Notes from the Warsaw Ghetto

 Ringelblum, Emmanuel. Notes from the Warsaw Ghetto. Ed. and trans. Jacob Sloan. Schocken, 1974.

Article Ref.

• Burstin, Barbara Stern. “The Warsaw Ghetto: A Shattered Window on the Holocaust.” The History Teacher, vol. 13, no. 4, 1980, pp. 531–541. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/494023.
• Braham, Randolph L. “Jewish Social Studies.” Jewish Social Studies, vol. 22, no. 1, 1960, pp. 53–55. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/4465754....

Ringelblum had worked in Jewish relief agencies. Once in the Warsaw Ghetto, he had been able to organize a clandestine network of re- searchers to gather information from Warsaw and neighboring towns. Ringelblum's diary portrays in simple and direct language the terror, deprivation, dehumanization, and misery of the Jewish masses under the Nazis. The almost daily entries between January 1940 and the end of 1942 describe the Nazi-appointed Jewish Council or Judenrat, its responsibilities, and its controversial status in the community.

It should be noted that: 

Page 167 of the Editor’s Afterword in True Tales of a Grotesque Land – said this:

The credibility Factor occupied the chronicler under siege as far back as 1941. Fearing that the depositions of victims in the Warsaw Ghetto would be received with skepticism after the war, Emmanuel Ringelblum instructed his chroniclers to adhere strictly to bare facts, and to avoid emotional coloring in their reports. Comprehensiveness was the chief principal guiding our work, notes Ringelblum in his diary, and objectivity was the second principle guiding our way. We aspired to tell the whole truth, however painful it might be.

In the Braham article cited above we learn that one of the major groups active in the field of historical documentation was referred to as O.S. (Oneg Sabbath – Sabbath Celebration.)

Emmanuel Ringelblum organized this group to help in the documentation of all that went on Inside the Warsaw Ghetto…He was 39 years old and particularly qualified for the task as he was ab expert in the history of the Jews of Warsaw.

Page 53 Braham article quote below:..

He perceived the unfolding of the Nazi plan for the "final solution of the Jewish question" and became actively engaged in the organization of resistance. Just before the up- rising of April 19, 1943, he was smuggled out of the ghetto. But the long arm of the Nazi murderers caught up with him. He was uncovered in a subterranean hide- out where he had found refuge with his family and thirty-five other Jews. On March 7, 1944, he was executed among the ruins of Warsaw together with his wife and twelve-year old son, Uri. Only the archives survived and the Notes which were buried just before the uprising in two sections of the Ghetto. They were located and unearthed in September 1946 and December 1950,”

Page 54 Braham article quote below:..

He and his collaborators wrote about everything 

The Notes encompass all of life within the Ghetto, with all its characteristics and contradictions. They relate the intra- and inter-group relations within and outside the wall, the rise and spread of diseases, the clandestine pattern of education, the system of informers and beggars, the lucrative affairs of collaborators and smugglers, the heartbreaking plight of children and refugees, the flourishing of nightclubs and cabarets, and the corruption of some of the members of the Jewish Council and of the Jewish Police. 

Page 531-541m Burstin article quote below: 

As a result of his efforts in Jewish relief agencies, he had been able to organize a clandestine network of re- searchers to gather information from Warsaw and neighboring towns. Ringelblum's diary portrays in simple and direct language the terror, deprivation, dehumanization, and misery of the Jewish masses under the Nazis. The almost daily entries between January 1940 and the end of 1942 describe the Nazi-appointed Jewish Council or Judenrat, its responsibilities, and its controversial status in the community. They also explore numerous independent self-help committees that Ringelblum was instrumental in establishing to fund and provide for the needy on a tenement-by-tenement basis. The diary gives a picture of the varied underground social, cultural, and educational activities in which Jews engaged despite the physically and psychologically numbing atmosphere of the ghetto. Through Ringelblum's narrative, we especially come to appreciate the crucial role played by smugglers, including many children, who supplemented the meager food rations allocated by the Nazis (estimated at "less than 10 percent of the mini- mum calorie requirements necessary to sustain human life – 175 calories a day per person….

Vittel Diary

Katznelson, Yitzhak. Vittel Diary. Translated by Myer Cohn. 2nd Ed. Tel-Aviv: Hakibbutz Hameuchad, 1972. 

The poet Yitzhak Katznelson, who recorded his experiences of internment during the period he was composing the poem "The Song of the Murdered Jewish Nation," a manuscript buried in the hotel grounds and recovered only at the end of the war. 

Katznelson arrived at Vittel from Poland on 22 May 1943, bearing a forged South American passport. The 21 July 1943 entry in his Vittel Diary records the grim mood of the camp's Jewish inmates: "There is not a single Jew here who believes that he will be allowed to remain alive" (47). Expressing his grief for those still in Poland and his guilt over having left them behind, Katznelson concluded that "these two months here, are, in a sense, harder to endure than almost a whole year in Warsaw? in that valley of death" (48). Katznelson died in Auschwitz in 1944. His diary survived because Miriam Novitch, a friend and member of the Resistance, smuggled it out of the camp.

