The diary of Mary Berg Growing up in the Warsaw ghetto

The book was first published in the U.S. in 1945 as Warsaw Ghetto: A Diary, and now it is in an expanded edition. The author, a Jew, was 15 when Hitler invaded Poland in 1939. From then until she arrived in the U.S. with her parents and sister in March 1944, Berg kept a diary recounting her years in the Warsaw ghetto, prison detention in Warsaw, internment in France, and the trip aboard a mercy ship contracted by the U.S. Berg recorded her eyewitness account in 12 notebooks that she smuggled out of Europe. In describing the ghetto, for instance, Berg wrote, In the streets, frozen human corpses are an increasingly frequent sight. Many mothers often sit with children wrapped in rags from which protrude red frostbitten little feet. Sometimes a child huddles against a mother, thinking that she is asleep and trying to awaken her, while, in fact, she is dead. The richness of Berg's memories and the intensity of her experiences record for posterity a chilling account of childhood during the Holocaust. --George Cohen Copyright 2007 Booklist

Today I am fifteen years old. I feel very old and lonely.... Everyone is afraid to go out. The Germans are here." So begins this extraordinary memoir of Jewish life in Lodz, Poland, and the Warsaw ghetto as the Nazis began to liquidate its starving and disease-ridden inmates. In 1940 Berg fled Lodz with her parents and sister. They lived in the Warsaw ghetto, and in July 1942 were transferred to Pawiak prison within the ghetto. Originally published in the U.S. in February 1945, the memoir is based on notebooks that Mary Berg (nee Wattenberg) smuggled out of Europe when she and her interned family were traded for German prisoners and sailed to America. This powerful testament documents Nazi brutalities, and the difference between those without means, who starved and died of typhus, and the more privileged, like Berg's family (her mother was American and her father relatively wealthy), who, for a time, were able to patronize ghetto cafes and attend the theater. Berg is a remarkably clear-eyed, skillful and heart-breaking recorder of those terrible years. 23 illus. (Apr. 12) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved