Salvaged Pages
Young Writers` Diaries of the Holocaust
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- 18٫99 US$
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- 18٫99 US$
وصف الناشر
Thismoving book presentsdiaries 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.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Zapruder, who works in the education department at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, has done a great service to history and the future. Her book deserves to become a standard in Holocaust studies classes, particularly those aimed at youth or focusing on individuals. The 14 diaries in this anthology most appearing in English for the first time detail the lives of teens and their families, some on the run, some in camps, some in hiding and some during the chilling last days in the ghettoes in Nazi-occupied Europe. Each is prefaced with a biography of its author, information on family background and, when known, his or her fate. Zapruder also provides other facts that would have been known to the diarists and their peers, providing readers with a more complete context. Their experiences and reactions vary widely. Peter Feigl's parents baptize him as a Catholic and send him to church, but eventually are forced to send him from Austria to France. He blames the Jewish-identified teens around him for the circumstances that have ripped him from his parents. In contrast, Belgian Moshe Flinker becomes more attached to traditional Judaism, but increasingly depressed. His last entry, in the fall of 1943, reads, "I am sitting facing the sun. Soon it will set; it is nearing the horizon. It is as red as blood, as if it were a bleeding wound. From where does it get so much blood? For days there has been a red sun, but this is not hard to understand. Is it not sufficient to weep, in these days of anguish?" These writings will certainly impress themselves on the memories of all readers.
