The title is an excerpt from the diary of Etty Hillesum. Following are a few excerpts of several Holocaust diaries. What I find striking—is that despite the horrors, they still had a glimmer of hope.
Anne Frank June 12, 1942: “I hope I will be able to confide everything to you, as I have never been able to confide in anyone, and I hope you will be a great source of comfort and support.”
July 15, 1944: “It’s really a wonder that I haven’t dropped all my ideals, because they seem so absurd and impossible to carry out. Yet I keep them, because in spite of everything, I still believe that people are really good at heart.”
December 24, 1943: “What is done cannot be undone, but one can prevent it happening again.”
February 23, 1944: “I’ve found that there is always some beauty left — in nature, sunshine, freedom, in yourself; these can all help you.”
March 29, 1944: “It’s difficult in times like these: ideals, dreams and cherished hopes rise within us, only to be crushed by grim reality. It’s a wonder I haven’t abandoned all my ideals, they seem so absurd and impractical. Yet I cling to them because I still believe, in spite of everything, that people are truly good at heart.”
Anne Frank was born on June 12, 1929, in Frankfurt, Germany, and died in 1945 at Bergen-Belsen Concentration Camp.
Rutka Laskier February 5, 1943: “I cannot grasp that it is already 1943, four years since this hell began.”
February 20, 1943: “I have a feeling that I am writing for the last time. There is an Aktion [a Nazi operation] in town. I’m not allowed to go out, nobody is allowed to. The town has been cut off. Telephone connections have been cut off too. Jews are being taken out of their homes. There are constant shootings.”
April 24, 1943: “Today I’m worried. When will this misfortune end? It’s not a life, I am existing. Father is worried, because people have been taken away in Przemysl. Maniu [Rutka’s sister] wants to go to Israel. Mother wants to escape to Hungary.”
April 25, 1943: “I felt the air was again charged with unease, with horror. The sun was setting, and the silence so great that I thought I would hear my own heartbeats. Then shots rang out, a lot of shots, a hundred, no, thousands, each one echoing back from the woods, from the hills, from the distant city.”
Ruth Rutka was born on June 12, 1929, in Krakow, Poland, and died in 1943 at Auschwitz Concentration Camp.
Chaim Kaplan October 16, 1939: “A week has passed since the curse of war first descended upon us, and what a week! What suffering! What agony! Warsaw, the city of the wise, has become a city of despair, of darkness, of hunger, and of plague. […] We find ourselves in a dark tunnel without light, and we are swallowed up in darkness.”
December 7, 1940: “Life in the ghetto is intolerable. With the passage of each day, the people grow weaker and weaker. The little food we have is hardly enough to sustain us. The streets are filled with the sick and the dying. Death has become our constant companion.”
February 16, 1941: “The Germans continue to tighten their grip on the ghetto. The walls grow higher, the restrictions more severe. We are prisoners in our own city, condemned to a life of suffering and humiliation. Yet, despite it all, the spirit of the people remains unbroken. We refuse to surrender to despair.”
June 1, 1942: “The deportations have begun. Every day, trains filled with Jews leave the ghetto, bound for unknown destinations. We know not where they go, only that they never return. The streets are filled with tears, with cries of anguish. Yet, even in the face of such unspeakable horror, we must find the strength to carry on.”
April 19, 1943 (during the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising): “The ghetto is in flames, the streets filled with the sound of gunfire. The brave fighters of the Jewish resistance are battling the Germans, refusing to surrender to tyranny and oppression. Though the odds are against us, we will not go quietly into the night. We will fight until our last breath, until freedom is ours once more.”
Chaim Kaplan was born on September 19, 1880, in Horoyszcze, Poland, and died at Treblinka Concentration Camp in Poland in 1942.
Etty Hillesum Etty Hillesum was a young Jewish woman living in Amsterdam during the Holocaust, and her diary provides a remarkable and introspective account of her spiritual and emotional journey during that time. Here are some excerpts from her diary:
July 20, 1942: “We should be willing to act as a balm for all wounds. Sometimes a single warm word is enough to heal an open sore.”
August 18, 1941: “In the end, love is stronger than hate and death. It is as strange and mysterious as life itself. It is the force that holds the universe together.”
