Sunday, December 12, 2004

"'It looks like the end of the world. Hell has come to earth"

The endgame of the Nazi soldiers in Warsaw was brutally clear: "By 1945, there will not be one Jew left in Europe." Yet, as the residents of the city's Jewish Ghetto began their desperate, doomed 27-day uprising against systematic slaugher, one young woman hiding in a lice-infested, bomb-blasted bunker bagan to record a diary of the last days.

Written from her underground hideout, while fighting raged all around, the six-page journal has only just been unearthed from archives in an Israeli museum. It is now being put on display for the first time at the Ghetto Fighters' House in western Gaililee as the sole surviving contemporary chronicle of life during the 1943 urban insurrection. It begins five days into the revolt and describes in harrowing detail how she and 45 fellow Jews in the shelter are starving, terrified and awaiting certain death.

Read the rest here.

Never Again.


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