Carolyn Gammon
Carolyn Gammon
At the beginning of the Nazi period, 25,000 Jewish people lived in Tarnow, Poland. By the end of the Second World War, nine remained. Like Anne Frank, Israel Unger and his family hid for two years in an attic crawl space above the Dagnan flour mill in Tarnow. Their stove was the chimney that went up through the attic; their windows were cracks in the wall. Survival depended on the food the adults were able to forage outside at night. Against all odds, they emerged alive. Now, decades later, here is Unger's "unwritten diary." At the end of the war, following a time as people sans pays, the Unger family immigrated to Canada. After discovering a love of chemistry, Israel Unger had a stellar academic career, married, and raised a family in Fredericton, New Brunswick. The Unwritten Diary of Israel Unger is as much a Holocaust story as it is a story of a young immigrant making every possible use of the opportunities Canada had to offer. This revised edition includes a reproduction of Dagnan's List, a list of Jewish slave labourer similar Schindler's List, made famous in the Steven Spielberg movie. The name of Israel Unger's father appears on the list, in which Dagnan declares that Unger is an "essential worker"-a ruse that may have saved the father's life. This recently discovered document proves that Israel Unger's memory of this key part of the story was accurate. A new postscript details the importance of this startling document.
At the beginning of the Nazi period, 25,000 Jewish people lived in Tarnow, Poland. By the end of the Second World War, nine remained. Like Anne Frank, Israel Unger and his family hid for two years in an attic crawl space. Against all odds, they emerged alive. Now, after decades of silence, here is Israel's "unwritten diary." Nine people lived behind that false wall above the Dagnan factory in Tarnow. Their stove was the chimney that went up through the attic; their windows were cracks in the wall. Survival depended on the food the adults leaving the hideout at night were able to forage. Even at the end of the war, however, Jewish people emerging from hiding were still not safe. After the infamous postwar Kielce pogrom, Israel's parents sent him and his brother as "orphans" to France in a program called Rescue Children, a Europe-wide attempt to find Jewish children orphaned by the Holocaust. When the family was finally reunited, they lived a precarious existence between France-as people sans pays-and England until the immigration papers for Canada came through in 1951. In Montreal, in the world described so well by Mordecai Richler, Israel's father, a co-owner of a factory in Poland, was reduced to sweeping factory floors. At the local yeshiva (Jewish high school), Israel discovered chemistry, and a few short years later he left poverty behind. He had a stellar academic career, married, and raised a family in Fredericton, New Brunswick. The Unwritten Diary of Israel Unger is as much a Holocaust story as it is a story of a young immigrant making every possible use of the opportunities Canada had to offer.
Persecuted as a Jew, both under the Nazis and in post-war East Germany, Johanna Krause (1907-2001) courageously fought her way through life with searing humour and indomitable strength of character. Johanna Krause Twice Persecuted is her story. Born in Dresden into bitter poverty, Krause received little education and worked mostly in shops and factories. In 1933, when she came to the defence of a Jewish man being beaten by the brownshirts, Krause was jailed for "insulting the Fürer" After a secret wedding in 1935, she was arrested again with her husband, Max Krause, for breaking the law that forbade marriage between a Jew and an "Aryan." In the years following, Johanna endured many atrocities-a forced abortion while eight months pregnant and subsequent sterilization, her incarceration in numerous prisons and concentration camps, including Ravensbrück, the notorious women's camp near Berlin, and a death march. After the war, the Krauses took part enthusiastically in building the new socialist republic of East Germany-until 1958, when Johanna recognized a party official as a man who had tried to rape and kill her during the war. Thinking the communist party would punish the official, Joanna found out whose side the party was on and was subjected to anti-Semitic attacks. Both she and her husband were jailed and their business and belongings confiscated. After her release she lived as a persona non grata in East Germany, having been evicted from the communist party. It was only in the 1990s, after the reunification of Germany, that Johanna saw some justice. Originally published as Zweimal Verfolgt, the book is the result of collaboration between Johanna Krause, Carolyn Gammon, and Christiane Hemker. Translated by Carolyn Gammon, Johanna Krause Twice Persecuted will be of interest to scholars of auto/biography, World War II history, and the Holocaust.