About “Cecile”

About “Cecile”

The novel entitled “Cecile” is a narrative of a Jewish girl from the Warsaw ghetto comprising the period between l939-1943. At the end of the war, in 1947, Cecile migrates to Israel. The novel starts in the year of l986 with her remembrance of her childhood as she visits Warsaw. While she walks in the streets, bitter scenes of her childhood come out of her consciousness. On her second day in the city she visits the concentration camp of Majdanek where she was once put in prison. She comes to view her past from a different perspective. Paths of life differ from each other. Yes, hers was a difficult one. But Cecile now as an adult is in an understanding of how every experience, even painful ones, had shaped up her personality. She had regained her balance and integrity. She called it inner peace or knowledge of life.

 What Cecile has experienced as a little girl and then afterwards as a young girl are bitter ones but nevertheless they belong to her being, and to her life. Yes, she had been in the Warsaw ghetto, in the camps of Madjanek, she had hid with her family in the sewer, in cellars, without heat and where sanitary facilities were inadequate or nonexistent. She not only suffered physically –from lack of food, medicine, and warm clothing- but also emotionally. She had little opportunity to enjoy her childhood, for she was forced to grow up quickly. She had grown old beyond her years merely by seeing so much death on a daily basis. Yes, she had been a candidate for death. But, now she is alive which means that she was one of the few that survived the Holocaust and she feels blessed.

After visiting Poland with the March of the Living Project in 2005, I started to read more about the Warsaw Ghetto. Questions such as “How did people in that particular time and place educate their children? What did they eat? How did they live? What kinds of work did they do? The questions had to be answered.

The Jews who were crowded in the Warsaw ghetto had a life that was a day-to-day battle for existence, and the creativity and methods they used to prolong their lives is a valuable story of human perseverance that would be denied by focusing only on politics. Knowing that children as young as five or six outwitted Nazi guards on a daily basis, that  they risked death by secretly practicing their religion, that children attended secret schools in the ghetto and even earned diplomas- these are the things that revealed the fabric of life that inspired me and the more I read the more amazed I was. Ultimately, seeing how these people lived, enriched my understanding of them and I wanted to share this experience. So here I am infront of you, with a book I entitled “Cecile”, which is a fiction on the life of the Warsaw Ghetto.

As a writer when I look back at Holocaust, everything seems frenetic. I read a lot on Holocaust documents, novels and specially diaries.. In the ghettos, people lived in cellars, synagogues, former schools and cinemas, often without heat and many broken windows. And how life changed from the fall of Warsaw on September 21, l939 to the mass deportation of Warsaw Jews in July l942. Despite the attempts by the Germans to impose a state of barbarism upon them, the Jews persisted in maintaining or in re-creating their organized society and their culture. In nearly all the ghettoes, the Jews conspired against the Germans to provide themselves with arts, letters and society. Isolated in the ghetto, Warsaw Jews read underground newspapers to obtain factual information to dispel the constant rumors, they organized soup kitchen themselves, and they organized secret schools, which were held around kitchen tables, in attics, cellars, and basements – anyplace that was far from the watchful eyes of the Nazi soldiers

Within the history of Holocaust, the Warsaw Ghetto was a particularly horrible microcosm. As the largest Jewish community under German control, its development from l940 to 1943 was both a reflection of evolving Nazi policies and a reaction to them. Today as the number of surviving witnesses pass away; their individual experiences continue to be transmitted into a larger collective memory.

So my readings of the Holocaust turned into documents on grip of life. And I decided to write a fiction book. This is how “Cecile” came into being. From this point of view “Cecile” is a book about the life of the Jews of Warsaw ghetto.

Rachel Raquella Asal’s biography

Asal, born in 1949, graduated from the Izmir American Girls College in 1969. 

She became a certified national tour guide in French and English in 1989.  Asal attended courses in Diavox Institute Moderne des Langues in Lausanne, Course des Civilisation Française de la Sorbonne in Paris, Universite de France-Compte Course de Français in Besançon, and Centre Audiovisuel de Royan Pour l’Etude des Langues in Royan.  She also took Art History courses in the evening educational program of  Besançon’s Open Education University and attended Art History seminars at the Louvre Museum in Paris.  

She  received the French language competency diploma, Diplome Approfondi de la Langue Française, in 1992 from the Ministére de L’education Nationale Académie de Besançon. In 1995 she obtained an advanced Spanish language certificate from the Escuela Salamantina de Estudios Internacionales in Salamanca, Spain. 

In the years 1997-2000 she attended seminars on fundamentals of writing, applied writing, literature and philosophy at the Ugur Mumcu Analytical Journalism Foundation, in Ankara, Turkey.

Asal, mother of a son and a daughter, is a prolific writer who resides in Izmir, Turkey.

Her published boks are:

The Tears of Volga, (2003)  Do you Hear it, My Heart (2003),   Now Everything is as if in a Dream of the Past (2003),  The Street of Roses (2010),  Like Life (2011)

Rachel Raquella Asal made a powerful entrance into the world of literature by publishing htree novels one after the other in 2003.  “Cecile” is her sixth novel.