Diaries of victims of war and violence

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Diaries of victims of war and violence were created as personal records of people who were victims of war , violence and persecution . Among the diaries from the time of National Socialism , the diary of Anne Frank in particular achieved worldwide fame.

Diaries of Nazi victims

The Polish Rutka Laskier describes the Holocaust similar to Anne Frank from the perspective of a young girl. Her diary was only published more than 60 years after her death in Auschwitz . The Polish boy Dawid Rubinowicz , the German literary scholar Victor Klemperer , the Romanian writer Mihail Sebastian and the Dutch teacher Etty Hillesum also wrote down their impressions of the threat of the Holocaust.

A lesser known victim of the Holocaust was the Czechoslovakian Jew Věra Kohnová . At a young age she kept a diary that was shaped by the fate of the Jews in the Holocaust. However, she focused on her personal feelings. After her death in the concentration camp, it took 65 years for her notes to be released for publication.

The 15-year-old Moravian Jew Otto Wolf began to keep a diary after the family fled before being transported to Theresienstadt in June 1942. It was published in 1997 and is the only one that describes the life of a Jewish family in hiding in the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia .

The Dutch Jew Moshe Ze'ev Flinker (Maurice Wolf Flinker) was also a victim of National Socialism. He and his parents died in Auschwitz in 1944. His diary was published in Hebrew in 1958 . An English translation of Young Moshe's Diary: The Spiritual Torment of a Jewish Boy in Nazi Europe followed in 1965. Since 2008, Moshe's diary has also been available in German under the title Even if I hope: The diary of Moshe Flinker .

In January 2008, the diary of the Jew Hélène Berr appeared in France , who is compared to Anne Frank in her home country.

The Russian girl Tatyana Nikolaevna Savicheva was not a direct victim of the genocide of the Jews. Your notes consist of only a few pages, but show in a dramatic way the suffering of the people in Leningrad, besieged by Germans . The author describes how almost her whole family - weakened by hunger - gradually dies.

I have to tell is the diary of the Lithuanian Jew Mascha Rolnikaitė , who was born in 1927 and survived imprisonment in a concentration camp. She published her partly lost records for the first time in 1963 under the censorship conditions of the Soviet Union.

The diary of the Hungarian girl Éva Heyman was posthumously revised by her mother Ágnes Zsolt and published in Budapest in 1948. The German translation was published in 2012 under the title Das Rote Fahrrad and describes the situation of a thirteen-year-old in Oradea before being deported to Auschwitz.

Diaries of victims of other wars

Diaries are also known from other wars. The Bosnian Zlata Filipović , for example, describes the war in Sarajevo from the perspective of an innocent child. Because of some (controversial) parallels, the media referred to her as "Anne Frank of Sarajevo".

Diaries from Soviet Russia

The book The Gulag Archipelago is on the one hand the author's autobiography, but was also inspired by the diaries of other Gulag victims.

Individual evidence

  1. "Even if I hope" The diary of Mosche Flinker - article at dradio.de, accessed on June 21, 2010