The Story of the Only Extant Auschwitz Diary

Emmanuel Levinas spent most of World War II in a Nazi forced-labor camp, where he began writing one of his most influential books. During that time, another East European Jew, named Sheindi Miller, was writing a work of her own, under even more terrible conditions. Zvika Klein writes:

Sheindi Miller was born Sheindi Ehrenwald in 1929 in the small Slovak town of Galanta, where family, faith, and community defined life. But that life changed when she was fourteen. In March 1944, German forces entered Hungary, setting into motion a chain of events that would alter the course of Sheindi’s life.

On that day, Sheindi began writing in her diary, chronicling the confusion, fear, and brutality of a world suddenly turned upside down. Her diary would ultimately survive the Holocaust—the only known diary from Auschwitz to have done so.

Sheindi’s diary consists of 54 pages, written on scraps of paper and 52 dockets from the Karl Diehl arms company where she worked as a forced laborer. The remaining pages were written on small slips of paper, narrowly filled with her girlish handwriting. . .  . “I hid the pages in my clothing,” she recounted. “Every night, I would write what I saw, what I felt. It was dangerous, but it was my way of fighting back.”

Miller, who died in Jerusalem on October 28 of this year, kept her diary in Hungarian—the language of many Slovakian Jews at the time—although it was eventually translated into Hebrew. Naturally, she and others compare her diary to Anne Frank’s. The differences call to mind Dara Horn’s observations about the latter work. First, Frank’s experience represents that of the minority of Western Jews, not of the more religiously devout and less acculturated Jews of the East, who made up the majority of the Holocaust’s victims. Second, Frank’s diary tells a story not of experiencing the Shoah but of temporarily escaping it. By the time Frank was in Auschwitz, she had stopped writing, so far as anyone knows.

Read more at Jerusalem Post

More about: Anne Frank, Auschwitz, Holocaust, Hungarian Jewry

American Middle East Policy Should Focus Less on Stability and More on Weakening Enemies

Feb. 10 2025

To Elliott Abrams, Donald Trump’s plan to remove the entire population of Gaza while the Strip is rebuilt is “unworkable,” at least “as a concrete proposal.” But it is welcome insofar as “its sheer iconoclasm might lead to a healthy rethinking of U.S. strategy and perhaps of Arab and Israeli policies as well.” The U.S., writes Abrams, must not only move beyond the failed approach to Gaza, but also must reject other assumptions that have failed time and again. One is the commitment to an illusory stability:

For two decades, what American policymakers have called “stability” has meant the preservation of the situation in which Gaza was entirely under Hamas control, Hizballah dominated Lebanon, and Iran’s nuclear program advanced. A better term for that situation would have been “erosion,” as U.S. influence steadily slipped away and Washington’s allies became less secure. Now, the United States has a chance to stop that process and aim instead for “reinforcement”: bolstering its interests and allies and actively weakening its adversaries. The result would be a region where threats diminish and U.S. alliances grow stronger.

Such an approach must be applied above all to the greatest threat in today’s Middle East, that of a nuclear Iran:

Trump clearly remains open to the possibility (however small) that an aging [Iranian supreme leader Ali] Khamenei, after witnessing the collapse of [his regional proxies], mulling the possibility of brutal economic sanctions, and being fully aware of the restiveness of his own population, would accept an agreement that stops the nuclear-weapons program and halts payments and arms shipments to Iran’s proxies. But Trump should be equally aware of the trap Khamenei might be setting for him: a phony new negotiation meant to ensnare Washington in talks for years, with Tehran’s negotiators leading Trump on with the mirage of a successful deal and a Nobel Peace Prize at the end of the road while the Iranian nuclear-weapons program grows in the shadows.

Read more at Foreign Affairs

More about: Iran, Middle East, U.S. Foreign policy