Lvov Ghetto Diary

Originally published in Hebrew, this memoir bears witness to the systematic destruction of some 135,000 Jews in the Ukranian city of Lvov during the Holocaust. The author, a rabbi, escaped death because he was hidden by the Ukranian archbishop of the Uniate Catholic Church. His wife and young daughter were also given refuge, separately, in Catholic convents. The memoir covers the period from July 1, 1941, when the Germans occupied Lvov, to July 27, 1944, when the city was liberated. In the first part of the book, the author is living in the Jewish ghetto under increasingly dire circumstances; in the second part, he is imprisoned in a forced labour camp; and in the third part, following his escape, he is hiding under the protection of Metropolitan Sheptytskyi.

Reprint. Originally published: New York: Holocaust Library, c1978.

The information has been methodically collected and divided [giving] the reader a clear pictureThe analysis of the Holocaust period is enriched by accounts from the human aspect, which further our understanding of the individuals action and their motives.Prof. Dina Porat, the Stephen Roth Institute for the Study of Contemporary Anti-Semitism and Racism, Tel Aviv UniversityA comprehensive work on the third largest Jewish community in Poland during the Nazi occupationThe research constitutes an important contribution to the history of the Holocaust in general and to the history of Polish and Ukrainian Jewry of this period in particular.Prof. Israel Gutman, the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, and former Head Historian, Yad VashemAn exceedingly thorough examination.The [book] includes an important section on the many labor camps in East Galicia, which except for the Janowska camp, have not been fully dealt with in research studies.Dr. Yitzchak Arad, former Executive Director, Yad Vashem

Dr. Kessler, a Jewish attorney from Lwow, Poland, gives an eyewitness account of the Holocaust through the events recorded in his diary. In vivid, raw, documentary style, he describes his experiences in the Lwow Ghetto, the Janowska Concentration Camp, and in an underground bunker where he and 23 other Jews were hidden by a courageous Polish farmer and his family.

This remarkable chronicle of life and death in the Jewish Ghetto of Kovno, Lithuania, from June 1941 to January 1944, was written under conditions of extreme danger by a Ghetto inmate and secretary of the Jewish Council. After the war, in order to escape from Lithuania, the author was forced to entrust the diary to leaders of the Escape movement; eventually it made its way to his new home in Israel. The diary incorporates Avraham Tory’s collections of official documents, Jewish Council reports, and original photographs and drawings made in the Ghetto. It depicts in grim detail the struggle for survival under Nazi domination, when—if not simply carted off and murdered in a random “action”—Jews were exploited as slave labor while being systematically starved and denied adequate housing and medical care. Through it all, Tory’s overriding purpose was to record the unimaginable events of these years and to memorialize the determination of the Jews to sustain their community life in the midst of the Nazi terror. Of the surviving diaries originating in the principal European Ghettos of this period, Tory’s is the longest written by an adult, a dramatic and horrifying document that makes an invaluable contribution to contemporary history. Tory provides an insider’s view of the desperate efforts of Ghetto leaders to protect Jews. Martin Gilbert’s masterly introduction establishes the authenticity of the diary, presents its events against the backdrop of the war in Europe, and considers the crucial questions of collaboration and resistance.

Published by the University of Nebraska Press, Lincoln, and Yad Vashem, Jerusalem The Holocaust in the Soviet Union is the most complete account to date of the Soviet Jews during the World War II and the Holocaust (1941-45). Reports, records, documents, and research previously unavailable in English enable Yitzhak Arad to trace the Holocaust in the German-occupied territories of the Soviet Union through three separate periods in which German political and military goals in the occupied territories dictated the treatment of the Jews. Arad's examination of the differences between the Holocaust in the Soviet Union compared to other European nations reveals how Nazi ideological attacks on the Soviet Union, which included war on "Judeo-Bolshevism," led to harsher treatment of Jews in the Soviet Union than in most other occupied territories. This historical narrative presents a wealth of information from German, Russian, and Jewish archival sources that will be invaluable to scholars, researchers, and the general public for years to come.

“The most comprehensive to date treatment of these precious artifacts of the Holocaust’s Jewish efforts to maintain religious observations and identity.” —Choice Calendars map time, shaping and delineating our experience of it. While the challenges to tracking Jewish conceptions of time during the Holocaust were substantial, Alan Rosen reveals that many took great risks to mark time within that vast upheaval. Rosen inventories and organizes Jewish calendars according to the wartime settings in which they were produced—from Jewish communities to ghettos and concentration camps. The calendars he considers reorient views of Jewish circumstances during the war and show how Jews were committed to fashioning traditional guides to daily life, even in the most extreme conditions. In a separate chapter, moreover, he elucidates how Holocaust-era diaries sometimes served as surrogate Jewish calendars. All in all, Rosen presents a revised idea of time, continuity, the sacred and the mundane, the ordinary and the extraordinary even when death and destruction were the order of the day. Rosen’s focus on the Jewish calendar—the ultimate symbol of continuity, as weekday follows weekday and Sabbath follows Sabbath—sheds new light on how Jews maintained connections to their way of conceiving time even within the cauldron of the Holocaust. “Rosen demonstrates the relationship between time and meaning, between meaning and holiness, between holy days and the divine presence―all of which came under assault in the Nazis’ effort to kill Jewish souls before destroying Jewish bodies.” —David Patterson, author of Along the Edge of Annihilation: The Collapse and Recovery of Life in the Holocaust Diary

The Diary of Samuel Golfard and the Holocaust in Galicia examines the contents and context of a rare diary written by a Jewish man from Nazi-occupied Poland. Serving as both a record and an artifact of Samuel Golfard’s life, the diary details his attempt to make sense of and resist the event that ultimately destroyed him. Wendy Lower integrates photographs, newspaper articles, documents, and testimonies to create a more complete picture of Golfard’s experiences and writings. She also traces the diary’s own journey after Golfard’s death, from 1943 Poland to the present day.