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Extracts A truly remarkable Yiddish writer, born in 1888, Y. Perle survived the great deportation from the Warsaw ghetto before being finally taken prisoner and deported to Birkenau where he was immediately murdered in August 1943. This text, written in Yiddish and rediscovered amongst the Ringelblum archives in 1950, was probably composed between September 1942 and January 1943. Translated and presented by Nathan Weinstock who, in Europe, is certainly one of the very most appreciated and celebrated discoverers of this literature of annihilation and of the world which preceded it. The text by Perle is not conceived from the standpoint of a historian but is the testimony of a broken, desperate witness whose nerves are utterly frayed. The violence in the particular timbre maintained throughout the text is also part of the history of a state of absolute desperation.