“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 …
“The day before yesterday eight thousand fresh prisoners arrived in camp. On that account we’ve had to move still closer together. It’s impossible for more than half, at the highest estimate, to sit down to meals, and I daren’t even think how much air we have at our disposal per head. I’ll work it out …
“Warsaw will be falling this week, one should imagine, and then it isn’t far to the German frontier!” —–Odd Nansen’s diary, Sunday, July 30, 1944 Would that it were so. Warsaw was not liberated in the week following Nansen’s post. In fact, it was not liberated, by elements of the Red Army and First Polish …
Eighty years ago today, Odd Nansen arrived at the Sachsenhausen concentration camp in Oranienburg, Germany, approximately twenty-five miles north of Berlin. After a practical joke went awry, and became a contest of wills between Nansen and head of the protective custody camp called Grini, located outside of Oslo, Norway, Nansen was informed by the Schutzhaftlagerführer: …
“Your cause of sorrow must not be measured by his worth, for then it hath no end.” Macbeth, Act V, Scene viii I first met Tom Buergenthal—or rather—he first met me, in January 2011. As my readers know, a year earlier I had purchased Tom’s newly published memoir, A Lucky Child, on an impulse. …
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 …
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, …
Today marks the 76th anniversary of the liberation of Sachsenhausen Concentration Camp. I can’t think of a better way to observe it than to republish the post I wrote one year ago: April 22, 1945: Thomas Buergenthal Liberated Seventy-five years ago today, Polish and Russian armed forces liberated Sachsenhausen Concentration Camp, and with it, Thomas …
“Yet such is oft the course of deeds that move the wheels of the world: small hands do them because they must, while the eyes of the great are elsewhere.” The Lord of the Rings I have a confession to make: I am a big fan of J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings (LOTR …
“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.
