Diary From Hell in Transnistria 1942–1944

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. 

$37.63

His journalistic instincts led him to discover and disclose the social scourges in the ghetto: the denunciations, the division into classes of the rich and the wretched poor, and the acrimonious relations between the deportees and the local Jews. Along with sharp criticism and harsh descriptions of the deportations, the diseases, and the deaths, the diary also abounds with Kunstadt’s musings and profound questions regarding God, justice and injustice, and reward and punishment, as well as poetic depictions of nature and the beauty of creation even in the hell of Transnistria. Kunstadt laid down his pen on April 13, 1945, following liberation and his return to his hometown of Radauţi with the surviving members of his family. Diary from Hell in Transnistria is a compelling, detailed chronicle of the fate of the Jews of Romania who were deported to Transnistria. Published for the first time in English, this annotated, scholarly edition makes a significant contribution to the study of the Holocaust in this region.

His journalistic instincts led him to discover and disclose the social scourges in the ghetto: the denunciations, the division into classes of the rich and the wretched poor, and the acrimonious relations between the deportees and the local Jews. Along with sharp criticism and harsh descriptions of the deportations, the diseases, and the deaths, the diary also abounds with Kunstadt’s musings and profound questions regarding God, justice and injustice, and reward and punishment, as well as poetic depictions of nature and the beauty of creation even in the hell of Transnistria. Kunstadt laid down his pen on April 13, 1945, following liberation and his return to his hometown of Radauţi with the surviving members of his family. Diary from Hell in Transnistria is a compelling, detailed chronicle of the fate of the Jews of Romania who were deported to Transnistria. Published for the first time in English, this annotated, scholarly edition makes a significant contribution to the study of the Holocaust in this region.

Products specifications
No. of Pages 566
Size 23.5X15.5
Publisher Yad Vashem
Translator from the Yiddish: Rebecca Wolpe
ISBN 978-965-308-666-1
Year 2022
Cover hard
Product tags
Customers who bought this item also bought

The Jewish Underground Press in Warsaw: Volume One - May 1940–January 1941

Editors: Joseph Kermish, Tikva Fatal-Knaani

$44.47

The Jewish Underground Press in Warsaw: Volume Three - July–October 1941

Editor: Tikva Fatal-Knaani | Hebrew edition editor: Joseph Kermish

$44.47

IN SPITE OF IT ALL: Julius Paltiel - A Norwegian Jew in Auschwitz

Vera Komissar

 

A child’s cry pierces the stillness. The wail breaks the dismal silence that fell when the doors were locked. It’s as if the child’s tears give us all permission to let out our despair. Julius Paltiel grew up in Trondheim, Norway, where he lived with his mother and his brother. Like all the Jews of Norway, their lives changed forever when the Nazis came to power in April 1940. His arrest at the age of eighteen in 1942 marked the beginning of a journey of inconceivable horror and brutality in the Nazi concentration camps. Initially incarcerated in Falstad, a Nazi concentration camp in his native Norway, Julius Paltiel was then deported to Germany by sea in February 1943 before boarding a train to Auschwitz. He was selected for forced labor to work for IG Farben in Auschwitz III–Monowitz. In January 1945, he was sent on a death march to Buchenwald where he was liberated by U.S. forces on April 11, 1945. Julius Paltiel is one of the few Norwegian Jews who survived and returned from Auschwitz and one of the Jewish survivors who testified in the war crime trials against the Nazi perpetrators in Norway. He dedicated his life to the fight against antisemitism to ensure that such horrors would never happen again. As one of only a handful of Holocaust testimonies from Norway, In Spite of It All sheds light on Julius Paltiel’s personal ordeal to survive the Holocaust as well as on the Jewish persecution and murder of Norway’s Jewish community. This tale of survival also serves as a warning of the atrocities that are possible at the hands of ordinary human beings.

$27.37
Close