Few events in history stand out with more terrible clarity than the tragedy of the Warsaw Ghetto and the 500,000 Jews who died there. Here, in an area of l00 blocks encircled by a wall eight feet high, a crime was committed not only against the world's Jews, but against the whole of civilized humanity.

This is the chronicle of that crime - the notes and diaries of Emmanuel Ringelblum, the archivist of the Warsaw Ghetto. In NOTES FROM THE WARSAW GHETTO, Ringleblum not only gathered his historical notes, but hid them for posterity. The actual records were dug up in two sections from the rubble of the razed ghetto - in September, 1946, and December 1950. Their initial appearance in English was one of the significant publishing events of the time.

Rinbelblum recorded the events that occurred in the period from the beginning of the war in September, 1939, to the eve of the Ghetto uprising in April, 1943. As a source of history, the Notes are invaluable, with a truth and immdiacy no fictionalized version could attain. Through anecdotes, stories and notations, there emerges an agonizing, eyewitness account of human beings caught in the furor of senseless, unrelenting brutality.

There has been no effort in this book to dilute the enormity of the truths manifest in these Notes. It is a terrifying account - bitter, compelling, often unbeliveable.

However, what is revealed most sharply, and movingly, it the immutable faith of human beings in a time of unprecedented horror.

He writes: "Though we are condemned to die, we have not lost our human faces."

Emmanuel Rinbleblum was thirty-nine when he began his notes. He was, at the time, married, and the father of a seven year old boy. When the Germans invaded Poland, he could have escaped to Switzerland, but chose to stay and document what he knew was an oncoming tragedy. On March 7, 1944, he was executed among the ruins of Warsaw, together with his wife and son, and thirty-eight others who shared his hiding place.