Mary Berg (1) (1924–2013)

Mary Berg (a pen name; her real name was Miriam Wattenberg) was born in Lodz, Poland. When she was 15, she and her family fled to Warsaw to escape the Nazi invasion. They were all confined to the Warsaw Ghetto afterward. She kept a diary of her experiences there. Mary's mother was a United States citizen and, as a result, the Wattenberg family obtained American passports and were released from the ghetto in July 1942, just before the mass deportations began. They traveled to New York City in 1944, when Mary was 19. She published her diary not long afterward and gave appearances, appealing to the Allies to save the Jews that were still alive. However, she did not want to be a hero. She dissociated herself from her book in the 1950s and dropped out of sight. The book went out of print and a new edition wasn't published until 2006. In the mid-1980s, when a Polish version was published for the first time and a Warsaw theater staged a dramatic reading, Mary responded through friends with a refusal to return to Poland to watch it. The New York Times reported in 2014 she had died the previous year.