The collections of the State Museum at Majdanek contain an extraordinary diary – one of the most important testimonies to the extermination of the Polish Jews. 80 years after the outbreak of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, the Museum in cooperation with the Prószyński Media publishing house, is releasing a new edition of this source. What is this document about? What makes it so important? We encourage you to read the article on this unique source.

"I looked at the mouths, most of them lipsticked, recounting now almost carelessly some unimportant events, those mouths from which mostly flow stories incredible in their horror of their own tragic experiences, and I thought to myself that the human is after all some kind of miraculous creature, one that can nevertheless detach oneself, one that can nevertheless forget now that they are stuck up to their ears in this swamp, which threatens to pour over them at any moment."

The excerpt above comes from one of the most vivid and moving testimonies in the archival collections of the State Museum at Majdanek. At reference is a diary from the Warsaw Ghetto found in the late 1940s in the area of the building materials storage at the former German concentration camp at Majdanek grounds.

According to the contents of the diary, its author is the mysterious Maryla, which is why the source is called Maryla's Diary. How did her notes find their way to the camp? Did she bring them personally, arriving at KL Lublin in one of the last transports sent from the Warsaw ghetto in the spring of 1943, or did someone from her close circle had it with them, and did she herself die during the uprising? We are unlikely to ever find out.

At Majdanek, two checkered notebooks and several single sheets of paper were found. Some of them remained blank. The most extensive preserved fragment, constituting the core of this source, was written on 67 pages numbered from 267 to 334. The author filled them with legible, neat handwriting, constructing grammatically and stylistically correct sentences. She was skilful in her use of the Polish language, which allows us to assume that she attended a Polish school or that she even studied at university. She was married and probably had no children. In any case, she wrote nothing on this subject. She focused mainly on depicting the realities of life, or rather the vegetating, in Warsaw's locked up Jewish quarter. The fragments of her diary that have been found (as it certainly have not survived in its entirety) describe the period just before the outbreak of the ghetto uprising, although Maryla repeatedly reflects earlier events, among others 22 July, 1942 - the first major deportation of Jews to the Treblinka extermination camp. It is not known when exactly she started keeping her diary, but in the surviving scraps of one of the notebooks we find an extract with the date 1942. Unfortunately, due to the severe damage in the central part of the pages, it is only possible to read what is on the edges. Other sources and available knowledge about the ghetto are helpful in identifying the content of the text.

The second notebook is significantly better preserved, which contains loose descriptions of events or reflections of the author, who not always dates the individual entries. The first date is 1 May 1943. Maryla wrote: “This evening was only a short evasion, for an hour I had the impression, that the words flowing towards me are already beyond the borders of our existence, that I already hear them in the context of a new life, in which they no longer have their right to be and are just a memory of an experienced nightmare.

Unfortunately, spring’s last verse brutally threw me back into my somewhat sad reality. I woke up.

Actually it is meteorological spring, and the mild winds are also hinting to it, but that is all. Spring without flowers, without grass, without faces beaming with joy in the walled space of these few houses, it is not really spring, just another part of this nightmare.”

Interpreting these words we can assume that she participated in literary entertainment meetings, the so-called Szlengel evenings, where the poet presented his work. Dealing with culture, experiencing and sharing emotions with other people allowed the inhabitants of the ghetto to maintain a semblance of normality for a short moment, and was a way to free themselves from the rampant violence, hunger, fear for their own lives and those of their loved ones, from the Umschlagplatz and the terrifying deportations to Treblinka, from the gloomy fame of Bełżec, Poniatowa and Trawniki.

