debora's diary

the u.s. holocaust museum has released some pages from the diary of a young woman recording some of her experience in the warsaw ghetto. it is real, and unsanitised, and horrific to read. nevertheless i did. the translation may be found here. its existence was revealed to me by this article in the telegraph. It notes:

"Debora was killed fighting in the Warsaw uprising of 1944, but her diary was recovered from her bombed-out home by her friend Lusia Schwarzwald Hornstein, who only revealed its existence on her deathbed in 1998. She asked that it be donated to the museum, but many of the pages, which cover January 1943 to mid-1944, had either been burnt or were stuck together, making it largely unreadable. But through painstaking work, curators at the museum have managed to transform the blackened fragments into a readable document by submerging it in de-ionised water. This made all the words stand out clearly, meaning they could be photographed and the images handed to a specialist translator."