“I believe it will be hard for posterity, indeed for other people at all, to grasp the depth of suffering and horror of which Auschwitz has been the frame. Still less will it be possible to understand those who have survived it. That they can remain human beings, think and feel like human beings. One …
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 …
“They’re bombing and bombing, more and more and oftener and oftener.” Odd Nansen’s Diary April 12, 1944 Sachsenhausen Odd Nansen wasn’t exaggerating when he wrote the above diary entry. The Allied bombing effort over Germany had gone from a trickle in the early years of the war to a deluge by 1944. The combined RAF …
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, …
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 …
There are some people whose experiences during World War II are so fantastical, so filled with drama and danger, that one wonders how they managed to simply keep going. Jan Karski is one such man. Karski, described by British historian Michael Burleigh as “one of the bravest men of the war,” and whose life was …
Today is International Holocaust Remembrance Day, or, more formally, the International Day of Commemoration in Memory of the Victims of the Holocaust. The date, set by UN Resolution, corresponds to the day that Auschwitz, the largest and deadliest concentration the Nazis ever built, was finally liberated. Approximately 1.1million prisoners, of which 1 million were Jews, …
As dates go, the first two days of August 1944 seem to me unusually fraught. Many things changed irrevocably—most for the worse, only a few for the better. ANNE On Tuesday, August 1, 1944, Anne Frank wrote in her diary to her imaginary friend Kitty. To Kitty, and only to Kitty, could Anne confide all …
Today, January 27, marks the 75th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz. The anniversary has been designated by the United Nations as International Holocaust Remembrance Day. As the number of Holocaust survivors dwindles, as does the number of contemporary witnesses, and as antisemitism appears resurgent everywhere, even and especially here in the U.S., one is …
Seventy-five years ago today (August 2, 1944), Thomas Buergenthal, age 10, entered Auschwitz, the largest and most lethal concentration camp the Nazis ever built, and the symbolic heart of the Holocaust. Tom was immediately separated from his mother Gerda—thereafter he was to see her only once, through the wire, before she was transported to Ravensbrück, …
“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.