Between Two Streams: A Diary from Bergen-Belsen

Herzberg, Abel. Between Two Streams: A Diary from Bergen-Belsen. Translated by Jack Santcross. LB Tauris Publishers, 2008.

This is a diary about incarceration at the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp. Abel Herzberg was born in Amsterdam in 1893. a Dutch novelist and playwright, as well as a prominent lawyer, whose Holocaust diary only came to light after his death in 1989. 

He was transported to Bergen-Belsen on 11 January 1944. He spent 15 months at Bergen-Belsen in a special section of the camp, where prisoners who possessed some status in the prewar world were kept alive for possible exchange with Allied- held Germans. The translator of this work, was a 9-year-old boy who was transported to Bergen-Belsen in the same transport; who survived and decided to translate this work into English after reading it in Dutch, was able to realize that everything he remembered was true. (pvii).

The title of his work signified national socialism and Judaism, persecuted and persecutors, powerful and powerless…

He served as a kind of judge for his section of the camp, rendering decisions. He and other inmate leaders were constantly forced to strike a balance between punishing offenders and cooperating with Nazi sadism. Beyond the treatment of significant philosophical and psychological issues, the diary's strength is its eloquence and irony. He kept his diary between August 1944 and the summer of 1945 when he was liberated. He died in 1985.

In describing life in the camp – these are samples of this elegant and incredibly sorrowful prose:

Page 12. We are nothing anymore. We have been lifted out of the universe, we receive nothing, and we give nothing. No influence reaches us from outside, no influence flows out from us. All that exists is the desire we sense it to destroy us we experience it as a natural law, as we experience the laws of gravity, of cold and Heat come up and we resist with bitterness with silence come up with a voidance come up by preserving a physical strength to the utmost by being Frugal with our movements. For the rest. Joe, life is something from which we are cut off. And, only a prisoner will understand this that means your name, hankering after freedom... yes, we do not know what is happening in the world.... Yet somehow a distant Echo gets through.

Page 18. An entry on August 18th. Last night I watch the new transporter Polish women it was a strangely mild evening who’s infinite Beauty penetrates even to here. For although they have robbed us of the world, they have not succeeded with the sky. The clouds and the moon remain witnesses. If only they could speak! But they cannot speak. They remain silent and in embody the silence as it were That silence which is full of mysteries, of whisperings of the past, filled with an endless melancholy that evokes an almost intolerable longing. The depths of Sorrow become fathomless.

Page 67-71. Herzberg discusses God – the Jewish God of Monothetisism and the difference with polytheistic…He sees God – as the ONE - that creates and justifies a moral standard, justice for the individual and for the community.

Page 67. in discussing God, they also say "it is highly debatable whether from a psychological point of view pure monotheists exist at all. Probable Batman is a composite according to his desires and interests he is seriously and the man Bound by the rules of religion and each moment heathenism and monotheism threaten him if the truth be known."

Page 67. 

he sees the Jew as subjecting himself with all his passions to an eternal principle of justice and righteousness which exists in and by itself, and which is absolutely goodness and therefore unassailable. And Mankind, at least in Europe and in the USA, adopted monotheism in the form of Christianity. It became a monotheistic Humanity but did not staple the Heathen within itself. The Heathen can only be conquered and bound. And this Heathen, who lives on in the dungeons of the human soul, hates being bound and hates the one who has tied him down and who found him? The Jew! Does he was originally the Jew of Moses of the packs or rescue the nation from Egypt but the Jew as he had developed himself to enable him to bind heathendom: Christ.

Page 68. 

In discussing anti-semitism Hertzberg writes: "the Heathen hates the Jew because the Christians pinion him. And there is not a nation and no period in history in and on which the Heathen does not lie in wait to regain his full my freedom. For this reason, anti-Semitism is eternal and has everywhere a chance - as Eternal Judaism itself. This also explains why for centuries the Christian church as being the persecutor of the Jews.... I am discussing here only the psychological reasons. The church because he is alleged to have crucified Christ.”The church persecuted the Jews because the Jew had given birth to Christ. Christ's death is, in other words, a Wishful thought of the Heathen living among the Christians which he has shifted onto the Jew. the guilt that the Christian feels because his heel and sole rebelled against Christ seeks to avenge itself on the one who placed him in the torment of ambivalence. That person is the Jew.

Page 68. He goes on to say:

One could say that other nations have had their ethics. Indeed. But no nation has had such a profound influence on the human soul through its stories and legends, and through the favor and force of its profits, as the Jewish Nation.... does it mean from this that Jews are better people than others? Not in the least. And this should never be forgotten - Heathens to the same extent as other Nations. But their historical achievement was that they knew it. This knowing is the revelation. And when we say they knew, it means only that a very small minority knew. But this minority has always existed. 