November 29, 1942: “Sometimes I feel as if I am carrying the weight of the world on my shoulders. But then I remember that I am only human, and that I can only do what I can. The rest is in the hands of fate.”
March 15, 1943: “I have made a decision to embrace life fully, no matter what the circumstances. Even in the darkest moments, there is still beauty to be found, still joy to be experienced. I will not let the darkness consume me.”
September 3, 1943: “I am learning to find peace within myself, to accept the things I cannot change, and to find strength in the face of adversity. It is a difficult journey, but one that I am determined to take.”
Etty Hillesum was born in Middleburg, Netherlands on January 15, 1914. She died on November 30, 1943 in Oświęcim, Poland.
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The letter above is dated 18 December 1943. However, it is in direct connection with a program that started eight years earlier. On 12 December 1935, the Lebensborn program began as a campaign to encourage so-called “racially valuable” Germans to have more children. Lebensborn initially focused on giving financial assistance to members of the SS with large families and providing pregnant “German-blooded” women with medical care in comfortable maternity houses. During World War II, the program also became involved in the kidnapping of thousands of foreign children for adoption into German families to counter Germany’s declining birthrate.
On 13 September 1936, nine months after the program had been initiated, Heinrich Himmler wrote the following to members of the SS:
“The organisation “Lebensborn e.V.” serves the SS leaders in the selection and adoption of qualified children. The organisation “Lebensborn e.V.” is under my personal direction, is part of the Race and Settlement Central Bureau of the SS, and has the following obligations: • Support racially, biologically and hereditarily valuable families with many children. • Placement and care of racially, biologically and hereditarily valuable pregnant women, who, after a thorough examination of their and the progenitor’s families by the Race and Settlement Central Bureau of the SS, can be expected to produce equally valuable children. • Care for the children. • Care for the children’s mothers. It is the honourable duty of all leaders of the central bureau to become members of the organisation “Lebensborn e.V.” The application for admission must be filed prior to 23 September 1936.”
One of the children conceived via the Lebensborn program is Anni-Frid Synni Lyngstad from the Swedish pop band ABBA.
After her birth on 15 November 1945, the result of an encounter between her mother, Synni, and a German sergeant, Alfred Haase, Anni-Frid’s mother and grandmother were branded as traitors and ostracized in their village in Northern Norway. They were forced to emigrate to Sweden, where Anni-Frid’s mother died of kidney failure before her daughter was two.
It is estimated that 20,000 Polish children were kidnapped who passed the Germanization criteria and were integrated into the Lebensborn program.
Below is the translation of the letter above:
Lodz. 18 Dec. 1943 To Mr Karl Müller
Richrath / Langenfeld Rietherbach St. 11 R IV / I – A. E. – 023 – Hei / MHW –
Subject: placement of a child Reference: Preceding correspondence Condition: proof of health (2 persons)
Dear Mr Müller! I am pleased to finally announce that I have found two boys, one of which you will most likely approve. They are Sep Piehl, born on 3 December 1935, and Eugen Bartel, born on 11 March 1937. I believe that at least one of them is of an age that is well-suited to your household. The children currently live in Oberweis (Upper Danube). Arrange to take the 6:19 train leaving Gmunden on 4 January 1944, and arrive in Oberweis at 6:37. If you need overnight accommodation, confirm with me and I will arrange it. It is necessary that you bring your identification papers with you. Please notify me no later than 22 December 1943, whether I can expect you in Oberweis on 4 January. In any event, please complete the accompanying proofs of health for yourself and your wife. The authorized departmental or SS physician will, as is standard, provide me with the completed forms. I hope that my news to you has given you special Christmas joy.
Hail Hitler! On behalf of: signed
Most people will have heard of the Wannsee conference, but only a few know about the meeting that preceded the conference. That meeting may have had greater implications than the Wannsee conference.
On the afternoon of the 12th of December 1941, Hitler ordered the leading members of the Nazi party to a meeting in his private rooms at the Reich Chancellery.
The announcement Hitler made on 12 December to the Reichsleiter and Gauleiter refers to an earlier statement he had made on 30 January 1939:
“If the world of international financial Jewry, both in and outside of Europe, should succeed in plunging the Nations into another world war, the result will not be the Bolshevization of the world and thus a victory for Judaism. The result will be the extermination of the Jewish race in Europe.”
