Name: 1940 – The evacuation of Dunkirk begins
Start: 2025-05-24T00:00:00-04:00
End: 2025-05-24T23:59:59-04:00

1940 – Winston Churchill, in his first address to the House of Commons as Prime Minister, tells his audience “I have nothing to offer but blood, toil, tears and sweat.”

May 13, 2025 1940 – Winston Churchill, in his first address to the House of Commons as Prime Minister, tells his audience “I have nothing to offer but blood, toil, tears and sweat.”

From Day to Day: One Man’s Diary of Survival in Nazi Concentration Camps

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“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.

On this day in history

May 2025

2012 – Gunnar Sonsteby, Norway’s most highly decorated resistance fighter, dies, age 94

1934 – Thomas Buergenthal born in Ĺubochňa, Czechoslovakia

1960 – Adolf Eichmann is captured in Buenos Aires, Argentina

1943 – Franklin Roosevelt and Winston Churchill meet in Washington, DC, at the Trident Conference, to discuss Allied strategy

1930 – Odd Nansen’s father Fridtjof Nansen dies at Polhøgda (age 68)

1940 – Winston Churchill, in his first address to the House of Commons as Prime Minister, tells his audience “I have nothing to offer but blood, toil, tears and sweat.”

1944 – The deportation of Hungarian Jews to Auschwitz commences

1943 – The Warsaw Ghetto Uprising ends

1933 – Vidkun Quisling founds Nasjonal Samling (NS) Party in Norway

1944 – Monte Cassino, Italy finally captured, after six-month struggle

1943 – President Franklin Roosevelt and Winston Churchill fix May 1, 1944, as the date for the cross-channel invasion

1940 – The evacuation of Dunkirk begins

Events

May 2025

From Day to Day: One Man’s Diary of Survival in Nazi Concentration Camps