In the past few weeks much of the nation has been beset by unusually cold and snowy weather. In fact, this January was the coldest such month in the contiguous United States since 1988. Nearly everyone has been discomfited in one way or another. Even here in western North Carolina, the so-called Isothermal Belt, where …
Today’s news headline: “Alerts for cold weather are in effect for nearly half the U.S. population, running from the northern Plains to the Gulf Coast and the Rockies to the Southwest.” As you’re reading this blog you are probably one of the many millions who qualify for the above weather alert. Even here in western …
With much of the U.S. once again facing a winter onslaught, I thought it might be worth revisiting and republishing a blog I wrote three years ago during a similar case of winter’s fury: the Bomb Cyclone of 2018. Sadly, my fears of antisemitism have only grown stronger in the interval. Here it is. So …
“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.