With the United States being dragged into World War II on 7 December 1941 and the subsequent declaration of war on the US by Nazi Germany on 11 December, the war, especially regarding the above statement, had become truly a World War. Hitler announced this declaration of war on 11 December in the German Reichstag, a speech also broadcast on the radio. On 12 December 1941, he had a meeting with the most important Nazi leaders.
Attendance in this meeting was obligatory for Nazis in high party offices. No official list of the people who attended this meeting exists, but the following leaders of Nazi Germany, are known to have been there:
Adolf Hitler, Heinrich Himmler, Joseph Goebbels, Martin Bormann, Hans Frank and Philipp Bouhler. More than likely, Alfred Rosenberg; Gauleiters Arthur Greiser, Fritz Bracht, and Fritz Sauckel, Reichskommissars Hinrich Lohse and Erich Koch, and Alfred Meyer were also present. Known to have been absent from this meeting were Hermann Göring and Reinhard Heydrich.
Joseph Göbbels. noted the following in his diary on 13 December 1941.
“Regarding the Jewish question, the Fuehrer is determined to clean the table. He prophesized that should the Jews once again bring about a world war, they would be annihilated. These were no empty words. The world war has come, therefore the annihilation of the Jews has to be its inevitable consequence. The question has to be examined without any sentimentality. We are not here to pity Jews but to have pity for our own German people. If the German people have sacrificed about 160,000 dead in the battles in the east, the instigators of this bloody conflict will have to pay for it with their lives.”
What is so significant about the December 12 meeting is that Adolf Hitler himself was present and had called for the meeting. Believe it or not, but to this day there are still people who claim that Hitler had no hand in the murder of Jews, clearly, that meeting shows his full knowledge and endorsement and also that he ordered the mass murder.
On that same day, the first group of Jews was deported to Majdanek: 150 men who had been captured in a manhunt in the Lublin ghetto. By 6 January 1945, just 17 of them were still alive and were liberated from the camp by an order of the German Labor Ministry in Lublin. Between 22 February and 9 November 1942, at least 4000 Jews from Lublin were murdered in Majdanek.
Werner Galnik, a young Jewish boy in the Riga Ghetto in Latvia worded it probably the best in his diary entry of 12 December 1941.
“I figured this way: Hitler loves only the Germans, but no other people, and particularly not us Jews. Does it follow that because we are Jews we must be prisoners? Did my father perhaps steal or murder that he should be arrested? And what had my dear mother done? And what did we children do?”
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Bizarrely enough diaries were not always used or recognized as evidence or as study material for the Holocaust. researchers tended to dismiss Jewish diaries as subjective and unreliable. Only in the last few decades the value of diaries have been acknowledged. To me there is nothing more powerful of the words of those who lived through the horrors.
Below are just some examples of diary entries.
Jacques Salamon Berenholc was a fourteen-year-old boy living in his home city of Paris when Nazi forces invaded and occupied the country in the summer of 1940. In summer 1942—both in the occupied northern part and in Vichy. French police were rounding up Jewish people and deporting them via Drancy to the killing centers
“Saturday, January 16, 1943 Things aren’t going well this morning. They made us leave the room to lead us into the corridors. There is another disinfection. It’s very unpleasant! I’m supposed to leave and I’m waiting impatiently for my release. Around 2 p.m., Joaquin comes to tell me that my release slip is at the director’s but he isn’t there yet to sign it. It would be really disagreeable to go to the disinfecting room before I leave, for my clothes would be completely ruined. Finally I arrange to go with the last persons. Just in case… Those who want to save their suits put them in my bag. I am loaded down like a donkey. […]
Toward 5 p.m., someone comes to inform me that I am free and leads me out with many shouts of “venga,” “come on.” It’s just enough time for me to say goodbye to friends. Papa and Victor are summoned to see Mama. At the prison office, I’m searched, my fingerprints are taken, I get my papers back, and I’m given my release slip.
When I saw Mama at the threshold of the door, we both burst into tears as we hugged each other.
Finally we left the place and caught the train that would take us to Caldas.
We got there around 6 p.m., and at the hotel all the women overwhelmed me with questions. Among them, I was very surprised to recognize Mlle. Henriette Weil, whom I have known since 1941. She slept in the same room as Mama, like the fiancée of Simon Gausfain’s fiancée, Mlle. Giselle Landesman.
