Introduction
And it continued. Ten a day, ten thousand Jews a day. That did not last very long. Soon they took fifteen thousand. Warsaw! The city of Jews - the fenced in, walled-in city, Dwindled, expired, melted like snow before my eyes.
- from Yitzak Katzenelson’s The Song of the Murdered Jewish People written 2-3-4 November 1943
On April 19, 1944, Mary Berg began her fight to open American eyes to the Holocaust. On that day, a crowd of thousands gathered at the Warsaw Synagogue in New York and marched to City Hall in commemoration of the first anniversary of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising. Heading the marchers was the Wattenberg family, Shya and Lena and their daughters Mary (Miriam) and Ann, who had escaped the terrible fate of so many European Jews and reached the United States just four weeks earlier. The marchers carried signs reading, "We appeal to the conscience of America to help save those Jews in Poland who can yet be saved," "Avenge the blood of the Polish ghetto" and "Three Million Polish Jews have been murdered by the Nazis! Help us rescue the survivors."[i]
The Wattenbergs had arrived in the United States in March 1944 as repatriates on the S S Gripsholm, an exchange ship leased by the U. S. Department of State from the Swedish American line. S. L. Shneiderman, a Yiddish journalist who had himself escaped Nazi Europe, had met Mary Berg, who was then nineteen years old, on the dock after the ship arrived. He learned she had brought a diary of her and her family’s experiences in the Warsaw Ghetto with her, written in Polish in twelve small, spiral notebooks.
Shneiderman recalls in the preface to the 1983 Polish edition of the diary that:
In a state of awe I read the tiny letters on the densely written pages of her notebooks. Afraid that the books might some day fall into the hands of the Nazis, Mary wrote her notes in a her own form of shorthand, using only initials for the people whose names she mentioned. She never used the word ‘Nazi.’ Instead, she wrote ‘they.’ 2
Nancy Craig, in a radio broadcast on station WJZ in New York, asked Mary how she had managed to bring her diary to the States. She replied, “I developed a sort of code of my own and wrote down the most important facts. Very simply I put them in my valise. Also I memorized all the important dates and names.”[ii] Soon after her arrival, Mary began to rewrite her notes in Polish.
Shneiderman worked closely with Mary for the next several months, deciphering the notebooks and asking her “to explain certain facts and situations which otherwise would have been puzzling not only for American readers but for readers through the world,” apparently amending some spellings and perhaps adding some material. When she knew the persons mentioned had perished, she and Shneiderman changed the initials to full names. For the same reason, the author's surname was shortened to Berg to protect family and friends who might yet be alive in wartime Poland. In Pawiak, Mary had also begun rewriting parts of her diary. For these reasons, it is perhaps most accurate to call her published work “a diary memoir.”
Shneiderman translated the Polish manuscript[iii] into Yiddish, which he published, in serial form, in the Der Morgen zshurnal. He then hired Norbert Guterman, who was born in Poland, and Sylvia Glass, a graduate of Wellesley College, to translate the Polish version into English. Apparently, this version appeared in the P.M. newspaper in New York in serialized form, and in an abridged form in the Jewish Contemporary Record, in the fall of 1944. At about the same time, a German translation of the diary was translated by Mary Graf and appeared in the New York exile newspaper Aufbau [Reconstruction] from 22 September 1944 until 19 January 1945.[iv]
In February 1945, Shneiderman published Mary Berg's full work, Warsaw Ghetto: A Diary, with L.B. Fischer in New York. Mary designed the original dust jacket portraying the brick wall marking the boundary of the Warsaw ghetto. In the foreword to a special edition of the diary, sponsored by the National Organization of Polish Jews, President Joseph Thon outlined Berg and Shneiderman's purpose in publishing the diary. He explained:
The leaders of the United Nations have declared that they would resort to poison gas and bacteriological warfare only if the Germans used these inhuman methods first. The Germans have used these methods to slaughter millions of Jews in Treblinki, Majdanek, Oswiecim, and other camps. But even today the civilized world does not fully realize this fact. It is therefore our duty to make known the horrible truth, to publicize documents and eyewitness accounts that reveal it beyond any doubt.
Mary Berg's diary was published before the war was over, before people in the United States and abroad, and even the diarist herself, knew the enormity of the German crimes and the details of the Final Solution. Moreover, we should remember that as a witness to these crimes against humanity, Mary had arrived in New York before the summer of 1944, when the Hungarian Jews, the last of the European communities, were gassed at Auschwitz, and hope remained that the world’s attention to their plight might lead to rescue.
