"[The] most striking recollection I have of those evenings is the reading and translating of Goethe's Faust by Ella Schliesser, who had found a copy in the mud.--Claudette Bloch-Kennedy
The quoted recollection describes conditions at Rasjko--a sub-unit of the Nazi concentration camp of Auschwitz, where there was an agricultural research station during the war (see here for some details; and here, too.) The woman described was my dad's aunt, Ella Schliesser, who by all accounts was a remarkable woman. (She was the subject of this German play in the early 1990s.) As a teenager she was a member of a communist agit-theater group, "Rote(s) Sprachrohr," in Berlin. After she fled Germany she got advanced degrees in (I believe) chemistry in Paris. She survived the war, was expected to be part of the Communist leadership that would rebuild (East) Germany, but committed suicide in 1947.
Ella Schliesser is a family legend, I had heard stories about her spiritedness at Auschwitz. But until I read the quoted sentence this morning, I had not encountered, I think, direct eye-witness testimony about her war-time activity. (My dad's family was basically apart from her for much of the 1930s and 40s.) I assume Ella Schliesser was translating Faust from German into French (several of the other women in that research group were French), but, perhaps, it was into Yiddish.
The detail about where Ella found that copy reminds me of a passage in Faust:
Have you, O Thales, in a single night
Brought a mount, from mud [Schlamm], to light?--, Anaxagoras to Thales, Goethe.
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