I Remember...A Memoir of Nazi Invasion Forced Exile and Conce... by Lorissa Wilfong Holt

The Diary of Anne FrankĪnne Frank, who wrote her diary in hiding with her family and a handful of acquaintances in an attic warehouse in Amsterdam, is the most famous child diarist of the Holocaust era.īorn Annelies Frank in Frankfurt-am-Main, Germany, on June 12, 1929, she was the second daughter of businessman Otto Frank and his wife Edith. Published under the penname “Mary Berg” in February 1945, Miriam Wattenberg's diary was one of the very few eyewitness accounts of the Warsaw ghetto available to readers in the English-speaking world before the end of World War II. German authorities eventually transferred the family to the Vittel internment camp in France, and allowed them to emigrate to the United States in 1944. Shortly before the first large deportation of Warsaw Jews to Treblinka in the summer of 1942, German officials detained Miriam, her family, and other Jews bearing foreign passports in the infamous Pawiak Prison. The Wattenbergs held a privileged position within this confined community because Miriam's mother was a US citizen. The Wattenberg family fled to Warsaw, where in November 1940, Miriam, with her parents and younger sister, had to live in the Warsaw ghetto. She began a wartime diary in October 1939, shortly after Poland surrendered to German forces. Wattenberg was born in Lódz on October 10, 1924. The diary of Miriam Wattenberg (“Mary Berg”) was one of the first children's journals which revealed to a wider public the horrors of the Holocaust. In these accounts, the young writers documented their experiences, confided their feelings, and reflected on the trauma they endured during these nightmare years. Of the millions of children who suffered persecution at the hands of the Nazis and their Axis partners, only a small number wrote diaries and journals that have survived. About 1.5 million of the victims were children. When World War II ended in 1945, six million European Jews were dead, killed in the Holocaust.

I Remember...A Memoir of Nazi Invasion Forced Exile and Conce... by Lorissa Wilfong Holt