls' School, Warsaw. Associated with Emmanuel Ringelblum. Died: Murdered, victim of the Holocaust, ca. 1942.

Publication

Diary

A Cup of Tears: A Diary of the Warsaw Ghetto, edited by Antony Polonsky. 1988.

Other

Kantonistn: vegn der Yidisher rekrutshine in Rusland in di tsaytn fun Tsar Nikolay dem ershtn, 1827-1856. 1934.

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Abraham Lewin was a teacher at the Yehudia secondary school for Jewish girls in Warsaw, where Emmanuel Ringelblum was also a member of the faculty. In addition to teaching Hebrew in the interwar period, Lewin authored a historical study in Yiddish, The Cantonists (1934), concerning the conscription of Jews into the Russian army in the nineteenth century. Personally acquainted, then, with Lewin's dedication to Jewish education and to his intellectual accomplishments, and no doubt familiar with his role as a Zionist organizer, Ringelblum included Lewin in the directorate of Oneg Shabbes, the archival project for documenting the experience of the Warsaw Ghetto. Lewin's principal contribution to that effort is A Cup of Tears: A Diary of the Warsaw Ghetto (1988), covering the period from 26 March 1942 to 16 January 1943. The extant text is written in two parts, the first in Yiddish and the second in Hebrew, drawing upon the command of both languages that he had demonstrated in his professional activities. It is presumed that Lewin died shortly after the final diary entry in the course of the renewal of the major deportations.

Two of the hidden deposits of Oneg Shabbes archives, including Lewin's diary, were recovered after the war, and there exists, moreover, a substantial literature of diaries and memoirs from other sources in the Warsaw Ghetto. Lewin's professional formation would link him to the educator Chaim A. Kaplan , for instance, but the latter's diary, Scroll of Agony (1965), is a text of extended personal reflection and lamentation. Lewin's sparer account is more closely related to Ringelblum's own diary, Notes from the Warsaw Ghetto (1958), and The Warsaw Diary of Adam Czerniakow (1979) in that all three grow out of institutional concerns—the aims of Oneg Shabbes, on the one hand, and Adam Czerniaków 's work as chairman of the Jewish Council, on the other. Hence, like Ringelblum and, to a lesser degree, Czerniaków, Lewin tends to efface his personal experiences.

Nevertheless, Lewin's writing may be distinguished from their diaries by a certain intimacy of tone. Whereas Ringelblum and Czerniaków concentrate on social structures in the Warsaw Ghetto, Lewin is, above all, an avid listener to and moving recorder of individual tales of suffering. One might compare, for instance, the entries related to 10 June 1942—a date to be "writ large, in bloody letters, in the history of the Warsaw Ghetto," according to Ringelblum. As is his custom, Ringelblum provides an explanatory frame: "Apparently, there was a decision to liquidate … smuggling" and "It would seem that the general plan is to exterminate the Jews in the larger cities of Poland through a policy of systematic starvation." Between these remarks the account is by no means dispassionate, but the description remains generalized: "Dozens of smugglers were liquidated that night, in the usual way." Indeed, the only figure singled out by Ringelblum is an especially murderous Nazi guard who had earned the name of Frankenstein.

Czerniaków, for his part, moves the scene to the offices of Nazi power, where, from his point of view, the real battle for the survival of the Warsaw Ghetto was fought. He notes on 10 June, "At the Gestapo I raised the question of the 'Frankenstein' who keeps shooting people every day at one of the gates." But on 11 June, the day following the events that Ringelblum considered so noteworthy, Czerniaków comments, palliatingly, "There is restlessness in the ghetto because of the daily shootings of smugglers as well as of law-abiding pedestrians by elements not readily identifiable," amidst other concerns.

In contrast to Czerniaków, Lewin focuses starkly on the brutality; but he also differs from Ringelblum in that he highlights the drama by employing a literary structure. As is often the case, Lewin's account, although highly condensed, forms a complete story in miniature, with an introductory scene, a sudden climax, and a narrative denouement ("When silence fell, we saw a man … "). Like the others, Lewin notes the actions of the murderer, but his attention focuses on the victims. Presented at first as "a young Christian" and "a Jewish woman"—that is, in the anonymity they would have borne in the eyes of the killer—Lewin characteristically adds what information he can, giving them the life, in literature at least, that Frankenstein had taken away: "The Jewish woman was 27 years old and her name was Liman. Before the war the Limans had a fruit store… The Christian who was killed was supplying them with goods." Throughout A Cup of Tears Lewin is the determined researcher into and often the lucid teller of such personalized tales, writing his diary at street level, near at hand to the dying and the dead.

—Andrew Bush

See the essay on A Cup of Tears: A Diary of the Warsaw Ghetto.