3 Review(s)

Notes from the Warsaw Ghetto is available now for the first time in a soft cover edition. It is the moving account of the horror of the Warsaw Ghetto—written by the recognized archivist and historian of the area while he lived through it. As a source of history the Notes are invaluable, with a truth and immediacy no fictionalized version could attain. Through anecdotes, stories, and notations—some as brief as "was slapped today in Zlota Street," some merely fragments of incidents and thoughts Ringelblum intended to expand after the liberation of Warsaw—there emerges the agonizing, eyewitness accounts of human beings caught in the furor of senseless, unrelenting brutality. In the Journal, there is the whole of life in the Ghetto, from the erection of the Wall, in November 1940, for "hygienic reasons," through the brief period of deceptive calm to the eventual mass murders. It is a portrait of man tested by crisis, stained at times by the meanness of avarice and self-preservation, illumined more often by moments of nobility.