Renata Laqueur

Renata Laqueur (1919-2011) was born in what is now Brzeg, Poland and grew up in Amsterdam. Her father was a Prussian professor and among the first scientists to isolate the hormone testosterone.

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After the war, she moved to New York City, where she remarried and completed a PhD in Comparative Literary Studies at New York University, arguing for the literary merit of concentration camp diaries. Previous editions of her diary have been translated into German and Welsh.

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Renata Laqueur

Diary From Bergen-Belsen

At the age of twenty-four, Renata Laqueur and her husband Paul Goldschmidt, two Jewish members of the Dutch resistance, are arrested and, after a short internment in transit camp Westerbork, deported to concentration camp Bergen-Belsen in Germany. Though it is strictly forbidden, Laqueur manages to record her camp experience in four notebooks and, shortly after the couple’s liberation, write up her remaining notes in detail. More than a story of survival, Diary from Bergen-Belsen is the surreal portrait of a sensitive and intelligent young woman attempting to transcend her harrowing reality, made all the more powerful by her emotional restraint and ruthless pen.

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