Today is Odd Nansen’s 120th birthday. Nansen has been described in many ways: humanitarian; architect; diarist; man of character. In my Introduction to From Day to Day: One Man’s Diary of Survival in Nazi Concentration Camps, I use the same words Primo Levi used to describe his friend Alberto Dalla Volta, whom Levi credits with …
Today is Marit (Nansen) Greve’s birthday. She would have been 93 years old. Odd Nansen wrote about Marit in his diary on November 8, 1944, while in Sachsenhausen, using “fiskerjente,” meaning “fisher girl” as a term of endearment. After all, she had often accompanied him in the prewar era when he went out fishing, something …
Seventy-six years ago today, Tom Buergenthal arrived at a Jewish orphanage in Otwock, Poland. [Located 14 miles southeast of Warsaw, Otwock had been the site of a Jewish Ghetto earlier in the war. By September 1942 the Ghetto’s inhabitants, numbering 12-15,000, had all been murdered.]. Tom had just spent the better part of 6+ months, …
The following is an updated version of a blog I first posted in 2018. Today is Fridtjof Nansen’s 160th birthday. I recently revisited the incredible account of his quest for the North Pole, Farthest North, in anticipation of a lecture I gave on the same subject. The first time I had read it was back in 2010, …
No sooner than I had just finished posting a new blog describing my recent article in the Scandinavian Review about Odd Nansen and his art world, featuring fellow Grini prisoner Per Krohg, among others, I learned yesterday about a new play called “The Bøyg,” written by A.J. Ditty. According to Ditty, the ostensible protagonist in …
Those of you who have read From Day to Day know full well Odd Nansen’s artistry. In 41 illustrations Nansen depicts in great detail the squalid, dangerous life of a concentration camp prisoner. Where did Nansen develop his artistic ideas and technique? Recently I was approached by the Scandinavian Review to write an article about …
My recent blogs about Jan Karski and Otto Frank generated an unusual amount of feedback from my readers, and I appreciate hearing from so many of you. It has been a while since I mentioned serendipity, but it seems that it has been hard at work again! Bep Voskuijl No sooner had I posted my …
Millions of people worldwide have read the diary of Anne Frank. By now it has been translated into 70 languages, and regularly appears on many schools’ reading lists. Millions more, without having ever read the book, know many of the basic facts of her life story. How Anne received a diary on her 13th birthday, …
…….was the word. Actually, many of them. About 300,000 to be accurate. While still in high school I adopted a practice I learned from the father of one of my school friends: writing on the front endpaper of one’s book one’s name and the date they started reading said book. I later began to add …
Seventy-seven years ago today Thomas Buergenthal, age 10, entered Auschwitz-Birkenau along with his parents. Originally the site of a Polish army barracks (inhabited briefly by Jan Karski), Auschwitz was developed by the Nazis into the largest and deadliest concentration/extermination camp ever. Approximately 1.1 million people—the population of Salt Lake City or Memphis—were murdered there. Of …
“I want to thank Tim Boyce for this . . . . It would be lost to history if people like Tim Boyce did not devote the effort and time and expense–a good part of his life–to preserve the Odd Nansen story. It is a moving and gripping story. . . .”
–U.S. Senator Richard Blumenthal
Hailed by The New Yorker as “among the most compelling documents to come out of the war,” From Day to Day is a World War II concentration camp diary—one of only a handful ever translated into English—secretly written by Odd Nansen, a Norwegian political prisoner. Arrested in January 1942, Nansen, son of polar explorer and humanitarian Fridtjof Nansen (Nobel Peace Prize 1922) was held captive for the duration of the war in various Nazi camps in Norway and Germany.
Nansen’s diary entries detail his palpable longing for his wife and family, his constantly frustrated hopes for release, the quiet strength and sometimes ugly prejudices of his fellow prisoners, and his horror at the especially barbaric treatment reserved for the Jews. The diary brilliantly illuminates Nansen’s daily struggle, not only to survive, but to preserve his sanity and maintain his humanity in a world engulfed by fear and hate.
First published in English in 1949, From Day to Day had been out of print for almost seventy years. The new edition contains entries and sketches never previously available in English. It also features a new introduction and extensive annotations by Timothy Boyce and a preface by Thomas Buergenthal, whose life (as a ten year-old) Nansen saved while in Sachsenhausen, later recounted in his own memoir A Lucky Child: A Memoir of Surviving Auschwitz as a Young Boy.
