The Diary of Mary Berg: Growing Up in the Warsaw Ghetto

A revised edition of an extraordinary record of life in the Warsaw Ghetto, first published in 1945, before the end of World War 2. Originally edited by SL Schneiderman, this edition has a new introduction by Susan Lee Pentlin.

On her fifteenth birthday, as the German army tightens its grip on Warsaw, Mary Berg begins writing her diary. She does not yet know that by the time she has filled twelve small notebooks she will have endured four years of Nazi terror and recorded in vivid detail some of the most important events of the twentieth century.

From the siege of Warsaw to the final, brutal suppression of the Ghetto Uprising, she documents the plight of the refugees, the lives of the nouveaux riches, the forced conscription, the deportations and the heroism of the resistance fighters who rose up against German oppression. Rescued with her family through an allied prisoner exchange, Mary smuggled out of Warsaw the diary she had begun four years earlier. In doing so, she brought to light one of the most incredible documents of the Second World War - the uniquely personal story of a life-loving girl's encounter with unparalleled human suffering, and an extraordinary insight into one of the darkest chapters of history.

SL Schneiderman was born in Kazimierz, Poland in 1906 and died in Israel in 1996. Susan Pentlin is Emeritus Professor of Modern Languages at Central Missouri State University in Warrensburg, MO.