In Those Nightmarish Days

Peretz Opoczynski was a journalist who made significant contributions to the Warsaw Ghetto's secret Jewish archive, Oyneg Shabes. Josef Zelkowicz, an ordained rabbi, became a key member of the semi-official archive in the Ló dz Ghetto. While other writers sought to create an objective and dispassionate record of ghetto circumstances, Zelkowicz and Opoczynski chronicled daily life and Jewish responses to the torment of Nazi oppression with powerful immediacy. This is a volume of reportage from occupied Poland produced in the two major Nazi ghettos, Warsaw and Ló dz, by two Yiddish writers schooled in the culture of East European Jewry. Translated by David Suchoff, with an expert and elegant introduction by Samuel Kassow, these profound writings are at last accessible to contemporary readers.