Page 70-71. Finally he talks about why could there always be a Remnant that returned? 

Because there have always been Jews who returned to the Bedrock of the National History and knew that without the central concept of a council approved monotheism the nation would perish. The Jews wear a small nation and in reality, always if not always in an identical political form - formed a minority admit large majorities. The universality and absoluteness of their God was the greatest National recompense for the universality and absoluteness of their misfortune. They appealed to justice, not to power, for they neither possessed power nor were able to possess any, and because they did not want to surrender to the majority in an active unparalleled historical courage either, they hoisted the standard of absolute righteousness, to force others to respect them and to plant for themselves a star in the Heavens to guide them in life. 

Page 70. 

This is the Jewish star. ...The Lord speaks not through the sword, but through the spirit.... Even now that the Jewish star has been forced upon us as a mark of shame, it's lights our path in this somber life. Those who persecute us are heathens and do not know how great the God of Israel is. They hate us for our greatness and for our eternity, once again they are resisting the voice that Kohl's and Kohl's, and will not see schooling pain, Kane, where is your brother Abel? I'm once again there is a Remnant that returns. Again, that rises in our midst the voice of the prophets and in our heart the song of the poet not for nothing do we sing on the Sabbath. Those who sow with tears will reap with joy. This Joy exists in our eternal avowal. The more difficult our life and the more distressing our Fate, the more clearly our Thousand-Year National programme manifests itself to us anew: Hear O Israel: Jaweh our God, Jaweh is unity.

Page 183: Discussion of Death. The author writes:

Oh how abandoned we are in this place, which is nothing but a grave. Death does not mean something frightening. It means only that will help is in vain. Dying is a transition from Death to death, no longer a transition from life to death. People are dying in their filth and their life. Have human beings ever had it as bad as this? They are robbing the corpses. A grave, a grave at night and in the morning and I wake mournfully in my coffin, which we have not even to ourselves but must share.

The Diary of a Young Girl

Frank, Anne. The Diary of a Young Girl. Translated by B. M. Mooyaart-Doubleday. New York: Modern Library, 1952. 

Anne Frank's diary remained hidden until the end of the war, then it was published, after numerous publishers had rejected the manuscript in the Netherlands and in the United States. The book came out right after the war in Amsterdam, and in 1952 in the United States.

The fact is that this diary is the most common introductory text for all young people to the Holocaust. 

By its very widespread acceptance, Anne Frank’s diary confirms humanity’s unprepared ness to “respond to the grimmer realities and the imaginative re-creations to the literature of atrocity.” (Langer Page 76.)

(Langer Page 77.) – Anne Frank’s diary was written in innocence (and the ignorance of youth) but its conclusions form the point of departure of Elie Wiesel’s Night./..Langer notes that most authors writing ‘atrocity literature’ challenge the principle that for her were both premise and epitaph: “In spite of everything, I still think people are good at heart.”…. a concept of character that dies pitilessly in Night and in atrocity literature in general.

 (Langer Page 77.) “The optimism that nurtured her faith in humanity is symbolized by her family’s quarantine during their years in hiding……The story that transformed the world began after Anne’s diary ended… Langer states: “The values the Anne Frank diary preserves, are mocked by the fate she suffered… and only dramatize the inadequacy of heart0warming terms to describe the soul-chilling universe that destroyed her.”

Young Moshe’s Diary

Flinker, Moshe. Young Moshe’s Diary. Translated by Shaul Esh and Geoffrey Wigoder Jerusalem: Yad Vashem and Board of Jewish Education, 1971. 

Mosher Flinker was born in The Hague. His parents fled with Moshe and his brothers and sisters to Belgium, thinking it would be safer for them there than in Holland.

In 1942, the Flinker family decided to flee Holland to Belgium where they thought their chances for survival would be better. In 1944, Gestapo agents sent the entire family to Auschwitz, where Moshe (born 1926) and his parents died.

 One of his sisters found his Hebrew diary after the war that was written before being deported. As an observant Jew, he wrote of great theological issues and like Job, tried to understand how such suffering.

Moshe viewed the experience of the Jewish people through a theological lens. The war signals "the end of our exile," he writes, "it is the 'birth- pang' of the Messiah." 

Moshe Flinker, was gassed in Birkenau in 1944; he was deeply religious. He viewed the experience of the Jewish people through a theological lens. The war signals "the end of our exile," he writes, "it is the 'birth- pang' of the Messiah." Consequently, Flinker disapproved of Jews who fled and of attitudes to the contrary of his own views.

It is, he attests, only when the Jews abandon hope for such an attitude of those among his fellow Jews who hoped for an Allied military victory that "the Lord will have mercy upon us, and His light will shine upon us, and His salvation will come" An anonymous female diarist in the Lodz ghetto wrote in early 1942: "There is no justice in the world, not to mention in the ghetto." 

