In 1942 Norwegian Odd Nansen was arrested by the Nazis, and he
spent the remainder of World War II in concentration camps Grini in
Oslo, Veidal above the Arctic Circle, and Sachsenhausen in Germany.
For three and a half years, Nansen kept a secret diary on
tissue-paper-thin pages later smuggled out by various means,
including inside the prisoners' hollowed-out breadboards. Unlike
writers of retrospective Holocaust memoirs, Nansen recorded the
mundane and horrific details of camp life as they happened, ""from
day to day."" With an unsparing eye, Nansen described the casual
brutality and random terror that was the fate of a camp prisoner.
His entries reveal his constantly frustrated hopes for an early end
to the war, his longing for his wife and children, his horror at
the especially barbaric treatment reserved for Jews, and his
disgust at the anti-Semitism of some of his fellow Norwegians.
Nansen often confronted his German jailors with unusual
outspokenness and sometimes with a sense of humor and absurdity
that was not appreciated by his captors. After the Putnam's edition
received rave reviews in 1949, the book fell into obscurity. In
1956, in response to a poll about the ""most undeservedly
neglected"" book of the preceding quarter-century, Carl Sandburg
singled out From Day to Day, calling it ""an epic narrative,""
which took ""its place among the great affirmations of the power of
the human spirit to rise above terror, torture, and death.""
Indeed, Nansen witnessed all the horrors of the camps, yet still
saw hope for the future. He sought reconciliation with the German
people, even donating the proceeds of the German edition of his
book to German refugee relief work. Nansen was following in the
footsteps of his father, Fridtjof, an Arctic explorer and
humanitarian who was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1922 for his
work on behalf of World War I refugees. (Fridtjof also created the
""Nansen passport"" for stateless persons.) This new edition, the
first in over sixty-five years, contains extensive annotations and
new diary selections never before translated into English. Forty
sketches of camp life and death by Nansen, an architect and
talented draftsman, provide a sense of immediacy and acute
observation matched by the diary entries. The preface is written by
Thomas Buergenthal, who was ""Tommy,"" the ten-year-old survivor of
the Auschwitz Death March, whom Nansen met at Sachsenhausen and
saved using his extra food rations. Buergenthal, who later served
as a judge on the International Court of Justice at The Hague, is
this year's recipient of the Elie Wiesel Award from the US
Holocaust Memorial Museum.
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