The Warsaw Diary Of Adam Czerniakow

Adam Czerniakow was a Polish Jew who killed himself on July 23, 1942—on the face of it not an uncommon occurrence in those times. But there is more to the story than the tragic death of one man among so many millions. Czerniakow was for almost three years the chairman of the Warsaw Judenrat—a Jew, devoted to his people, who served as the Nazi-sponsored “mayor” of the Warsaw Ghetto. His personal dealings with the German authorities bring to this daily record of events a depth of knowledge, accuracy of detail, and panorama of view that was possible to no other participant in the epic prelude to the final doom of the largest captive Jewish community in Eastern Europe. This secret journal is not only the testimony of an unbearable personal burden but the documentary of the Ghetto’s terminal agony. It is the most important diary to emerge from the Holocaust.

The classic firsthand account of life and death in the Warsaw ghetto.

A story of one of the few survivors of the Warsaw Ghetto and of an underground existence in the non-Jewish part of the city during the Second World War. Based entirely on the author's original diary, rediscovered twenty years after the war, Michael Zylberberg tells of the ghetto uprising and the Polish uprising of General Bor-Komorowski; of the moral conflicts of the Poles who helped the Jews and those who betrayed them. There is valuable historical detail never before revealed, as in the chapters on the educationalist and martyr, Janusz Korczak and tales of the author's last-minute escapes and desperate games of bluff, when he posed as a Catholic and a Polish Officer.

Offers a description of daily life for Jews sealed off by the Nazis in a large section of Warsaw