He wrote a secret diary to describe his life in the death camp and buried it in a time capsule. The document was found among the ashes of the perished in March 1945, after the liberation of the camp. “Gradowski knew exactly that he would die.

It became the purpose of his life to record what he had seen and hide it. He is supposed to have written more but only two fragments survived,” János Kőbányai, director of the publisher Múlt és Jövő, told MTI. The fragments were first published in Hebrew in 2012.

The Hungarian translation made by Zsombor Hunyadi, a young PhD student of Jerusalem’s Hebrew University, is based on the original Yiddish text.

Republished with permission of Hungary Matters, MTI’s daily newsletter.