Mary Berg was not the only witness of these events to testify in English before the end of the war. A few articles and pamphlets were published featuring eye-witness accounts between 1942 and 1943, and firsthand testimony was also included in a book on Polish Jewry in 1943.[v]
However, Mary Berg's diary was the first account to describe the events from the ghetto's establishment through to the first deportations that took place between July and September of 1942 to appear in English as eyewitness testimony. It was also one of the first personal accounts to describe gas being used to kill the Jewish population at Treblinka. In a preface to the diary, Shneiderman pointed out that:
At some future time, we hope, chronicles hidden by writers in the ruins of the Warsaw ghetto will be discovered. Other survivors may be found to give additional testimony to this heroic episode of the war...for the time being, Berg's diary is the only existing eye-witness record.[vi]
Mary Berg's unique contribution was recognized in reviews during the winter of 1945. The New Yorker wrote: "This is a grim book, full of darkness and horror, and, because of the picture it gives of the courage and humanity of the people of the Warsaw ghetto, it is also a brave and inspiring one."[vii] The Kirkus Review called it "a moving record of terrorism"[viii] and the New York Times review recommended it as reading for everyone "without qualification."[ix] The Saturday Review concluded that Berg's diary entries, "bear the imprint of sincerity and authenticity, and apparently are not ‘glamorized' by editorial treatment."[x]
Soon after its publication in February 1945, the diary was translated into several foreign languages.[xi] More recently, it has been the subject of a play, a piece of street theater, and been featured in a 1991 documentary film, “A Day in the Warsaw Ghetto, A Birthday Trip to Hell,”[xii] It also appears as a source in the bibliography of many important works on the Holocaust available to students and scholars.[xiii]
Mary Berg’s diary is unique for its authenticity, its detail and its poignancy, as well as for its early publication. Alice Eckhardt, a noted Christian theologian, wrote in 1995,“Now with the ghetto’s final fate known by all, the details of the community life that went on and even at times blossomed despite the dreadful conditions under which it existed become even more important for us to know. The unique factors that made it possible for this young woman, , to leave the ghetto just prior to its elimination give the book a vibrancy and at the same time a poignancy that is hard to match.”[xiv]
Mary Berg was fifteen years old when the Germans attacked Poland, and when she began her diary on October 10, 1939, and her diary is that of a young girl.. Like many child diarists, she was searching to find meaning in the cruelty she experienced. Like Anne Frank and others, she began her diary as a means to comfort and occupy herself. Later, it became an outlet for her and her friends. Alvin Rosenfeld in his work A Double Dying[xv] concludes that diaries of the Holocaust written by children or young adolescents "seem almost to constitute a distinctive subgenre of the literature of incarceration."
She was with her family in the Warsaw Ghetto from its beginning in November, 1940 until a few days before the Great Deportation began on July 22, 1942. On July 17, 1942, they had been interned as American citizens in the Pawiak Prison, which stood inside the ghetto. From the windows of the prison, they witnessed the deportation of over 300,000 ghetto inhabitants. Several years later, Mary recalled watching many friends among “the aged men with gray beards, the blooming young girls and proud young men, driven like cattle to the Umschlagplatz on Stawki Street to their deaths.”[xvi]
Shortly after midnight on January 18, 1943, the day the second Aktion began in the ghetto that was to lead to the first armed resistance the next day, Mary, her parents and her sister Ann were sent with other foreign internees to an internment camp in Vittel, France. Over a year later, they were selected for an exchange with German prisoners in the United States. They arrived in the United States aboard the S.S. Gripsholm on March 16, 1944.
Early in the occupation, Mary learned that the Germans would set a price on life and that those with wealth and privilege from before the occupation would have a better chance of survival. When the ghetto was established in Lodz, a schoolmate of Mary’s came to Warsaw with, Mary describes it, “bloodcurdling stories.” Her family had managed to escape, she told her friend, by “bribing the Gestapo with good American dollars.” Of course, Mary knew that only “the well-to-do Jews” could have easy access to foreign currency.
She realized that she was among the privileged. She explained,in her diary that those without privilege “have only a 10 per cent chance at most [to survive].” Later, she admitted with equal openness that, “Only those who have large sums of money are able to save themselves from this terrible life.” Mary had grown up in a well-to-do home in Lodz. Her father owned an art gallery and traveled abroad to purchase works by European masters such as Poussin and Delacroix. She attended gymnasium in Lodz and her family could afford to spend six weeks in a health resort in the summer of 1939, and had relatives living in the United States.
