A Scrap of Time and Other Stories

Jewish Lives

by Ida Fink, Francine Prose (Translator), Madeline G. Levine (Translator)

A Scrap of Time is a haunting collection of stories about life in Poland during World War II.
These shattering stories describe the lives of ordinary people as they are compelled to do the unimaginable.

Genres: Holocaust, Short Stories, Fiction, Historical Fiction, World War II, Poland, Jewish

165 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1985

About the author

Fink writes in Polish, primarily on Holocaust themes. Her stories revolve around the terrible choices that the Jews had to make during the Nazi era and the hardships of Holocaust survivors after the war.
-Wikipedia

Reviews

[Paul Bryant · Rating 4 out of 5]

These bitter glimpses of the Holocaust in Poland ring like small folorn bells tolling us all to hell. I'll give you one example. In "The Key Game" there's a couple and their three year old boy. They finish dinner, it's late, 10 at night, but before the boy goes to bed he has to play the Key Game. They have been playing it every night for two weeks and the boy still hasn't got it right. The problem is not the boy, it's the father who just isn't quick enough. The game starts. The mother calls out "Ding dong!" imitating the doorbell. That's all she has to do. The boy jumps up and runs to the door. "Who's there?" he says. And then, "Just a minute, I have to find the keys." Then he runs back into the main room and runs about making a lot of noise with his feet. He pulls out drawers, slams doors and yells "Just a minute, I can't find them, I don't know where Mummy put them!" Then more stamping about and finally "I found them!" That's it, that's the key game. In a minute or so, the father reappears from the bathroom. He says "I still need more time, he has to look for them longer. I slip in sideways... but it's so tight. And he's got to stamp his feet louder." The mother says to the boy "You're doing a wonderful job. You know that if someone should ring the doorbell one day when Mummy is at work, everything will depend on you? And what do you say when they ask where your parents are? " The boy says, "Mummy is at work. "

"And Daddy?"

The father yells "And Daddy??"

The boy says "Daddy is dead."

[Greta G]

A Scrap of Time and Other Stories

[Jaksen · Rating 5 out of 5]

Powerful book. A series of short stories based on actual events, that is, the event gave rise to the story, but the author, Ida Fink, never names names. She wanted to preserve the privacy of these individuals.

Now I've read a lot of Holocaust literature, starting with 'Anne Frank' when I was quite young. I've read Primo Levi and Art Spiegelman; Elie Weisel and others. My father was a GI during WWII; he was at Normandy; he was among the GIs who liberated the camps. However, when I first asked him 'what he did' during the war, he said he served ice cream to German POWS in a prison camp. Later he had a story about killing one of the royal swans in London (to eat) because he was tired of K-rations. (He had no idea all the swans in England belong to the ruling king or queen.) Or he was an MP and patrolled streets in some little European town or city. He sugar-coated what he did, where he was posted, what he saw. But when the TV series 'Holocaust' was aired, he told my younger sister a few things including this: when she asked if the concentration camps were as bad as depicted on TV, he said 'they were worse.'

So...and to be honest...I didn't want to read any more Holocaust books. Then I saw this slim volume and changed my mind.

Of course Holocaust literature is almost always very powerful, harrowing, poignant, terrifying. The stories in this volume are all that and more. Most are very short and feature people at the end of their lives - or their wife's life, their parents, their small children. But who saw these events? Who lived to tell the truth that became these stories? In most cases, non-Jewish Poles, though some were witnessed by Jews who survived.


Everything you can imagine is here, a young woman caught making love in a garden, then turned away by the garden's owner and who later meets a terrible fate. (Could the owner have done something to save the young woman? Perhaps.)

Or a man and his wife and their young daughter walking to the town center, a place in many Polish towns where hundreds - thousands - of Jews met their death. They know what they are walking toward; they have no choice. A last-second opportunity is given to save their child - do they take it?

Stories of people in hiding, lying in cramped quarters for days on end to the point they can barely walk when at last they emerge. Or the story of a young woman, a survivor, who meets an American near the end of the war. He professes to love her but wants her to keep her 'Ayran,' or 'non-Jewish-sounding name' a secret. Why? He's a rescuer - why does he want her to conceal who she really is?

The story of a young man, who when ordered to bring his elderly teacher to the town center, has to lie to entice her there. How does he go on after that? And there's the fairly well-known story of a little boy, who when he hears a certain knock on the door, has been trained to forestall those on the other side of the door by rushing about, looking for the key to the door. He needs to do this long enough in order to give his father time to hide.



