This stirring collection of diaries written by young people during the Holocaust reflects a vast and diverse range of experiences—some of the writers were refugees, others were hiding or passing as non-Jews, some were imprisoned in ghettos. This seminal National Jewish Book Award winner was the first comprehensive collection of such writings, with extensive excerpts from fifteen diaries, ten of which had never before been translated and published in English. The diarists ranged in age from twelve to twenty-two; some survived the Holocaust, but most perished. Taken together, their accounts of daily events and their often unexpected thoughts, ideas, and feelings serve to deepen and complicate our understanding of life during the Holocaust.

Salvaged Pages has now been fully revised and updated in a second edition.  It begins with a new preface by Alexandra Zapruder examining the book’s history and impact and includes her introduction from the original edition in which she examines Anne Frank’s diary and offers a new framework for thinking about the diaries young people produced in this time of extreme crisis. In introductions to each chapter, she assesses the value of these literary fragments as part of the historical record of the Holocaust and provides informative introductions to each diary about when and where each diary was written; the diarist’s biographical, religious, cultural, and economic circumstances; the fate of the diarist; the circumstances of the diary’s discovery. A revised appendix gives details about the known diaries written by young people during this period and a second appendix provides a study of related materials, such as rewritten and reconstructed diaries, letters, diary-memoirs, and texts by non-Jewish young victims of the war and Nazism. 

AWARDS

Winner of the 2001-02 National Jewish Book Award in the Holocaust category

PRAISE FOR Salvaged Pages:

“Written in fear and darkness by Jewish youth and adolescents, while waiting for death by SS executioners and their accomplices, these extraordinary diaries will resonate in the reader’s broken hearts for many days and many nights.”  —Elie Wiesel

“Zapruder . . . has done a great service to history and the future. Her book deserves to become a standard in Holocaust studies classes, particularly those aimed at youth or focusing on individuals. . . . These writings will certainly impress themselves on the memories of all readers.” —Publishers Weekly

"A searing collection of Jewish youngsters’ private Holocaust diaries, Salvaged Pages shines a bright light on their daily lives and their inner lives.  Zapruder offers us the opportunity follow these child and adolescent writers as they endured and responded to an ever harsher Nazi regime.  Salvaged Pages gives us a glimpse, too, of the unfulfilled potential lost with the murder of a generation. A key text for teachers and students alike, Salvaged Pages enriches our understanding of how life was lived and lives were destroyed, day by day, year after year." —Debórah Dwork, Director, Strassler Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies, Clark University

“For the millions who read The Diary of Anne Frank (1952), this collection of 14 Holocaust diaries by young people from all over Europe will extend the history beyond Anne’s attic walls. Scholars will want this volume--editor Zapruder’s research is meticulous, drawing on archives and museums across the world--but the intensely personal voices of these young people who record the unimaginable will also draw a general audience. In her clear overview and introductions to each diary, Zapruder gives historical context and biography and decries any message of consolation or redemption, pointing out that these stark narratives banish forever the stereotypes of sweet victim, beneficent rescuer, and unfeeling bystander; instead, they suggest the immense complexity of ordinary people….A landmark collection.” —Booklist

“Written with the candor and the guilelessness of youth, these rescued fragments give us newly raw insights into the conditions of life and death during the Holocaust, and unvarnished glimpses of individual responses to circumstances of extremity. An important and a poignant collection.” —Eva Hoffman, author of The Secret

“. . . A staggering volume of epic scraps penned by clear-eyed Jewish adolescents and edited by Alexandra Zapruder. . . . Zapruder has given new life to these memoirs of death, and . . . they render history with quivering immediacy.” —Justin Davidson, Newsday

“The selections here offer a new way of looking at how the young regarded their fates. . . . It is unbelievably wrenching reading. . . . The words written by these Jewish children as they await their deaths at the hands of their German executioners are searing.” —Marc Horton, The Edmonton Journal