The Warsaw Ghetto Diary of Adam Czerniakow

Czerniakow, Adam. The Warsaw Ghetto Diary of Adam Czerniakow. Ed. Raul Hilberg, Stanislaw Staron, Joseph Kermisz. Translated by Stanislaw Staron, et al. New York: Stein and Day, 1979.

Article Ref.

• Lichten, Joseph L., And Ludwik Krzyżanowski. “Adam Czerniakow And His Times.” The Polish Review, vol. 29, no. 1/2, 1984, pp. 71–89. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/25778050. 
• Douglas, Donald M. “The Historian.” The Historian, vol. 42, no. 3, 1980, pp. 495–496. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/24446011.
• Rappoport, Leon. “Military Affairs.” Military Affairs, vol. 44, no. 4, 1980, pp. 215–215. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/1987319.

AS the head of the Jewish Council, Czerniakow’s voluminous diaries -nearly all of which were discovered after the war, give us a very detailed account of life in the Ghetto up to Czerniakow’s suicide – taken after he was ordered to prepare a transport of Jewish children – which he refuse to do.   The article by Lichten goes into great detail to examine the historical facts and opinions of many on the role and the person of Adam Czerniakow. To this day, he is a controversial figure, criticized both for his way of life and for his manner of death.

Page 72, Lichten quote below:

“Speaking about the life of this one man transcends individual fate and illustrates and penetrates into an epoch unprecedented in modern history…The Chairman of the Warsaw Ghetto has often been labeled a controversial figure by historians and has evoked impassioned disputes.”

There continues different opinions as to why Czerniakow recorded his diaries (over 1000 pages) – some saying it was to have a defense for ‘collaborating with the enemy’,. Others because he wanted to cleanse himself of guilt. Few that he wrote for himself. seeking a confidant in his diary.

Czerniacow precided over the Judenrat in the Warsaw Ghetto between the outbreak of war and July of 1942. Uptill then, there was still hope of survival for part of the population and hence the need for an organizational structure, protection of the weak, young and old – creating conditions for a tolerable life. After July 1942 came the liquidation, the armed uprising and the final destruction.

Page 76, Lichten quote below:

Czerniakow did not and did not want to differentiate his work into two independent areas? Polish and Jewish. For him they constituted an inseparable whole, though he clearly saw, beside the bright aspects, shadows increasingly apparent on the horizon of Polish-Jewish relations.”

Page 79, Lichten quote below:

It appears that Czerniakow always behaved with dignity. He was never a blind executor of the German orders, though he often had to yield in order to serve a greater good. He was always guided by one aim: to save at least a part of the people from destruction. It was not yet clear that this was a futile hope, since the Germans negotiated with him and graciously agreed to small concessions, although they proceeded, slowly at first but then increasingly parent on the horizon of Polish-Jewish relations.

Page 88, Lichten quote below:

“For Czerniakow the liquidation of the Warsaw Ghetto was a personal blow, the ruin of all his efforts and his work of almost three years. More, it was the defeat of his philosophy of survival. He had undoubtedly reached the conclusion that he could save nothing from the Warsaw Ghetto.”

Page 88 and 89 contain quotes from Czerniakow’s suicide notes to the Council and to his wife.

Page 495, Douglas article quoted below:

This diarist was chairman of the Jewish council of Warsaw from September 1939 to late July 1942. The 8 out of 9 notebooks recovered, are full of the endless minutiae of day-to-day administration for over 400,000 Jews in the Ghetto. Czerniakow was also responsible for keeping order, which meant the creation and operation of a Jewish police. Through this diary – we are left with a much greater understanding of Jewish Ghetto governance. He was so wrapped up in solving the financial problems of administration and of ameliorating physical problems of ghetto life that he failed to take in that there would be NO future in the future for Jews – when he did finally understand that fact, he committed suicide.

The Scroll of Agony: The Warsaw Diary of Chaim A. Kaplan

Kaplan, Chaim A. The Scroll of Agony: The Warsaw Diary of Chaim A. Kaplan. Edited and translated by Abraham I. Katsh. New York, Collier, 1973.

Article Ref.

• Graziano, Frank. “Beyond Silence & Denial: The Warsaw Diary Of Chaim Kaplan.” The Polish Review, vol. 29, no. 1/2, 1984, pp. 91–96. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/25778051.
• Graziano, Frank. “Beyond Silence & Denial: The Warsaw Diary Of Chaim Kaplan.” The Polish Review, vol. 29, no. 1/2, 1984, pp. 91–96. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/25778051. 
• Burstin, Barbara Stern. “The Warsaw Ghetto: A Shattered Window on the Holocaust.” The History Teacher, vol. 13, no. 4, 1980, pp. 531–541. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/494023.

Kaplan, in 1939, launched a prophecy which had significance far beyond any he imagined: "We are witnessing the dawn of a new era in the history of the world."1 This "new era," an era whose calendar begins at Auschwitz, initially leaves the ghetto residents "imprisoned between fear and hope".

