Articles

Time and The Diary in Captivity, a Case Study: The Diary of Fela Szeps (1942-1944)

Authors

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.21827/ejlw.14.41513

Keywords:

Time and space perception in confinement, holocaust diaries, genre

Abstract

When the diarist is free from imminent danger, and has reasonable flexibility in managing a daily routine, clock-and-calendar time helps in organizing the individual’s chosen social roles and responsibilities as well as their private interests, all of which are the building blocks of personal identity. Daily objective time is not bestowed as such with a symbolic meaning but is taken for granted as a point of reference.  

In concentration camps, gulags, and prisons, freedom of movement and choice—contact with the outside world, access to information, interactions with others, quality of food and hygiene, privacy—are controlled by the captors. Hence, the inmate’s time and space perception are transformed. 

As a literary genre, the diary chains subjective time in cages of objective time, and the two are in a constant state of collision.  In this article I analyze the vicissitudes in time perception and a personal modification of public spaces in a diary written by 24-year-old Warsaw University student Fela Szeps, (1918–1945), from the Polish town of Dąbrowa Górnicza. She kept a clandestine diary between April 1942 and November 1944 in the Grünberg forced-labor camp in Silesia, Poland. 

Author Biography

Batsheva Ben-Amos, The University of Pennsylvania

Dr. Batsheva Ben-Amos’s research, teaching and writing areas include the autobiographical genres of diary, autobiography, memoir, online blogs and diaries, and autofiction. She is an instructor in the Department of Comparative Literature and the College of Liberal and Professional Studies, at the University of Pennsylvania. Her publications include The Diary: The Epic of Everyday Life, edited with Dan Ben-Amos; “The Multilingual Diary from the Lodz Ghetto”; “A Tourist in Ir-ha-Haregah (A Tourist in the City of Slaughter) - Kishinev 1903”; and “The Dialogical Dimension of the Diary of Chaim Kaplan—Warsaw 1935-1942.”

Published

2025-01-23

Issue

Vol. 14 (2025): EJLW

Section

Articles

Copyright (c) 2025 Batsheva Ben-Amos

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