She also had the insight to see that foreign citizens had a much better chance of survival. Jews with passports for neutral countries were exempt from having to wear the Jewish star and doing forced labor. When two friends obtained papers as nationals of a South American country, she commented: “No wonder many Jews try to obtain such documents; but not all have the means to buy them or the courage to use them.”
Mary’s mother, Lena, was born in New York on 1 May 1902, and was a citizen of the United States.. When Lena was about twelve, she had moved to Poland with her Polish-born parents and an older brother and sister, who were also born in the States. Her younger brothers Abie and Percy were born after the family returned to Poland in 1914. When her parents and older siblings moved back to the States in the 1920s, Lena, a fashion designer, remained in Lodz with her younger brothers. She married Shya Wattenberg, a Polish citizen, who was a painter and an antique dealer..[xvii]They had two children, Mary and a younger daughter named Ann.
Under the Germans, her mother’s status as an American citizen gave the whole family protection and privileges, even though Mary and her sister were born in Poland. When the mailman brought her mother a letter from the American consulate in December 1939, Mary reported that he “could not refrain from expressing his envy over the fact that we have American connections.” On April 5, 1940, she noted, realistically, that “Polish citizens of Jewish origin have no one to protect them, except themselves.” Later, she explained that her mother’s visiting card on the door in Warsaw, indicating she was an American, was a “wonderful talisman against the German bandits who freely visit all Jewish apartments.” This was so much so, that neighbors came to their apartment as soon as German uniforms came into view.
Although the Wattenbergs were refugees, they had managed to hold on to some money and valuables. They also received mail and packages from relatives in the States and Mrs. Wattenberg, as an American citizen, was permitted, at first, to leave the ghetto. When, in November 1940, the Germans officially closed the Jewish quarter in Warsaw as a ghetto, the Wattenbergs were fortunate to be able to remain in their apartment at Sienna 41, on the corner of Sosnowa Street in the ghetto. It was included in the area referred to as the “Little Ghetto,” at the southern border of the ghetto. The courtyard outside their windows opened onto the “Aryan” side of the ghetto where they could still see people walking around freely.
The “Little Ghetto” became the privileged quarter. Gutman points out that:
Even though the ghetto adopted the slogan ‘all are equal,’ some people were ‘more equal’ than others, and this imbalance could be felt on the streets as well. Some streets, such as Sienna and Chlodna, were considered well-to-do sections. The apartments there were larger, the congestion lighter, and above all, the people relatively well fed. The streets were the addresses of the assimilated Jews.... and rich Jews who had managed to hold on to a portion of their wealth.[xviii]
Mary was aware of this inequality and of the importance wealth played in the life of the ghetto.
Her knowledge of the corruptibility of the Judenrat is also clear from a later entry, after she and her family moved to an apartment at Chlodna 10, located right at the western ghetto gate, by the foot bridge over Chlodna Street. She explained that:
The well to do, who could afford to bribe the officials of the housing office, get the best apartments on this street with its many large modern houses. Chlodna Street is generally considered the ‘aristocratic’ street of the ghetto, just as Sienna Street was at the beginning.
Although Mary often seemed uncomfortable with the privileges and protection afforded her family, she also wanted to forget the horror all around her, and with the resilience of youth she adapted to life during the occupation. Wiszniewicz interviewed a ghetto survivor living in the United States a few years ago.
People think the ghetto was like in the movies: constant, relentless terror. But it wasn’t like that at all. We were always surrounded by terror, but we led normal lives right alongside it. Flirting went on in the ghetto, romances, concerts, theatrical performances. People went to a restaurant, while behind the restaurant somebody was dying. The normal and the abnormal intertwined repeatedly.[xix]
This is the life that Mary describes on every page.
Many of her young friends from Lodz had also fled to Warsaw. During the summer of 1940, the principal,of her Lodz gymnasium, Dr. Michael Brandstetter,[xx]with a number of his teaching staff, started illegal classes in Warsaw. The students secretly met twice a week in the safety of the Wattenberg home so that they could finish their studies. School was only possible for the privileged, because students in the study-groups usually had to pay their teachers about thirty to forty zlotys a month.[xxi]
As the numbers of refugees increased and conditions grew more and more distressing, Jews in Warsaw began to establish a network of relief and self-help organizations in the Jewish quarter. Eager to make a contribution, Mary and eleven of her friends from Lodz founded a club to raise relief funds. Soon, at the request of a representative of the Joint Distribution Committee, they decided to put on a musical show. They called themselves the “Lodz Artistic Group” (Lodzki Zespol Artystyczny) or, in Polish, the LZA. whose letters appropriately, she felt, formed the word “tear.”