Kaplan writes: in 1939…Silence was the answer as fragile psyches struggling to maintain integrity, so as to put the truth in a coma. "We have stopped reacting," Kaplan wrote on October 22, 1939.

An individual of great honesty, integrity and insight? an individual like Kaplan, cannot easily deceive himself out of stunned silence by puffing up with empty rumors of hope. He must, at the same time, find a way to deal with "darkness so thick it can be felt" (25), a way out of the painful silence, out of the fire and into the frying pan. While many people in the ghetto closed their eyes to the truth in order to make peace with it, Kaplan compels himself to face the atrocity head-on to override the silence by demanding that it address its cause? and thereby resists denial and assumes his mission to bear witness: "I will write a scroll of agony in order to remember the past in the future" (30). While much of Jewish Warsaw unwittingly assists the enemy becomes tame for him by deceiving itself into inactivity, Kaplan wagers a literary resistance grounded in whatever truth he can sift from propaganda and assemble from his perceptions, his pen wielded for want of a sword. The virtue of his act bears little relation to the efforts of underground pamphleteers; Kaplan's resistance is personal rather than political. He finds in documentation a means to avoid silence and denial, as well as a catharsis venting the gloom he has compelled himself to face. Kaplan's commitment to bear witness, in short, is at once an act of resistance and self-preservation

(As quoted below

Page 93, Graziano article:

Chaim Kaplan was born into an orthodox Jewish family in White Russia in 1880. Steeped in Talmudic education, he became an educator, who moved to Warsaw in 1902 where he founded a pioneering elementary Talmudic school. Kaplan was principal of that school for the next 40 years. He started writing a personal diary in 1933. 

His diary, the « Scroll of Agony » is the only major document of the time, written in Hebrew script. In the Torah and the Talmud, if someone witnesses an injustice, it is incumbent upon them to report the injustice. Chaim’s adopted, factual style, defined his aesthetic mission within the context of Jewish literary tradition as what we might term today, ‘documentary realism.’ His survival and the need to bear witness through literary testimony, clearly became Chaim’s driving reason to keep surviving for as long as he could. Throughout the testimony in this diary, what the reader learns is not just of the factual horrors of the daily Ghetto destruction and horrible deaths of men, women, children and babies from murder, illness, and starvation going on all around him, but also of the awareness of the witness (Chaim) that the perpetrators had a strategy all along to deceive their victims – making their testimony even more difficult.

At the same time, Kaplan did more than focus his views and observations on what was happening in Poland. Right at the beginning of his diary on the day Germany invaded Poland, (September 1 1939), Kaplan was prescient in his written prophesy for what this war was going to mean for all of Europe, and in particular for this war heralding the extermination of all European Jewry.

He wrote the following in why he did not succumb himself to stunned silence: 

Kaplan compels himself to face the atrocity head-on- to override the silence by demanding that it address its cause? and thereby resists denial and assumes his mission to bear witness: "I will write a scroll of agony in order to remember the past in the future" – he wrote.

In the end, the very act of writing and its product are Kaplan’s salvation and in a way become his ‘soul’s salvation! – See article and on Page 96. 

Page 537, Burstin article quoted below:

While this diary covers much of the same period as Ringelblum's account, it is more personalized and much less analytical in its description of Jewish life at the hands of the Nazis. Turning at random to any page of this narrative, the reader is plunged immediately into the nightmarish atmosphere of the ghetto. Unlike Ringelblum, the professional historian, Kaplan felt no hesitancy in expressing his emotions, lamenting the fate of the Jews, and affirming his burning desire to live to see Hitler's downfall or at least to leave behind a written testimony of Nazi inhumanity for all to read. That was his "historic mission" as he himself described it, and certainly the very thing that sustained him throughout the last months of his ordeal.

Lvov Ghetto Diary

Kahane, David. Lvov Ghetto Diary. Translated by Jerzy Michalowicz. The University of Massachusetts Press, 1990.

The author began writing this diary in September of 1943 when he was hiding from the Gestapo in the Palace of the Archbishop of Ukraine. It was not till more than 35 years later that the author decided to publish his diary....

In his preface to his diary, the author makes the following statement:

"The task of rendering tangible the meaning of the Holocaust for those who did not experience it, however, remains insurmountable. the Holocaust defies comprehension. It is beyond my ability to understand what happened; no one can understand it and make others understand."

the author goes on to say:

it seems that our generation should give up attempting to provide an answer based on logic and reason. We must reconcile ourselves to the fact that the Holocaust will remain and opaque, Hora written riddle conceived by the Creator. The term Holocaust intimates but does not express the depth and scale of the disaster.

This diary contains "numerous vignettes and details not to be found elsewhere. It's descriptions of the temple and behavior of Nazi Executioner's are especially valuable; they help in the understanding of the social psychology of the truth and of European jewelry most important of all this memoir contributes to the history of the attitude of Ukrainians to Jews during that time- which is bitterly disputed by the Ukrainians to this day.

