A diary belonging to a teenage girl living in New York City in 1945 has offered a fascinating glimpse of what life was like growing up during this turbulent point in history.
Helaina Ferraioli spends her days surrounded by history. Her father, JP Ferraioli, owns and operates Yesterday’s News, a shop specializing in American vintage and antiques from the early 20th century up into the 1980s.
The shop has been in business for 24 hours, almost all of Helaina’s life. Like her father, she has developed a passion and keen eye for collectibles. She discovered the diary during a private call with her father to an estate in the Kensington neighborhood of Brooklyn.
“I found a bookcase with hundreds of books, and the diary was on it,” Helaina told Newsweek. “We purchased it directly from the purveyors of the estate who were likely relatives semi-removed from the journal owner, as they had no desire to keep it.”
Helaina, who was on break from college, skimmed the book but soon had to return to her studies, leaving it to gather dust on a bookshelf in the house. It was only recently, having started working with the family business full-time, that she returned to it.
Yesterday’s News
“A few nights ago, I couldn’t sleep, and I pulled it off the shelf and began to actually read,” she said.
Helaina initially struggled with the text, but as she “got more familiar with her handwriting,” it came to life. “I was shocked to find how much historical detail was written in between the lines of mundane day-to-day text,” she said.
Initial entries discuss how the teenager got an “88 in history test and 94 in math” or “bought socks after school.” Then, she suddenly writes: “A little before six we learned the tragic news of President Roosevelt’s death,” adding, “No one knows what the future will bring.”
“Today Mr Springmeir spoke over the loudspeaker about Roosevelt. Every teacher said something and during French we heard a special broadcast from Brooklyn Tech,” she writes. “Because of the President’s passing the museum cancelled the show.”
In a later entry, she describes learning about the end of World War II.
“Today is V.E. Day,” she writes. “The President hasn’t proclaimed it yet so it’s still unofficial but – have closed in Germany and all of Europe.”
It made for fascinating reading for Helaina. “As a girl who grew up in Brooklyn, it felt eerily familiar yet distinctly of another time,” she said. I was impressed with how unemotional and matter-of-fact she was in her reporting of her day.”
One of the diary’s standout sections is the news of Japan’s surrender.
“This morning at 2:30 I was awoken by the noise,” the teenager wrote. “News had come that we had received Japan’s answer. And that unofficially there was peace.
“All morning long until 6 we traipsed around the street in pajamas and housecoats. Everyone was celebrating. About 5:30 We came in and ate breakfast. I didn’t go to sleep again, just got dressed and went to work.”
Yesterday’s News
Helaina said: “To hear about the raw reaction of the end of the war in the moments it unfolded and how people were congenial with their neighbors who had all likely been touched by the war in some way felt like a glimpse into time that most people are never granted.”
After work, the diarist met with friends and headed to Times Square, picking up “two Canadian merchant navy men” along the way. That puts her in the location of Alfred Eisenstaedt’s famous picture portraying a U.S. Navy sailor kissing a total stranger.
Her version of events is slightly less romantic, though.
“The crowd was wild and soldiers and sailors were kissing everyone they could catch. Newsreel men and photographers were everywhere,” the teenager wrote. At one point, she and her friends had to be “protected” from the soldiers and sailors by their Canadian merchant navy friends.
This was arguably one of the most fascinating parts for Helaina.
“It was also incredible to hear an alternative point of view of the scene at Times Square from a young girl versus the sort of narrative that the photo of the kiss gives us,” she said. “I never really considered that maybe it wasn’t romantic but more sort of a party vibe.”
Yesterday’s News
Helaina said that whoever wrote the diary never put her name in it, and she suspects they may have passed away “since we bought it from a house that was being sold and no one took it with them.”
Despite not knowing her identity, she was eager to share her story. “It felt like a waste for those words to sit on my bookshelf for another 75 years when they have so much to offer us today in a time that feels sometimes uniquely scary and challenging,” she said.
The teenager never talks about crushes or uses profanity in the diary and lives a life that, to Helaina, is “more adult than some adults in America today.”
“She is not thinking about her thoughts and feelings,” she said. “It’s unclear if it is because that just wasn’t the norm back then or if she just didn’t have such a complex inner world because her day and life was so full.”
The diary also highlights something Helaina feels has been lost in cities like New York.
“The descriptions of spontaneous celebrations and block parties happening for days following the war’s end speaks to the sort of loss of street life,” she said. “There was a more involved and complex web of socialization that has been lost in the modern era. However I think Gen Z and Gen X are in the process of reviving it.”
Helaina isn’t waiting to get misty-eyed about times gone by. Ultimately, the diary is a historical artifact and should be viewed as such. “I hope people can find the beauty in the timelessness of the human experience,” she said.
