Using Young Writers’ Diaries in the Classroom

Alexandra Zapruder

INTRODUCTION

  • Overview: research and recognition of the genre

Broad suggestions for using diaries in the classroom

HISTORY: WARTIME EXPERIENCES

Exile (life as refugee; mechanics of flight; loss of home, language, family; adaptation to foreign culture, foster homes, alien environments)

  • legal emigration (bureaucracy; internal and external impediments; timing)
  • illegal flight (physical dangers and complexities; risk and dependence)

Hiding (going underground, becoming invisible)

  • literal hiding (how to live in the world without leaving a mark; mechanics of complete concealment)
  • passing with false papers (the question of identity; paper as protection; proximity of the enemy; presence of non-Jews living normally)

Ghetto (segregation, imprisonment, and vulnerability; extreme deprivation; complex collective and social existence; privilege and “pull”)

HISTORY: TOPICS AND THEMES

  • moral/ethical complexity of daily life
  • deportations, loss, and separation
  • intellectual, artistic, and cultural activity
  • passage of time; wait for liberation; hope and despair
  • contradictions of liberation and life after the Holocaust

LITERATURE

  • genre(What do diaries have in common? What makes them different from other sources? What do they offer? What don’t they offer?)
  • style and voice (reflection, reporting, chronicling)
  • purpose (why, what, and how they wrote: connections between these three elements. Urge to communicate, to express ideas and feelings; what different kinds of writings yield; the diary as artifact and what it tells us about importance of writing. Connections with young people writing today)

ANNE FRANK

  • What are the strengths of her diary? What are the dangers of relying only on it or any one diary?
  • How does her diary fit among other diaries? In above suggested frameworks?

DIARY CHART

For each diarist, a spreadsheet outline gives the diarist’s name, entry date of diary, subject/style of entry, link to wartime experience and theme or topic illustrated.

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Using Young Writers’ Diaries in the Classroom

Alexandra Zapruder

bibliography of young writers’ diaries

young writers

Bauman, Janina. Winter in the Morning: A Young Girl’s Life in the Warsaw Ghetto and Beyond. New York: The Free Press, 1986

[This is, in fact, a memoir of Mrs. Bauman’s life but it contains extracts of her diary written in the Warsaw Ghetto and in hiding after the family’s escape from there. The original diary was stolen from Mrs. Bauman’s luggage, presumably by Polish authorities, when she emigrated from Poland to Israel in 1968. The only surviving part of her diary are a series of extracts that had been copied by her mother at an earlier date.]

*Berg, Mary. Warsaw Ghetto: A Diary. S.L. Shneiderman, ed. New York: L. B. Fischer Publishing Corporation, 1945.

*Gissing, Vera. Pearls of Childhood. New York: St. Martins, 1988.

*Flinker, Moshe. Young Moshe’s Diary: The Spiritual Torment of a Jewish Boy in Nazi Europe. Shaul Esh and Geoffrey Wigoder, eds. Jerusalem: Yad Vashem, 1965 and 1971.

*Heyman, Eva. The Diary of Eva Heyman. Trans. by Moshe Kohn. Israel: Yad Vashem, 1988. America edition: New York: Shapolsky Publishers, 1974 and 1988.

Jacoby, Ingrid. My Darling Diary: A Wartime Journal – Vienna 1937-39, Falmouth 1939-44. Great Britain: United Writers Publications Ltd., 1998.

*Leiblich, Ruthka. Ruthka: A Diary of War. Translated and edited by Jehoshua and Anna Eibeshitz. New York: Remember, 1993.

Nelken, Halina. And Yet I am Here! Translated by Halina Nelken with Alicia Nitecki. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1999.

Novac, Ana. The Beautiful Days of My Youth: My Six Months in Auschwitz and Plaszów. Translated from the French by George L. Newman. New York: Henry Holt and Co., 1997.

Orsten, Elisabeth M. From Anschluss to Albion: Memoirs of a Refugee Girl 1939-1940. Cambridge: Acorn Edition, 1998.

*Rubinowicz, Dawid. The Diary of Dawid Rubinowicz. Trans. Derek Bowman. Edinburgh: Blackwood, 1981.

*Rudashevski, Yitskhok. The Diary of the Vilna Ghetto. Israel: Ghetto Fighters’ House, 1973.

Sierakowiak, Dawid. The Diary of Dawid Sierakowiak: Five Notebooks from the Lodz Ghetto. Edited by Alan Adelson. Translated by Kamil Turowski. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997

collections

Zapruder, Alexandra. Salvaged Pages: Young Writers’ Diaries of the Holocaust. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2002.

Boas, Jacob. We Are Witnesses. New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1995.

Holliday, Laurel, ed. Children in the Holocaust and World War II: Their Secret Diaries. New York: Pocket Books, 1995.

We Are Children Just the Same: “Vedem,” The Secret Magazine by the Boys of Theresienstadt. Philadelphia and Prague: Jewish Publication Society, 1994.

[Excellent anthology of children’s writings in prose and poetry from Terezin.]

world war II

Ginter, Maria. Life in Both Hands. Translated by P.C. Blauth-Muszowski. London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1964.

*The Kikuchi Diary: Chronicle from an American Concentration Camp. Edited by John Modell. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1973.

Jens, Inge ed., At the Heart of the White Rose: Letter and Diaries of Hans and Sophie Scholl (New York: Harper and Row, 1987)

*Konstantinova, Ina. The Girl from Kashin: Soviet Women in [the] Resistance in World War II. edited and translated by K. J. Cottam. Manhattan, Kan.: MA/AH Publishers, 1984.

*Kosterina, Nina. The Diary of Nina Kosterina. Translated by Mirra Ginsburg. New York: Crown, 1968.

*Malthe-Bruun, Kim. Heroic Heart: The Diary and Letters of Kim Malthe-Bruun, 1941-1945. Vibeke Malthe-Brunn, ed. Translated by Gerry Bothmer. New York: Random House, 1955.

*Perry, Colin. Boy in the Blitz. London: Leo Cooper, Ltd., 1972.

*Phillips, Janina. My Secret Diary. London: Shepheard-Walwyn (Publishers) Ltd., 1982.

Senesh, Hannah. Hannah Senesh: Her Life and Diary. New York: Schocken, 1971.

*Van der Heide, Dirk. My Sister and I. Trans. Mrs. Antoon Deventer. New York: Harcourt, Brace, and Co., Inc., 1941.

*Wyndham, Joan. Love Lessons: A Wartime Diary. London: William Heinemann Ltd., 1985.

* indicates that the book is out of print

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