Auschwitz Survivor Diary Shows How Hope For Revenge Kept Him Going

The entrance to Auschwitz-Birkenau. Image by Getty

By Ari Feldman December 5, 2017

A Greek Holocaust survivor’s diary of his time in Auschwitz was only recently translated — and it shows how revenge kept him alive after he lost hope, the New York Post reported.

Marcel Nadjari stuffed his account of life in the concentration camp into a thermos and buried it in 1944. Though the manuscript was discovered in 1980, it was only able to be decoded recently due to advances in digital imaging.

Nadjari was a sonderkommando, tasked with loading the gassed bodies of Nazi victims into the camp’s incinerators.

“Often I thought of going in with the others, to put an end to this,” he wrote over 75 years ago. “But always revenge prevented me doing so. I wanted and want to live, to avenge the death of Dad, Mom and my dear little sister.”

Nadjari survived the war, settling in New York and having a daughter, who he named after his sister. He died in 1971 at the age of 53.

Contact Ari Feldman at [email protected] or on Twitter @aefeldman

Ari Feldman is a staff writer at the Forward. He covers Jewish religious organizations, synagogue life, anti-Semitism and the Orthodox world. If you have any tips, you can email him at [email protected]. Follow him on Twitter @aefeldman.

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