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

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.

Keywords

• time and space perception in confinement
• holocaust diaries
• genre