After a good bath, I changed my clothes and ate. To eat at last with a real spoon on real plates and with a knife and fork.
After dinner, since two of the ladies were leaving the next day—one of whom, Mme. Pollock, was a friend of Mama—a young actress, a singer, gave a recital. She was wonderful and sang very well. She sang a song entitled, ‘Little Papa, when you come back.,
You can’t imagine how it depressed me.”
Dr. Aron Pik was a well-established physician living in Shavli (the Yiddish name for Šiauliai in Lithuania) with his wife and son when Nazi forces invaded the country in June 1941.
“For sixteen and a half years, I was the director of the internal and contagious diseases division of the city hospital […]
[But] despite my sympathies for [the Bolshevik regime], it suddenly created great unpleasantness for me. One of the reasons was that I had a mark on me, of which I was long unable to cleanse myself. That is: my official membership in the Zionist party and my occupying the post of Vice Chairman of the Shavli organization of general Zionists. Firstly, it was decided under the Bolshevik regime to remove me from the hospital, and the mayor had already informed me officially about the decision. After sixteen and a half years of work in the hospital, to be a “former” person, superfluous, this made a very difficult impression on me, even in this period of surprises and unexpected events. Fortunately, this decision was not immediately executed, thanks to an order from the health ministry that all doctors should for now remain at their positions. And so I remained a whole four months in the hospital, hanging between heaven and earth, and waiting each day with fear and anxiety for unpleasant news. This very matter ended in a completely unexpected fashion. One morning, I receive an official announcement from the health department that I am designated as the director of the central city policlinic—and Dr. D., who was considered a leftist because he was not a Zionist, replaced me in the hospital. And in this way, instead of being removed from public medicine and pushed into the legion of the “former people” and loafers, I received a very honorable position, with much responsibility, and I was entrusted with the supervision of the whole ambulatory-medical care of Shavli.
[…]
The arrival in Shavli of a great mass of [German] soldiers immediately affected my situation as the director of the policlinic. With no formalities, the German medical-surgical division broke into the policlinic, and their chief physician immediately began to “set up house,” as if he were at home. His first act was to make the policlinic Jew-free. At that time, Dr. B-n, Dr. V. (dentist), and nurse L-n were in the policlinic, all with typical Jewish physiognomies, with brown hair, made in the true image of God—and he went up to each of them and ordered them to make off as quickly as possible: “You are Jews, go off and disappear, I should not have to see you any more.” […]
It will not be redundant to record an episode that sheds light on the German chief physician mentioned above and illustrates the relationship between the German intellectual, if we can call him such, and the Jews—almost colleagues of his. This very “bearer of culture” did not satisfy himself with driving the Jews out of the policlinic—suddenly, he remembered the dentist V., and sent a Lithuanian nurse to his home with the accompaniment of a German soldier, in order to bring him back to the policlinic. And when the dentist V. arrived, the chief physician ordered him to go clean the street around the policlinic, to carry water, and other such “honorable” work for a whole day […]
I soon met Dr. V., the dentist, and after him Dr. B., who ran to me out of breath and very upset, in order to let me know what had happened to them and what was generally happening in the policlinic. Hearing this news, I, of course, considered it a foregone conclusion that the “noble” chief physician would “honor” me, too, with this type of welcome, and I decided to remain at home and finita la comedia.1 In this fashion, my management of the policlinic, which lasted about eight months, ended.
Now I sit at home idle, without work, and have free time, over and beyond, to write out in greater or lesser detail my unhappy memories. In any case, one is afraid to go out in the street, to distract oneself a little, unless there is an important reason to go—in order not to run up against the hatred of our propaganda-filled masters, the Lithuanians […]”
Henryk Goldszmit, a Polish Jewish doctor known for his children’s books. under the name Janusz Korczak. He was the director a Jewish orphanage in Warsaw from 1912 until his death in 1942. Korczak’s diary provide a glimpse into the doctor’s state of mind in late July 1942 as Nazi authorities began a massive wave of deportations from the ghetto. The featured entries reflect his concerns over the children’s mental health I will be doing a blog on him quite soon but for now this is an excerpt from his diary.
