Debora's diary
Extent and Medium
oversize box
1
Archival History
United States Holocaust Memorial Museum
Acquisition
United States Holocaust Memorial Museum Collection, Gift of the family of Lusia Hornstein
Debora's diary was donated by the family of Lusia Hornstein to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in 2002.
Scope and Content
The collection includes a diary written in 1943 by a young woman named Debora (last name unknown) who fought with the Polish underground in Warsaw. Debora hid the diary and told her friend Lusia Schwarzwald Hornstein, a fellow underground fighter, where to find it should she not survive. Debora was killed by a bomb in Warsaw during the Polish uprising in 1944. In the diary Debora writes about living in hiding, poor living conditions in the bunker, looking for her mother, learning that her mother was killed, and burying her mother. Lusia recovered the diary in March 1945 from behind a radiator in a burned-out house where they lived under false papers and wrapped it in a newspaper. After the war, Lusia married her husband in 1948 and they immigrated to the United States in 1951.
System of Arrangement
Debora’s diary is arranged as a single series.
People
- Debora.
Subjects
- Warsaw (Poland)
- Warsaw (Poland)--History--Uprising, 1944.
- World War, 1939-1945--Jewish resistance--Poland.
- World War, 1939‐1945‐‐Personal narratives.
Genre
- Diaries.
- Document