MARY BERG'S DIARY

​On March 15, 1944, the SS Gripsholm steamed into the harbor of New York under the guiding light of the Statue of Liberty. It was a Swedish passenger ship leased by to the United States for exchanging American citizens kept in German prison camps for German POWs captured by the Allied forces in Europe.
 
Standing along the railing were the Wallenbergs. A wealthy Jewish family living in Poland before WWII, Lena Wallenberg was an American citizen who had met and married Shya Wallenberg, a Polish citizen, painter, and antique dealer, several years before when he had traveled to New York City to buy art. She returned with him to the city of Lodz, fifty miles southwest of Warsaw, where he managed an art gallery. She became a fashion designer, and they soon had a daughter named Mary, who was nineteen when she stared up at the Statue of Liberty.
 
A large crowd waited on the dock in New York City to welcome the refugees. Among them was a Yiddish journalist, S. L. Shneiderman, who was interviewing people as they got off the ship. He began a conversation with Mary, asking her to describe her life under Hitler. Mary reached into her suitcase and pulled out twelve small spiral-bound notebooks—her diary, written in a self-devised code and kept hidden through the four years of their captivity.
 
The journalist would later help her translate her diary into, first, a serialized series of articles for a Jewish journal in 1944, and then, on February, 1945, a book entitled Warsaw Ghetto: A Diary, by Mary Berg.
 
The book would shock America; never had the atrocities committed under the Third Reich been even imagined.
 
Mary and her family had been enjoying a six-week vacation at a resort in Poland when the German Army invaded on September 1, 1939, when Mary was fifteen. Racing back to their home in Lodz, already being shelled by German artillery, they gathered what they could and rode three bicycles into the throngs of people escaping to Warsaw. Over the next four years, the Nazi Gestapo and their relentless persecution of Jews decimated their lives, not in concentration camps, but by confining them inside the Warsaw ghetto, established in November, 1940.
 
In July, 1942, negotiations between Germany and the Allied nations proposed exchanging non-European families for German POWs. In preparation, Mary, her family and seven hundred other ghetto residents who held foreign passports were moved into the Pawiak Prison, a compound near the center of the ghetto. Twenty-one were U.S. citizens, while most of the others had South American passports: Paraguay, Costa Rica, Nicaragua, Ecuador, Bolivia, and Mexico.
 
In January, 1943, they were moved to an internment camp at Vittel, in the mountains of France. Vittel was a former resort that housed the new prisoners in former hotels and hostels, while providing them access to the parks, shops, and entertainment venues of the resort. The purpose of placing them in Vittel was to show to the world that the Third Reich treated their “captured citizens” with great care and concern.
 
Mary’s diary revealed the truth.
 
As her diary was prepared for publication, Mary used the last name Berg as protection for her family, friends, and relatives in Poland. She was not the only witness to the Nazi atrocities before the war in Europe ended, but her diary was the first account in English to describe the ghetto from its initial establishment in 1940 through the deportations that took place in the late summer of 1942. It was also one of the first personal accounts to describe gas being used to kill prisoners at the death camps.
 
She also told:

• That Jews from all parts of Europe were “resettled” in the ghetto, swelling the initial population of 200,000 to 500,000 by May, 1942. The required minimum number of occupants allotted to apartment buildings became 10 people per room.
• That human life existed by the whims of the administrators, guards and soldiers. People on the street, in apartments, walking on the sidewalk, at work, and elsewhere were beaten to death or shot with no warning. Dozens and then hundreds were forced out of their buildings at night to be shot in the open areas.
• That, since the ghetto was officially closed, rations cards were issued that entitled each person to a quarter of a pound of bread a day, one egg a month, and two pounds of vegetable jam a month. Potatoes cost extra. Those with American passports, like Lena, received additional packages of foodstuffs. The official daily calorie count was kept at about 200 per day for Jews and 800 for others, while the quota for Aryan citizens outside the ghetto was about 2200.
• That a thriving black market existed for items like food, medicine [typhus was the chief disease, along with typhoid], coats, blankets, and fuel for heating.
• That the graft and corruption within the Gestapo, who administered the ghetto, occasionally provided relief from the oppression, and then turned around to commit brutalities, creating for every resident an ongoing threat of spontaneous terror. Theft, smuggling, robbery, and murder were commonplace. A Jewish mafia-like political structure developed that functioned in tandem with the Gestapo.
• That hundreds died daily from starvation, disease, and brutality, enough that hand-pulled wagons drove the streets every morning to pick up bodies.
• That she watched from her window as 3,000 people per day, then 10,000 per day, were escorted to trains headed for death camps, while 30,000 men and women were forced to work twelve hour shifts at Polish and German factories. Many died from overwork and starvation.
• That she watched the Great Deportation in July of 1942 where 300,000 people were marched to the Umschlagplatz Center to be loaded into freight cars headed for Treblinka, Auschwitz, and other extermination centers. Family members of American citizens were not deported.
• That the ghetto community developed a layered social structure that allowed money and privilege to influence work assignments, food allotments, entertainment, education, and other aspects of daily life. Despite the efforts of the Nazis to search and confiscate possessions, residents learned to hide their money and valuables.
• That, without radios, telephones, or newspapers, the ghetto community managed to secretly connect to outside sources, maintain hidden radio communications, and to publish resistance papers that were circulated by hand. The knowledge of what was going on in other parts of the occupied territories stayed relatively current.
• That life in the ghetto continued with flirting, romances, marriages, births, hospitals, mail, medicines, street vendors, beggars, cafes, restaurants, orchestras, concerts, music lessons, theaters, plays, taxes, and rent.
• That, when the building was needed for other activities, the children from a ghetto orphanage were led through the streets to the cemetery and then shot.
• That the resiliency of the community was proven by the development of hidden educational classes for young people, hidden synagogues and worship activities for men, as well as secret tunnels [using the basements of bombed-out buildings] leading under the wall for organized smuggling. Children were sent through the tunnels to beg for food, clothes, and money.
• That there was an internal resistance organization that selectively executed black market controllers, collaborators, informers, and spies. Mary knew fighters in the resistance who would organize the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising in June of 1943, after she had left. The insurrection lasted for five weeks and the Germans used more firepower during the battle than during the siege of the entire city of Warsaw. Afterwards, the ghetto was set on fire and the remaining 40,000 Jews were burned to death.

Mary’s diary is unique for its authenticity, its detail and its poignancy, as well as for its early publication. It was originally meant only to comfort and occupy herself, but became an outlet for her and her friends. Combined with other writings smuggled out of the Nazi regime, secret diaries, letters, pictures, and drawings gave unparalleled descriptions of the conditions of the German ghettos and camps, and the orchestrated programs intended by the Third Reich to gather, transport, and murder the Jews in Europe.
 
On March 5, 1944, as the SS Gripsholm pulled away from the French coast and began its trip across the Atlantic, Mary Berg wrote:
“I went out on deck and breathed the endless blueness. The blood-drenched earth of Europe was far behind me. The feeling of freedom almost took my breath away. In the last four years I have not known this feeling. [I have only known] four years of the black swastika, of barbed wire, ghetto walls, executions, and, above all, terror—terror by day and terror by night.”
 
The 75th edition of Mary’s diary is titled The Diary of Mary Berg, Growing up in the Warsaw Ghetto. It is a OneWorld Publication, 2018.

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