What do you think?
Rate this book
From Day to Day: One Man's Diary of Survival in Nazi Concentration Camps
This new hardcover edition of Odd Nansen's diary, the first in over sixty-five years, contains extensive annotations and other material not found in any other hardcover or paperback versions.
Nansen, a Norwegian, was arrested in 1942 by the Nazis, and spent the remainder of World War II in concentration camps--Grini in Oslo, Veidal above the Arctic Circle, and Sachsenhausen in Germany. For three and a half years, Nansen kept a secret diary on tissue-paper-thin pages later smuggled out by various means, including inside the prisoners' hollowed-out breadboards.
Unlike writers of retrospective Holocaust memoirs, Nansen recorded the mundane and horrific details of camp life as they happened, "from day to day." With an unsparing eye, Nansen described the casual brutality and random terror that was the fate of a camp prisoner. His entries reveal his constantly frustrated hopes for an early end to the war, his longing for his wife and children, his horror at the especially barbaric treatment reserved for Jews, and his disgust at the anti-Semitism of some of his fellow Norwegians. Nansen often confronted his German jailors with unusual outspokenness and sometimes with a sense of humor and absurdity that was not appreciated by his captors.
After the Putnam's edition received rave reviews in 1949, the book fell into obscurity. In 1956, in response to a poll about the "most undeservedly neglected" book of the preceding quarter-century, Carl Sandburg singled out From Day to Day , calling it "an epic narrative," which took "its place among the great affirmations of the power of the human spirit to rise above terror, torture, and death." Indeed, Nansen witnessed all the horrors of the camps, yet still saw hope for the future. He sought reconciliation with the German people, even donating the proceeds of the German edition of his book to German refugee relief work. Nansen was following in the footsteps of his father, Fridtjof, an Arctic explorer and humanitarian who was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1922 for his work on behalf of World War I refugees. (Fridtjof also created the "Nansen passport" for stateless persons.)
Forty sketches of camp life and death by Nansen, an architect and talented draftsman, provide a sense of immediacy and acute observation matched by the diary entries. The preface is written by Thomas Buergenthal, who was "Tommy," the ten-year-old survivor of the Auschwitz Death March, whom Nansen met at Sachsenhausen and saved using his extra food rations. Buergenthal, author of A Lucky Child , formerly served as a judge on the International Court of Justice at The Hague and is a recipient of the 2015 Elie Wiesel Award from the US Holocaust Memorial Museum.
Nansen, a Norwegian, was arrested in 1942 by the Nazis, and spent the remainder of World War II in concentration camps--Grini in Oslo, Veidal above the Arctic Circle, and Sachsenhausen in Germany. For three and a half years, Nansen kept a secret diary on tissue-paper-thin pages later smuggled out by various means, including inside the prisoners' hollowed-out breadboards.
Unlike writers of retrospective Holocaust memoirs, Nansen recorded the mundane and horrific details of camp life as they happened, "from day to day." With an unsparing eye, Nansen described the casual brutality and random terror that was the fate of a camp prisoner. His entries reveal his constantly frustrated hopes for an early end to the war, his longing for his wife and children, his horror at the especially barbaric treatment reserved for Jews, and his disgust at the anti-Semitism of some of his fellow Norwegians. Nansen often confronted his German jailors with unusual outspokenness and sometimes with a sense of humor and absurdity that was not appreciated by his captors.
After the Putnam's edition received rave reviews in 1949, the book fell into obscurity. In 1956, in response to a poll about the "most undeservedly neglected" book of the preceding quarter-century, Carl Sandburg singled out From Day to Day , calling it "an epic narrative," which took "its place among the great affirmations of the power of the human spirit to rise above terror, torture, and death." Indeed, Nansen witnessed all the horrors of the camps, yet still saw hope for the future. He sought reconciliation with the German people, even donating the proceeds of the German edition of his book to German refugee relief work. Nansen was following in the footsteps of his father, Fridtjof, an Arctic explorer and humanitarian who was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1922 for his work on behalf of World War I refugees. (Fridtjof also created the "Nansen passport" for stateless persons.)
Forty sketches of camp life and death by Nansen, an architect and talented draftsman, provide a sense of immediacy and acute observation matched by the diary entries. The preface is written by Thomas Buergenthal, who was "Tommy," the ten-year-old survivor of the Auschwitz Death March, whom Nansen met at Sachsenhausen and saved using his extra food rations. Buergenthal, author of A Lucky Child , formerly served as a judge on the International Court of Justice at The Hague and is a recipient of the 2015 Elie Wiesel Award from the US Holocaust Memorial Museum.
624 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 1949
79 people are currently reading
298 people want to read
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 19 of 19 reviews
February 11, 2022
The Tattooist of Auschwitz has over seven hundred reviews on Goodreads. From Day to Day has around seventy. The Holocaust has become big business for the publishing industry. But where does the truth lie? With fictionalised real life stories, or memoirs, or the much rarer diary? All have a place in addressing how the Holocaust is remembered and fiction (where it is evaluative) is significant. Yet it is disturbing that absolutely vital sources, such as this diary by Odd Nansen, are eclipsed by popular fiction.
Odd Nansen, the second youngest son of Fridtjof Nansen, was imprisoned because of his connections to the Norwegian royal family and his pro-Jewish activities, something that made him a threat to the Nazis. The final section of the diary focuses on his imprisonment in Sachsenhausen, a place that Nansen refers to as a "real concentration camp": real in that it fulfilled all of the horrors that were circulating. In this section, much of what a reader would identify as the Holocaust is described in detail. This is the Hell within a new Inferno.
The strength of the diary, however, is in the whole, in its ability to show how fanatical ideology and administration stretched across a wide range of camps -- how brutality took many forms. Nansen's sea voyage from one detention camp to another reads like an episode from a slave narrative. And what holds the diary together is the humility and humanity of Nansen himself, his refusal to hate and reflect the hatred of the enemy. Nansen appears as a talented caricaturist (in words and in drawings).
And he mocks the foibles of the Nazi's remorselessly. He also demonstrates an ability to empathise and protect the vulnerable wherever possible.
From Day to Day is hardly the catchiest title. Exactly the point. The diary entries (smuggled inside hollowed out bread boards) compose a Book of Hours, a day to day account of tedium, horror, beauty. Events are told faithfully and without egotism. They are not written with a wish to stimulate a reader's imagination and offer a rounded narrative-- they are written to record and testify.
Odd Nansen, the second youngest son of Fridtjof Nansen, was imprisoned because of his connections to the Norwegian royal family and his pro-Jewish activities, something that made him a threat to the Nazis. The final section of the diary focuses on his imprisonment in Sachsenhausen, a place that Nansen refers to as a "real concentration camp": real in that it fulfilled all of the horrors that were circulating. In this section, much of what a reader would identify as the Holocaust is described in detail. This is the Hell within a new Inferno.
The strength of the diary, however, is in the whole, in its ability to show how fanatical ideology and administration stretched across a wide range of camps -- how brutality took many forms. Nansen's sea voyage from one detention camp to another reads like an episode from a slave narrative. And what holds the diary together is the humility and humanity of Nansen himself, his refusal to hate and reflect the hatred of the enemy. Nansen appears as a talented caricaturist (in words and in drawings).
And he mocks the foibles of the Nazi's remorselessly. He also demonstrates an ability to empathise and protect the vulnerable wherever possible.
From Day to Day is hardly the catchiest title. Exactly the point. The diary entries (smuggled inside hollowed out bread boards) compose a Book of Hours, a day to day account of tedium, horror, beauty. Events are told faithfully and without egotism. They are not written with a wish to stimulate a reader's imagination and offer a rounded narrative-- they are written to record and testify.
February 1, 2017
This article originally appeared in the Jan. 13, 2017, issue of The Norwegian American.
Book review: Nansen’s powerful WWII diary republished
The name Nansen has a cachet in Norway. Fridtjof navigated the Fram to the Arctic Ocean and skied across Greenland, was an ambassador for Norwegian independence in 1905, and earned the role League of Nations High Commissioner for the Aid of Refugees and Prisoners for his involvement in the refugee situation following World War I. Nansen won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1922.
His son, Odd, helped Jewish refugees escape Nazi-controlled countries. The Nansen Office for International Refugees won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1938. On January 13, 1942, the Nazis arrested Nansen as a “court-hostage,” famous people who were part of the resistance. Odd, 40, kept a log of his experiences in three concentration camps over three years. They were Grini, outside Oslo (January 13, 1942, to August 4, 1942; November 22, 1942, to October 6, 1943); Veidal in northern Norway (August 5, 1942, to November 22, 1942); and Sachsenhausen in Germany (October 6, 1943, to March 20, 1945). From Day to Day: One Man’s Diary of Survival in Nazi Concentration Camps, was republished by Vanderbilt University Press, thanks to the efforts of editor Timothy J. Boyce, a retired lawyer in Tryon, N.C. The book is 604 pages, including 47 with photographs and appendices that include translations of common German phrases and “SS Ranks and U.S. Army Equivalents.” Also included are 43 of Odd’s beautiful sketches. The uniqueness of From Day to Day, as opposed to other diaries from the period, is that it was written in “real time.”
The book was out-of-print for 60 years. It took Boyce six years to find a publisher.
Toward the end of the war, the Nazis were liquidating the camps or sending prisoners to other camps. A majority of Jews were exterminated. Into Sachsenhausen from the Auschwitz Death March came 10-year-old Thomas Buergenthal, whose toes were so frostbitten that several had to be amputated. He had spent five years in camps so he could not read or write but had worked in the crematoriums. Nansen used his food and tobacco rations to bribe the hospital orderlies to keep Thomas’s name off the periodic selection lists.
Thomas became life-long friends of Odd and his children. He grew up to become judge on the International Court of Justice at The Hague and received the 2015 Elie Wiesel Award from the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum. He published a memoir, A Lucky Child, in 2010. That caught Boyce’s eye.
“I knew nothing about the book or Buergenthal, but I love history, particularly memoirs, and am fascinated with the Holocaust,” said Boyce. “Thomas relates that Nansen kept a diary while a camp prisoner.”
Boyce searched the internet and found one copy of From Day to Day in the U.S., and five in the world.
“It was one of the most powerful, compelling, eloquent, cinematic, and humanistic books I had ever come across,” said Boyce. “I decided that I would try to get the book republished. It was a masterpiece that people should read. It has such inspirational value for all people, how one maintains his humanity in the face of the most inhumane conditions possible.”
Boyce contacted Buergenthal, who was teaching at George Washington University Law School. They met in January 2011. Buergenthal supported the republishing effort, wrote the preface, and put Boyce in touch with Odd’s surviving children, Marit and Eigil. Boyce met them in Oslo in summer 2011.
Boyce’s break in finding a publisher came after a talk to the Sons of Norway Lodge in Nashville. “A member, Sten Vermund, offered to introduce me to the Director of the Vanderbilt Press. Sten had a personal reason for helping to get the book back into print. His grandfather was a prisoner at Grini.”
Since Fridtjof donated his Nobel prize money to refugee organizations and Odd used his royalties from the German translation of the diary for German refugee groups, Marit and Boyce decided Boyce should donate half his royalties to the U.S. Holocaust Museum and the other half to the Jewish Museum of Oslo.
Writing was forbidden in the camps. As readers, we are blessed with history, so when prisoners express optimism in 1942 that the war will soon end, we know it lasted three more years. Kudos to original translator Katherine John for retaining the superb writing.
There were stark differences between the camps. Grini was more of a labor camp with the possibility of release. Odd was an architect, so he had an indoor job where he avoided the outside hard labor and physical abuse other prisoners experienced. The Norwegian prisoners were allowed to receive parcels from family.
He was also used for making signs and pictures, some with hidden anti-German messages. It also gave him an office where, after hours, he could write in the diary. The diary was written, in part, to his beloved wife, Kari.
His status gave him certain freedoms. He could go into Oslo with a guard to pick up materials. He was able to arrange meetings with Kari, sometimes with the children (she was pregnant with their fourth child), where he would smuggle the diary out. Occasionally, she was able to visit him at the camp for 10 minutes under strict supervision. The diary was hidden in walls and buried in the ground at the edge of the camp.
A remarkable show of resistance was shown at the Lysaker train station. People at the station encircled Kari so she and Odd could meet. She also brought food and cigarettes. While Odd copied freight bills, the goods were loaded into his hung jacket, to be smuggled into the camp for him and other prisoners.
Curiously, some of the guards encouraged the smuggling. One was Eckert, “a good-natured lunatic.” When Odd dropped a loaf of bread back in camp, Eckert told the lieutenant it was his loaf. Eckert received a month’s curfew.
Odd analyzed the guards, officers, and commandant. Prisoners gave them nicknames like “Storm Prince” and “The Segment.” He tried to find any humanity in them and had conversations with them about Nazism. He poked fun at them in his writing. However, Odd shares how an officer, considered a bully, cried after the execution of 15 resistance fighters.
Odd had status among the prisoners, who would ask for assistance with their situations.
The many footnotes in the book are remarkable, for example identifying all prisoners mentioned, why and when they were arrested and their exact release dates. Information about the individual guards and leaders and what happened to them after the war were also included.
“The internet helped direct me on my research, especially in the beginning, when I knew nothing about Nansen or Norway,” said Boyce. “I read just about every available English language work dealing with Norway, WWII, and the concentration camps. As I became more experienced with written Norwegian, I could also rely on some Norwegian texts. The other font of information was Marit, who is the family historian and explained hundreds of questions I had along the way. Without her, the footnotes would not be nearly so insightful about Nansen himself. Tom Buergenthal was also very helpful.”
Odd did spend a short time in isolation.
The Jews were kept separately from the other prisoners and had the worst outside jobs.
The prisoners held secret entertainment evenings—some were able to bring instruments with them. They would close by singing “Ja vi elsker.” (Norwegian national anthem.)
“West wind” was the code word for news reports from the BBC.
The expanding breadth of the resistance is seen as Odd announces the arrivals. One day the teachers, another the clerics. During his second stint in Grini, it was the ski jumping champion Ruud brothers.
Odd and most of the other prisoners he knew left Grini on Aug, 4, 1942, en route to northern Norway. Their destination was unknown. First, 34 men were crammed into a train cattle car; then 400 in the hold of a ship. Sometimes, they were allowed on deck. Food was smuggled aboard.
At Veidal, the prisoners were able to build a stove where they could cook the food from the parcels. There were evening lectures as some of the prisoners were experts in their fields. I was surprised when my friends’ grandfather—Olav Dalgard—was mentioned! Odd’s tasks were mainly wood carving and trivial things like making boxes for the Germans to send herring home for Christmas presents.
Grini was harsher the second time around. He does another stint in isolation. A couple of weeks after negotiating for better treatment from one of the officers, Odd is sent to Sachsenhausen, after a caricature he drew of the commander is uncovered.
At Sachsenhausen, they immediately learned the hand signal signifying someone had died in the crematorium, their ashes had gone “up the chimney.” Though the Norwegians still received their parcels, the camp food was usually cabbage soup. There were floggings and hangings. The Nazis often had prisoners do the task. Absent was Odd’s access to the Nazi officers and his sarcasm. Boyce did a search and found one instance of humor at Sachsenhausen. Sachsenhausen was also 20 miles north of Berlin, so they were able to see and feel the bombings.
