Warsaw Ghetto.

BERG, Mary.

Item Number: 91463

New York: L.B. Fischer Publishing Company, 1945.

First edition of this powerful collection of diary entries begun by Berg at the age of fifteen, one of the most important documents in the age of Hitler. Octavo, original red cloth. Signed and dated by the author on the front free endpaper in the year of publication, “Mary Berg Long Branch 1946.” Near fine in a near fine dust jacket with some rubbing to the extremities. With the author’s father’s name, S. Wattenberg’s five-digit phone number and Long Branch, New Jersey address on on the rear dust jacket flap. Mary Berg’s father was Shaya Wattenberg was a local gallery owner in prewar Łodz. Her mother Lena, was an American citizen residing in the Second Polish Republic. Lena Wattenberg’s parents, Mr. and Mrs. Benno Zol, were the Zolotarewski family of Long Branch, New Jersey. Translated by Norbert Guterman. Edited by S.L. Shneiderman. Most rare signed as Berg resolutely refused to participate publicly in any events, zealously guarding her privacy.

On her fifteenth birthday, as the German army tightens its grip on Warsaw, Mary Berg begins writing her diary. She does not yet know that by the time she has filled twelve small notebooks she will have endured four years of Nazi terror and recorded in vivid detail some of the most important events of the twentieth century. She arrived in the United States in March 1944, at the age of 19. Her memoir was serialized in American newspapers in 1944, making it one of the earliest accounts of the Holocaust to be written in English.