The Wartime Diary of Edmund Kessler: Lwow, Poland, 1942-1944 ed. by Renata Kessler (review)

This volume, lovingly brought to fruition by Renata Kessler, daughter of Holocaust survivor Edmund Kessler, includes contributions by several authors, but Edmund Kessler's wartime journal and poems are at its center. Unlike the original Polish title, Przeżyć Holokaust we Lwowie (To Survive the Holocaust in Lwów) (2007), the English title leads one to expect that the bulk of the book is the somewhat misleadingly labeled "diary." In fact, Kessler's concise account of what happened in Lwów between the first days of German occupation in July 1941 and the liquidation of the Lwów ghetto in the summer of 1943 occupies only thirty-four pages. In these pages Kessler's focus is almost entirely on the communal suffering of the Jews, with very little attention to his own experience. Although neither he nor his daughter explains why he wrote his near-contemporaneous account of events in Lwów, it seems plausible to assume that as a lawyer he felt compelled to create a written record that, should it survive him, might contribute to eventual indictments of the perpetrators of the terror he was documenting—the German occupiers above all, but also their Ukrainian henchmen and many members of the Judenrat and Jewish police. It should be noted, however, that Kessler did not name names or identify individuals; rather, the torturers and murderers whose acts he describes are identified only by ethnicity or the organization to which they belonged.

Kessler did write about his own experiences, expressing his impotent rage and his despair in a language very different from the predominantly journalistic tone of the diary. It is unclear whether Edmund Kessler intended his poems to serve as counterpoint to his journal accounts or if the pairing of the two bodies of writings was Renata Kessler's excellent editorial decision. The twenty-one poems were composed by Kessler while he was in hiding with his wife, Fryderyka, and twenty-two other Jews in a bunker constructed by a Polish farmer and his wife, Wojciech and Katarzyna Kalwiński. The Kalwińskis undertook to aid these Jews at great risk to their own survival and to that of their children. How so many Jews were successfully sheltered, fed, and otherwise provided for over a period of twenty months, surviving the Holocaust while 99 percent of Lwów Jews did not, is explained in an eighteen-page memoir written in 1998-1999 by the Kalwińskis' son, Kazimierz, a teenager during the war. Renata Kessler places this memoir immediately following her father's poems; this, too, is an excellent decision. Kalwiński's story is an essential supplement to Edmund Kessler's testimony, which offers no details about life in the bunker. The truth of Kalwiński's memoir is, in turn, confirmed in a four-page letter to Renata Kessler written in early 2004 by Lusia Sicher, who was one of three children in the bunker. Sicher recalls the same events recorded by Kalwiński. Whether because she had read his memoir prior to writing her letter and had her memory prompted by it, or whether the events they both write about were so unusual or traumatic as never to have been forgotten, is something the reader cannot know. What is essential is that Lusia Sicher, like Edmund and Fryderyka Kessler, survived because the courageous Kalwińskis saved her and her extended family.

For the English edition, noted scholar of the history of Polish Jewry Professor Antony Polonsky (who is also editor of the Academic Studies Press series Jews of Poland), has provided an informative introductory essay that briefly summarizes the prewar history of multi-ethnic Lwów, explaining its complicated political history: Poles and Ukrainians vied for control of the city after the collapse of the Austro-Hungarian empire, and Jews, comprising roughly one third of the pre-World War II population of the city, strove to...