There were also the Muselmänner, some of whom had been in the camp since the 1930s. Most were Ukrainians and Russians, who looked like skeletons and crawled on the ground looking for scraps of food, like “animals.”
Odd criticizes his compatriots for hoarding their food and treating these prisoners no better than the Nazis did. “Weren’t we fighting the same thing?”
Sachsenhausen was also where the Nazis secretly had prisoners, mainly Jews, print counterfeit British pounds, stamps, and passports. They were separated from the rest of the camp. Adolf Burger, believed to be the last surviving member of this operation, died Dec. 6, 2016, at age 99.
Odd wrote a powerful post script in 1948. He recalls how when he was finally safely in Sweden, he wanted to call Kari but had forgotten the telephone number—after writing a diary that would be a testament to history and memory. He also notes that as horrible as what he witnessed was, it was worse elsewhere. His admonition to us:
“…How is the coming generation equipped for this work of rebuilding the world and carrying it forward? And, what can and must we do to strengthen it and lighten its labor on this, the hardest and most difficult task that any generation has ever faced?…One thing is certain: hate, revenge and retribution are not the way. They lead us back to the abyss. We should have experience enough by now to know that.…I am thinking of the rising generation in all countries, for no country has escaped the disaster. And not least, I am thinking of the rising generation in countries that lost the war…
“…Whatever one might feel about the Germans and others who were fighting against one’s country during the war, surely in the course of time, even though it may require some effort, one can think and feel differently about the growing generation, wherever it is growing up….
“…Just suppose that, from the tormented, starving, fear-ridden humanity, instead of the cry for justice, there arose a cry for kindness—for love!…In the echo of that cry from human hearts, a new justice would be created, the outlines of a new, more human world would appear, and the way to it would open…And along with it will come…a recognition of the duties and responsibility that democracy has need of to endure….The worst crime you can commit today, against yourself and society, is to forget what happened and sink back into indifference. What happened was worse than you have any idea of—and it was the indifference of mankind that let it take place!”
Book review: Nansen’s powerful WWII diary republished
The name Nansen has a cachet in Norway. Fridtjof navigated the Fram to the Arctic Ocean and skied across Greenland, was an ambassador for Norwegian independence in 1905, and earned the role League of Nations High Commissioner for the Aid of Refugees and Prisoners for his involvement in the refugee situation following World War I. Nansen won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1922.
His son, Odd, helped Jewish refugees escape Nazi-controlled countries. The Nansen Office for International Refugees won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1938. On January 13, 1942, the Nazis arrested Nansen as a “court-hostage,” famous people who were part of the resistance. Odd, 40, kept a log of his experiences in three concentration camps over three years. They were Grini, outside Oslo (January 13, 1942, to August 4, 1942; November 22, 1942, to October 6, 1943); Veidal in northern Norway (August 5, 1942, to November 22, 1942); and Sachsenhausen in Germany (October 6, 1943, to March 20, 1945). From Day to Day: One Man’s Diary of Survival in Nazi Concentration Camps, was republished by Vanderbilt University Press, thanks to the efforts of editor Timothy J. Boyce, a retired lawyer in Tryon, N.C. The book is 604 pages, including 47 with photographs and appendices that include translations of common German phrases and “SS Ranks and U.S. Army Equivalents.” Also included are 43 of Odd’s beautiful sketches. The uniqueness of From Day to Day, as opposed to other diaries from the period, is that it was written in “real time.”
The book was out-of-print for 60 years. It took Boyce six years to find a publisher.
Toward the end of the war, the Nazis were liquidating the camps or sending prisoners to other camps. A majority of Jews were exterminated. Into Sachsenhausen from the Auschwitz Death March came 10-year-old Thomas Buergenthal, whose toes were so frostbitten that several had to be amputated. He had spent five years in camps so he could not read or write but had worked in the crematoriums. Nansen used his food and tobacco rations to bribe the hospital orderlies to keep Thomas’s name off the periodic selection lists.
Thomas became life-long friends of Odd and his children. He grew up to become judge on the International Court of Justice at The Hague and received the 2015 Elie Wiesel Award from the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum. He published a memoir, A Lucky Child, in 2010. That caught Boyce’s eye.
“I knew nothing about the book or Buergenthal, but I love history, particularly memoirs, and am fascinated with the Holocaust,” said Boyce. “Thomas relates that Nansen kept a diary while a camp prisoner.”
Boyce searched the internet and found one copy of From Day to Day in the U.S., and five in the world.
“It was one of the most powerful, compelling, eloquent, cinematic, and humanistic books I had ever come across,” said Boyce. “I decided that I would try to get the book republished. It was a masterpiece that people should read. It has such inspirational value for all people, how one maintains his humanity in the face of the most inhumane conditions possible.”
Boyce contacted Buergenthal, who was teaching at George Washington University Law School. They met in January 2011. Buergenthal supported the republishing effort, wrote the preface, and put Boyce in touch with Odd’s surviving children, Marit and Eigil. Boyce met them in Oslo in summer 2011.