“Night, July 18
During the first week of our last stay at the Goclawek summer home, the result of the consumption of bread of unknown composition and make was a mass poisoning which affected the children and some of the staff.
Diarrhea. The excrements boiled over in the chamber pots. Bubbles fonned upon the surface of the pitch-like matter. Bursting they exuded a sweetish-putrid odor, which not only attacked the sense of smell but invaded the throat, eyes, ears, the brain.
Just now we have something similar, but it consists of vomiting and watery stools.
During the night, the boys lost 80 kg among them — on the average a kilogram per head. The girls — 60 kg (somewhat less).
The children’s digestive tracts worked under heavy strain. Not much was needed to precipitate a disaster. Perhaps it was the inoculation against dysentery (five days ago) or the ground pepper added pursuant to a French recipe to the stale eggs used for Friday’s pate.
The next day, not so much as a single kilogram of the losses in weight was made up.
Help for those vomiting, moaning with pain, was administered in near darkness — with limewater. (Unlimited dental chalk for whoever wanted it, jug after jug. In addition, a drug for those suffering from headaches.) Finally, for the staff, sparingly — morphine. An injection of caffeine for a hysterical new inmate following a collapse.
His mother, wasting away of ulcerated intestines, was unwilling to die until the child had been placed in the Home. The boy was unwilling to go until the mother had died. He finally yielded. The mother died propitiously, now the child has pangs of conscience. In his illness, he mimics his mother: he moans (screams), complains of pain, then gasps, then feels hot, finally is dying of thirst.
“Water!”
I pace the dormitory to and fro. Will there be an outbreak of mass hysteria? Might be!
But the children’s confidence in the leadership prevailed. They believed that as long as the doctor was calm there was no danger.
Actually I was not so calm. But the fact that I shouted at the troublesome patient and threatened to throw him out onto the staircase was evidence that the man at the helm had everything under control. The decisive factor: he shouts, so he knows.
The next day, that was yesterday — the play. The Post Office by Tagore. Applause, handshakes, smiles, efforts at cordial conversation. (The chairwoman looked over the house after the performance and pronounced that though we are cramped, that genius Korczak had demonstrated that he could work miracles even in a rat hole.)
This is why others have been allotted palaces.
[This reminded me of the pompous opening ceremony of a new kindergarten in the workers’ house at Gorczewska Street with the participation of Mrs. Moscicka (Wife of the prewar President of Poland) — the other one.]
How ridiculous they are.
What would have happened if the actors of yesterday were to continue in their roles today?
Jerzyk fancied himself a fakir.
Chaimek — a real doctor.
Adek — the lord mayor.
(Perhaps illusions would be a good subject for the Wednesday dormitory talk. Illusions, their role in the life of mankind. . . .)
And so to Dzielna Street.
The same day. Midnight
If I were to say that I have never written a single line unwillingly, that would be the truth. But it would also be true to say that I have written everything under compulsion.
I was a child “able to play for hours on his own,” and with me “you wouldn’t know there was a child in the house.”
I received building blocks (bricks) when I was six. I stopped playing with them when I was fourteen.
“Aren’t you ashamed of yourself? Such a big guy. You ought to be doing something else. Reading. But blocks — what next. …”
When I was fifteen I acquired the craze, the frenzy of reading. The world vanished, only the book existed. . . .
I talked to people a lot: to peers and to much older grownups. In Saski Park I had some really aged friends. They “admired” me. A philosopher, they said.
I conversed only with myself.
For to talk and to converse are not the same. To change one’s clothes and to undress are two different things.
I undress when alone, and I converse when alone.
A quarter of an hour ago I finished my monologue in the presence of Heniek Azrylewicz. Probably for the first time in my life I told myself positively:
“I have an analytical, not an inventive, mind.”
To analyze in order to know?
No.
To analyze in order to find, to get to the bottom of things?
Not that either.
Rather to analyze in order to ask further and further questions.
I ask questions of men (of infants, of the aged), I question facts, events, fates. I am not so pressed for answers; I go on to other questions — not necessarily on the same subject.
My mother used to say:
“That boy has no ambition. It’s all the same to him what he wears, whether he plays with children of his own kind or with the janitor’s. He is not ashamed to play with toddlers.”
