I am writing to inform you of the recent publication of my mother's wartime diary: Girl With Two Landscapes: The Wartime Diary of Lena Jedwab, 1941-1945 , as I believe it would be of interest to the Bialystok Region Research Group.

This is the diary that my mother, Lena (or Lea) Jedwab, kept between 1941 and 1945 while stranded by war in the Soviet Union. Lena was born in Bialystok, where she went to a Yiddish gymnasium. When the war broke out between Germany and the Soviet Union, Lena was 16. She was a camp counselor in a summer camp at Druskeniki (you will find her name listed at http://www.zchor.org/bialystok/children.htm). The director of the summer camp tried to bring the children back to Bialystok (Poland) where they came from, but was unable to do so, because the railroad had been bombed.

He then looked for a safe place for them and evacuated them deep into the Soviet Union, in the Republic of Udmurtia. The summer camp turned into an orphanage, where my mother spent two years. She then moved to Moscow to study. During those four years, isolated >from friends and family, Lena kept a diary where she described her life and her feelings of loneliness and longing for home.

While Lena was in the Soviet Union,her entire family was exterminated at Treblinka. Her dawning awareness of this fact and ultimate full realization of it toward the end of the diary create a powerful undercurrent to the stories of her daily life. While there have been numerous accounts of life in ghettos and concentration camps, Girl With Two Landscapes offers a glimpse of a little known facet of the life of Jewish children evacuated in the Soviet Union during the war.

You will find more information about the book on the publisher's web site at:

http://holmesandmeier.com/titles/rozenberg.html

The original Yiddish edition of the diary was published in 1999 in Paris (where my parents live) and reviewed in the Forverts, Heshbon and various other Yiddish newspapers. The American edition was published by Holmes & Meier last November and has been reviewed in various publications, such as the Jewish Advocate, the Women's Review of Books, and Jewish Currents. I believe this book would be of interest to your readers.

Sincerely,

Dorothée Rozenberg