A secret diary buried in a time capsule at Auschwitz-Birkenau has been translated into Hungarian to mark this year’s International Holocaust Remembrance Day, held on January 27.
Polish Jewish author Zalmen Gradowski’s Auschwitz fragments are regarded as one of the most authentic documents from the Holocaust era.
Gradowski was a prisoner of Auschwitz-Birkenau, pictured above, in German-occupied Poland from 1942 and worked for 16 months in the Sonderkommando slave labor unit in the gas chambers and the crematoria until his death in October 1944.
According to MTI, he wrote a secret diary to describe his life in the death camp and buried it in a time capsule. The document was found among the ashes of the perished in March 1945, after the liberation of the camp.
“Gradowski knew exactly that he would die. It became the purpose of his life to record what he had seen and hide it. He is supposed to have written more but only two fragments survived,” János Kőbányai, director of the publisher Múlt és Jövő (Past and Future), told MTI.
The fragments were first published in Hebrew in 2012. The Hungarian translation made by Zsombor Hunyadi, a young PhD student of Jerusalem’s Hebrew University, is based on the original Yiddish text.