This is a slim, book, a quick read, but the stories will not be easily forgotten. To know these all originated in real events - and to also realize that there are hundreds of thousand of other stories we will never know - is absolutely heart-breaking.

Five stars, nothing else.

[Antof9 · Rating 3 out of 5]

Wow -- this book was very heavy. Of course, I expected that, but oh! this was hard to read. Maybe because it covered so many scenarios? Each of them painful. I read the first half or so in one sitting and then took a break to read another book. Came back and finished it, and then thought a lot about my review. It's hard to just write a short "review" of the book, isn't it? These were real people. It was good to take a breath between each chapter.

I think we must read things like this, no matter how difficult or upsetting. As Agafia says in "Behind the Hedge", "We have to know about it. And look at it. And remember."

I asked my Polish sis-in-law if she'd heard of this book before. She hadn't. But when she saw the name of the title in Polish, she said the name hadn't been changed at all -- in Polish, that's exactly what it means -- A Scrap of Time.

[Terri Lynn · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book is stunning. It is a slim volume of short stories set in Poland during the Holocaust and are slices of that experience that the author and others shared. They are not long stories and were finely written and unusual. They don't come out in your face and say "Holocaust in Poland" but break your heart nonetheless with people knowing what is coming and facing it such as a family with a preschooler who is prepared to answer the door to Nazis and give his dad time to hide, telling the Nazis that his daddy is dead, and an old woman who ran off two young Jewish lovers from her garden only for them to be slaughtered by Nazi guns. If you are like me and can't bear to read about bad things happening to dogs, don't read the Dog story. This is a very fine thought-provoking collection of stories. I wept over them.

[Anastasiia · Rating 5 out of 5]

Wow, amazing stories! So emotionally heavy and dramatizing but so wonderfully written that they are light like feathers. The author is incredibly talented storyteller, the reading is so easy and quick but the effect is proportionally opposite. The book imbues you with that desperation, fear and numbness of death without even depicting actual bestiality of that bloody mess. Ida Fink is a real master and if you want to tickle your nerves with something true and horrifying better read her then Stephen King.

[Yani Daniele · Rating 4 out of 5]

si no fuera porque son relatos sobre personas reales, personas que han sobrevivido a hechos tremendos, quizás este libro no me hubiera llamado la atención y probablemente lo hubiera calificado de otra forma. Como dije antes, a diferencia de la mayoría de los libros sobre el Holocausto que nos narran la vida en los campos de concentración, este nos cuenta el comienzo de todo, como de la tensión se pasó a la guerra, nos cuentan como fueron los primeros días en que empezaron a suceder cosas horribles, todo contado por aquellos que lograron sobrevivir

[Alana Cash · Rating 5 out of 5]

I would give this book a "10" if Goodreads ratings went that high. The writing is engaging, personal, and intelligent. The powerful stories are set during the Nazi era and in each story, the protaganist is always a Jew trying to survive that brutality, sometimes with great pathos, sometimes with cowardice, sometimes with delusion - always with fear and sadness. Each story is different and deserves to be considered for a while before beginning the next one.

[Matthew Berkshire · Rating 4 out of 5]

Amazing. Told in simple language that belies the harsh reality. It makes reading of sad events worse that it's told so beautifully and contradicts the message that beauty can't exist in a world where such ugliness lies. The author is so efficient with her words, that many of these stories can be considered small masterpieces, like tiny Netherlandish devotional paintings.

[Mark S H · Rating 5 out of 5]

Read this so you know... and never forget how horrid humanity can be.

[faith adams-michaels · Rating 5 out of 5]

after a while, no one noticed him anymore

[Erika Dreifus · Rating 5 out of 5]

I wish I'd encountered Ida Fink and her work earlier.

[Ana' · Rating 5 out of 5]

Title Review: Moments captured and revealed

I discovered this beautiful novel through a Holocaust online class I took through coursera.org; really recommend it by the way. I learned so much and my knowledge on Holocaust literature has expanded enormously. This was the last novel assigned in the course, and now that I have read it, I can understand why.