One document recovered from the Oneg Shabbat archive refers to the “privileged” youth in the ghetto, mainly refugees from Lodz and neighboring towns, whom he disparagingly called the “golden youth.” In her diary Mary describes going to the cafes on Sienna Street to sing, and to performances at the Feminina Theater with Romek, outings that stand in stark contrast to the starving youth and children in the ghetto. Even the LZA club, which was set up to raise funds for the poor, clearly brought the youth running it welcome relief from the horrors they saw all around them, as Mary reported that they “had a lively time” putting on their play, and were quite a hit . However, she remained sensitiveto this inequality, and to the growing desperation in the ghetto. Just a few weeks earlier, she had noted a visit she made to a refugee home where she saw half-naked, unwashed children lying about listlessly. One child looked at her and said she was hungry. With characteristic candor, she confessed in her diary, “I am overcome by a feeling of utter shame. I had eaten that day, but I did not have a piece of bread to give to that child. I did not dare look in her eyes.”
In another moving passage, she wrote about the “dreamers of bread” in the streets whose “eyes are veiled with a mist that belongs to another world.” She explained that, “usually they sit across from the windows of food stores, but their eyes no longer see the loaves that lie behind the glass, as in some remote inaccessible heaven.” In the same entry, she also expressed guilt about her privileges, concluding: “I have become really selfish. For the time being I am still warm and have food, but all around me there is so much misery and starvation that I am beginning to be very unhappy.”
Abraham Lewin, a ghetto diarist who perished, described the huge contrasts between the better off inhabitants of the ghetto, and the many thousands who were suffering poverty, disease and starvation:
The ghetto is most terrible to behold with its crowds of drawn faces with the color drained out them. Some of them have the look of corpses that have been in the ground a few weeks. They are so horrifying that they cause us to shudder instinctively. Against the background of these literally skeletal figures and against the all-embracing gloom and despair that stares from every pair of eyes, from the packed mass of passers-by, a certain type of girl or young woman, few in number it must be said, shocks with her over-elegant attire...Walking down the streets I observe this sickly elegance and am shamed in my own eyes.[xxii]
As another Oneg Shabbat essayist reminded future historians, while these privileged youth lived comparatively well, “nevertheless they, too, were affected by wartime conditions which changed their lives in a negative way.”[xxiii]
Wealth and privilege in the ghetto influenced more than housing and education. Mary discovered they played a part in protecting the inhabitants from labor camp and helped secure the most desirable jobs. She clearly faced an inner, moral dilemma herself when in the fall of 1941, she learned that the Judenrat was offering practical courses in subjects like metallurgy and applied graphic arts near her home on Sienna Street[xxiv] The course was to last six months and the tuition was twenty-five zlotys. When she went to register, she found many friends among the almost six hundred applicants, all eager to escape labor camp.[xxv] Not surprisingly, there were only a few dozen openings.
She admitted to herself in her diary knowing that “pull” would play a large part in the selection of students. At first she “rebelled” against this, but when she realized she had little chance of being admitted, she “decided to resort to the same means.” There was an additional selfishness in this decision, because she also admitted knowing that at the time girls were not threatened with labor camps as young boys were.
She had begun to accept the realities of bribes and pull a few months earlier. When the Judenrat established the Jewish Police force, she had explained, “more candidates presented themselves than were needed.” She had then added, “A special committee chose them, and ‘pull’ played an important part in their choice. At the very end, when only a few posts were available, money helped, too...Even in Heaven not everyone is a saint.” Since Mary’s uncle Abie served in the police force, she probably knew of this at first hand.
Due to their pre-war social standing, education and wealth, many of Mary’s relatives and friends were able to acquire positions of “privilege,” thus enabling them to live much better than the average ghetto dweller and to survive at least a while longer. Most had got their positions through the Judenrat. Although public opinion varied as to the integrity of the Judenrat, Ringelblum described the council as “hostile to the people” in his Oneg Shabbat notes.[xxvi] Others, however, joined the Jewish Police, whom Ringelblum and other memoirists condemned out right, saying they ”distinguished themselves with their fearful corruption and immorality.”[xxvii]
Later, Mary explained that her uncle Percy got a job with the Judenrat, picking up bricks in ruined buildings, but he lacked the “pull” to get a higher paying position as an overseer. On the other hand, she knew that her “boy friend” in the ghetto, Romek Kowalski, another “golden youth” from Lodz, had secured a position as an overseer for the construction of the ghetto wall, because he did have “pull.” Kowalski was a relative of engineer Mieczslaw Lichtenbaum, the head of the wall construction commission formed by the Judenrat,[xxviii] and of Marek Lichtenbaum, who became the head of the Judenrat after the Great Deportation.
