At least 1.1 million Jewish children were murdered during the Holocaust. 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. 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.Miriam was born in Lódz on October 10, 1924. She began a wartime diary in October 1939, shortly after Poland surrendered to German forces. The Wattenberg family fled to Warsaw, where in November 1940, Miriam, with her parents and younger sister, had to live in the Warsaw ghetto. The Wattenbergs held a privileged position within this confined community because Miriam’s mother was a US citizen.
Shortly before the first large deportation of Warsaw Jews toTreblinka in the summer of 1942, German officials detained Miriam, her family, and other Jews bearing foreign passports in the infamous Pawiak Prison near the center of the ghetto, while most of the rest of the inhabitants were deported to their deaths.
She watched them leave from the prison windows. “The whole ghetto is drowning in blood. Sometimes a child huddles against his mother, thinking that she is asleep and trying to awaken her, while, in fact, she is dead” she wrote. “How long are we going to be kept here to witness all this?” German authorities eventually transferred the family to the Vittel internment camp in France, and allowed them to immigrate to the United States in 1944.
Published in 1945 under the pseudonym “Mary Berg”, Miriam’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.
Mary Berg’s Warsaw Ghetto became known worldwide. Over the next two years, translated versions appeared in five countries and Berg became a New York celebrity. She marched on City Hall with signs demanding action to save Jews still alive in Poland. She gave talks before audiences and interviews on the radio.
Most early reviews of her writings wanted to transform it into a heroic story. Berg did not want to be a hero. She wrote, “We, who have been rescued from the ghetto, are ashamed to look at each other. Had we the right to save ourselves? Here everything smells of sun and flowers and there—there is only blood, the blood of my own people.”
Berg published her diary as a call to action. “I shall do everything I can to save those who can still be saved,” she wrote. “I will tell, I will tell everything, about our sufferings and our struggles and the slaughter of our dearest, and I will demand punishment for the [Germans]….who enjoyed the fruits of murder….A little more patience, and all of us will win freedom!” But, alas, not all of them did.
Imagine the nightmares that the survivors of the Holocaust had to face every day even after being released from prison camps, ghettos, as well as concentration camps. Children were alone without their parents, parents could not find their children and others had lost every family member. Let us pray that these atrocities never happen again. As we do, our prayers must be for the peace and protection of Jerusalem (Psalm 122:6).
To read more about Mary Berg please see Tablet and United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.
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