Hanna Lévy-Hass was born 1913 in Sarajevo to Sephardic Jews. The parents spoke Ladino, she adopted what she called „Yugoslavic“ , the local dialect of Bosnia-Herzegovina, the lingua-franca of Balkan Jews but also a political project, as Kerenji explains. Amira Hass, her daughter, writes that the new federation of Yugoslavia was a mixture of religious and ethnic identities in which Jews were equal among equals and her mother had friends among all. The ideal of equality, above all in the communist underground, united them; many went to fight in Spain against the fascists.

Hanna Lévy was thirty-one when she was sent to Bergen-Belsen in the summer of 1944. The camp was no longer an internment camp in which Jews who could possibly be exchanged were held - conditions then did not necessarily lead to death; now it had become a concentration camp. Unlike Auschwitz where death came in the way of industrial production, in Bergen-Belsen death came through starvation, brutality, lice, no sanitation under unbelievable crowded conditions, filth and stench, disease and epidemics. Her diary of life in Bergen-Belsen is a unique testament of life in hell where the walking, dying skeletons can no longer be recognised as humans.

She understands herself as a political woman - her Jewish identity, the reason she has been imprisoned, is secondary (Schröder 2010, 138). She adheres to communist ideals of equality, she takes an active part fighting against the corruption among the prisoners for the benefit of the whole group, she starts teaching the children.

The last entry is from April 1945. Hanna Lévy was one of 7000 Jews who were transported in three trains between the 6th and 11th April with the aim of reaching Terezín. She was liberated by the Red Army before the train reached its destination.

What a courageous and sincere woman! Determent and refusing to submit at least in spirit to ruthless control and deprivation. And just as courageous and sincere is her daughter Amira Hass, who is a journalist writing for the daily Haaretz newspaper.

In the two essays Amira Hass provides the family background of her mother and tells about her parents later lives. Emil Kerenji describes the linguistic and political context of Yugoslavia between the wars.

This diary from Bergen-Belsen is a unique document as only very few secret recordings made from within german concentration camps have come down to us. Why then is it so little known?

Hanna Lévy-Hass wrote the diary in Serbo-Croatian; she transcribed it when she returned to Yugoslavia. The original diary seems to be lost. Later she translated it into French. It was first published in French and German in 1961 (Geisel 1991, cited in Schröder 2010, 133) (VI-20)

Schröder, Dominique: Semantics of the self. Preservation and construction of identity in concentration camp diaries, InterDisciplines. Journal of History and Sociology (2010) 2, 123-144 (https://www.inter-disciplines.org/index.php/indi/article/view/936) ( )

I'm sorry this diary was ignored by the public for so long, for it's one of the very few diaries to come out of a concentration camp. Its author was a very educated, intelligent woman who spoke several languages and certainly knew how to write. I'm amazed that, starving and sick in Bergen-Belsen with people dying all around her, Hanna Levy-Hass was able to teach the children, write these amazingly detailed diary entries, and even have philosophical conversations with others about the nature of ethics in a concentration camp.

At one point she writes, "Our existence has something cruel, beastly about it. Everything human is reduced to zero [...] We have not died, but we are dead."

The reader should be aware that the introduction and afterword take up 70 pages of this slim book. Hanna Levy-Hass's daughter is a journalist in Israel and a Palestinian rights activist, and she writes about her mother's pre-war background and post-war wanderings, as well as her own experiences as a child of two Holocaust survivors. The introduction provides helpful biographical information, but the afterword, though beautifully written, can be skipped over entirely. ( )