After what she describes as a ”struggle,” which probably means bribes were required, her father got the coveted position of janitor in their apartment block. The Judenrat appointed janitors. They got a salary, free lodging, relief from community taxes and extra rations, as well as a pass from the Judenrat exempting them from forced labor. In Mary’s words, “no wonder the job is hard to obtain.” Also,Mary’s sister Ann attended classes in sewing children’s clothing, which were run by the Judenrat’s Institute for Vocational Guidance and Training, known as the ORT.
Another acquaintance of Mary’s, Heniek Grynberg, whose cousin Rutka was Ann’s best friend, was a smuggler in the ghetto. He was apparently involved in the ghetto underworld, as he frequented the Cafe Hirschfeld with Gestapo agents. Mary notes, “He is one of the most successful people in this new business. This can be seen from his prosperous appearance and the elegant dresses worn by his wife and daughter.” His main trade was to smuggle inanti-typhus serumwhich, of course, as typhus swept the ghetto, went to those who could pay high sums.
The Special Ambulance Service received particularly scathing criticism from Ringelblum,[xxix] who regarded it as a front for selling cards and caps that afforded the holders valuable advantages, such as exemption from forced labor. It was run by the infamous mafia-style underworld in the ghetto known as the “Thirteen,” which was widely feared to be a tool of the Gestapo. One of Mary’s friends and a fellow member of the LZA, Tadek Szajer, was the son of a member of the “Thirteen,” and himself a member of the Ambulance Service. He pursued her with youthful fervor, but she rejected his advances, noting that while others such as Romek Kowlaski had to work so hard to provide for their families, Tadek was always well fed and smartly dressed, and traveled everywhere by rickshaw. She suspected his father of doing business with the Nazis, and her decision not to see him any more suggested she understood what was happening, and wanted to take a moral stand.
In early 1942, Mary learned that U. S. citizens had been allowed to leave the ghetto and one acquaintance’s father was interned in Germany. There were rumors in the ghetto,of a prisoner exchange. A few weeks later, she noted that here “pull” and bribes could also be useful. She wrote in her diary, “Naturally, one must have some scrap of paper stating that at least one member of the family is a foreign citizen. My mother is lucky in this respect, for she is a full-fledged American citizen”
Later Mary’s mother made contact with a Gestapo agent named “Z” who promised her help. Naively, Mary confessed to believing that “it seems that despite his position he has remained a decent man.” More likely, money passed into his hands before he registered Mrs. Wattenberg with the Gestapo. A month later, Mary Berg and her family marched through the ghetto, with about seven hundred citizens of neutral, European and American countries, twenty-one of whom were Americans, to the Pawiak prison where they were interned.
When the Wattenbergsmoved into the Pawiak prison, Mary parted not only from Kowalski and her many girl friends, but also from her mother’s two younger, Polish-born brothers. Her Uncle Abie accompanied them to the prison gate. In parting, he asked her mother, “How can you leave me?” Later, in the relative safety of the internment camp in Vittel, Mary wrote in her diary, “we, who have been rescued from the ghetto, are ashamed to look at each other. Had we the right to save ourselves?…Here I am, breathing fresh air, and there my people are suffocating in gas and perishing in flames, burned alive. Why?”
On arrival at the Vittel internment camp in early 1943, the Wattenbergs and other internees from Pawiak could not at first believe that such a world of comparative normalcy existed any longer. Gutta Eisenzweig, who had shared a cell with Mary at Pawiak, writes in her recent memoir about her initial reaction, “I stood there in shock, for we had suddenly crossed the divide from hell to paradise...we had come to a serene atmosphere of Old World sumptuousness. The contrast was overwhelming.”[xxx] Vittel was a showplace among the German internment camps in Europe, designed to reassure the International Red Cross, that the internees were well-treated to help ensure the safety of Germans interned abroad.
The Vittel camp was based at a health spa in the Vosges Mountains of France. The internees had rooms in the hotels and some of the luxuries of the spa still were available.There was a hospital with kind inmate physicians such as Dr. Jean Levy, movies and entertainments, a few shops and a beautiful park they could promenade in during the day. With the help of Red Cross packages they received, no one was hungry. The American and British internees at Vittel had time enough to establish a social life. There were language classes and other courses available, concerts and entertainments. There were also contacts with the French resisitance, several hundred nuns, and internees like Sofka Skipwith who reached out to help the new arrivals from Warsaw.