Very few Ukrainian helped the Jews. the most eminent figure in that Minority was Metropolitan Sheptytskyi, the head arch bishop of the Ukrainian Church. He even wrote a letter to Himmler protesting extermination. No other ecclesiastical figure in the whole of Europe displayed such sorrow for the fate of the Jews and acted so boldly on their behalf. (p. vii) 

In describing many of the horrors in the Llov Ghetto, the author writes, "the depth and persistence of hatred among Ukrainian people is truly astonishing."

The author writes that he can still see the letter that his 86-year-old mother wrote to him in late June of 1941. she wrote that my 3 Brothers sons and an 18-year-old grandson perished at the hands of peasants who used to visit them stay nights traded with the children in a friendly way and then ended up butchering them. in her letter, she asked " where should one look for the root cause of this pervasive terrible hatred?"

Page 11. The author comments that the Jewish were not blameless but he asks how can one blame a whole people for the sins of individual land tenants or store - keepers? He comments further along that Ukrainian youth remained under the spell of " the nascent Ukrainian nationalist literature, virulent in its vicious anti-semitism."

Page 14-25. The author describes in depth the formation of the Judenrat - the Germans regarded the establishment of Jude and rats as one of the ways of destroying the Jews and Judaism. Quote the communal structure set up by then led to demoralization, first of its workers and then of the whole community. Simply put, it amounted to about 1 stage leading towards the end of the entire Jewish population It formed but one section of the overall plan prepared in advance of the battle with the Jews. The author notes not the law of Jews called the Judenrat quote the municipality of bizarre death.

Page 44 - 51. the author describes "Aktions" These were German orders the rounding up Jews. After March of 1942, "Aktions" never stopped. The Jews began inquiring about the destination of the victims.

Page 47-48. "Slowly the bitter truth the terrible secret filtered back to us. Railroad workers who worked on that train reveal to us the victims have been transported to Belzec. Belzec is a small Township located along the railroad 20 kilometers from Rebecca. the Jews disappeared into the camp and were never seen again. The author writes not one to manage to escape from Belzec at that time Belzec remain shrouded impenetrable veil of Mystery. A terrible secret over it. It could be revealed only with the departure of the Germans from Galicia. The only thing known at present is that Belzec is a mass grave of hundreds of thousands of Jewish victims of the Western European Jews were brought to Belzec under the pretext of resettlement. German hypocrisy, the cold-blooded cynicism of the Predator, new no limits post the Jews were showing brochures of a flourishing Belzec coming with cinemas, theaters, hospitals and schools how were the victims killed? today we know from the only eyewitness who had succeeded in escaping from Belzec fact that they were gassed. The fact is that clouds of black smoke now and then be seen Rising about Belzec the stench was noticeable kilometers away.

Page 58-59. the also describes the meeting of himself with the Metropolitan, an 86-year-old man.

Page 81. The author describes how he was almost swept up in an Aktion. he was saved by a former student of his who helped him to escape. he comments oh to live to live no matter what to live at any price all my senses my entire being, was provided by one thought only to live in spite of Hitler against the will of all who hate us to live to stop never before had I been so possessed by the will to live! As the persecution intensified, so did the bums to life grow stronger until they became the sanctification of life. After the November Aktion, the lights Instinct grew in strength in the Love guitar and the will to live became firm as a rock. 

Page 89-104. At the end of 1942 the author was captured and imprisoned in the Janowski camp. 

Page 90 97. specific details about the rulers of the Janowski camp are given their names and specific details of the murderous personalities and the murders they committed.

the author describes his situation as a prisoner in the Janowski camp. my situation was so hopeless that I could feel the blade of the sword on my neck. I did not sleep a wink that night. I strained to the utmost not to give way to despair, turning over in my mind the phrase even when the blade of a Sharp sword..." I decided to guard well my Round Disc with the number 9 meaning "alive,".

Page 98. yeah the daily routine in the Janowski camp is described. On Page 102 he describes giving the blessing over the first candle of Hanukkah. The barracks stirred electrified. It seemed as if his words fell like a cool, and livening rain on school, arid soil.

Page 121-125. dissection describes how the author after escaping from his work order outside the guitar fled to the safety of the monastery / palace was able to hide in Metropolitan Sheptytsky residence for several months we are given details of the Pastoral letter issued by Metropolitan in July 1st, 1941. the fact is speaking publicly about the duty of Tolerance towards other religions required a great deal of courage and an unshakable commitment tomorrow principles. An appeal of this sword was extremely unpopular and then tell grave risk for its proponent.

Page 127. while being hidden in safety in the monastery he kept wondering what was happening to the Jews in the ghetto what was happening to his friends in the camp he was plagued by removes did he have the right to escape and save himself? The Archbishop asks the Author to describe in every detail what happened in the Janowski camp - he did what he was asked. The Archbishop gave him copies of his Pastoral Letter and of his letter to Himmler.

