On this day in 1951 Thomas Buergenthal first set foot on American soil. He was 17 years-old. During a good part of those 17 years Tom had successfully defeated the Nazis’ best efforts to murder him, whether through the liquidation of the Kielce Ghetto, internment in Auschwitz-Birkenau, or participation in the Auschwitz Death March. But …
It isn’t often that one gets to write the words “heart-warming” and “Sachsenhausen” in the same sentence, but here’s a rare occasion: a reunion by two 97-year-old Holocaust survivors who lost track of each other back in 1943, but reunited for the first time–by accident no less–recently. Click here for the full story. A heart-warming …
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, …
From the November 2018 issue of Smithsonian Magazine: https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/astonishing-holocaust-diary-hidden-world-70-years-resurfaced-america-180970534/?fbclid=IwAR0dSgjl9xk0oeJLVivob9K4hP1azB9iJeJ8psQg5ORxeoOwsvyR_ugWR94
Today, one day following International Holocaust Remembrance Day, the Washington Post published a news story about the Polish government’s passage of a law “making it a criminal offense to mention Polish complicity in crimes committed during the Holocaust.” According to Polish Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki, the law is intended, not to “whitewash history, but to safeguard …
“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.
