Mary Berg. Warsaw Ghetto: A Diary. Edited by S. L. Shneiderman.

(HOLOCAUST).

Martin Press for L.B. Fischer

New York

1945

FIRST EDITION. With dust-jacket designed by the Author.

The diary of Mary Berg was among the first eye-witness accounts of the Warsaw Ghetto tragedy. Berg, the daughter of a Polish-Jewish art dealer, began her diary on her fifteenth birthday, shortly after the Germans invaded Poland in 1939. She was imprisoned in the Warsaw Ghetto the next year. From the Ghetto’s beginnings in the winter of 1940, Berg recorded the Jews struggle to continue daily life amidst ever-increasing hunger, restrictions, and Nazi sadism. She witnessed the Great Deportation in July 1942 (in which 300,000 Jews were “driven like cattle to the Umschlagplatz on Stawki Street to their death”) from the windows of Pawiak Prison in which her family were held due to the American citizenship of Berg’s mother. In 1943, her family was sent to an internment camp in France, and a year later they were exchanged for German prisoners and received papers for the United States. Soon after her arrival, Berg rewrote her diary from the original shorthand and prepared it for publication with the help of S. L. Shneiderman. It was first published as a Yiddish serial in 1944 and L. B. Fischer published the book in English in 1945. However Mary Berg disassociated herself from Shneiderman in 1957 and has attempted to fade from view since. The diary, despite its acclaim, has never been reprinted in English since 1945. (Source: University of Maryland Libraries website).