At the end of the summer of 1939, Julius Feldman was getting ready to go back to secondary school. He was fifteen years old, lived in the Podgorze district, and attended a school where most of his classmates were non-Jewish. His father ran a glazier's shop and got his news from the daily paper published by the Polish Socialist Party.

Then came September 1. German warplanes began bombing Cracow at dawn. Rumors multiplied in the absence of hard news, and people who went onto the roofs to watch the airplanes were arrested under suspicion of signalling to them After several days, the Polish authorities withdrew, looting broke out, and, finally, Julius Feldman watched motorized troops with strange markings on their helmets entering Cracow along the main artery at the end of the block where he lived. They were the outriders of the German army that presently took over the city.

On February 11, 1943, when his parents were gone and the ghetto where he lived had been reduced to a fraction of its original size through mass deportations to the German death camps in the east, and two days before the monstrous Amon Goeth took office as commandant at the new camp being built a few miles away in Plaszow, Feldman realized that the time had come for him to start writing down what he remembered. He had survived long enough to turn nineteen.

"Starting on this description of experiences from wartime, I have begun three and a half years late, and I am not sure that I will finish it since every day brings something new here. This might not be an exact sketch of the story with all the details, but my memory today is not capable of recalling everything. Nor is it possible to write everything."

Yet the important thing is that he did begin writing, in Polish, on sheets of paper that he concealed in different places as the tragic final chapter of the Cracow Jewish community played itself out.

Feldman may not have recalled everything, but his description was precise enough that, years later, Dr. Marek Bieberman, using a copy of the Feldman diary, included parts of its descriptions almost verbatim in his history of the destruction of the Cracow Jews. Feldman's account of the progressive horror of the occupation, from curfew to restrictions to confiscation to plunder to armbands to resettlement to confinement in the ghetto and, ultimately, extermination, checks out in detail against the invaluable timeline by Joseph Soski that is included in the present publication.

A few months after Feldman began writing, the ghetto had been liquidated and its survivors marched off to suffer under Goeth in Plaszow. Yet Feldman was in an exceptional position. He worked for a German "company," with premises in the district that had recently been the ghetto, that specialized in refurbishing plundered Jewish-owned furniture for the use of Nazi officials. Feldman spent his nights in the Plaszow camp and then marched off to labor during the day. His job was extraordinary, for he drove or rode on a horse cart that traveled around the city delivering furniture to the dwellings that Nazi dignitaries had appropriated for themselves. He received a dressing-down in the street from no less dangerous a figure than Goeth himself for daring--a Jew!--to drive his furniture cart beneath General Governor Hans Frank's perch in Wawel Castle. He had to listen to ominous threats from a Nazi nabob: "Mr. Anderson was not happy because a screw was missing. He was very angry and threatened to shoot us all." Feldman had chance meetings with non-Jewish acquaintances from the times before the Germans came. Then, back at the furniture shop, he waited for an occasion to take his diary out of its hiding place, write as much as he could, and then conceal it again.

Not long before the end, Feldman notes: "I am facing a big decision which could be a matter of life and death." Less than two weeks after that entry, the diary ends in mid-sentence.

Feldman's diary is a valuable and apparently reliable historical source. It reveals aspects of wartime experience not always given adequate attention in works written years later by historians. Feldman's account makes it impossible to say that the people in the ghettos regarded themselves as irrevocably cut off from the broader conduct of the war or what was happening elsewhere in the world. Feldman shows how their moods swung just as strongly in regard to distant battles as to the latest perversities of the German extermination campaign. Perhaps this is natural; like people of every generation since Homer, they had at least a vicarious experience of war. They knew how to make sense of reports on distant battlefields. But who had ever gone through extermination in the Nazi style? Who could conceive of it, even as it was being done to them? In his next-to-last entry, Feldman writes: "We learn from the newspaper that the offensive in Tunisia is making great progress. Our optimism is undiminished for that reason." From the Cracow ghetto, they were following military campaigns in the North African desert. What, in London or Washington, did anyone know at that moment about the Cracow ghetto? (One must also add that, while the Jews in Cracow knew what was happening in Tunisia, they did not know what had happened to their relatives who had been deported to Belzec months earlier. Or perhaps they could not bring themselves to know, or speculate, if they wanted to have any hope of going on.)

