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 feldman@forward.com or on Twitter @aefeldman
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