Madeleine Steinberg, a British internees, has written her memoir about the Vittel camp. She recalls that Mary volunteered right away to help with the children at art classes and when they were playing. She also recalls that Mary was the first one to tell the other internees about life in the Warsaw ghetto and to explain why the children from Poland ran and hid in the cellar when they saw a German at Vittel.[xxxi] The internees began to have hope once again. However, a few weeks after the Wattenbergs’ departure for the SS Gripsholm exchange, most of the Polish internees who had been moved to the Hotel Beau Site outside the barbed wire surrounding the park were deported in two transports to Drancy, and a short time later, from there to Auschwitz, where they were gassed upon arrival.
In the Warsaw Ghetto, after the deportations in late summer 1942, the Jewish Fighting Organization and other political youth assassinated collaborators in the ghetto, including Jews who had worked with the Gestapo and made huge fortunes in business deals with the Germans and known Gestapo informers.[xxxii] Postwar reactions, especially among displaced survivors in Europe, against the Nazi perpetrators - including collaborators, those who were members of the ghetto councils, the ghetto police or Kapos in the camps - was, at first, determined. Some were tried in Occupied Germany and declared responsible for their actions.
Later, several much publicized cases against Jewish collaborators were tried in Israeli and German courts. However, “guilt” in a legal sense was often difficult to prove and to judge. Since the Germans’ ultimate goal was to destroy the Jewish population, these collaborators were subordinated to the Germans’ will, so the lines between cooperation and collaboration were often indistinct. The courts of public morality have also tended to judge these defendants with leniency, as people wonder what they might have done to save themselves or family members in similar circumstances, had they been tested.[xxxiii]
Questions my students often asked when they read Mary Berg’s Diary were how she knew in Pawiak what was happening in the ghetto, and why she wrote that the victims at Treblinka were killed with steam. Although Mary was in Pawiak during the Aktion in 1942, the walls of Pawiak were transparent. She speaks of rumors that reached them through the prison guards and Polish police. She and the other internees at Pawiak also received letters from friends and family. Gutta Eisenzweig, who shared a cell with the Wattenbergs at Pawiak, got detailed updates from Hillel Seidman, a community official. They also communicated with new internees and with ghetto inhabitations through the windows at Pawiak. Mary’s writings also reflect what people knew at the time. Some of the first reports indicated that steam was being used to kill people at Treblinka. It was some time after people first escaped from Treblinka that Warsaw fully understoond that the Germans were using carbon monoxide.
The images of suffering we see in headlines and on television screens today make our world, in fact, too similar to the world of Mary’s girlhood experience. Young people today often lash out at the world to stop the killing. Holocaust scholars endeavor to do the same thing. They hope that educating future generations about the past will empower them to build a new world without hate. Mary’s diary provides readers with an understanding of the Holocaust from an intense, personal perspective, and empowers readers to hope for a better future for the human family.
Marcel Reich-Ranickil explains in his recent memoir, in reference to his wife who escaped from the Umschlagplatz, “Whoever, sentenced to death, has at close quarters watched a train leaving for the gas chambers, remains marked for the rest of their lives.” [xxxiv] Although Mary never passed through the Umschlagplatz, she watched as over 300,000 Jews marched by Pawiak prison in Warsaw on their way to their deaths at Treblinka. After she returned to the U. S., she learned that most of her friends and family in Europe had perished in the Holocaust, including two hundred Polish Jews at Vittel, her roommate Rosl Weingort, Adam Wentland and his sisters, and many others she knew. They were on the verge of freedom, but the world turned its eyes away and they were deported back to Poland where they died in the gas chambers of Auschwitz.
Mary began a new life in America and made an effort to leave the past behind her. When Nancy Craig asked her in early 1945 if she wanted to visit Poland again, she replied:
No, I will never go back. America is my country now and I'm going to be a real American. It wouldn't be nice to go back to Poland and see only cemetaries….also my father's family has been killed...so have all our friends. After what we went through, I know what freedom really means...it means America. Just talking with you this morning over the radio...this is America.
While readers may conclude that Mary was “fortunate” in surviving, and assume that once in the United States she returned to the happiness of her early teenage years, most also understand that the lives of survivors of trauma, children perhaps most of all, are changed forever by persecution, the future altered by the horror, the losses and the choices they once had to make.
Until the early 1950s Mary Berg was a personality in New York, granting interviews and appearing on radio. Then she disassociated herself from the diary, saying she wanted to forget the past, and she disappeared from the public eye. It is not known if she found happiness in her adult years. We can only hope she was able to make a life for herself in the post-war world and find solace from past memories.
