Diary notations written by a Jew incarcerated by the Nazis in the Lodz ghetto in 1942 and 1943, telling the pitiful story of starvation, death–and the will to live and to save his daughter’s life- -are published in the Warsaw newspaper, Nowa Kultura, reaching here today.
The diary, according to Nowa Kultura, was found last summer by Polish authorities in charge of the former Auschwitz concentration camp. The author, who is identified in the manuscript only by the initials N. N., wrote in Yiddish, framing his diary in the form of letters to someone called “Dear Willy.”
The manuscript was found in a metal drum buried in the ground near Crematorium III of the infamous Auschwitz camp. There were 354 sheets, of which 50 were totally disintegrated, 174 mostly illegible except for a few words, and the remainder quite readable. The pages still readable depict life in the Lodz ghetto, where the Jewish population had risen to about 200, 000. The last 70, 000 Jews from Lodz were sent to Auschwitz in the summer of 1944, and most of them were murdered by the Nazis.
In his diary, N. N. gave details about the starvation in the ghetto, severely criticized Mordecai Chaim Rumkowski, Jewish head of the ghetto government, who was later executed by the Nazis, and told of the writer’s pathetic efforts to save the life of his daughter who may have died of starvation, Reporting the fantastically high prices of food in the ghetto, N.N. noted that the only salvation for his daughter would have been food. “But, ” he added, “to go and buy something, who has money for that? Whole treasures would not be sufficient. In a word, it is practically impossible to save anyone.”
Despite his despair N.N. wrote, according to Nowa Kultura: “As a former lover of the Bible, together with the whole tortured brotherhood of ghetto workers, I cry out: And, weltering in your own blood, you shall live. ” N.N., evidently, was killed, and his body disposed of in Crematorium III.
According to the Polish Commission for Research into Nazi Crimes, word was received last summer from a former member of the special Nazi detail assigned to cremate the bodies of gassed Jews, that 30 metal drums, containing documents, had been buried near the crematorium. The N.N. manuscript was in the first of the containers discovered when the commission started excavating the area last summer. The Warsaw newspaper reported that further excavations are proceeding.
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The Archive of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency includes articles published from 1923 to 2008. Archive stories reflect the journalistic standards and practices of the time they were published.
