Irene Sobel - September 8, 1998
Writing Poetry
And you were less affected then by this information.
Uh, I was, from what I recall now, I was less affected.
Why do you think?
Uh, I was so eager to live. And by live, I don't mean just breathe and exist. There were so many things that I wanted as a young teenager. I came back to, after the war I was thirteen years old. There was so much normalcy that I hungered for and I was a very inquisitive child--girl. Uh, and I was probably driven by my own needs to, to, to live. I remember, I wrote poetry when I was in the Soviet Union, in Polish and thereafter, and had books of poetry and I wanted to see, I wanted to try and publish some. And they were really not so much--they were more out of loneliness and a need to, to express my feelings. I wanted to study and I wanted to do this, and there were a million things I wanted to do. Yes, there was enormous sadness, but it didn't stay with me on an ongoing basis. When I saw it, I experienced it. They took us after the war there, whether the school or the Jewish community, I don't know who organized it, to Auschwitz to see and...
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