The memoir of a young woman who was 16 when the war began. The oldest daughter of a large, happy Orthodox family, of course things got very bad for them when they were confined to the Lodz Ghetto and her relatives began dropping like flies, beginning with her father and disabled little sister. She is the only member of her family to survive the war.

This would be a quite unremarkable Lodz Ghetto memoir were it not for the most REmarkable detailed diary in the last third of the book, between November 1944 and May 1945, when the author was working in the office in a forced-labor camp. Writing mostly on the backs of used vouchers, she poured out her heart, all her misery and despair and worry about her brothers she'd been separated from at Auschwitz, and the brutality at the camp with everyone fed starvation diets and girls being beaten badly, sometimes to death, over nothing at all. Yet she was determined to survive.

I've stopped caring about anything. I'm being ground to dust, I've stopped existing, my "me" is a jagged piece of pain which is seized from time to time with outbursts of fury and despair. I feel that I can't go on, but know I can, and that I will, and for who knows how much longer.

I try to get my hands on every Holocaust diary I can find. I'd never heard about this one. The book's description material didn't mention it, and I don't think the diary has been published elsewhere. ( )