This beautifully written historical document tells about the Warsaw ghetto's last years, as recorded by the official archivist of Warsaw's Judenrat. These diary entries remain a stirring and remarkable testament to the heroism of Warsaw Jewry in its last days.

Offers a description of daily life for Jews sealed off by the Nazis in a large section of Warsaw

Reprint. Originally published: New York: Holocaust Library, c1978.

Chaim Aron Kaplan, born in 1880 in Belarus, wrote his "Megillat yissurin" ("Scroll of Suffering") in the Warsaw ghetto. A Zionist who emphasized the role of history in Jewish culture, he wrote his diary in Hebrew for future historians, but lost his belief in God and feared that his diary may serve no purpose if the entire Jewish nation is annihilated. He was killed in Treblinka in 1942.

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.

The powerful writings and art of Jews living in the Warsaw Ghetto Hidden in metal containers and buried underground during World War II, these works from the Warsaw Ghetto record the Holocaust from the perspective of its first interpreters, the victims themselves. Gathered clandestinely by an underground ghetto collective called Oyneg Shabes, the collection of reportage, diaries, prose, artwork, poems, jokes, and sermons captures the heroism, tragedy, humor, and social dynamics of the ghetto. Miraculously surviving the devastation of war, this extraordinary archive encompasses a vast range of voices—young and old, men and women, the pious and the secular, optimists and pessimists—and chronicles different perspectives on the topics of the day while also preserving rapidly endangered cultural traditions. Described by David G. Roskies as “a civilization responding to its own destruction,” these texts tell the story of the Warsaw Ghetto in real time, against time, and for all time.

A Holocaust expert who survived three Nazi concentration camps recounts the events of the Jewish uprising in Warsaw.