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Remember_The_Holocaust] Mary Berg’s Diary

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She was just fifteen when Hitler entered Poland. She survived four
years of Nazi
terror. This is her story.

When Hitler invaded Poland in 1939, Mary Berg had just turned fifteen.
From that
time until her arrival in the United States in March 1944, Mary kept a
detailed
personal diary, recording her years in the Warsaw Ghetto, detention in
Pawiak
prison, internment in Occupied France, and finally, her journey to
freedom
aboard a mercy ship hired by the American government. Carefully hidden
among her
meager possessions were her twelve small notebooks, smuggled out of
Europe under
the noses of the Nazis. Less than a year later, its war-time
publication played
a key role in bringing the plight of the remaining European Jews to the
world’s
attention.

The diary immediately won the highest acclaim from America’s press in
the first
days of 1945, including a major piece in the New York Times which
concluded,
“Without qualification, this reviewer recommends Mary Berg’s Diary to
everybody”.

After a gap of 60 years, this amazing diary is about to be published
once more,
this time for a worldwide audience. These extracts give a flavour of
that world
long ago, a world of both light and dark.

Mary Berg’s Warsaw Ghetto: A Diary

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

[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.