Word: akhmatova
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...world in spite of the final obstruction; they insist on their presence. A simple matter, but a basic one. We will do anything to stay around, and to keep others around as well, by way of monuments, ceremonies, books. During the Stalinist terror, the Russian poet Anna Akhmatova stood in line at the Leningrad prison off and on for a period of 17 months. One day she was approached by a woman "with lips blue from the cold," who, like Akhmatova, was waiting for news of the fate of someone in the prison...
...describe this?" the woman asked the poet. Akhmatova said she could. "Then something like a smile passed fleetingly over what had once been her face...
When the poet Anna Akhmatova was waiting in line outside a prison in Lenin grad during a time of political apocalypse - the Yezhov terror - a woman with lips blue from the cold asked her, "Can you describe this...
...Akhmatova answered...
Friedrich, like Wiesel, has finally understood very little. To understand very much would be an insult. But he has borne witness to a horrific, obscene lot, and the reader must feel something of the grati tude that the woman in the cold felt to ward Akhmatova...