A really touching piece from Tablet about the Warsaw ghetto diary that we have never heard of.
I'm putting the article up in the hopes that it will catch some momentum and someone may publish it.
I would sure be interested in reading the whole thing.
"About 800 pages long, penned in minuscule
handwriting that is almost impossible to read with the naked eye, the
diary is a remarkable account, clear-eyed and poignant, spanning roughly
the time from the establishment of the ghetto to the arrival of Soviet
troops in Warsaw. It contains references to everything its author had
ever studied—from Mishnah and Torah to secular literature and the work
of Sigmund Freud, with whom Ben-Shem learned in Vienna in the interwar
period—as well as a close observation of the ways in which Jews were
forced to become animals, not metaphorically, but actually."