Boyce’s break in finding a publisher came after a talk to the Sons of Norway Lodge in Nashville. “A member, Sten Vermund, offered to introduce me to the Director of the Vanderbilt Press. Sten had a personal reason for helping to get the book back into print. His grandfather was a prisoner at Grini.”
Since Fridtjof donated his Nobel prize money to refugee organizations and Odd used his royalties from the German translation of the diary for German refugee groups, Marit and Boyce decided Boyce should donate half his royalties to the U.S. Holocaust Museum and the other half to the Jewish Museum of Oslo.
Writing was forbidden in the camps. As readers, we are blessed with history, so when prisoners express optimism in 1942 that the war will soon end, we know it lasted three more years. Kudos to original translator Katherine John for retaining the superb writing.
There were stark differences between the camps. Grini was more of a labor camp with the possibility of release. Odd was an architect, so he had an indoor job where he avoided the outside hard labor and physical abuse other prisoners experienced. The Norwegian prisoners were allowed to receive parcels from family.
He was also used for making signs and pictures, some with hidden anti-German messages. It also gave him an office where, after hours, he could write in the diary. The diary was written, in part, to his beloved wife, Kari.
His status gave him certain freedoms. He could go into Oslo with a guard to pick up materials. He was able to arrange meetings with Kari, sometimes with the children (she was pregnant with their fourth child), where he would smuggle the diary out. Occasionally, she was able to visit him at the camp for 10 minutes under strict supervision. The diary was hidden in walls and buried in the ground at the edge of the camp.
A remarkable show of resistance was shown at the Lysaker train station. People at the station encircled Kari so she and Odd could meet. She also brought food and cigarettes. While Odd copied freight bills, the goods were loaded into his hung jacket, to be smuggled into the camp for him and other prisoners.
Curiously, some of the guards encouraged the smuggling. One was Eckert, “a good-natured lunatic.” When Odd dropped a loaf of bread back in camp, Eckert told the lieutenant it was his loaf. Eckert received a month’s curfew.
Odd analyzed the guards, officers, and commandant. Prisoners gave them nicknames like “Storm Prince” and “The Segment.” He tried to find any humanity in them and had conversations with them about Nazism. He poked fun at them in his writing. However, Odd shares how an officer, considered a bully, cried after the execution of 15 resistance fighters.
Odd had status among the prisoners, who would ask for assistance with their situations.
The many footnotes in the book are remarkable, for example identifying all prisoners mentioned, why and when they were arrested and their exact release dates. Information about the individual guards and leaders and what happened to them after the war were also included.
“The internet helped direct me on my research, especially in the beginning, when I knew nothing about Nansen or Norway,” said Boyce. “I read just about every available English language work dealing with Norway, WWII, and the concentration camps. As I became more experienced with written Norwegian, I could also rely on some Norwegian texts. The other font of information was Marit, who is the family historian and explained hundreds of questions I had along the way. Without her, the footnotes would not be nearly so insightful about Nansen himself. Tom Buergenthal was also very helpful.”
Odd did spend a short time in isolation.
The Jews were kept separately from the other prisoners and had the worst outside jobs.
The prisoners held secret entertainment evenings—some were able to bring instruments with them. They would close by singing “Ja vi elsker.” (Norwegian national anthem.)
“West wind” was the code word for news reports from the BBC.
The expanding breadth of the resistance is seen as Odd announces the arrivals. One day the teachers, another the clerics. During his second stint in Grini, it was the ski jumping champion Ruud brothers.
Odd and most of the other prisoners he knew left Grini on Aug, 4, 1942, en route to northern Norway. Their destination was unknown. First, 34 men were crammed into a train cattle car; then 400 in the hold of a ship. Sometimes, they were allowed on deck. Food was smuggled aboard.
At Veidal, the prisoners were able to build a stove where they could cook the food from the parcels. There were evening lectures as some of the prisoners were experts in their fields. I was surprised when my friends’ grandfather—Olav Dalgard—was mentioned! Odd’s tasks were mainly wood carving and trivial things like making boxes for the Germans to send herring home for Christmas presents.
Grini was harsher the second time around. He does another stint in isolation. A couple of weeks after negotiating for better treatment from one of the officers, Odd is sent to Sachsenhausen, after a caricature he drew of the commander is uncovered.
At Sachsenhausen, they immediately learned the hand signal signifying someone had died in the crematorium, their ashes had gone “up the chimney.” Though the Norwegians still received their parcels, the camp food was usually cabbage soup. There were floggings and hangings. The Nazis often had prisoners do the task. Absent was Odd’s access to the Nazi officers and his sarcasm. Boyce did a search and found one instance of humor at Sachsenhausen. Sachsenhausen was also 20 miles north of Berlin, so they were able to see and feel the bombings.
There were also the Muselmänner, some of whom had been in the camp since the 1930s. Most were Ukrainians and Russians, who looked like skeletons and crawled on the ground looking for scraps of food, like “animals.”
Odd criticizes his compatriots for hoarding their food and treating these prisoners no better than the Nazis did. “Weren’t we fighting the same thing?”
