Cover of Numbered Days

Numbered Days

"As the Nazis swept across Europe during World War II, Jewish victims wrote diaries in which they grappled with the terror unfolding around them. Some wrote simply to process the contradictory bits of news they received; some wrote so that their children, already safe in another country, might one day understand what had happened to their parents; and some wrote to furnish unknown readers in the outside world with evidence against the Nazi regime." "Were these diarists resisters, or did the process of writing make the ravages of the Holocaust even more difficult to bear? Drawing on an array of unpublished and published diaries from all over German-occupied Europe, historian Alexandra Garbarini explores the multiple roles that diary writing played in the lives of these ordinary women and men. A story of hope and hopelessness, Numbered Days offers an examination of the complex interplay of writing and mourning. And in these heartbreaking diaries, we see the first glimpses of a question that would haunt the twentieth century: Can such unimaginable horror be represented at all?"—Jacket.

Audience
adult
Length
medium · 288 pages

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“If you want more of the same (history about jewish), start with these.”

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  2. The Diary of Mary Berg: Growing up in the Warsaw Ghetto
  3. Columbia University Library, Manuscript Division, New York: Varian Fry Papers
  4. The Holocaust, never to be forgotten

“If it was the World War II that hooked you, try one of these.”

  1. Anne Frank (Diary of Anne Frank / Excerpts from Anne Frank)
  2. Bittere kruid
  3. The Seven, A Family Holocaust Story
  4. Renia's Diary

“These start from a similar idea, even if they go somewhere else with it.”

  1. Nella Last in the 1950s: The Further Diaries of Housewife, 49
  2. Spaces in Her Day
  3. The small details of life
  4. Children in the Holocaust and World War II: Their Secret Diaries