Warszawa – Bergen-Belsen. Utwory prozatorskie Niny Gitler

Abstract

This article deals with the prose works of the former Bergen-Belsen prisoner Nina Gitler (1926–1945). The author was in the Warsaw Ghetto and then in the Bergen-Belsen camp during World War II. She died tragically at the age of 19, run over by a car. Among Gitler’s writings, which today are mostly available in archives, we find poems, as well as a few fairy tales. On the one hand, the author described the successive stages of her war wanderings; on the other hand, she often escaped into the world of the imagination, creating fictional stories to provide a break from the reality of the camp. The purpose of this article is to present and discuss Gitler’s prose works and to try to answer the question of how they relate to the theme of the Holocaust. The article is divided into three main sections. In the first, I discuss examples of fairy tales written in concentration camps; in the second, I examine the reality of Bergen-Belsen and Gitler’s camp situation; and in the third, I present the author’s prose texts.