Ruth Maier’s Diary, edited by Jan Erik Vold, translated by Jamie Bulloch
‘Why shouldn’t we suffer when there is so much suffering?’ wrote Ruth Maier to her friend the Norwegian poet Gunvor Hofmo in a letter smuggled from the ship deporting her from Oslo to Auschwitz in the autumn of 1942. Ruth was then 21, a thoughtful, talented young woman just beginning to make her mark with her poems and water-colours. She had a thin, lively face and had started to model for an artist.
Ruth left behind her with Hofmo over 1,100 pages of diary. In the late 1990s, a Norwegian editor, Jan Erik Vold, visited Ruth’s sister, who had taken refuge in Britain in 1939, and gathered together the many letters written by Ruth from Norway. The resulting book is a carefully woven mixture of diary entries and letters, the letters providing continuity where the diaries are missing.
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