The Warsaw Diary of Adam Czerniakow: Prelude to Doom

Edited by Raul Hilberg, Stanislaw Staron, and Josef Kermisz; Translated by Stanislaw Staron and the staff of Yad Vashem

Adam Czerniakow was a Polish Jew who killed himself on July 23, 1942—on the face of it not an uncommon occurrence in those times. But there is more to this story, much more than the tragic death of one man among so many millions. More, because Adam Czerniakow was for nearly three years the chairman of the Warsaw Judenrat—a Jew, devoted to his people, who served as the Nazi-sponsored “mayor” of the Warsaw Ghetto. His personal dealings with the German authorities bring to this daily record of events a depth of knowledge, accuracy of detail, and panorama of view that was possible to no other participant in the epic prelude to the final doom of the largest captive Jewish community in Eastern Europe. This secret journal is not only the testimony of an unbearable personal burden, but the documentary of terminal agony of the living-dying city-within-a-city that was the Warsaw Ghetto before its half-million people were deported to the death camps at Treblinka.

In its lacunae and in its sometimes inexplicable allusions, the journal is also mute testimony to the savagery of the Nazis and the thoroughness of their destruction of Warsaw Jewry. Indeed, it is as if this most important diary to emerge from the Holocaust had survived to us from across millennia rather than from only yesterday. From the book cover.