Diaries

Heniek Fogel | Editor: Helene Sinnreich

Baruch Milch | Editor: Shosh Milch-Avigal

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. 

Ilya Gerber, Edited by Lea Prais

Luigi Fleischmann | Editor: Daniella Zaidman-Mauer

Chajka Klinger | Editor: Avihu Ronen

Josef Zelkowicz | Edited by Michal Unger

Mirjam Bolle

In early 1943, Mirjam Levie, a young Jewish woman from Amsterdam, began to write letters to her fiance, Leo Bolle, who had immigrated to Eretz Israel a few years earlier. Her letters, which were never sent, were written during the deportations of the Jews from Amsterdam; during her incarceration in Westerbork, the main transit camp for Jewish deportees to the death camps in Poland; and during her imprisonment in Bergen-Belsen. As secretary in the controversial “Jewish Council of Amsterdam”, Mirjam’s letters are the only source remaining to describe events from the viewpoint of one of its members. Mirjam managed to hide the letters she wrote in Amsterdam and Westerbork; and those she wrote in Bergen-Belsen she brought with her when she was released as part of an exchange between Dutch Jews and German POWs, and arrived in Eretz Israel on 10 July 1944. The book presents a series of letters – unique in their historical interest and extremely moving in their human dimension – forming a personal diary of real time.

Lazar Engles (Engelstern)

The moment we first set foot on the soil of the Naliboki Pushcha, the atmosphere was completely different. We felt a new kind of security, as if we were in our own partisan kingdom…. We had survived so many dangers, but we were now among Jews in the forest.

Prior to the German invasion of the Soviet Union, Lazar Engles (Engelstern) lived a peaceful and fulfilled life in his beloved city of Vilna with his wife and two daughters. The Nazi occupation of the city in June 1941 and its subsequent ghettoization marked a rapid escalation of horrors for Lazar and his family.

Rutka Laskier | Editor: Daniella Zaidman-Mauer

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

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

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

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

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.

Emanuele Artom, Edited by Guri Schwarz

Edited by Jean Ancel

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

Ruth Leimenzon Engles| Edited by Ben-Tsiyon Klibansky

At last, I have gotten a notebook in which to write. I have a pencil. I will try. Maybe it will make it easier to push through the days. It’s hard for me. As soon as dawn breaks, my first thought is: how does one endure until the end of the day.
Ruth Leimenzon Engles, May 15, 1944

A few days after the Germans occupied Vilna at the end of June 1941, Ruth Leimenzon’s husband was seized by local collaborators and was never seen again. Ruth, the sole survivor of her murdered family, managed to survive two years in the ghetto using her intelligence and common sense, helped by luck and perhaps miracles. Just two days before the ghetto’s liquidation in September 1943, Ruth escaped with the help of a Christian woman, her former boss’ wife, and found a hiding place in a barn on a farm 20 kilometers from Vilna, where she hid for nearly a year. During the last two months in the barn, Ruth wrote a diary in Yiddish describing her three-year ordeal.