The Journal of Hélène Berr

Berr Hélène. The Journal of Hélène Berr. Translated by David Bellos. Weinstein Books, 2008.

Article Ref.

• Hertich, Alexander “Journal by Hélène Berr.” The French Review, vol. 82, no. 3, 2009, pp. 647–648. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/25481649.

As stated in the article by Hertich, Alexander:

Helene Berr, a twenty-one-year-old Jewish student at the Sorbonne, in Paris, started writing her journal in April 1942. She continued until her arrest in March 1944. She started to give past writings of her diary to the family's cook for safe keeping. After the war, when the family learned of Helene's death at Bergen Belsen, only a few days before the camp's liberation, the manuscript was sent to her fiancé. It wasn’t until many years later that the manuscript was donated to the Shoah foundation in Paris. Helene’s diary is not about her exploits in trying to save children of deported parents. Rather it is a poignant observation of the changes going on in Paris as Jews were rounded up and deported etc . Helene describes how she does not feel herself to be someone ‘apart’ from the rest of humanity – it is this a-partness foisted upon her because she is simply a Jew that she just cannot understand.

Just one month before her arrest, she remarks: "Quelle mine! Quel triomphe du mal sur le bien, du laid sur le beau, de la force sur l'harmonie, de la matière sur l'esprit. [...] Et je crois encore a la supériorité du bien sur le mal" (272).. Yet despite all the horrors going on around her, she still believes that good will triumph over evil.

 In August 1943, after suspending her journal entries for eight months, Berr writes:

 II faudrait que j'écrive done pour pouvoir plus tard montrer aux hommes ce qu'a ete cette époque. Je sais que beaucoup auront des leçons plus grandes a donner, et des faits plus terribles a dévoiler. [...] Mais cela ne doit pas me faire commettre une l'achète, chacun dans sa petite sphère peut faire quelque chose. Et s'il le peut, il le doit. (171)

Helene believes that even if one can only do a very little, if one can one should – even though she is sure others have more to say and more terrible things to write about.

Helene Berr was born into an old Jewish-French prominent business family in Paris. She started writing her personal diary (in a mixture of both French and English, in the Spring of 1942. It was never intended for publication. Her diary was finally first published in France in 2008. There are four interwoven threads in Helen Berr’s diary. We sense across the Pages the escalating Nazi policy in occupied France. On almost every Page, we are confronted with the fate of Jewish families. We continue to learn of her personal life as a student and a young woman figuring out her love life as two suitors court her. And finally, we learn of how the Nazi noose tightened itself around her and her parents making the fate of all of them being arrested, just a matter of time. 

The Berr Diary was a rare portrait of the French part of the Holocaust, because, as a French Isrelite from an ‘old’ French family, her testimony continued right up to three months before the liberation of Paris. (The Vichy Government was at first reluctant to give up its French Jews, so left them to be rounded up till the last.) It is a diary of ‘denial’ – because persecution of the Jews started incrementally, making the Nazi’s true import very difficult to fathom. Helene was clearly not able to fathom early on what was happening to the Jews. Only finally, shortly before she was arrested, does she mention in her diary that 'people are speaking about suffocating gas that they use on the convoys which arrive at the Polish frontier. There are rumours – she writes- but there must be some truth in them…'

Ghetto Diary

Korczak, Janusz. Ghetto Diary. Edited by Aaron Zeitlin, with a Preface by Igor Newerly. Holocaust Library, 1978.

Article Ref.

• The Human Spirit as Orphan Reviewed Work(s): The Warsaw Ghetto Memoirs of Janusz Korczak by E. P. Kulawiec Review by: Henryk Grynberg Source: The Polish Review, Vol. 24, No. 1 (1979), pp. 39-43)
• Efron, Sara Efrat." Moral Education between Hope and Hopelessness: The Legacy of Janusz Korczak." Curriculum Inquiry, Vol. 38, No. 1 (Jan.,2008), pp. 39-62 http://www.jstor.org /stable/30054722 

Efrat in a 2008 article has this to say about Korczak:

Korczak (1878-1942), a Jewish-Polish Pediatrician and educator, for more than 30 years, "devoted his life to educating orphaned Jewish and non-Jewish children. He stayed with the Jewish children to the end as they all perished in the concentration camp of Treblinka. At a time when the surrounding society surrendered to fascism, anti-Semitism, and self-destruction, Korczak encouraged individual autonomy and caring relationships within the context of a community where a vision of justice and trust was an integral part of life. The orphanage inside the Warsaw Ghetto – as others he had directed before, were democratic, self-ruled communities. In his last orphanage, the children even had their own parliament, court, and newspaper."

Korczak's heroic work with orphan children lead to the UNESCO Korczak Year celebrations in Warsaw on May 31, 1978 and later to the unveiling of Korczak's stone monument in Treblinka. Korczak's teaching about the child's human rights, freedom of choice and expression on the basis of a Western-type parliamentary democracy was just the opposite to what those officials actually represented. He was a fighter against any physical or psychological child abuse, and particularly against molding children in accordance with any state, religious or social class interests. 

