Helga’s Diary: a Young Girl’s Account of Life in a Concentration Camp
Helga Weiss (translated by Neil Bermel)
Viking, 256pp, £16.99
Many readers of this review will have kept a diary as a youngster but few will have made entries in the expectation that they might soon be wrenched from home and confronted with mass murder. Yet these were the circumstances in which countless young Jews kept diaries in countries under Nazi rule between 1939 and 1945. Only a few have survived and they are prized as witnesses to the catastrophe. However, for decades after the war, there was apparently only one “Holocaust diary”, Anne Frank’s.
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