This is a compilation of short stories related to the Holocaust capturing specific moments. Through the series of fictional stories, the author clearly presents different circumstances during the Holocaust: like round-ups, when Jews were murdered in the forest or sent to labor camp and extermination camp. Each individual story represents a specific moment. It is so well described that one becomes one more spectator in the story. One feels the tragedy, the panic, the desperation. It is as if the story became a bubble that the author blew air into for us to see, to be part of it and to understand how each event was experienced by these characters.

The novel deals with the issue of the Holocaust: its injustice, horror, and aftermath and also with the issue of memory as well through characters not wanting to remember, or feeling bothered to acknowledge what is happening in front of their eyes. It mainly focused on the Polish Jews.

I am so glad these stories are short since they are truthful, real, and powerful. It leaves a significant impact. One is not bothered of their shortness but is instead contempt. Somehow you wouldn’t want to continue, to figure out the ultimate tragic outcome. One instantly dwelves in the brevity of these moments, never feeling lost. You get attached instantly to the characters of each story.

As one reads along, one realizes that the stories despite being unrelated, are arranged in a chronological order from the beginning of the war to its aftermath.

You will notice as well that some stories have recourse to satire, black comedy.

. My insights on some stories:
“A Spring Morning” [p. 39] : broke my heart. I cried.
“Crazy” [p.107] : occurs in time of shock and tragedy. It reminds you how no one really knows how one will react in the moment of panic.
“The Black Beast” [p.53]: really like it.
“Aryan Papers” [p.63]: was just disgusting!
“Night of Surrender” [p.93]: liked this story but didn’t like the end. You will see why. It has to do with her Jewish identity.
“The Shelter” [p.127]: It really makes you ponder, who are we to decide the fate and future of the Jews after the war and their place in the world.
“Traces” [p.135]: account on the issue of memory. Is it worth remembering such horror?
“The Table” [p.139]: This is the last story and the author is maybe trying to lay out the problematics of memory, of reconstructing the facts of the Holocaust after so many years and the problem of accuracy.

This is a striking, powerful account. Really Recommend it. I am including the list of reading from the Holocaust class, for those who wish to discover more on Holocaust literature.

Appelfeld, Aaron. "Badenheim 1939, B. G. Rudolph Lectures in Judaic Studies", Syracuse U Press
Arieti, Silvano. "The Parnas"
Bauer, Yehuda. "A History of the Holocaust"
Borowski, Tadeusz. "This Way for the Gas, Ladies & Gentlemen"
Browning, Christopher. "Ordinary Men"
Levi, Primo. "Survival in Auschwitz"
Kertész, Imre. "Fateless"
Schwarz-Bart, André. "The Last of the Just"
Tec, Nehama. "Dry Tears"
Wiesel, Elie. "Night"

[Jaime K · Rating 5 out of 5]

5/5 for the writing and translation
0/5 for Nazi scumbags

This is a compilation of short stories (most of which are 3-8 pages, some are 10 pages, and the last is the longest) about the Jewish experience during and after the Third Reich. Some of the POVs are also Germans (or friendly to the Germans) but it's definitely about Jewish lives.

It packs a punch. I cried at the end of nearly every one, and the emotional distress the ends wrought are nothing compared to what these people had to have endured.
It's about the pain, horror, fear, despair, hopelessness, exhaustion, suffering, hope, memories, love, distress, survivors, feelings like there is no choice...
It is about the emotional horrors, and not only the physical ones.

Some stories are of adults and others are of children. But all are focused on the theme of the first (and eponymous) short story: Time is sometimes measured in words and memories, not solely days, months, or years.

We learn about some of the Germans, and their own conflicting emotions...and what happens when they don't listen to their conscience.

Quite a few were about the sacrifices of fears of parents, and the fact that so many never felt like they had the right choices.

It's a devastating book, and it's needed:
"We have to know about it. And look at it. And remember." - from Behind the Hedge

In Jean-Christophe, I learned that there were female guards. And through that, it was interesting to read that some of the guards knew the Jews they were watching over and allowed for a more...relaxed atmosphere. Y'know, as relaxed as someone on death row could be.

The Black Beast was the first longest story and almost heartwarming about a dog helping keep a Jew safe as he traveled from a secondary safe house to his first one.

The Table shows how inane and awful trials/prosecutors can be, even to people who have gone through a traumatic experience.

