Amongst the vast amount of studies about the Holocaust, the most difficult ones to carry out were—and still are—those focusing on the inner views and feelings of the Jews during this period. Our lack of information on that matter has been partially fulfilled during the past decades with the publications of testimonies, journals, and the collected remnants of the Oyneg Shabbes series. Alan Rosen's The Holocaust's Jewish Calendars must be added to these key publications as it offers a major contribution to the understanding of the lived life Jews had to experience not only as human beings cast into dreadful circumstances, but most sensibly as people trying to survive under inhuman situations, chiefly designed to eradicate their own Jewishness. By doing so, Rosen aims at filling a gap in the study of Jewish victims. As he writes in his epilogue: “to reinstate the victim's Jewish world also leads to a more general reevaluation of scholarship on time and the Holocaust” (226). While describing the multifaceted calendars, he explains: “Wartime calendars and diaries that served as surrogate calendars help us understand the way Jews saw the world that imploded before their eyes… .Because calendar consciousness was a basic element of Jewish life, especially in eastern Europe” (x). The importance of the calendar for the existence of Jewish life was notorious to the Nazis; and, as it is sadly known, they made a perverse use of it, and “carried out murderous actions on days of special sanctity” (4). Yet, this sole perspective does not do justice to the role the calendar played for the Jews themselves. Under conditions in which the date of the day was blurred, observant Jews, for whom the orientation into time is set by the Sabbath, which divided its course between profane and sacred time, the natural time consciousness was lost altogether with the rest of the inner consciousness of being alive as individuals. In ghettos and camps, the Holocaust caused this time-disorientation for millions of Jews for months and even years. As an act of resistance, Jewish calendars of all kinds have been fashioned during the war, and this is precisely the phenomenon this book is all about.

When all the Jewish printing houses were shut down, as in Łódź, as early as in July 1940, not to mention the prohibitive price of ink and paper, the underground press proceeded to secretly publish newspapers and vital information, including calendars. These calendars were hardly available, however, as Adam Czerniakow wrote in his diary ⁽The Warsaw Diary of Adam Cziernikow, ed. Raul Hilberg, et al., New York, 1979): “It is impossible to buy a calendar either in the ghetto or outside. I have been obliged to make a calendar by myself (38).” As a result, wartime ghettos and concentration camps made calendars that were painstakingly handwritten and could display a combination of Gregorian or Julian and Jewish times. Although issuing these calendars was a difficult task, they have nonetheless been fabricated from scratch, on blank sheets or even written in the margins of pieces of printed pages. Rosen studies the handful of calendars that have been collected, acknowledging that they may represent but a fragment of those probably produced that have been lost or destroyed together with their owners. In the absence of proper references or inventories, Rosen tracked them to museums, archives, and private owners and also followed some leads mentioned in books. (See Appendix 1, where Rosen added an inventory of wartime Jewish calendars, 229–30).

While Rosen is well aware of the many psychological studies dealing either with time consciousness or the importance of foreseeing a future, he points to very specific Jewish attitudes toward time. Accordingly, his book is a major opus to add to the library of any reader. Although presenting some deep scholarly insights, it is easily readable and offers often-poignant testimonies Rosen gathered. Especially moving are the numerous colored illustrations of the calendars, with the handwriting of their unknown authors, clumsily or finely designed. However, the importance of Rosen's book lies in the way it discloses a hidden way to resist destruction, because: “The Jewish calendar maintained a continuity with both the near and distant past and…projected a seamless future.…[These calendars] bore within them the secret of freedom” (226–27). And so it still is.