I used to ask my building blocks, children, grownups, what they were. I did not break toys, it did not interest me why the doll’s eyes closed when it was put down. It was not the mechanism but the essence of a thing, the thing for itself, in itself.
Writing a diary or a life story I am obliged to talk, not to converse.
Now back to euthanasia. The family of a suicide. Euthanasia to order.
An insane man, legally incapacitated, incapable of independent decision.
A code comprising a thousand articles is needed. Life itself will dictate them. What is important is the principle: it is pennissible, desirable.
On a beautiful remote island, serene, as in a fairy tale, in a fine hotel, boarding house, a suicide casts the die. Is living worthwhile?
How many days or weeks are necessary to decide? A life following the patterns of contemporary magnates? Perhaps work?
The hotel service. Duties in shifts. The work in the garden. The length of stay?
“Where is he?”
“He has left.”
To a neighboring island or to the bottom of the sea.
Should there be a rule:
“The death sentence will be carried out in one month, even against your will. For you have signed an agreement, a contract with an organization, a deal with temporal life. So much the worse for you if you recant too late.”
Or the death — liberation comes in sleep, in a glass of wine, while dancing, to the accompaniment of music, sudden and unexpected.
“I want to die because I’m in love.”
“I long for death because I hate.”
“Take my life because I am capable of neither love nor hate.”
All this exists, but in crazy confusion, festering, filthy.
Death for profit, for a fixed payment, for convenience, to oblige.
Most intimately connected with death are sterilization, and the prevention and interruption of pregnancy.
“In Warsaw, you are free to have one child; in a small town, two; in a village, three; in a frontier village, four. In Siberia, ten. Take your choice.” “Free to live but childless.”
“Free to live but unmarried.”
“Manage by yourself; pay the taxes exclusively for yourself.”
“Here is a mate for you. Pick one out often, out of a hundred girls.”
“You may have two males. We allow three females.” Hurrah! lots of jobs, files, agencies, offices! (An iron machine does the work, provides accommodations, furniture, food, clothing. You are concerned only with organizing.)
A new method of land cultivation or livestock breeding, or new synthetic products, or the colonization of regions today inaccessible — the equator and the North and South Pole. The total population of the earth can be increased to five billion.
Communication has been established with a new planet. There is colonization. Mars, perhaps the moon will accept new immigrants. Perhaps there will be even more efficient means of communication with a distant neighbor. The result: ten billion men like you and me. The earth has the last word as to who, where to, how many.
Today’s war is a naive, though insincere, shoot-off. What is important is the great migration of peoples.
Russia’s program is to mix and crossbreed. Germany’s is to gather together those having a similar color of skin, hair, shape of nose, dimensions of the skull or pelvis.
Today, specialists feel the stranglehold of unemployment. There is a tragic quest for a dish of work for physicians and dentists.
Not enough tonsils waiting to be cut, appendixes to be taken out, teeth for filling.
“What to do? What to do?”
There is: acetonemia, pylorospasmus. There is: angina pectoris.
What will happen if we find that tuberculosis is not only curable but cured with a single injection, intra-venal, intramuscular or subcutaneous?
Syphilis — test 606. Consumption, 2500. What will be left for doctors and nurses to do?
What will happen if alcohol is replaced by a whiff of gas? Machine No. 3. Price, ten zlotys.1 A fifty-year guarantee. The dose as prescribed on the label. Payable in installments.
If sufficient daily nourishment were contained in two .t-bion pills, what about the chefs and the restaurants?
Esperanto? One daily newspaper for all peoples and all tongues. What will the linguists do, and above all, the translators and the teachers of foreign languages?
The radio — perfected. Even the most sensitive ear will detect no difference between live music and a “canned, conserved” melody.
What’s going to happen when even today we need disasters to provide work and goals for just one generation?
We cannot go on like this, my dear friends. Because unprecedented stagnation will set in, and foul air such as no one has ever encountered, and frustration such as no one has ever experienced.
A theme for a short story.
Tomorrow begins a radio contest for the master violinist of the year, playing this or that symphony or dissonance.
The whole world is at the loudspeakers.
An unprecedented Olympic contest.
The fans of the violinist from the Isle of Parrots experience moments of terrible suspense.
Comes the final night.
Their favorite man is beaten.
They commit suicide, unable to reconcile themselves to the fall of their idol.
