Warsaw Ghetto Diary Found

From New York Jewish Week

12/10/2004

Staff Report

A six-page diary kept by a Jewish woman during the Warsaw Ghetto uprising - the only known Jewish account to be written in the midst of the 27-day revolt - was discovered in the archives of the Ghetto Fighter's House, a museum in northern Israel. The diary, written in Polish on graph paper, included a diagram of the anonymous writer's hideout where she lived on little more than a daily bowl of soup during a nine-day stretch beginning April 24, 1943.

"The ghetto is burning for the fourth day," she wrote. "You see only chimneys standing and the skeletons of burnt houses. At the first moment, the visions arouse a horrible chill." The writer, whose fate is unknown, described smoke entering her hideout, where she lived with several others. She wrote how Jews from other burning buildings moved into her hideout, but their noise, lack of food and the presence of a restless young child made sleep difficult and increased the possibility of discovery.

Her final entry, May 2, was the longest and most ominous: "The only thing we are left with is our hiding place. Of course, this will not be a safe place for very long."

The diary was part of a collection of papers donated to the museum at Kibbutz Locamei Haghettaot in the 1970s by Adolf-Abraham Berman, a survivor and one of the leaders of the Warsaw underground, but the museum only recently recognized the uniqueness of the diary while preparing the archive for display.