“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 …
“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 is with deep sorrow that I write to inform you that my dear friend, Tom Buergenthal, died on Monday, May 29, 2023. He had just recently turned 89. Tom’s obituary can be found here. I am currently at a loss for words, but will write more soon.
On this date in 1945, the Ohrdruf concentration camp was liberated. This is notable for three reasons: FIRST: Thomas Buergenthal’s father Mundek died in Ohrdruf just weeks earlier, on January 15, 1945. Tom and Mundek were separated in Auschwitz in late October, 1944, when Mundek was moved to Sachsenhausen, arriving there on October 26, 1944. …
On this date in 1922 the Permanent Court of International Justice, a/k/a the World Court, officially opened. The need for a supranational body to resolve disputes between nations had been recognized—and proposed—as long ago as 1305. Nevertheless, it took the carnage of the First World War to provide the impetus for actually establishing such a …
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 …
Today is Anne Frank’s birthday. Had she lived, she would be 93 years old. The exact date and cause of her death are unknown, although it is now believed that she succumbed in late February, 1945, probably to a disease such as typhus. Anne, her family, and the other inhabitants of the secret annex in …
Today marks Yom HaShoah, or Holocaust Remembrance Day. We vow never to forget, and never to let it happen again. Today also happens to be the 77th anniversary of the final entry in Odd Nansen’s diary, From Day to Day: “What on earth am I to write? It’s as impossible today as on all the …
Let’s face it: 2021 was not the year most of us will remember fondly. The fears, the disrupted plans, the false dawns. Yes, 2021 is best left behind as soon as possible. But even at the end of a bad year there are always a few bright spots worth noting. I. A Mother and Child …
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, …
“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.