Sachsenhausen was also where the Nazis secretly had prisoners, mainly Jews, print counterfeit British pounds, stamps, and passports. They were separated from the rest of the camp. Adolf Burger, believed to be the last surviving member of this operation, died Dec. 6, 2016, at age 99.
Odd wrote a powerful post script in 1948. He recalls how when he was finally safely in Sweden, he wanted to call Kari but had forgotten the telephone number—after writing a diary that would be a testament to history and memory. He also notes that as horrible as what he witnessed was, it was worse elsewhere. His admonition to us:
“…How is the coming generation equipped for this work of rebuilding the world and carrying it forward? And, what can and must we do to strengthen it and lighten its labor on this, the hardest and most difficult task that any generation has ever faced?…One thing is certain: hate, revenge and retribution are not the way. They lead us back to the abyss. We should have experience enough by now to know that.…I am thinking of the rising generation in all countries, for no country has escaped the disaster. And not least, I am thinking of the rising generation in countries that lost the war…
“…Whatever one might feel about the Germans and others who were fighting against one’s country during the war, surely in the course of time, even though it may require some effort, one can think and feel differently about the growing generation, wherever it is growing up….
“…Just suppose that, from the tormented, starving, fear-ridden humanity, instead of the cry for justice, there arose a cry for kindness—for love!…In the echo of that cry from human hearts, a new justice would be created, the outlines of a new, more human world would appear, and the way to it would open…And along with it will come…a recognition of the duties and responsibility that democracy has need of to endure….The worst crime you can commit today, against yourself and society, is to forget what happened and sink back into indifference. What happened was worse than you have any idea of—and it was the indifference of mankind that let it take place!”
March 14, 2018
I found Odd Nansen through two routes - first because he was the son of Fridtjof Nansen the Arctic explorer whose works are well worth the time to read, and second from a previous book I read about Giorgio Perlasca, who saved Jews during the Holocaust. This book is Nansen's very readable diary of his time in the concentration camp at Sachsenhausen, Germany, where he was sent after being arrested for being a member of the Norwegian resistance. It's a large book, but well written (I can't say "entertaining"), well translated by mystery writer Katherine John, and despite its size, the narrative flies by. This and other primary sources on the Holocaust should be read by all, as Nansen points out, the things that happened were so awful that even those who experienced them can hardly believe they happened. And Nansen cautions against people forgetting and sinking into indifference, for "it was the indifference of mankind that let it take place."
February 23, 2021
This book was a hard read. Not because it is long (it certainly is that), not because it is boring (no, it is absolutely riveting), but because it is hard to understand the sadism, the brutality, the inhumanity, and it is even more difficult and shocking to read the sentences describing his first-hand accounts. It is hard to understand why Nansen does not become bitter, angry, discouraged, but on the contrary, it is amazing that he keeps a firm hold on his optimism and his humanity, his ability to believe in his fellow man, to understand and empathize with what they are going through. It is not hard to believe that after the war, he was one of the founders of UNICEF. His stories about the ophan Tommy in Germany are shattering to read. He could not help Tommy, but he could help other unfortunate children.
Writing the diary was an absolute necessity for Nansen's survival. It is never clear why he was arrested in January 1942. He thinks possibly because he was a friend of the royal family. I think possibly because he was an intellectual (all teachers were arrested, too). It doesn't really matter. What matters is having spent 42 months in a prison camp at slave labor (though Norwegians are treated more kindly than many others such as Jews, Poles, Ukranians, and Russians), and he preserved his faith and sanity through keeping his diary.
I was especially interested in how a war ends and the prisoners in a concentration camp are released. There is no particular method. The camps go on operating long after it is clear that Germany is done for--the Nazis just don't surrender. In Nansen's case, the Swedish Red Cross arrives with many busses and takes, in several transports, all the Norwegians to Denmark and then to Sweden. Even then, he seems to spend a long time in Sweden recovering and the book ends there rather than at his reunion with his wife, Kari, and their four children (one of whom is born after he is incarcerated).
The book I read was a 2016 paperback reprint of the 1949 publication. Better I should have read the hardback published in 2016 which is heavily annotated and perhaps contains the answers to some of my questions. At the very least it would supply the context of the larger world view and possibly maps so one could understand where each camp was. And possibly it would contain information about the people Nansen knew and what their fate was after they were moved. Some of course died, but others may have lived to be freed at the end and we don't know. I would especially like to know what happened to Tommy*, but many others, too.
Confession: I did not read every word. I simply could not read the descriptions of the public hangings, for instance, or the brutal beatings some of the prisoners suffered. And several other atrocious incidents required skimming, if not actually skipping, over. Believe me, I read enough. I think the world should be grateful to have this very rare on-the-spot account of how it really was. I don't think the world can afford to forget this dark, ugly period in our human history.
*After I wrote this, I learned that Tommy did survive and wrote his own book: A Lucky Child: A Memoir of Surviving Auschwitz as a Young Boy by Thomas Buergenthal. After being liberated, he was reunited with his mother who had also miraculously survived, came to America and became a lawyer. He has served as a judge in the International Court of Justice in The Hague. And Nansen and Tommy did meet again after the war.
