The Text Called Szmul Rozensztajn’s Diary

The text called Szmul Rozensztajn’s Diary, catalogue number 302/115, can be found in the Memoirs collection of the Archives of the Jewish Historical Institute. This is a typewritten text in Yiddish, 161 pages long, compiled on the basis of a manuscript written in the Łódź Ghetto. Daily entries cover the period from 20 February 1941 to 21 November 1941. This is no doubt part of a larger whole. Both the immediate post-war scholars of Jewish literature from the Łódź Ghetto – Ber Mark and Iszaja Trunk – and the contemporary editors of fragments of Szmul Rozensztajn’s Diary translated into English – Alan Adelson and Robert Lapides – say that the original of the Diary is kept at the Jewish Historical Institute in Warsaw, while the typewritten text is in Yad Vashem Archives in Jerusalem. But the inventory of the Jewish Memoirs collection of the Jewish Historical Institute published in 1994 mentions only a typewritten copy. The whereabouts of the original are unknown. We do not know which part of the copy is available to us.