SUSAN PENTLIN
Notes
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[i] “Thousands Mourn Victims of Ghetto," New York Times, 20 April l944, pg. 10.
[ii] Transcript of “Woman of Tomorrow.” Interview with Mary Berg by Nancy Craig. WJZ radio. 8:30 a.m. 21 February 1945. S. L. Shneiderman Archives. Tel Aviv.
[iii] The editor has a few photocopied pages of the original Polish manuscript, but the full Polish manuscript as well as Berg’s original diary are apparently no longer extant.
[iv] The editor wants to thank Fabian Fuerste at the Wiener Library in London for checking their holdings of the issues Aufbau from 1944 to 1945 and establishing the exact dates and issues that the diary appeared in German.
[v] Among others, “The Extermination of 500,000 Jews in the Warsaw Ghetto: the Day to Day Experience of a Polish Gentile” was published the American Council of Warsaw Jews and the American Friends of Polish Jews in New York in 1942. It was a translation of pages from a diary written by a Polish woman employed in a municipal office in the Warsaw Ghetto, and covered events over a two-month period in the ghetto, from July 22, 1942 to September 25, 1942. Mary Berg’s account covers the period the Wattenberg family spent in Warsaw both before and after the ghetto was established (September 1939 to July 17 1942) as well as their experiences in Pawiak prison inside the ghetto itself until the day of the first Uprising in the ghetto on 18 January 1943. She also wrote about their year in the internment camp at Vittel, France through to February 1944.
Tosha Bialer, who had escaped from the Warsaw ghetto with her husband and young son in 1942, wrote the two-part article, “Behind the Wall,” for Colliers magazine, and it appeared with graphic photos of the ghetto in February 1943.
The American Federation for Polish Jews also published Jacob Apenszlak’s The Black Book of Polish Jewry: An Account of the Martyrdom of Polish Jewry under the Nazi Occupation, in 1943.
In addition, Jan Karski's report, "My Visit to the Warsaw Ghetto," appeared in the American Mercury magazine in 1944, at almost the same time as the initial selections of Mary Berg’s diary were published. Karski, a courier for the Polish underground, had visited Warsaw in 1942 and met with three of the ghetto leaders. He reported on their conversation:
The first thing they made clear to me ...was the absolute hopelessness of their predicament. For the Polish Jews, this was the end of a world. There was no possible escape for them or for their fellows... ‘Do you mean that every one of those presumably deported was actually killed?’‘ Every last one.’
One of the Bund leaders had told him: "The Germans are not trying to enslave us as they do other people; we are being systematically murdered." Like Karski, Sheniderman and Berg intended to inform America of the Nazi atrocities against the Jews of Europe.
[vi] After the war, the Oneg Shabbat archives of the ghetto, organized by Emanuel Ringelblum, were recovered in Warsaw, and the diaries and chronicles of Adam Czerniakow, Janusz Korczak, Chaim Kaplan, Abraham Lewis and Emanuel Ringelblum, who perished in the Holocaust, came to light. Several memoir accounts appeared over the next four decades, including those of Alexander Donat and Helena Szereszewska, and survivors of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, like Yitzak Zuckerman and Vladka Meed. The memoir of the ghetto policeman Stanislaw Adler, who survived but killed himself in 1946, was also published in English in 1982 by Yad Vashem..Since only one per cent of the ghetto inhabitants survived the war, even accounts written after 1945 are rare.
[vii] Review, New Yorker, 21, 24 February 1945, pg. 77.
[viii] Review, Kirkus, 13, 15 February 1945, pg. 24.
[ix] Marguerite Young, "First Hand Report of a Nightmare," New York Times Book Review, 18 February 1945, pg. 6.
[x] F. Weiskopf, review, Saturday Review, 28, March 3, 1945, pg. 34.
[xi] In 1945, a Hebrew translation of the diary appeared in Tel Aviv, and a Spanish edition came out in Buenos Aires. In 1946 an Italian edition appeared in Rome and a French translation in Paris in 1947. Several decades later, Shneiderman edited a Polish translation of the original English, which appeared in Poland on the fortieth anniversary of the ghetto uprising in 1983. In 1991, a Hungarian translation followed, as well as a new Italian translation.
