„Mir zenen do!“

Rachel Salamander and Beno Salamander read from texts by the “Schejres Haplejte.” “Schejres Haplejte” is Yiddish and means “remnants of the saved.” This is the name given to themselves by the Jewish survivors of the Shoah, who began to write down their experiences immediately after liberation.
The literature of the “Schejres Haplejte” represents the earliest attempts to approach the catastrophe they experienced in a literary way. From 1945 to the early 1950s, autobiographical stories, novels, and poetry collections were published in Germany, as well as a large number of Jewish press publications in Yiddish or Hebrew.
The texts documented personal experiences and everyday encounters in occupied post-war Germany. With the exclamation “Mirzenen do!”, meaning “and yet we are here!”, the “Writers’ Association of Liberated Jews”, founded in 1946, repeatedly drew attention to the contemporary conditions of Yiddish writers.
Under the same title, the reading now brings selected literary testimonies of impressive linguistic power back into the memory of the present.