Basia Temkin-Bermanowa, "Lady Barbara", was raised in an average Jewish family. From 1943 onwards she was active in the Jewish Resistance Movement for approximately two years. Together with other Jews and Poles, she helped hundreds flee the ghettos and, in doing so, saved their lives. During the second last year of the Occupation, she began to record current events and intertwine them with her own memories.
Bermanowa spent over a year working on her Diary from the Under World. The entries begin on 5 January 1944, and end on 14 January the following year. Three days later, the Bolshevik offensive brought her work to an abrupt end. As she herself writes, she wanted to document the people who had been persecuted and destroyed with unprecedented cruelty as well as the activities of a handful of convicts who had made it their task to protect the rest of the population from complete annihilation, to defend their integrity and to preserve documents that would act as witnesses to the truth.
Basia Temkin-Bermanowa
Diary from the Under World / Dziennik z podziemia
Żydowski Instytut Historyczny and Wydawnictwo Książkowe Twój Styl, Warszawa 2000
© Emanuel Berman
© for this edition: Wydawnictwo Ksiazkowe Twoj Styl, Żydowski Instytut Historyczny
160 x 235, 390 pages
ISBN 83-7163-289-4