Abraham Cykiert

Abraham Cykiert ( born April 26, 1926 in Łódź, † March 2009 in Melbourne ) was a Polish- Australian writer and journalist.

Life

Abraham Cykiert grew up in a textile worker's family. After the German occupation of Poland, the Jewish population of Łódź was deported in February 1940 in the Lodz ghetto and forced to perform forced labor. The youthful Cykiert got a job as an errand boy at the Judenrat in the ghetto administration. His first poetic attempts at writing were supported by Miriam Ulinover (1888-1944) and in the tolerated only during the first year, ghetto newspaper Naye Folksblat printed.

When the ghetto was dissolved in August 1944, Cykiert came up with the few survivors in the Auschwitz concentration camp and after fourteen weeks of stay from there to the Buchenwald concentration camp, where he was liberated in April 1945. His parents and five siblings had been gassed at Auschwitz.

Even at the time of incarceration, he tried to write a long poem appeared in 1947 in an English translation in South Africa. The British newspaper the Manchester Guardian published on May 14, 1945 interview with Cykiert. Was Cykiert the work of the concentration camp doctor Josef Mengele heard at the ramp in Auschwitz as a witness.

Cykiert and a surviving sister were brought by the Jewish Agency to 1948 in a group of Jewish Holocaust orphans in a sanatorium in Lugano, Switzerland, from where they could emigrate to Australia and arrived on 21 October 1948. There he worked as a journalist for the Yiddish press. Since that time he published several minor literary contributions, poems and ghetto records in Yiddish newspapers in London, Paris, New York and Montreal. Since 1993, he also wrote in English. Cykiert wrote two plays, one on the Eldest of the Jews of the ghetto, Chaim Rumkowski and its dilemma. The Emperor of the Ghetto was performed in 1994 by Alan Hopgood 150 times and sent as a film by the Australian Broadcasting Corporation.

In 1976, he stayed on for a year in Jerusalem. In 1994 he was invited as a guest lecturer at the Hebrew University and later also to the University of Cracow, which awarded him an honorary doctorate.

From Cykierts poems there is no printed output.

  • The last summer days. Friends of Schneider Children's Medical Center of Israel, Tel Aviv 2010 ( Autobiographical writing)
  • The Uniqueness of the Lodz ghetto and Rumkowski. In: Paweł Samus / Wieslaw PUS: Fenomen getta Łódzkiego. Łódź 2006 pp. 129-134
  • The Emperor of the Ghetto. Video. Melbourne, Vic.: Seven Stars Productions 1992 With an interview post. .
  • The Emperor of the Ghetto. Stage manuscript 1990
  • Leon Wolowski; Abraham Cykiert: Memories of the shtetl: sculptures. Fitzroy: Globe Press, 1982
  • Post in: Souls in the wilderness. Songs, Yiddish. Jerusalem: PAC Records, 1977
Unfree labour The Guardian Jewish Agency for Israel Monash University
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