in her diary: "I want to be famous. I don't want to fall or die like a cog in the machine. I can't imagine myself in the gloom of anonymity, as it were. People disappear. I want to live! To leave something behind, a document that I was here. Some big, beautiful enterprise."Maier was only 14 at the time − a Viennese girl from a bourgeois, intellectual, assimilated Jewish family. Like many girls her age, she envisioned great plans for the life that awaited her. Over the next eight years, her diaries filled up 1,100 pages. In addition to these she wrote some 300 letters. Her notebooks overflowed with philosophical debates, literary musings, poems and the experiences of an adolescent girl living in the shadow of the Nazi regime − unrequited love, first sexual experiences, confusion, fear, despair − as well as with evidence of a full, rich and cultured life.
At 22, Maier was murdered in the gas chambers at Auschwitz.
from Haaretz: 'There is no point in dying'
~~~~~~~~~~~
No comments :
Post a Comment