From: The Associated Press
The secret diary of a young Jewish woman recounting two years under the Nazi occupation portrays the slow shattering of her life, ending with her deportation on her 24th birthday and death in a concentration camp.
Helene Berr's account of life under occupation was destined for her fiance, Jean Morawiecki, who had left Paris to join the Resistance. She secreted the loose pages with the family cook. The diary was turned over to Morawiecki after her death in April 1945.
Once more a Holocaust journal has been found and published to tell their story. My friend, June, told me about this today while I was on campus and I looked it up once I got home.One of the questions that struck me as I was looking this up was: "Where are the journals of the Japanese Americans who were held in the camps in California? Is there story not just as interesting?"
I wonder if the people who wrote these journals ever thought or wanted them to be found by someone else? What bit of ephemera (pictures or keepsakes) were stashed in the back of the journal for some purpose unknown.
I ask some interesting questions sometimes.
-Tom
2 comments:
It isn't as if some diaries from this period recounting the experiences of Japanese Americans have not been published. A quick search on Amazon pulls up a few:
http://www.amazon.com/Evacuation-Diary-Hatsuye-Egami/dp/0964804212/ref=sr_1_5?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1200163797&sr=8-5
http://www.amazon.com/Kikuchi-Diary-Chronicle-American-Concentration/dp/0252062833/ref=sr_1_3?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1200163797&sr=8-3
There are also memoirs and other factual accounts from the period, if not actual journals--which, in truth, are rare in Holocaust studies as well. There are -way- more memoirs from European Jews and other affected by the Holocaust and WWII in general than there are actual published journals. I am sure that there are a few unpublished journals about, some in museums, and more in the hands of family members or stuck in attics somewhere.
I mean, other than Anne Frank's diary and this new one--what other Jewish WWII diaries can you name? Not many, I would bet. Memoirs, yes, but diaries? No.
For more memoirs of the period of Japanese internment, look at these links, also from Amazon:
http://www.amazon.com/Looking-Like-Enemy-Imprisonment-Internment/dp/0939165538/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1200164234&sr=1-1
http://www.amazon.com/Only-What-Could-Carry-Internment/dp/1890771309/ref=pd_bxgy_b_text_b
http://www.amazon.com/Desert-Exile-Uprooting-Japanese-American-Family/dp/0295961902/ref=pd_sim_b_img_4
I do know that in universities where there is a department of Asian-American studies, this topic is a popular research subject, although among non-Asian non-academics, it is not as well known as Holocaust studies, most likely because Americans do not like to look upon our own sins. It is much easier to demonize the Germans and ignore our own failings.
Though, at least we can say we didn't commit genocide upon the Japanese Americans we put in camps, nor did we starve them to death nor use them for vivisection and bizarre medical experiments.
Small comfort, but some comfort nonetheless.
"Though, at least we can say we didn't commit genocide upon the Japanese Americans we put in camps, nor did we starve them to death nor use them for vivisection and bizarre medical experiments."
I guess we'd already gotten that out of our system with the Native Americans. And the African slaves -- although that wasn't quite genocide; we wanted to breed them big and strong. No, we just killed the ones that weren't useful. Or the ones that were uppity.
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