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This moving book presents diaries written by Jewish children and young adults during the Holocaust, the first comprehensive collection of such writings. The diarists ranged in age from twelve to twenty-two; some survived the Holocaust, but most perished. Taken together, their accounts of daily events and their often unexpected thoughts, ideas, and feelings serve to deepen and complicate our understanding of life during this dark time in European history. The volume begins with a discussion of Anne Frank's diary and offers a new framework for thinking about the diaries young people produced in this time of extreme crisis. Alexandra Zapruder assesses the value of these literary fragments as part of the historical record of the Holocaust and provides informative introductions about when and where each diary was written; the diarist's biographical, religious, cultural, and economic circumstances; the fate of the diarist; the circumstances of the diary's discovery. Finally she offers a view of the diary's significance. An appendix gives details about the known diaries written by young people during this period, more than fifty-five in all. A second appendix provides a study of related materials, such as rewritten and reconstructed diaries, letters, diary-memoirs, and texts by non-Jewish young victims of the war and Nazism.… (more)
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This is, I believe, a definitive collection and should be included in every library's Holocaust section. I was very impressed by the editor's scholarship and the wide range of diaries included.
This review is from: Salvaged Pages: Young Writers' Diaries of the Holocaust (Paperback)
A terribly moving work that brings the European Jews' suffering in the Holocaust to life. While Anne
The editor introduces each diary with a few pages of notes and biography as to the final outcome of the individual's life. In an insightful introduction, she contrasts her message - 'not to confuse the reading of them with the rescue of individual lives, even symbolically, but to allow them to be seen as the partial records that they are; and to contemplate at one and the same time what is before us and what is lost and irrecoverable' - with the efforts of other editors of similar works to try to put a positive spin on these heart-rending works ('the final impression is not of tragedy or despair but of the transendence of the human spirit and the eternity of the Jewish message', wrote one such introducer.)
After reading this, one's feelings are entirely of tragedy and despair. As one reads the diary of deeply religious Moshe Flinker, and his efforts to work out a scriptural explanation for the events; the highly intelligent Petr Ginz, confined to Terezin ghetto, and struggling to pursue what education he could there; the diary of Peter Feigl, a Catholic convert, kept for his parents - little knowing they lost their lives almost immediately he was sent away.... Others, more basic, as the privations kick in, focus on the desperate hunger, the cold; a family in hiding must rely on temperamental, unreliable locals to supply them...
An extremely well-constructed book that will remain with the reader forever.