Love at the End of the World

After thirty-five years of quiet acceptance, Tonia Rotkopf Blair returned to Poland and confronted the Holocaust. Growing into an outspoken survivor, she began to write precise, poignant stories. Some concerned her childhood or traveling halfway around the world, or New York City, where she raised a family and attended the renown Columbia University. But all grappled with memories, dreams, and the Holocaust, many taking us into its depths, notably the three weeks she endured in Auschwitz.
What makes Rotkopf Blair’s perspective unique is that, while working as a nurse in the Lodz ghetto or enduring the concentration camps, she remained very much a romantic young woman. As history’s most murderous war raged around her, she practiced love and kindness, and was sustained by encounters with decent people—including some Germans. So fresh are her views on these fraught subjects, Love at the End of the World includes an essay by her son, which teases those issues out by examining Darwin’s theory of evolution, revising it from “survival of the fittest” to “survival of the ‘lovingest.’”

Tonia Rotkopf Blair was born in 1925 in Lodz, Poland, to a poor but educated Jewish family. A shy girl, she was fond of animals, books, and movies. After the Germans invaded in 1939, she volunteered and became the Lodz ghetto’s youngest nurse, which saved her from deportation with her family. She went on to survive Auschwitz and two other camps and was liberated in Austria. After working as a nurse in Germany, she made her way to Paris, then Bolivia, Brazil, and finally the U.S., settling in New York City. There she met her filmmaker husband, raised two boys, became an administrative secretary, and enrolled in Columbia University, from which she graduated with a degree in sociology at the age of sixty-three. Ten years later, she immersed herself in creative writing.Her son and editor, Doniphan Blair, was born in 1954 in New York City, where he enjoyed a culturally complex childhood. After graduating from the Dalton School, he traveled for five years nationally and internationally, often hitchhiking. In San Francisco, he helped form a commune and art gallery, had a daughter, and earned a film degree from the Art Institute. In addition to working in film and graphics, he began publishing articles. He currently runs a design studio and publishes cineSOURCE magazine in Oakland, California.