It is clear from the outset that Evelyn Ripp writes to bear witness -- to record the sordid truth in all its tragic, yet often bittersweet detail. Truth and honesty are hard won. Both require extraordinary courage to face unbearable pain in the service of history and humanity.

As human beings our wish is to hide, to protect our selves from what we know, to protect our families from what we saw and felt. We work to block, to forget, to hide, and when forgetting is impossible, we silence ourselves. We lock the pain deep in our psyches and hearts and bear it alone -- hopeful that silence will quiet it -- or, at least contain it. But, the Shoah pain in its breadth and scourge cannot be contained.

Evelyn Ripp's The Abandoned recounts in searing detail the horrors of Nazi brutality toward an innocent people. We wish to turn away from such vast a horror. But Ripp forces the reader to feel the cruelty, and to be repelled and terrified each step along the way. With excruciating honesty, the writer reveals that life so that we ache, feel assaulted, and are filled with rage, yet rendered powerless. Ripp's gift lies in her choice of detail, her willingness to tell stories that touch us most profoundly: fathers sleeping with axes under their pillows, the killing of a young man for his eyeglasses, the heartbreak of a mother's and sister's disappearance, the call for people to present themselves before firing squads, the steady and systematic destruction of a town. All of this called forth from the life of an eleven-year-old girl. We are forced to live beside the children for two years in the forest, foraging for food with them, and then she startles us with childish play in the midst of deprivation.

As readers, we are threatened then empowered by a spirit that is vulnerable, and by the writer's enduring love of beauty, humor, compassion and the life force that celebrates small victories and occasional kindness. We are grateful to the Christians who hid Jews, and we revel in the ghetto's resistance and uprising: its will to destroy itself rather than face extermination. Together with her, we are terrorized by nightmares, long to buy a Red Dress, rail at God Where were You when gold teeth/Were ripped from jaws/When women and children were shot/And buried half alive, feel the survivor's guilt My joy is joy confined, and again We ran for our lives/Under German fire/They fell/And I go on/I wake tormented/I live in place of them.

And later,
But for the record,
There will always be
In the convex mirror
Of the Shoah,
The likeness of me,
Eyes bursting toward Heaven,
Mouth pried open
By a scream.

Joan Cusack Handler, Psychologist and Poet


Like so many survivors of the Holocaust, Evelyn Romanowsky Ripp's first memories are of a world that is lost forever, destroyed amid savage brutality. Her home town, Lachva, is only a small speck on most maps, yet it was the center of a vibrant Jewish life before the war. Its pre-war life is described here with great charm, evoking a lost age, a lost world. In 1942 that world came to an abrupt and vicious end. With great feeling, Evelyn Ripp tells the story of the Lachva ghetto. Her poems tell much more, starting with the line: "I've been silent so long." She is silent no more. All those interested in Jewish history will be grateful to her for her words and verses.

Sir Martin Gilbert, Historian


Poetry is not the conventional genre for describing the Holocaust, but here it is used with great skill and passion. The reader will long remember these beautiful poems. The Abandoned: A Life Apart from Life is an important contribution to Holocaust literature and I highly recommend it.

Dr. Stephen M. Berk, Professor of Holocaust and Jewish Studies


Evelyn Ripp's poetry takes us to the edge of the abyss and forces us to look down. The immediacy and intimacy of Evelyn's poems humanize the statistics, helping us to understand her experiences and to empathize with her attempts to integrate them into her still-haunted life today. This volume makes an excellent addition to any high school or university course on the Holocaust and will enrich the background of any adult interested in this subject.

Karen Shawn, Ph.D., Educational Consultant, American Friends of the Ghetto Fighters' Museum


Evelyn Romanowsky Ripp allows us a glimpse of the inner life of a survivor. Her poetic wonderings about God's absence/presence and remembrances and evocations of people and places are the underpinnings of this book and of her life -- to learn to "at once, remember and forget."

Dr. Gloria F. Waldman-Schwartz, Professor, York College and The Cuny Graduate Center