Children's Wartime Diaries: Secret Writings from the Holocaust and World War II by Laurel Holliday
To mark the 50th anniversary of the end of World War II, this is an anthology of diaries written by children in Nazi-occupied Europe. With a scope that encompasses the entire war, the breadth of Europe, the London Blitz and the Warsaw ghetto, the diaries are extremely powerful. The children are from England, Denmark, Holland, Belgium, Czechoslovakia, Israel, Poland and Lithuania. They write of life in the ghettos and concentration camps, of bombings and Blitzkreigs, of dreams and death, of fear and courage, tragedy and transcendence. The diaries were written by 22 young people aged 10 to 18. They recount in vivid detail the horrors they lived through day after day. Some of the diaries were found after liberation in the ghettos; others were left behind when their authors were sent to Auchwitz and Treblinka; some were still in the possession of their original owners at the end of the war. The diarists include a Hungarian girl, personally selected by Mengele to be put in a line of prisoners who were tortured and murdered; a Danish Christian boy executed by the Nazis for his partisan work; an American girl who survived the horrors of the Warsaw ghetto; and two teenagers who grew up among the nightly bombings of London.