[xii] In 1986, A Bouquet of Alpine Violets, a play based on the diary, was staged in Warsaw. See Kaufman, Michael T. “Warsaw Play Dramatizing Ghetto Diary, New York Times, ProQuest Historical Newspapers. 18 May 1986. p. 13. More recently, Tempesta, a production inspired by Mary Berg’s diary, appeared in five countries as street theater in an adaptation directed by Cora Herrendorf. The production was by the Teatro Nucleo company, which began in 1974 in Argentina and finds its home in Italy today. (See Teatro Nucleo’s web site at http://www.teatronucleo.org.) In 1991, Heinz Joest’s documentary film, “A Day in the Warsaw Ghetto: A Birthday Trip to Hell,” directed by Jack Kuper in Canada, featured text from Mary Berg’s diary.
[xiii] These include Lucy Dawidowicz, The War Against the Jews, 1933-1945 (New York: Bantam, 1975); Nora Levin, The Holocaust: The Destruction of European Jewry, 1933-1945 (New York, Schocken, 1973); Yisrael Gutman, The Jews of Warsaw, 1939-1943, trans. Ina Friedman (Bloomington: Indiana University, 1982. Selections from the diary also appear in many sources, including Laurel Holliday, Children in the Holocaust and World War II: Their Secret Diaries (New York: Pocket Books, 1995), pp. 209-248, and Martin Gilbert, A History of the Jews of Europe during the Second World War (New York, Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1985), which draws extensive quotes from the diary in discussing the Warsaw Ghetto.
[xiv] Letter from Eckhardt to Pentlin, dated 1995.
[xv] Alvin H. Rosenfeld, A Double Dying: Reflections on Holocaust Literature (Bloomington: Indiana University, l980), pp. 50-51.
[xvi] Esther Elbaum, “She Lived in the Warsaw Ghetto: An Interview with Mary Berg,” Hadassah Newsletter (March-April, 1945): 20-21.
[xvii] Mary Berg’s father was born on 19 July 1893 in Pultusk, Poland and died in the United States in 1970, where he had continued his antique business after the war; her mother Lena died in the United States in 1989.
[xviii] Israel Gutman, The Jews of Warsaw, 1939-1943, Ghetto, Underground,
Revolt. Bloomington, Ind., Indiana, 1982. Pg. 108.
[xix] Wiszniewicz, Joanna. And Yet I Still have Dreams, trans. Regina Grol, Evanston, Il, Northwestern, 2004.
[xx] He is identified in “Minutes of the Second Plenary Session of the Jewish Education Council in Warsaw,” PH/ 9-2-7 in To Live with Honor and Die with Honor, Joseph Kermish, ed. (Jerusalem: Yad Vashem, 1986), pp. 464, 466.
[xxi] [A Preliminary Study in Teaching People during the War], PH/ 13-2-4 in Kermisch, pg. 469.
[xxii] Abraham Lewin, A Cup of Tears: A Diary of the Warsaw Ghetto, Antony Polonsky, ed. (Oxford: Blackwell, 1988, p. 84.
[xxiii] “The Profile of the Jewish Child,” #ARI/ 47 in Kermisch, pg. 383.
[xxiv] [Special Schools]. ARI/ 341 in Kermisch, pp. 515-516. Berg gives the address as 16 Sienna Street. It seems likely that is in error. The address of the school is given in this essay as Sienna 34, which would have been closer to Berg’s home.
[xxv] [Jewish Youth in the War Years], pg. 518.
[xxvi] Emmanuel Ringelblum. Notes from the Warsaw Ghetto: The Journal of Emmanuel Ringelblum, Jacob Sloan ed. and trans. (New York: Schocken, 1958.
[xxvii] Ringelblum 329.
[xxviii] The Warsaw Diary of Adam Czerniakow: Prelude to Doom, Raul Hilberg, Stanislaw Staron and Josef Kermisz, eds. (New York, Stein and Day, 1972.), pg. 295
[xxix]
[xxx] Sternbuch, Gutta and David Kranzler. Gutta, Memories of a Vanish World, A Bais Yaakov Teacher’s Poignant Account of the War Years. NY, Feldheim, 2005.
[xxxi] Steinberg, Madeleine. “Une Internee Civile Britannique Témoin Indirect de la Fin au Ghetto de Varsovie.” Le Monde Juif, Paris, 180 (January-June 2004), pp. 341-42.
[xxxii] Emmanuel Ringelblum, Polish-Jewish Relations During the Second World War, eds. Joseph Kermish and Shmuel Krakowski (Evanston, Ill: Northwestern, 1974), pp. 249-250.
[xxxiii] See Peter Wyden, Stella (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1992), pg. 307.
[xxxiv] Reich-Ranicki, pg. 186.