The Diaries from the Warsaw ghetto
Summary
Abraham Lewin was born in 1893 in Warsaw, in a religious Jewish family. From 1916 until 1939, he was working as a teacher of Hebrew and Jewish studies in Yehudia – a progressive Jewish high school for girls. It was in Yehudia that he met his wife Luba, née Hotner, a fellow teacher of Hebrew. In 1928, their daughter Ora was born. Throughout the interwar period Lewin, a supporter of General Zionists, remained involved in Jewish communal life and the Warsaw branch of YIVO. He also studied and wrote about the history of Jews in Eastern Europe. In 1934, his book Kantonisten [the Cantonists] was published, in which he discussed conscription of Jewish boys to the Tsarist army in the Russian Empire. After the war broke out, Lewin, his wife and their daughter were forced to move to the Warsaw ghetto. There, having had met Emmanuel Ringelblum through his work in both Yehudia and YIVO, he became one of the key collaborators and a member of the executive board of the Oneg Shabbat – the Underground Archive of the Warsaw ghetto. He also worked for the Jewish Social Self-Help as a secretary of its youth division. Employed alongside other members of the underground in the Ostdeutsche Bautischlerei-Werkstätte workshop, Lewin survived the deportations in the summer of 1942. In August 1942, his wife was murdered in Treblinka, leaving him as the sole guardian of their teenage daughter. The last entry of his diary, which he deposited in the Ringelblum Archive, is dated 17 January 1943, a day before the beginning of the January Aktion, when he is assumed to have perished.
The diary of Abraham Lewin, which is presented in this volume and covers the period from April 1942 to January 1943, is one of the most important documents dealing with history of the Warsaw ghetto, and in particular the great deportation of July– September 1942. Despite the extremely difficult situation in which he found himself, Lewin was one of the few who kept a daily diary of the events unfolding in the ghetto in the summer of 1942. The diary, a document of very high literary quality, is a very personal description of the deportations in Warsaw, with references to the news of the annihilation of Jews in smaller localities that reached Warsaw at a time. The diary is also unique in the way in which it portrays the inner workings of the Oneg Shabbat.