Maryla confided to the pages of her diary her observations, describes situations within the ghetto and also beyond its walls. She is a quick and attentive observer. She writes straightforwardly about the horrors Jews encountered and calls all things by their names. Especially shocking is the description of conversations with friends and acquaintances who returned hunted from the “Aryan side” to the ghetto, stripped of their illusions and robbed of their money. They returned so that their fate would be fulfilled among their own “kin”. Maryla remembers the meeting with them as follows: „The acquaintances I mentioned some days earlier have returned. When I went to greet them, I had the impression to have before me ghosts with pale, emaciated faces and frightened, sad-looking eyes. On seeing me they confusedly began to talk, not letting the other one speak, from their chaotic phrases I could only comprehend that if I had been with them, which had in fact been our intention, I would have definitely ingested my luminal. Surely you would already be dead, Marylka, because if we would have had cyanide, you would not see us here.”

Another part of this startling report tells us about what life behind the ghetto walls was like. It is important to note that the author not only recounts events and human behaviour in occupied Warsaw, but also gives her judgement, sometimes very harshly, for example when writing: “Behind the red wall marking the demarcation line who is dividing us – drawn by them to decide who is allowed to live like a human being – runs another wall, which is far more harder to overcome – a thick wall of indifference and incomprehension.”

Of course it is difficult for us today to come to terms with such judgement, but the situation and conditions, in which Maryla found herself writing these words, legitimise it entirely. Her self-portrait as a Jewish woman is shocking, as she presents the reader with the words: “Having been a free human full of vitality I have already turned into a slave through the marking badge, through the ghetto, the selections, the sheds as a grave for the living.”

This grave is an underground shelter where Maryla and her husband went to probably on the night of 18 to 19 April, 1943. “We already went off at 3:30 pm, erased from the register of those living above ground.”

"The ghetto rose up. The ghetto rose up, some hundred barely armed men with pistols are fighting against the butchers, defending what is left of human honour.”

Maryla continued writing here diary after entering the shelter, wanting to draw up a testimony to the extermination of her people. Her notes lose their chronological character: “My writing is now without order, since I can only write when there is light and now I am mostly living in the basement’s dark, and when I can manage to produce coherent thoughts.”

The conditions in the shelter were difficult to endure, the people hiding there were suffocating from insufficient air circulation and lost their orientation in the dark. They relied only on themselves and their instincts. The fear for one’s own life was almost overwhelming. All senses were working at full speed, driving the inhabitants of the hideout mad.

"Having no connection to the outside world, because no one would dare to peek out, we had to cure the growing madness on the base of the symphony of sounds reaching us. First I heard above my head the orderly marching of hundreds of soldiers’ feet, that ceased just as quickly as it came up. Each footstep echoed with overcoming fear in our half-mad minds, in which remained only one thought: Will they find our shelter?(…)”

“It is now without question that the action has passed on to our territory and that the Germans literally want to wipe us off the face of earth, leaving no trace of us. We are listening to these increasingly louder sounds of fighting and fear paralyses us all, we cease to be human and turn into twitching bundles of nerves ready to go mad.”

Could Maryla have hoped for survival at that time? This is a purely rhetorical question, even more so when considering the fact that her writing abruptly ends on 27 April, 1943. Only imagination and today’s knowledge can hint to what happened with the inhabitants of the hideout. And even though we are doomed to speculate about the fate of Maryla, we discover a part of her story that remains in our memory, disturbing our peace and tormenting our emotions.

Currently Maryla’s diary is preserved in the archives of the State Museum at Majdanek. In 2010 it underwent conservation and was digitalised to ensure access to a wider public beyond the museum.

In 2023 the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising has its 80th anniversary. On this occasion the State Museum at Majdanek is releasing a new edition of “Maryla’s diary”. It was undertaken by outstanding experts in the history of the Warsaw Ghetto: Zuzanna Schnepf-Kołacz (Museum of the History of Polish Jews) and Dariusz Libionka (State Museum at Majdanek). The Museum of the History of Polish Jews is simultaneously preparing its exhibition. One of the key elements presented there will be Maryla’s manuscript lent from the Memorial’s collections as a treasure recovered from the extermination of Jews as also a unique testimony cited in many places in the exhibition.