Between Two Streams: A Diary from Bergen-Belsen

by Abel J. Herzberg, Jack Santcross (Translator)

At the height of the Holocaust it was Nazi policy to preserve small groups of ""privileged"" Jews for possible use in exchanges with Allied-held German civilians. Held in the special ""Sternlager"" at Bergen-Belsen their ""privilege"" amounted to being kept alive rather than gassed - although 70 per cent of the internees perished before the camp's liberation, victims of disease, starvation, beatings or sheer despair.

One such privileged internee - Abel Herzberg, a Dutch lawyer and writer - managed in the hell of Bergen-Belsen to keep a diary which chronicles the reality of daily existence in the camp, with its grotesquely dehumanizing conditions and the magnanimity and pettiness which they engendered. He describes the relations between inmates and the civic code of the internees.

Genres: Holocaust, Nonfiction, History, Autobiography

232 pages, Hardcover

First published April 15, 1997

About the author

Abel Jacob Herzberg was advocaat en procureur. Daarnaast was hij een Nederlandse toneel- en (kroniek)schrijver en essayist.

Reviews

[Roma · Rating 5 out of 5]

I read the original Dutch version. It's - of course - not an easy read, since its subject is the incarceration of perfectly innocent people in a concentration camp, just because they happen to be Jews.

[Kevin Ryan]

Just purchased book on-line. I will review pending receipt of book.

[Meaghan · Rating 4 out of 5]

This diary is more interesting and readable than most published diaries, because it's so detailed. Many entries are several pages long. The author had a position of a judge in Bergen-Belsen's makeshift court, which the inmates set up to deal with offenses within their ranks such as theft, etc., and he often wrote about the cases he'd dealt with. Hunger, too, is of course ever-present, and the privations that go with that.

An item of interest: the translator of this diary came to Bergen-Belsen on the same train as Mr. Herzberg and later left on the same train. The translator was only a child at the time and they don't seem to have ever met, but its intriguing all the same. Full circle.

[Doriana Bisegna]

While this diary is a very important piece of literature, I just couldn't make it to the end!