Author(s): Emmanuel Ringelblum

History

This is the moving account of the horror of the Warsaw Ghetto -- written by the recognised archivist and historian of the area while he lived through it. Through anecdotes, stories, and notations -- some as brief as was slapped today in Zlota Street -- there emerges the agonising, eyewitness accounts of human beings caught in the furore 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.