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