Academic

A Forgotten Holocaust Diary: Warsaw Ghetto By Mary Berg

By Dan Filler

Until recently, I was entirely unaware of the existence of Warsaw Ghetto, a novel by Mary Berg.  Berg was raised in Poland and arrived in New York in March 1944 at nineteen.  She was lucky: her mom was born in America and she came to the U.S. in a prisoner-of-war exchange.  She'd been living in Lodz in 1939 when the Germans arrived.  Her family fled the seventy miles to Warsaw.  She lived a strangely normal life for several years before being incarcerated in Pawiak prison - the lucky destination for those with foreign papers.  She arrived in the U.S. with twelve diary volumes and worked with a journalist to create a serial account of her experience in the Yiddish daily, Der morgen Zshurnal.  The story was subsequently translated into English and published in 1945 by L.B. Fischer (with the cover here, as drawn by Berg). 

The book apparently received raves in the New Yorker, Saturday Review, SF Chronicle, and the New York Times.  But it went out of print within a decade and Berg herself disappeared.  She was last heard from in 1995 and nobody knows if she is alive today.  I haven't yet read the diary, but was completely taken in by this account in Nextbook Reader.  You can order a new edition of the volume, read excerpts, and view remarkable archival photographs (like this one of Mary Berg) here.

Full post as published by The Faculty Lounge on November 13, 2008 (boomark / email).