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
A message from our CEO & publisher Rachel Fishman Feddersen
I hope you appreciated this article. Before you go, I’d like to ask you to please support the Forward’s award-winning, nonprofit journalism during this critical time.
We’ve set a goal to raise $260,000 by December 31. That’s an ambitious goal, but one that will give us the resources we need to invest in the high quality news, opinion, analysis and cultural coverage that isn’t available anywhere else.
If you feel inspired to make an impact, now is the time to give something back. Join us as a member at your most generous level.
— Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO
