We are delighted to announce that our publication, "Maryla’s Diary: Life and Death in the Warsaw Ghetto", has been awarded a distinction in the editorial category during the 30th anniversary edition of the KLIO Awards. The winners were announced on 28 November 2024, during the opening ceremony of the Historical Book Fair in the Great Hall of the Royal Castle in Warsaw.

"Maryla’s Diary", edited by Dariusz Libionka, is a joint publishing project of the State Museum at Majdanek and Prószyński i S-ka publishing house, prepared especially to commemorate the 80th anniversary of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising. The editorial preparation and publication editing were overseen by curator Dorota Niedziałkowska, and the cover design and typesetting were created by Izabela Tomasiewicz from the Exhibitions and Publications Department of the State Museum at Majdanek.

This "Diary" is one of the most moving and unique testimonies written during the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising. It is a poignant account of the thoughts, feelings, and fears of a young Jewish woman named Maryla, who hid during the Uprising in the Warsaw Ghetto. Her writings reveal the lives of people doomed to extermination, isolated from the rest of the world by a wall, and describe the fate of Jews on the Aryan side, documenting the course of the rebellion. The diary abruptly ends on 27 April 1943, leaving no clues about the author’s subsequent fate. The notebooks she wrote were discovered in the late 1940s at the site of the former German concentration camp at Majdanek.

In his foreword to the publication, Tomasz Kranz, director of the State Museum at Majdanek, wrote:

On 1 December 1950, in Warsaw, hidden documents were found in two metal milk cans. These documents formed the second part of the archive created in the ghetto during the German occupation under the initiative of Jewish historian Emanuel Ringelblum. This legacy, left by members of the Oneg Shabbat group, contains scholarly works, literary texts, diaries, letters, and loose notes, constituting one of the most significant testimonies to the extermination of Polish Jews. Some time earlier, another manuscript was discovered, also linked to the history of the Warsaw Ghetto—not among the ruins of a building, but in the construction storage of the former German concentration camp at Majdanek in Lublin.

The manuscript comprises fragments of a diary written in Warsaw, including entries spanning nine days in a bunker—one of 750 where the remnants of the Jewish population hid after the so-called ‘great deportation,’ during which over 250,000 ghetto residents were sent to the Treblinka extermination camp. Among these survivors was Maryla, a young woman who, with her husband Adam, found refuge in an underground hideout, likely at 74 Leszno Street.

Her diary's remaining passages mostly detail the terrible conditions in the "Jewish district" in April 1943, the days preceding and during the rebellion, as well as the looming wave of deportations to the Lublin district. This was a component of the Nazi strategy to use the labour force, equipment, and resources from the Warsaw Ghetto to create a labor-industrial centre close to Lublin. The biggest business impacted by this transfer was Walter C. Többens' textile industry, which the Germans moved to the Poniatowa work camp. Maryla was employed at a workshop owned by this corporation in Warsaw.

In addition to being incredibly personal, her writings provide a remarkable record of the time. To characterise this report, adjectives like "unparalleled," "moving," and "shocking" are quite suitable. Its most significant contribution, though, is that it is a voice from WITHIN, confirming directly the author's experiences as a victim and witness, expressing her perceptions and reactions to the atrocities. It is a detailed description of the feelings and thoughts of an extraordinarily perceptive observer amidst the horrors of war and impending disaster, and it is an autobiographical monument to humanity in the face of ultimate tragedy.

Maryla's diary has exceptional literary characteristics in addition to its historical significance. Franciszka Marciak, a historian at the State Museum at Majdanek, was the first to recognise this and prepared the autograph manuscript for publication in 1960. Political tensions at the time ultimately prevented it from being published in the Jewish Historical Institute's (ŻIH) "Bulletin," despite the fact that the text's critical depiction of Polish and Jewish attitudes deviated from the official narrative pushed by the communist authorities. The Institute was in a difficult position because it intended to publish manuscripts detailing the ways in which the Polish people helped Jews under the occupation and conduct a study on the complexity of Polish-Jewish relations.

The manuscript was kept in the museum. Concurrent research was initiated by the Majdanek National Publishing Council, which was founded in 1961. Its primary objective was to provide a lavish, in-depth account of the concentration camp. For many years, this research dominated this institution's activity for obvious reasons. These arguments, however, only partially support the decision to stop working on the manuscript. The diary, edited by Piotr Weiser, was not released until 2008 under the title "I Watched Their Lips… A journal from the Warsaw ghetto".

When the POLIN Museum of the History of Polish Jews asked to borrow the manuscript for an exhibition honouring the 80th anniversary of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, interest in it was rekindled. With the help of Prószyński Media and renowned Warsaw Ghetto historians Zuzanna Schnepf-Kołacz (POLIN) and Dariusz Libionka (PMM), this opportunity sparked the creation of a second edition.

Maryla’s ultimate fate remains unknown, though it should be presumed that she brought her diary to Majdanek. The final entry is dated 27 April 1943. The next day, a large transport of Jews from the Warsaw Ghetto arrived at Majdanek.

Within the group, 241 men and 278 women were classified as “fit for work,” whereas the rest were sent to the gas chambers. Had Maryla been among those selected for work, she may have encountered a fellow Warsaw resident, 17-year-old political prisoner Jadwiga Ankiewicz, who also kept a diary. On April 28, Ankiewicz noted: "The faces of the Jewish women we spoke to were red and swollen. They claimed that after spending three weeks underground in cellars, they were initially unable to see and that the abrupt change caused their faces to swell.”

Regardless of whether Maryla perished in Warsaw, Majdanek, Poniatowa, or elsewhere, her diary remains one of the most valuable accounts of the suffering of Polish Jews—a haunting testament to their “life and death,” as she herself wrote: "In the epilogue of our[existence]— as it ends in [non]existence… [our fate] shall be engraved.