A space of one's own, writing the experience of hiding

Living in hiding and in seclusion, no matter the diversity of places and ways of hiding involved in this experience, implied a subversive economy that consisted of transgressing bravely Nazi laws and blurring out boundaries through a reversal of binaries: Jew / non-Jew, life/death, visible/invisible, inclusion/exclusion. This paper is based on the fundamentals of Jacques Derrida's theory of deconstruction. The writing of the experience of hiding rendered in the poetics of the memoirs displays and unfolds in its binary mode the thin space/slash hidden Jews were to locate between presence/absence in the Judenrein space and consequently between life /death. They resisted the Nazi regime and laws and derided their fundamentals by the very act of living in hiding. This study focuses on the following memoirs: Flora I was but a child, Flora M. Singer (2007), The Girl With the Red Coat, Roma, Lagocka (2002), The Girl in the Green Sweater, Chrystyna Chiger (2008), The Hidden Girl, Lola Rein Kaufman (2008), and No Place for Tears, Sabina Rachel Kalowska (2008). Moving from one hiding place to another to better the chances of survival was the ordeal of many persecuted Jews who lived in hiding. They were forced to be on the run, being in constant motion, sliding in and out between absence and presence. It meant also changing identities frequently: from Aryan to Jew and vice-versa. The need to move to a new hiding place also underscores the movement of erasure of each element of the oppositions. This movement of erasure evolved into an existential move, essential in conditioning their survival strategy. Keywords: Derrida, deconstruction, Holocaust, living in hiding, literature.