The Diary of Mary Berg
Growing Up in the Warsaw Ghetto - 75th Anniversary Edition
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- $11.99
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
The first eye-witness account ever published of life in the Warsaw Ghetto
Mary Berg was fifteen when the German army poured into Poland in 1939. She survived four years of Nazi terror, and managed to keep a diary throughout.
This astonishing, vivid portrayal of life inside the Warsaw Ghetto ranks with the most significant documents of the Second World War. Mary Berg candidly chronicles not only the daily deprivations and mass deportations, but also the resistance and resilience of the inhabitants, their secret societies, and the youth at the forefront of the fight against Nazi terror.
Above all The Diary of Mary Berg is a uniquely personal story of a life-loving girl’s encounter with unparalleled human suffering, and offers an extraordinary insight into one of the darkest chapters of human history.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Today I am fifteen years old. I feel very old and lonely.... Everyone is afraid to go out. The Germans are here." So begins this extraordinary memoir of Jewish life in Lodz, Poland, and the Warsaw ghetto as the Nazis began to liquidate its starving and disease-ridden inmates. In 1940 Berg fled Lodz with her parents and sister. They lived in the Warsaw ghetto, and in July 1942 were transferred to Pawiak prison within the ghetto. Originally published in the U.S. in February 1945, the memoir is based on notebooks that Mary Berg (n e Wattenberg) smuggled out of Europe when she and her interned family were traded for German prisoners and sailed to America. This powerful testament documents Nazi brutalities, and the difference between those without means, who starved and died of typhus, and the more privileged, like Berg's family (her mother was American and her father relatively wealthy), who, for a time, were able to patronize ghetto cafes and attend the theater. Berg is a remarkably clear-eyed, skillful and heart-breaking recorder of those terrible years. 23 illus.