[Helen Lemus · Rating 5 out of 5]

The stories are of ordinary people surviving the incredible trauma of the Holocaust. The writing is expert, clear and rich. The anthology shares stories of what happened to people as they escaped from horror and death in ways that left deep scars. This trauma should never be forgotten, but to read and give memory its due witness creates healing. One account had a character saying that it was important to write the details down in order to leave "a trace" of those who died. Excellent book.

[Rachel Taylor · Rating 4 out of 5]

Although this book is quite short, I ended up reading it over the course of a fairly lengthy period because I felt the need to take some meditative time between stories. It is a very intense book and one of the first in a very long while to make me cry.

[Graeme Sutherland · Rating 5 out of 5]

An excellent collection. Some of these are shattering; others are darkly surprising. The range of the stories covers a breadth of the human experience of the occupation, the actions, the deaths and the survivals. These words will haunt you.

[Jennie · Rating 5 out of 5]

Phew, very heavy and heart wrenching! But awareness is everything.

[Sandy Korom · Rating 5 out of 5]

Amazingly touching and real

[Liza Rosen · Rating 5 out of 5]

lovely and sad

[Sara Salehi]

Required reading for the story called "The key game"

[Xiaohan Song · Rating 5 out of 5]

I bought this book from a second-handed bookstore, simply judging from the cover, title and short stories. I'll be honest, one reason is this book has only 165 pages, for sure I can finish that before I forget it. But I did not know this is a book about Jews suffering during and after WWII.

Most stories are surprisingly delicate and touching. Via different stories you can imagine how a normal person would suffer at/during/after the war. Many characters in different stories have their own personality, toughness or weakness, like trailing among the city during daytime; They may make a brave move to protect others and get shot dead rightafter, or may make a coward decision to hide themselves but regret for the rest of their life.

I also learnt a lot of things I didn't know before. Things about ghetto, Judenat, SS man, Arbeitskarte(German word for work card), however reading wikipedia about these historical norms are far less impressed by those stories in the book. Story 'Titina' describes a very detailed scene about when Judenat asks the boy to get the old lady who he will turn into German to fill the 'headcount', and 'The Table' describes a scene from multiple people about people getting selected for their fate.

Some stories are not about killing though. They are so subtle and sometimes I have to read again to understand what are those characters really meant when they say 'all right' (from 'A Conversation'), or lack of confidence for acknowledging themselves a Jew even the war has ended (from Night of Surrender).

As the NYT Books review commented on the cover of the book, 'Allows us powerful imaginative passage to an unimaginably infernal world'. Well said and indeed. It brings sad feeling to go through the book because you watch so many people suffer in different ways as if they are your close neighbors, and makes you feel the power of combination of literature and history.

[Greta · Rating 4 out of 5]

Ida Fink shares powerful feelings in each of her short stories in A Scrap of Time and provokes thoughts of today's invasion of Ukraine by Russian. Her stories originate in Poland during WWII as Russian invaded Poland until Hilter's armies arrived. Harsh, horrible, sickening, and yet very real experiences of the people who were affected by war on their country.

[Susan · Rating 4 out of 5]

I've read a book by Ida Fink years ago but recently picked up this slim book of short - and very powerful stories. There are no "wasted" words, every story is quite focused, a little gem. Horrifying, of course, There are no "light" moments in the lives and deaths of these people. And a reminder of how ruthless the killing was.

[Michael Norwitz · Rating 3 out of 5]

A collection of stories set in Poland, taking place at the onset of and shortly after World War Two, all detailing the experiences of the country's Jewish population. The translators bring a graceful, poetic sense to the prose as the terrible and frequently hopeless events of the era take place.

[Evelyn · Rating 5 out of 5]

Spare and succinct short stories, and a short play convey the heartbreak and tragedy of the Holocaust, and the guilt and fear of those who survived, but lost all who were dear to them at the hands of the Nazis.

[Maurizio Manco · Rating 5 out of 5]

"Ci sono pensieri che allo sguardo estraneo appassiscono, che vengono feriti dal respiro altrui, annullati dalla minima incrinatura nella solitudine." (p. 169)

[Marybeth · Rating 4 out of 5]

I love short stories, but to read what people had to go through.. with the torturing and abuse!! So very sad and heartbreaking.

[View Janthakan · Rating 5 out of 5]

These short stories appalled me, and left me without words with its violence and cruelty.

[Pettes · Rating 5 out of 5]

Found a really interesting paper about this piece, i’ll just drop it here:

https://www.scielo.br/scielo.php?pid=...