Salvaged Pages: Young Writers' Diaries of the Holocaust

by Alexandra Zapruder (Editor)

Overview

Winner of the National Jewish Book Award: viewing the Holocaust through the eyes of youth
 
“Zapruder . . . has done a great service to history and the future. Her book deserves to become a standard in Holocaust studies classes. . . . These writings will certainly impress themselves on the memories of all readers.”—Publishers Weekly
 
“These extraordinary diaries will resonate in the reader’s broken heart for many days and many nights.”—Elie Wiesel
 
This stirring collection of diaries written by young people, aged twelve to twenty-two years, during the Holocaust has been fully revised and updated. Some of the writers were refugees, others were in hiding or passing as non-Jews, some were imprisoned in ghettos, and nearly all perished before liberation. This seminal National Jewish Book Award winner preserves the impressions, emotions, and eyewitness reportage of young people whose accounts of daily events and often unexpected thoughts, ideas, and feelings serve to deepen and complicate our understanding of life during the Holocaust.
 
The second paperback edition includes a new preface by Alexandra Zapruder examining the book’s history and impact. Simultaneously, a multimedia edition incorporates a wealth of new content in a variety of media, including photographs of the writers and their families, images of the original diaries, artwork made by the writers, historical documents, glossary terms, maps, survivor testimony (some available for the first time), and video of the author teaching key passages. In addition, an in-depth, interdisciplinary curriculum in history, literature, and writing developed by the author and a team of teachers, working in cooperation with the educational organization Facing History and Ourselves, is now available to support use of the book in middle- and high-school classrooms.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780300205992
Publisher:	Yale University Press
Publication date:	08/25/2015
Edition description:	Second Edition
Pages:	536
Product dimensions:	6.10(w) x 9.20(h) x 4.30(d)

About the Author

Alexandra Zapruder was on the founding staff of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum and was writer and co-producer of I’m Still Here, an award-winning documentary for young people based on Salvaged Pages.

Read an Excerpt

1) When fear crawls out in the evenings from all four corners, when the winter storm raging outside tells you it is winter, and that it is difficult to live in the winter, when my soul trembles at the sight of distant fantasies, I shiver and say one word with every heartbeat, every pulse, every piece of my soul—liberation.
(— from the diary of Elsa Binder, Stanis_awów ghetto, 1942; the diary breaks off midsentence; she surely perished, but the exact circumstances of her death are unknown)

2) It dawned on me that today is my birthday. Today I became 15 years old…. Must I day in day out see the walled-up ghetto gate, must I in my best years see only the one little street, the few stuffy courtyards?… I wish to shout to time to linger, not to run. I wish to recapture my past year and keep it for later, for the new life.
(— from the diary of Yitskhok Rudashevski, Vilna ghetto, Lithuania, December 10, 1942; he was killed in 1943)

Table of Contents

Preface to the Second Edition ix

Acknowledgments to the Second Edition xix

Acknowledgments to the First Edition xxiii

Editor's Note xxvii

Introduction 1

1 Klaus Langer: Essen, Germany 13

2 Elisabeth Kaufmann: Paris, France 37

3 Peter Feigl: France 63

4 Moshe Flinker: Brussels, Belgium 90

5 Otto Wolf: Olomouc, Czechoslovakia 122

6 Petr Ginz and Eva Ginzová: Terezín Ghetto 160

7 Yitskhok Rudashevski: Vilna Ghetto 190

8 Anonymous Girl: Lódz Ghetto 226

9 Miriam Korber: Transnistria 243

10 Dawid Rubinowicz: Krajno, Poland 271

11 Elsa Binder: Stanislawów, Poland 301

12 Ilya Gerber: Kovno Getto 329

13 Anonymous Boy: Lódz Ghetto 361

14 Alice Ehrmann: Terezín Ghetto 395

Appendix I Young Diarists of the Holocaust 425

Appendix II At the Margins 447

Notes 455

Sources and Translators 479

Index of Names 481

Index of Subjects 487

Editorial Reviews

"Zapruder . . . has done a great service to history and the future. Her book deserves to become a standard in Holocaust studies classes. . . . These writings will certainly impress themselves on the memories of all readers."—Publishers Weekly

"In the best of scenarios, when a book is reissued in a second edition, it’s because so much new scholarship has been created around the topic that the first set of pages just cry out for expansion and even reinvention. This is certainly the case with Salvaged Pages, [in this] readable, informative, and enlightening edition."—Jewish Book Council

"These extraordinary diaries will resonate in the reader’s broken heart for many days and many nights."—Elie Wiesel

"Salvaged Pages offers important perspectives for today’s Holocaust education students. The voices of young adults during the Holocaust resonate in a way that can’t be replicated by other resources."—Jennifer L. Goss, Robert E. Lee High School

"Salvaged Pages shares the despair, frustrations, hopes, and loves of young adults who struggle mightily with the impact of the hatred and indifference of their neighbors. My students are enthralled."—Lynne Ravas, Lower Dauphin Middle School

"Salvaged Pages is a window into the private world of young diarists existing under Nazi occupation. Readers cannot help but respond to the humanity of writers in a world whose deprivations we can only begin to comprehend through their own words."—Elaine Culbertson, Director, Holocaust and Jewish Resistance Teachers’ Program

"A searing collection of Jewish youngsters’ private Holocaust diaries, Salvaged Pages shines a bright light on their daily lives and their inner lives. Zapruder offers us the opportunity follow these child and adolescent writers as they endured and responded to an ever harsher Nazi regime. Salvaged Pages gives us a glimpse, too, of the unfulfilled potential lost with the murder of a generation. A key text for teachers and students alike, Salvaged Pages enriches our understanding of how life was lived and lives were destroyed, day by day, year after year."—Debórah Dwork, Director, Strassler Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies, Clark University

From the Publisher

“In the best of scenarios, when a book is reissued in a second edition, it’s because so much new scholarship has been created around the topic that the first set of pages just cry out for expansion and even reinvention. This is certainly the case with Salvaged Pages, [in this] readable, informative, and enlightening” edition.”—Jewish Book Council

Jewish Book Council

[D]eserves to become a standard in Holocaust studies . . . These writings will certainly impress themselves on the memories of all readers.

Publishers Weekly