Writing the diary was an absolute necessity for Nansen's survival. It is never clear why he was arrested in January 1942. He thinks possibly because he was a friend of the royal family. I think possibly because he was an intellectual (all teachers were arrested, too). It doesn't really matter. What matters is having spent 42 months in a prison camp at slave labor (though Norwegians are treated more kindly than many others such as Jews, Poles, Ukranians, and Russians), and he preserved his faith and sanity through keeping his diary.
I was especially interested in how a war ends and the prisoners in a concentration camp are released. There is no particular method. The camps go on operating long after it is clear that Germany is done for--the Nazis just don't surrender. In Nansen's case, the Swedish Red Cross arrives with many busses and takes, in several transports, all the Norwegians to Denmark and then to Sweden. Even then, he seems to spend a long time in Sweden recovering and the book ends there rather than at his reunion with his wife, Kari, and their four children (one of whom is born after he is incarcerated).
The book I read was a 2016 paperback reprint of the 1949 publication. Better I should have read the hardback published in 2016 which is heavily annotated and perhaps contains the answers to some of my questions. At the very least it would supply the context of the larger world view and possibly maps so one could understand where each camp was. And possibly it would contain information about the people Nansen knew and what their fate was after they were moved. Some of course died, but others may have lived to be freed at the end and we don't know. I would especially like to know what happened to Tommy*, but many others, too.
Confession: I did not read every word. I simply could not read the descriptions of the public hangings, for instance, or the brutal beatings some of the prisoners suffered. And several other atrocious incidents required skimming, if not actually skipping, over. Believe me, I read enough. I think the world should be grateful to have this very rare on-the-spot account of how it really was. I don't think the world can afford to forget this dark, ugly period in our human history.
*After I wrote this, I learned that Tommy did survive and wrote his own book: A Lucky Child: A Memoir of Surviving Auschwitz as a Young Boy by Thomas Buergenthal. After being liberated, he was reunited with his mother who had also miraculously survived, came to America and became a lawyer. He has served as a judge in the International Court of Justice in The Hague. And Nansen and Tommy did meet again after the war.
Want to read
October 26, 2015The book is wonderful. He wrote with a honest pen. He wrote the book later in his life. The hate lessen and he told a true story of strong people in hard times. I recommend this book for everyone. I bought three and I gave two away to family and friend.
August 19, 2018
Absolutely an excellent read, it was a bit slow at the start, but the tension built steadily. In his epilogue, Nansen describes it as heavy going - and it is - but not having carefully studied the information on the Nazi concentration/death camps, I felt a growing MORAL duty to read through to the end. Although the book is detailed and even partially illustrated, I am sure that the horror depicted is orders of magnitude less than was observed/present. This 'diary' seems to have been written to/for his wife and smuggled out of the camps over time. My suspicion is that even this privileged Norwegian prisoner who was imprisoned for some three and a half years and seems to record little actual fear of being killed himself was shielded from the worst parts of the camp actions. Read it! It is well worth the effort. I probably should read additional books, but am not sure that I can stand to...
May 4, 2018
A vital document of the Holocaust, which is made all the richer by Boyce's introduction, careful annotations, and Nansen's sketches. The fact that Nansen kept a diary as he was moved from one concentration camp to another is of deep interest in itself, but the fact that he offers such a rich day to day catalog of events is priceless for history. In this -- the first annotated version -- Nansen's commentary on the brutality of Sachsenhausen is made all the harrowing by Boyce's careful footnotes. Historians and scholars of the Holocaust will surely find this of powerful and necessary interest, but Nansen's own story of survival is so immediate, so vivid, so "of the moment" that it will be of interest to all readers. FROM DAY TO DAY is a unique document in the history of the Holocaust, and this particular version will surely stand as the definitive one for decades to come.
September 20, 2013
I decided to read this book after reading the Book about the Lucky Child that escaped from Auschwitz, the book mentioned this one as another related book. I found the book dry at first as the author writes this as a day to day account, a diary, and it covers all of the years of his captivity. Tommy (from the other book) does not appear until almost the end of the book. The book starts out slow and does get long in spots, but if you stick with it you find yourself pulled in to the end where he is released. The only thing that I do find is that as he states is that man does what he needs to to survive.
March 29, 2020
Extremely detailed and unique historical account of World War II as experienced by a Norwegian POW. Odd Nansen remarkably was able to hide and ship a vast majority of his secret diaries. Most compelling was the intensity exhibited by the Nazi regime as their war effort was falling apart. It is also a love story as Odd writes to and receives correspondence from his wife Kari throughout his imprisonments. I had the fortune of meeting the writer, Timothy Boyce, and that enhanced my understanding of the Nansen family before and after the war.
January 13, 2020
Timothy Boyce deserves great credit for bringing Odd Nansen's book back to life. It's a beautifully written book written literally day by day in the grimmest of conditions and without knowledge of how the war will end up. This edition comes with comprehensive footnotes that really help contextualise what was going on outside the camps and includes some of Nansen's impressive drawings that compliment his evocative prose style. I cannot recommend this enough!
March 27, 2019
I laughed, I cried and I finished it a different person than when I started. Odd Nansen was brave, strong, honourable and a person we should all aspire to be just a fraction as good as. His diary is worth reading
October 19, 2018
Beautifully written about a haunting time in our history. This book is possibly the only real-time diary account of life in a concentration camp. I cannot recommend it enough.
