Memoirs of an Unfortunate Person: The Diary of Moty Stromer

This is the remarkable diary and memoir of Marek (Moty) Stromer, of Kamionka-Stumilowa. He wrote for his younger sister, who had moved to the United States just before the war. Most of the memoir refers to Moty's experiences in the Lemberg ghetto, where he lived with his other sister and brother-in-law. Stromer recounts the viciously brutal treatment that he suffered at the hands of the local Ukranians, his imprisonment in the Janowski forced labor camp, his escape from a deportation transport to the Belzec death camp, and his ultimate rescue in the barn of his Christian neighbor from Kamionka, Jozef Streker. When Streker gave Moty a blank ledger book and a pencil, Moty began to record his experiences and what he had witnessed since the outbreak of the war in 1939. The writing is a blend of memoir, relating his wartime experiences, and diary, relating events and his thoughts and fears as the Red Army approached his hiding place. He wrote on the assumption that all those he left behind had been killed. His last hope was that this account would reach his surviving sister in the US.