There is a Che kh ov story: A ten-year-old nanny is so desperate for sleep that she strangles the screaming baby.
Poor nanny — she did not know what else to do. I have found a way. I don’t hear the irritating coughing, I heartlessly ignore the aggressive and provoking behavior of the old tailor.
I don’t hear it. Two o’clock in the morning. Silence. I settle down to sleep — for five hours. The rest I shall make up in the daytime.
I would like to tidy up what I have written. A tough assignment.
July 21, 1942
Tomorrow I shall be sixty-three or sixty-four years old. For some years, my father failed to obtain my birth certificate. I suffered a few difficult moments over that. Mother called it gross negligence: being a lawyer, father should not have delayed in the matter of the birth certificate.
I was named after my grandfather, his name was Hersh (Flirsh). Father had every right to call me Henryk: he himself was given the name Jozef. And to the rest of his children grandfather had given Christian names, too: Maria, Magdalena, Ludwik, Jakub, Karol.
Yet he hesitated and procrastinated.
I ought to say a good deal about my father: I pursue in life that which he strove for and for which my grandfather tortured himself for many years.
And my mother. Later about that. I am both mother and father. That helps me to know and understand a great deal.
My great-grandfather was a glazier. I am glad: glass gives warmth and light.
It is a difficult thing to be bom and to learn to live. Ahead of me is a much easier task: to die. After death, it may be difficult again, but I am not bothering about that. The last year, month or hour.
I should like to die consciously, in possession of my faculties. I don’t know what I should say to the children by way of farewell. I should want to make clear to them only this — that the road is theirs to choose, freely.
Ten o’clock. Shots: two, several, two, one, several. Perhaps it is my own badly blacked out window.
But I do not stop writing.
On the contrary: it sharpens (a single shot) the thought.”
The most famous diary of course was Anne Frank’s diary, but there were more children and adults who kept diaries during that awful time. Below are diary entries from both children and adults. In most of the cases the authors are unknown.
Starting off with a more positive entry.
Illustrated page of a child’s diary written in a Swiss refugee camp. The diary entry describes how they crossed the border into Switzerland. The text reads, “We came out of the woods and into a clearing: we had to be as quiet as possible because we were so close to the border. Oh! I almost forgot! Before we came out of the woods, they made us stand still for a quarter of an hour while they went to explore the area and to cut through the fence. Fortunately, shortly thereafter, we began to walk again. We saw a small guard station that was literally in front of the hole in the fence, fortunately the guard was not there. One by one, silently, we went through the hole in the fence. What emotion! Finally, we were in free territory, in Switzerland.”
This letter was written by a Jewish carpenter, Srul Shaya Kalezyk, about 10 months after the Warsaw Ghetto uprising. He wrote in Polish and Yiddish, on the work permit he had used in the ghetto prior to its destruction. Lazer Levine found the permit in 1965 amongst the ruins of the ghetto.
“I am still alive. A carpenter, I lived in Warsaw in apartment 40 on 14 Krochmalna Street. On 15.2.1944, I worked at 8 Chucinska Street. I am still alive. I don’t know if I will be tomorrow. I write at a time when there are no longer any Jews in Warsaw. I would like to see my beloved wife and my two beloved children, Wareczyk and Jurek. I wonder if I will still see them. These are terrible days for me. I want to live, I feel the end coming. Kalezyk If anyone should find what I have written, publish it in a newspaper, so that my relatives – who may have survived – will know that at this time I was still alive”
With the aid of a Dutch woman, Cilli Dzialowski of Holland sent this farewell letter to her four children, who resided in England during the war. Her son Hy survived in a hideout in Holland. The letter was transmitted to Yad Vashem by one of Cilli’s daughters, Mrs. Jakobovitz, who now lives in Canada.
