Diary depicts Warsaw Jewish revolt

JERUSALEM - As flames engulfed the Warsaw ghetto in its last days in 1943, a young Jewish woman hiding from Nazi soldiers kept a journal about her fight to survive in a cramped basement.

The six-page diary, apparently the only account written during the uprising that survived the battle, has surfaced at a Holocaust museum in Israel.

The monthlong uprising by a few dozen desperate, starving Jews holding their own against the Nazis is one of the best known tales of Jewish heroism from the ashes of the Holocaust.

The author, who didn't give her name and whose fate is unknown, described a nine-day period during the uprising. She lived on a bowl of soup and a cup of coffee a day. Outside, the Germans were burning down houses.

"The ghetto is burning for the fourth day," she wrote. "You see only chimneys standing and the skeletons of burnt houses. At the first moment, the visions arouse a horrible chill."

She wrote in neat Polish handwriting on graph paper. She never mentioned her name, disclosing only that she was a member of a Jewish youth group, indicating that she was in her late teens or early 20s.

The pages are part of a large collection of letters, notes and pages collected after the war by Adolf-Abraham Berman, a survivor of the ghetto and leader of the Jewish Underground who moved to Israel after the war.

Berman donated the artifacts in the 1970s to the Ghetto Fighters House at Kibbutz Lochamei Haghettaot, a communal village in northern Israel. Experts at the museum realized the importance of the pages only recently, while organizing the Berman archive for release to the public.

"The uniqueness of this diary is that it is the only one found in the world, that we know of, that was written right at the time of the fighting," said Yossi Shavit, director of the museum's archives. "The other diaries were written afterward."

The Warsaw ghetto was established in Nazi-occupied Poland in 1940. Jews from surrounding areas were forced into it. At its peak in the spring of 1941, about 450,000 Jews lived on its 740 acres. Most died of starvation or were killed in gas chambers.

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