Page 140. To understand what kind of a Children's home Korczak ran in the Ghetto you only have to hear this quote - from the diary. One of the boys said to me when he left the Children's Home: "were it not for the home I would not know that there are honest people in the world who never steal. I would not know that one can speak the truth. I would not know that there are just laws in the world."(p.140)

Korczak wrote his diary in the Warsaw Ghetto mainly between May and August of 1942. he did write the first Pages in January of 1940 but then put the work aside. Two years later in the face of approaching extinction, he resumed, and carried on more or less systematically to the end.

In describing the ghetto Korczak referred to it as "the District of the damn semi colon elsewhere he wrote quote the appearance of the district changes from day to day hello a prison, a plague written a plague stricken area, a lunatic asylum, a casino. Monaco. The steak, your head."

Famine and typhus were decimating the population and people were dropping dead in the street.

Time in the sense of a normal perspective of days and months did not exist. That was an ephemeral present instant and Eternity. in the ghetto were large numbers of the intelligence, including many creative workers. They sought to the last to sustain human life on remainders of contemporary knowledge and culture.

When he was writing his diary Korczak was 64 years old; he had a ruined constitution yet he was responsible for the fate of more than 200 Children and adolescents from 7 to 17 or 18 years of age including a considerable number of former residents who turned to him protection and shelter.

As can be seen in the writing of his diary, complete psychological detachment from the agony of the ghetto simply proves to be impossible. (p.73). Korczak writes " until the very end he preserves that passion for cognition, or his self-analysis termed "the searching mind" for which, " not the mechanism but the actual substance of the thing” alone becomes compelling and worthy of probing.” 

Surviving the Holocaust: The Kovno Ghetto Diary

Tory, Avraham. Surviving the Holocaust: The Kovno Ghetto Diary. Edited by Martin Gilbert and Dina Porat, translated by Jerzy Michalowicz. Harvard University Press,1991.

Avraham Tory wrote a diary in Yiddish between the years of 1941-1944 when he was living in Lithuania, in the Kovno Ghetto – where the Germans had incarcerated more than 30,000 Jews. During that period, he wrote a full and often daily account.

As the Editor, Martin Gilbert recounts, "Tory's diary is one of the longest and fullest of the surviving diaries" - Tory also made ever y effort to "preserve and records events of the day on the d ay itself and to collect as many German orders and Jewish council reports and announcements as he could." (p.xv)

Avraham Tory wrote a diary in Yiddish between the years of 1941-1944 when he was living in Lithuania, in the Kovno Ghetto – where the Germans had incarcerated more than 30,000 Jews. During that period, he wrote a full and often daily account of the Fate of the Jews of Cosmo, while in the ghetto jewelry had help preparing 5 wooden crates in which the Pages of the Diary have been hitting. With the help of several friends they had dug hiding places and with Toy, secreted the crates under the concrete foundations of the uncompleted three-story building that has his repair shop. Kovno was the 8th largest Jewish community in June 1941 which was to become the German-occupied area of Eastern Poland, White Russia, Lithuania, and the western Soviet Union. The Kovno Jewish community dated back to 1410; we have prided itself on its religious and secular heritage.

Avraham Tory escaped from the Kovno Ghetto on March 23rd, 1944. a while later the Germans set the Ghetto on fire and deported all the remaining Jews to death camps. Tory returned a few days after the Russians entered Kovno on August 1st, 1944 to rescue as much of the crates containing his diaries as he could. at great risk to himself and his helpers - Eventually Tory managed to take flight, escape and take flight again before finally landing in Israel over 2 years after setting out to get there. Much of his diary elements finally found their way to Israel also...

As Gilbert notes at the end of his introduction to the Kovno diary:

"For Tory himself, the publication after 45 years of what has survived of his diary, and of the documents he had hidden with it, is an act of piety and Remembrance for those who have perished. For readers of the Diary, its publication brings an additional Dimension to our knowledge and understanding of a period in Jewish history which will remain a lament for the generations to come."

Page 5. June 23-July 7, 1941

Tory writes "we never feared imagined that they would murder women children and the elderly. Below is an example of a Ghetto order document’s contents:

on July 28th, 1941 the diary contains the document order number one of the Governor of Cosmo. It says the following:

the Jewish population is forbidden to walk on the sidewalks Jews must walk on the right side of the road and go one behind the other.

2. the Jewish population is forbidden to enter Promenade walks and public parks. Likewise, they are forbidden to use the benches.

3. the Jewish population is forbidden to use public means of Translated by port such as taxi cabs horse carriages buses passenger Steamers and similar vehicles the owners of operations of old public conveyances must display in a visible place a sign reading forbidden to Jews. Offenders against this order will be severely punished this as of today.