Franciszkańska i Nowiniarska From Warsaw

  • YES
  • From Warsaw
  • Midtown
  • Franciszkańska i Nowiniarska
  • antiquarian bookstore
  • in the ghetto
  • business, social/communal
  • trade, Intelligentsia

  • Antiquarian bookstore run by Szmeul Goldfarb. According to Barbara Temkin-Berman: '[He was] a poor, thin man with reddish hair wearing a threadbare hat. He was great books lover. and knew a lot about them. (...) I have found in this ['bookstor'] some rare books, but to be honest I have to say that I was afraid to stay there, because ['the clients'] - mostly the so-called street children, some of them very interesting and fine, very severely lice-infested, and it was the time of typhus fever epidemic.

  • The author started to write on 5 January 1944, and the last entry is dated 14 January 1945. The diary was written in ten, common, chequered school notebooks. Written irregularly. Bermanowa probably took a pen in her hand only when she either found the time or when she felt strong enough. Successive entries, dated scrupulously, written in Polish, were written in occupied Warsaw ('in hiding'), then in occupied ('free') capital and in a number of places near Warsaw (again 'on the Aryan papers'). The first event described took place during the Polish-German War of 1939, the latest - three days before the liberation of Warsaw (17 January 1945).

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