Diaries

Yehuda Bacon, Edited by Sharon Kangisser Cohen and Dorota Julia Nowak

Ilya Gerber, Edited by Lea Prais

Emanuele Artom, Edited by Guri Schwarz

Author: Yehuda Bacon
Editors: Sharon Kangisser Cohen and Dorota Julia Nowak

What a life it will be, Jerusalem! I know very well what the wordmeans. Like every association, it spans my entire life. Notebook 8, August 12, 1946; World-renowned Israeli artist and Holocaust survivor Yehuda Bacon began to keep a diary in July 1945, while living in a youth home in Štiřín, Czechoslovakia, shortly after his liberation. During the past seven decades, Bacon has filled over 240 notebooks. His diary is a mosaic of words and drawings through which he attempts to express his past, contemplate his present, and imagine his future.

Editor: Jean Ancel | Revised and annotated by Leon Volovici and Miriam Caloianu

Edited by Jean Ancel

Lipman Kunstadt | Edited by Sarah Rosen and Dalia Ofer

I decided to stop writing the diary and to destroy the pages… I eventually overcame the despair and listened to the counterargument…a miracle may occur and your fragmentary writings will be the only remaining memory of Transnistria. (Lipman Kunstadt, August 26, 1942)

Diary from Hell in Transnistria is a painfully vivid and intricate account of life in the Dzhurin ghetto in Transnistria, written by Lipman Kunstadt, who was deported there from Radauţi, Romania, with his wife, his children, his mother, and his sister on October 14, 1941. Kunstadt, who was well-educated and a journalist, was appointed secretary of the Jewish council in the Dzhurin ghetto, where he had access to a great deal of information about its inner workings. He began writing his diary in Yiddish on April 11, 1942, at great risk, sparing no criticism against the ghetto leadership.