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From Day to Day, by Odd Nansen; Psychologie des Lebens im Konzentrationslager Theresienstadt, by Emil Utitz
- Abstract
On January 13, 1942, late in the evening, architect Odd Nansen, son of Fridtjof Nansen, was arrested by the Gestapo as a hostage. Taken from his home, his pregnant wife, and three adolescent daughters, he was thrown into Grini conrentration camp near Oslo. There he remained—except for a few months spent in a camp farther north—until October 1943, when he was transferred to the notorious Sachsenhausen camp in Germany. It was not until May 1945 that Nansen became a free man again. During the whole time of his imprisonment he kept a diary that he managed to have smuggled, page by page, past SS guards to a safe place. The technical part of the writing and the preservation of the manuscript present a feat of skill, perseverance, and heroism in themselves. Reading the diary now, with the consciousness that its author survived where hundreds of thousands perished, one is often tempted to call out; “Stop it! They are coming! This line will kill you!”
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