A Personal Account · 1938 – 1945
The Erwin Benkő
Diaries
Vienna · Naples · Milan · London · New York · The War
A Personal Account · 1938 – 1945
Vienna · Naples · Milan · London · New York · The War
About the Diaries
In April 1938, a young Erwin Benkő began keeping a diary in Vienna. He was a teenager — curious, irreverent, alive to ideas. Over the next seven years, those pages would follow him across the continent and across the Atlantic, through adolescence and into the first years of manhood, through the friendship and love and uncertainty of a world coming apart.
From Vienna to Naples to Milan to London to New York, and then into the years of the Second World War, these diaries are a record of one person's interior life during one of the most consequential periods in modern history. Personal, philosophical, and deeply human.
Erwin wrote to understand himself. He wrote to friends he missed, to women he loved, to ideas he was turning over. Reading these pages now is to be admitted into a private world — one that feels, across the distance of decades, remarkably close.
The Journey
"Everything has been perfect for the last few weeks… I long for her, and I'm unhappy if I don't see her and absolutely contented when I do."Erwin Benkő — New York, March 1941
"…no matter how dark things look, how black the sky might be, the sun is always shining somewhere high above it all, and it is just the art of living to be above all the black and unpleasant things."Erwin Benkő
Audiobook
The diaries of Erwin Benkő are available as a full audiobook. Hear these entries read aloud — the voice of a young man navigating love, exile, and war.
Every entry, every letter, every city. Browse chronologically, filter by location, or search for a passage you heard in the audiobook.
Open the Diary Reader