So Julius Feldman's is a voice speaking to us directly from the Cracow ghetto, the voice of a young Jewish man who was in the middle of the Holocaust, but did not know what we know about how it would all turn out.

That should be enough to hold our interest. But there is far more.

It seems natural to Feldman that he and those around him should have been, even before the war began, avid readers of whatever newspapers they could get their hands on. Nowhere, however, does Feldman describe himself as having any ambitions to be a writer. Yet that is what he became, in less than three months, just before, during, and after the liquidation of the ghetto in which he was confined.

He began writing in the horrible time after his parents and those of his friends and relatives had disappeared in a great deportation. Just then, at about the time he was turning nineteen, he found himself sharing a relatively large room--so many had been taken away--with several other young people. Had the war never begun, Feldman might have been beginning his university studies at that age, or earning his own money, perhaps in his father's glazing business. In a normal world, he would have devoted a good deal of time between the ages of fifteen and nineteen to reading the literature on the Polish secondary-school syllabus. He might well have read Zbigniew Unilowski's 1932 novel, A Shared Room, which portrays a collection of boarders in a Warsaw rooming house trying to embark on avant-garde artistic careers amid the oppressive social tensions of Depression-era Poland. Unilowski's book became a standard text for creative artists; theatrical giant Tadeusz Kantor identified it as a major early influence, and Kantor's future rooms, his "rooms of childhood" and perhaps even the schoolroom of his Dead Class, can be read as glosses on Unilowski.

Unilowski's death at the age of 28 in 1937 was widely regarded as having deprived Polish literature of a writer of immense promise, one who had already marked out a place for himself in a genre that could be anachronistically referred to as "dirty realism."

Yet how much more oppressive was the occupation realism that Julius Feldman, almost a decade younger than Unilowski had been when he died, described as he embarked upon his diary in that shared room in the Cracow ghetto. Feldman begins slowly, as he tries to recall dates and keep the events in order. We can imagine him comparing his memories with those of the other young people in the shared room, until he is satisfied with the account. He provides telling details and scraps of occupation-era phraseology that speak eloquently of the absurdity and the fear that they all faced. He knows when to slow down and let concrete facts tell the story, as when his mother improvises a city-wide search for Feldman's father, who has been picked up by the Gestapo (and, this time, is later released).

The accidental, almost unnoticed way in which his father is separated for the last time from his family in the ghetto is heartbreaking, but nowhere does Julius Feldman give in to self-pity or accord any special status to his own emotions amid the general catastrophe. Like millions of other victims who did not leave any diaries behind, Feldman triumphs over Hitler by refusing, no matter what savagery the Germans inflict, to do anything that would undercut his own dignity. For anyone, but especially for a nineteen-year-old writer, that is an accomplishment.

To be strict, only the last part of the book should be called a "diary," for it is here that, rather than recalling past events, Feldman is writing about day-to-day incidents as they occur. The fragmentary nature of many of the last entries indicates that there were things he never had the time to write down. What he did write is terrifying: late-night searches of the barracks at the Plaszow camp or, as mentioned above, the confrontation with an enraged Amon Goeth, a man who, literally, would just as soon shoot you as look at you. As long as he could, Feldman went on writing. We do not know what happened after the final, interrupted entry. We only know that it could not have been good.

A literary analogue with Feldman is found in Borges's story "The Secret Miracle." There, God intervened to stop time just as a Nazi firing squad pulled the trigger, and the "miracle" allowed the hero to compose--in his mind--the epic about the Golem of Prague that he had been putting off all his life. Then the bullets hit.

In Feldman's Diary, God makes no appearance. Yet the miracle might thus seem all the greater. Julius Feldman had the chance, or perhaps the obligation, thrust upon him: to write a single book. Among circumstances we can barely imagine--which, nevertheless, he brings alive for us--he managed to do it, and we can read his book today: an authentic young voice speaking directly to us from the abyss.
 

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