A CUP OF TEARS: A Diary of the Warsaw Ghetto

A poignant, personal account of life in the Warsaw Ghetto, 1942-43. Found in milk churns just after the war, Lewin's diary often waxes poetic (""Earth, earth, do not cover our blood, and let no place be free from our cries!"") as this schoolteacher writes about his anger at the Nazis, the unrelenting hunger, the daffy slaughters. More personally, he records his devastation as his wife and friends are rounded up and taken to Treblinka to be murdered. The most moving sections here address the deportation (a word that Lewin always follows with the phrase ""read: murder""). Heart-splitting passages reveal the dread of Lewin's knowing that death is hanging over his head as well as over the heads of all the other Jews of Europe. Lewin chronicles people's opinions, their optimism, their pessimism, their predictions. He writes of rage directed at the Jewish Police for abetting the Nazis with roundups for deportation (""read: murder""), and of assassinations by the Jewish resistance of Jewish collaborators. One nightmare follows another (""Monday, 3 August. The 13th day of slaughter. A night of horrors. Shooting went on all night. I couldn't sleep. . .""), until the end. Lewin never made it out of ghetto--the exact details of his death are unknown--but his diary, written consciously for posterity, did: a powerful, worthy testament.