It was on his wedding day in 1964 when Feivel Wolgelernter’s uncle Dovid gifted him with the unnumbered pages, yellowed with age, handwritten in cramped, nearly undecipherable Yiddish that detailed, in real time, the anguish, fear and unimaginable loss suffered by his father who recorded his desperate struggle to survive the horrors of the Holocaust. 

“My uncle, who was living in Toronto, sent it to me in the hope that I would work on it. When I got it, I was newly married, I was still studying in university, I was almost 24,” Feivel recalled, speaking to The CJN from his home in Zurich, about the publication of his late father’s memoirs, The Unfinished Diary: A Chronicle of Tears, 70 years after he was murdered during the Holocaust.

“If you look at one of the pages, it was extremely hard to read. I mean, I can read Yiddish, I can read a newspaper, but this was extremely hard to read. It was bad quality paper and he was writing with a pencil. The pages were already fading,” he said. 

Feivel preserved the pages by spraying it with a special fluid, and tucked it away in a drawer where it didn’t see the light of day for more than two decades, until his then teenaged son, Nafti Wolgelernter, took it upon himself to translate the diary and learn about the grandfather he never knew.

Rabbi Chaim Yitzchok Wolgelernter, a gifted student who received his smichah at the age of 18, was a husband and father when World War II broke out. 

In September 1942, 1,500 Jews in his Polish town of Dzialoszyce were rounded up and murdered, while others – including his sister-in-law and three-year-old first-born daughter, Alte’le – were deported to the Belzec death camp. 

Chaim sent his wife, Chayele, and one-year-old son, Feivel, to live in a village with false papers that identified them as non-Jews, while he and his brothers, Meir and Dovid, fled in hopes of paying Polish non-Jews with cash and valuables to hide them.

Remarkably, details about Chaim’s brushes with death, his despair in learning about the fate of his daughter, parents and other family members, and his pleas to God were meticulously recorded with pencil and paper in poetic prose, with the hope his testimony would serve as a memorial if he didn’t survive. 

In a rare published diary by an Orthodox Holocaust victim, Chaim writes about a near-death experience and the thoughts that tormented him.

“I am in grave danger. O Merciful God! I pray. It is not yet three months since I was orphaned of my parents. Shall my two-year-old son, my one remaining child, now become orphaned, too, of a father whom he hardly knows? If I perish here in the fields of Drozejowice, there will be no witness to my death, and my dear Chayele will remain a tormented agunah for the rest of her life. Tomorrow night is our seventh anniversary. Shall our happy married life come to such a tragic end?”

Although he survived that ordeal, Chaim and his relatives, with whom he had been hiding, were eventually betrayed by the Polish man they’d been paying for about a year and a half to use his barn for shelter. 

When the Polish man learned they would be leaving his barn for a new hiding place, Feivel said, the man likely informed a Polish underground group about Chaim and his relatives, with the intention of having them killed and splitting whatever valuables they had.

“He knew that my father wanted to leave, because my Uncle Dovid and my cousin had already found a new place… with the help of a Jewish partisan named Avraham Fuhrman… and had already gone there and taken some luggage with them,” Feivel said, adding that Dovid likely took his brother’s journal with him. 

While Dovid, his cousin and the partisan waited for the rest of the group to join them, Chaim and the others who stayed behind were murdered and buried in a mass grave near the barn.

If not for the initiative of Feivel’s son, Nafti, Chaim’s unique historical account of his family’s desperate struggle for survival may never have been added to the Holocaust narrative.

When Nafti was a student at a yeshiva in Philadelphia, he showed it to one of his teachers, Rabbi Yitzchok Perman, who said he was also a descendent of the Wolgelernter family, and he put Nafti in touch with people who were experts in deciphering Yiddish documents.

Despite the efforts by people who offered their expertise, there were still many parts of the diary that were incomprehensible.

“Since he was already on the east coast of North America, he decided to make a trip to Toronto [in 1990], and there he sat with my Uncle Dovid, and they went through it, and he cleared up many of the unknown words,” Feivel said.

“I remember when my cousin Feivel sent his son to Toronto to sit with my dad one summer so that my dad could give him an idea of what happened and give him a perspective about things in the diary,” recalled Shia Wolgelernter, Dovid’s son, who lives in Toronto.

Shia said he witnessed first hand the effects of the trauma his father endured.

“Over the years, my father would tell me about what went on during the war, that he was hidden and that his family… was killed,” he said.

“There were instances where he would wake up in the middle of the night yelling and screaming, reliving whatever happened to him… There were a lot of times when my father would break down, and it was hard for him to accept the fact that all these people had been killed.”

Nafti dedicated years to translating, researching and editing the work, with the help of many including Rabbi Avraham Yaakov Finkel and Hindy Mandel, “but still, I didn’t do anything with the text,” Feivel said.

Although he said he can’t explain his hesitation to publish it, Nafti, “kept at it.”

In 1993, Nafti was invited by a cousin to attend an annual reunion of Holocaust survivors from Dzialoszyce. He went to the event in the hope of learning more about his family’s history.

Nafti was introduced to Avraham Fuhrman, the young partisan who had helped Dovid find a place to hide.

“This Fuhrman asked Nafti if he had ever been to the grave and he said, ‘No.’ Fuhrman asked him, ‘Why not?’ And he said, ‘Because no one knows where it is.’ So Fuhrman said, ‘I know exactly where it is.’ Four weeks later, we found the grave.” 

Although his father’s memoir comes to an abrupt end, the book moves forward with an epilogue by Dovid, a survival story by Chaim’s widow, Chayele, and an account by Feivel about how his family’s remains were recovered from an unmarked grave and reburied in Israel.

“I did not mean to write a best-seller, which it became,” Feivel said.

“I have five children, and a lot of grandchildren and already more than a dozen great-grandchildren, and I wanted them to know what happened and something about my father and my ancestors.”