May 11, 2022
fantastic. i only wish i had had full closure once he was "white bussed" back to norway. ...would loved to have heard further in his own words of his life after...how he was able to adjust. he was one of the privileged ones as a (non-jewish) Norwegian tho he stated once he did not really know why. every book i read (and there have been many) from this period i learn something new and valuable.
December 5, 2022
Intense and so hard to imagine the horrors that took place.
October 20, 2023
Although weighing in at over 600 pages, this diary is a compressed version of Odd Nansen's complete diary whilst a prisoner/hostage in concentration camps in Norway (Grini and Veidal) and Germany (Sachsenhausen) between 1942 and 1945. The perspective from other survivor diaries differs; Nansen wrote primarily for his wife and family, not for later publication, and, crucially, Nansen was not a Jew but rather a Norwegian hostage prisoner. Norwegians were, as he makes pains to state, treated better than other inmates as the Germans felt they were "nearly Aryan"; but this was a matter of slight degree, not substantial.
It's a depressing read, and what else could it be? Nansen describes what he saw and what he went through with brevity and deliberate precision; his shift from the relative comfort of Grini/Veidal to the horrors of Saschenhausen being reflected in his writing, the prose becoming notably irregular, harsher, the feel of a man being ground down absolutely clear. Of particular note is the difference in his tormentors' behaviour, the attitude, actions, graft and corruption among the Wehrmacht in the Norwegian camps juxtaposed with those of Saschenhausen.
Of real interest is the conflict inside Nansen's mind. On the one hand he despises Germans and Germany as his country's invaders, demonising them for their atrocities; on the other hand he remonstrates against himself, seeing his tormentors as not representative of the German people. Eventually, as we find in the last few pages, his actions post war illustrate which side of the chasm he came out on.
It's hard not to give this 5 out of 5 stars, simply by virtue of the clarity of writing, the subject matter, and the ease with which it can be read. For me, at times the subject matter was (seemingly) glossed over far too rapidly; hence 4 stars (although 4.5 is closer to where it should be)
If you want an account of concentration camp life and survival from the worst treated inmates (that is the Jews, Russians, Poles, Ukrainians) you won't find that here; if you want an account from an outsider who survived and bore witness to what went on, this one's for you.
It's a depressing read, and what else could it be? Nansen describes what he saw and what he went through with brevity and deliberate precision; his shift from the relative comfort of Grini/Veidal to the horrors of Saschenhausen being reflected in his writing, the prose becoming notably irregular, harsher, the feel of a man being ground down absolutely clear. Of particular note is the difference in his tormentors' behaviour, the attitude, actions, graft and corruption among the Wehrmacht in the Norwegian camps juxtaposed with those of Saschenhausen.
Of real interest is the conflict inside Nansen's mind. On the one hand he despises Germans and Germany as his country's invaders, demonising them for their atrocities; on the other hand he remonstrates against himself, seeing his tormentors as not representative of the German people. Eventually, as we find in the last few pages, his actions post war illustrate which side of the chasm he came out on.
It's hard not to give this 5 out of 5 stars, simply by virtue of the clarity of writing, the subject matter, and the ease with which it can be read. For me, at times the subject matter was (seemingly) glossed over far too rapidly; hence 4 stars (although 4.5 is closer to where it should be)
If you want an account of concentration camp life and survival from the worst treated inmates (that is the Jews, Russians, Poles, Ukrainians) you won't find that here; if you want an account from an outsider who survived and bore witness to what went on, this one's for you.
December 13, 2023
I found this book on our shelves, recognized the name "Nansen," but knew nothing about Frithof Nansen's son, including that he had spent the 4 years of WWII as a prisoner of the German's. It is never exactly clear why Nansen has been imprisoned, and he is clear that it doesn't matter; there could have been many reasons that a patriotic Norwegian would be seen as an enemy by the Nazi's. Nansen, an architect and writer, is clear that he HAD to write the diary we are reading (sharply edited and condensed) even though the writing (and hiding or sending with great effort and secrecy to Norway) put him in great danger. Unlike many/most Holocaust books, this is written day by day and Nansen and his fellow prisoners suffer, die, occasionally sing and definitely enjoy each others company. Nansen survived the camps (and is clear that, though many died, Norwegians - if they were not Jewish - were not in death camps and generally received food packages and did not starve to death.). But Nansen stuck up for his principles and remained a humanitarian during the whole time.
May 7, 2024
From Day to Day is a compilation of the daily journal entries of Odd Nansen,who was part of the Norwegian resistance movement during I WW 11. In 1942 he was arrested, and spent the remainder of the war in German camps. If you are interested in original source material, or researching particular facts about camp life, then this book is invaluable. For the casual reader, like me, just skimming the pages will expand your knowledge of the Holocaust, in all its horror. Odd Nansen stands out as an exemplary hero and a masterful writer.
February 11, 2024
Excellent book
Read
June 21, 2016Review by Jack Fischel for the Jewish Book Council.
Displaying 1 - 19 of 19 reviews