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Holocaust Diaries
Book Collects Writings of Young People Enduring Horror
 Listen to Scott Simon's interview with Alexandra Zapruder.
 Read excerpts from the diaries.
Alexandra Zapruder
Photo: Courtesy Yale University Press |
June 1, 2002 -- The Diary of Anne Frank is a harrowing account of life during the Holocaust. Even so, and even with its unhappy outcome, the work often strikes a certain optimistic tone. Her nights were dark and filled with dread, but when the sun rose each morning, she wrote, "I still believe that people are good at heart."
Compare that with the words of an anonymous young diarist trapped in the Lodz ghetto of Poland: "I feel my heart torn to pieces and I wish for the sun to be extinguished, and for our Earth to be pulverized."
The young man who wrote those despairing words was not alone in recording his thoughts and fears. In her book, Salvaged Pages: Young Writers' Diaries of the Holocaust, Alexandra Zapruder has collected the writings of more than a dozen young people who suffered during the Holocaust.
Some of the diaries were found in abandoned apartments, in ditches, and in garbage dumps. Some were given to loved ones before they left the ghettos. Zapruder tells Scott Simon for Weekend Edition Saturday, that she found several of them all but forgotten in archives and museums.
One diarist, Yitskhok Rudashevski, tells of his neighbors in the Vilna ghetto fighting over firewood. "People become petty, cruel to one another," he writes. Jewish policemen come on the scene, and Yitskhok muses on how they assist the Gestapo. The police "help to grasp their brothers by the throat, they help to trip up their brothers."
Such passages, Zapruder says, show that "human beings are not ennobled by deprivation, but are humiliated by deprivation. And their worst impulses tend to come out, which is so contradictory to the more rosy picture that we have from The Diary of Anne Frank, for example."
That Zapruder can see Anne Frank's diary as "rosy" speaks to the grim reality exposed in this book. Looking straight at the horror without flinching may be difficult, Zapruder says, but it's necessary. It is "a mark of respect … to permit ourselves to know that the world is different than it was … that the worst things are possible as well as the best things."
Other Resources
Read Alexandra Zapruder's biography at Scholastic.com.
Visit the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.
Learn about the Lodz Ghetto at the Jewish Virtual Library.
Read about the most famous Holocaust diarist at the Anne Frank House Web site.
The Holocaust History Project Web site includes an archive of documents, photographs, recordings, and essays.
The Yad Vashem Holocaust Memorial.
Learn about Transnistria.
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