Ida Fink

"This time was measured not in months but in a word-we no longer said "in the beautiful month of May," but "after the first 'action,' or the second, or "right before the third.""

"He had that horrifying clarity of vision that comes just before death."

"He stood between a lawyer's apprentice and a student of architecture and to the question, "Profession?" he replied, "Teacher," although he had been a teacher for only a short time and quite by chance. His neighbor on the right also told the truth, but the architecture student lied, declaring himself a carpenter, and this lie saved his life—or, to be more precise, postponed the sentence of death for two years."

"What our cousin experienced, locked up in that room, will remain forever a mystery."

"Once again, after the second action, a postcard turned up. It was written in pencil and almost indecipherable. After this postcard, we said, "They're done for." But rumors told a different story altogether-of soggy earth in the woods by the village of Lubianki, and of a bloodstained handkerchief that had been found. These rumors came from nowhere; no eyewitnesses stepped forward."

"The execution itself did not take long; more time was spent on the preparatory digging of the grave."

"Each day and night of those weeks could fill a book, if only the pen could take on this burden of despair and helpless loneliness."

"The man made a small chink for himself in the outside wall of the barn; through this chink he could keep an eye on a scrap of the world: the meadow in front of the peasant's fenced-in yard and a strip of road."

"That day he was awakened by the sound of motors. It was gray outside and he couldn't see very much. But he knew it was the sound of trucks driving from T----- to the town. He recognized the big trucks by their heavy rumbling. He dropped onto the floorboards and after a while he could no longer hear the rumbling diesel engines, his heart was beating so loudly. He knew what they signified; he thought about how the last time, when he was still in the town, twenty trucks packed solid had driven out of there. "They're coming back for the rest of the living," he whispered to himself, "for the rest of the living.""

"time brought all of us something quite different than what our childhoods promised."

"Some questions should not even be thought. The facts alone suffice."

"at the time, even eighteen-year-olds were nostalgic for the past."

"She had already begun to resemble her mother, and would surely have relived her mother's life-a fine home in a small town, pretty children, pretty dresses, the annual trip to a health resort-if the sentence of time hadn't made tragic heroes even of those least suited to play the part."

"Ida Fink's work seems to me one of the best answers offered to the question of how the artist can confront the Holocaust. The delicate motions of consciousness are traced, in all their glorious subtlety, while the unspeakable forces of massed brutality come bearing down. Only a writer of the first rank could bring this off, and the world is lucky to have her."

"Her subtle and nuanced writing brings memory and imagination to bear on a traumatic past...In all of Fink’s work, the seemingly insignificant detail opens up a profound look at complexities of experience, memory, and motivation. As Fink excavates what she terms “the ruins of memory,” she brings to the forefront the act of memory itself, and the complicated relationship linking memory, imagination, and language. Fragments of the past that resurface in the present, Fink’s writing offers an unflinching and insightful look at wartime experiences and post-war memories. By turns poignant and tender, grim and sardonic, Fink’s lean and unsentimental prose conveys the profound and lasting effects of the Holocaust."

"Ida Fink's haunting stories-brief and unforgettable-lead us gently into the harrowing ordinariness of wartime Jewish Poland. Through the disturbing, painterly quiet of her art we see them live again, all those doomed, preoccupied, idiosyncratic friends, families, and lovers. Traces confirms it: Ida Fink is the Chekhov of the martyred."

"I can think of no other writer on this subject who has domesticated it in quite the way Ida Fink has, conveying the banality of evil through ordinary details the smell of kasha cooking on a stove, mosquitoes buzzing, sunlight playing on water-and then suddenly, quietly, suffusing that banality with the taste of blood."

"Ida Fink...was a master at infusing moments and gestures with the looming violence and death of the Holocaust...Fink worked on a small canvas but managed within the confines of few words to remind us how quickly life can forever move into the abyss."