“Enschede, Holland 1 April 1943,
Beloved, precious children, In these final moments, before I join your dearest father, and will, like him, lose my freedom, there is an urgent compulsion within me to tell you the following. You are in our thoughts by day and night; our love for you makes our life even under these present difficult circumstances worth living; we long for the moment when we shall once more be able to embrace you with outstretched arms – you, our most precious possessions – and we have faith in the future, that this supreme joy will be granted us. ‘Beloved Sparrows’ – I must call you this once more, as I used to do when you were still very young – should circumstances alter course for us and we, according to the will of the Almighty, not meet again, I beg each one of you with all my heart to lead honest and straightforward lives always, and to support one another whenever necessary. Your young and only sister will receive your utmost thoughtfulness and love. And Hy, your eldest brother, who has missed you no less than ourselves all these years and who has suffered greatly through agony and fear, must also be close to your hearts. Unfortunately, uprooted as we have been here in Holland, we were never able to give him the secure parental home atmosphere for which he longed so much. Many times the longing for you and the desire to be reunited with you were so overpowering and strong in us, as well as in him that we feared we could bear it no longer. I know what a treasure we have in you, my beloved ones, and that you are committed and firm and of strong character, that – Baruch Hashem – you are all blessed with that essence of personality which makes you liked by your fellow men and will surely find favour in the eyes of the Creator. This knowledge brings me consolation. Never deviate from the path of God-fearing behavior and always be guided by the example of your beloved father. Our constant thoughts of you have accompanied you so far on your road through life, and our blessings will never leave you! This letter will reach you through the efforts of a fine Dutch lady who was always wonderful to us and constantly gave us courage for the future, which we accepted gratefully. My Precious Children – I bless each of you from a distance with the traditional blessing, also in Daddy’s name: ‘May you be happy and successful in life; cling one to the other; and never stray even one step from the path, from the precepts of our Torah.’ I embrace and kiss you and now feel truly united with you,
Always yours, Mummy
[The following is a part from the diary of a Jewish youth named Yarden, a member of the Ha-Shomer Ha-Tsa’ir in Lodz]
“September 13, 1939
It is hard to get bread; Jews are driven away from all the “queues.” They are seized, hauled off to labor, and beaten to a pulp. Hell has caught fire. Gangs of hooligans pounce on Jewish shops; looters plunder with impunity. Fewer Jews are visible in the streets; my father and brothers never venture out. Every knock on the door is terrifying; the slightest noise freezes the blood in our veins. Violent feelings rage within me… What more will this day bring? Shrieks, terror, blows, abductions, imprisonment, messengers, humiliation and disgrace, posters with laws – a sea of posters, white, green, red, yellow, new ones each day, but always with the same message: Jews are forbidden… to buy, sell, study, pray, gather, eat, etc., a string of prohibitions with no end! Would that the night would never end, that we could have some peace, some balm for the tumult in our hearts…”
“Dear diary,
Did I ever tell you I have a tattoo on my arm? Not by me, not my choice. I was branded.. I feel like I am an animal in the slaughter house. I was stripped of my basic human identity. Every prisoner has to have an ID number so when I first arrived here, they branded me.
I have received a letter from a relative of my fiancé’s saying that she was also taken to a concentration camp.. My world has crumbled. I have no hope anymore, nothing to look forward to. They also gave every prisoner a small triangle to wear on their uniforms. I was given a yellow triangle, yellow for Jewish. There was red for communists, green was for common criminals, pink was for homosexual men, purple for Jehovah’s Witnesses, and black was for gypsies.”
“When it’s so cold, even my heart is heavy. There is nothing to cook today; we should be receiving three loaves of bread but we will be getting only one bread today. I don’t know what to do. I bought rotten and stinking beets from a woman, for 10 marks. We will cook half today and half tomorrow. Does this deserve to be called life?”
Anonymous girl diarist, March 6, 1942
“Beautiful, sunny day today. When the sun shines, my mood is lighter. How sad life is. When we look at the fence separating us from the rest of the world, our souls, like birds in a cage, yearn to be free. Longing breaks my heart, visions of the past come to me. Will I ever live in better times?”
Anonymous girl diarist, March 7, 1942
“The day of my Bar Mitzvah arrived. I put on the tefillin and I said the blessings. As a gift from my family I received half a loaf of bread.They wanted me to eat it right there and then, in their presence. I refused. I couldn’t even imagine for how long they saved it from themselves in order to give it to me. They decided that I had to eat it, and I ate it. I couldn’t look them in the eye because I ate their bread.”
—Chaim Kozienicki, age 13
“From this day every German may shoot as many Jews as he wants. If anybody came near the wire fence, as far as his rifle could reach, he could shoot him. Hundreds and hundreds of people perished in the Ghetto this way.”
Israel Unikowski, age 13
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