The Diary Keepers

Based on select writings from an exceptional Amsterdam archive containing more than two thousand Dutch diaries from World War II, The Diary Keepers illuminates a part of history we haven''t seen in quite this way before. Nina Siegal, an accomplished journalist and novelist, weaves together excerpts from the daily journals of collaborators, resistors, and the persecuted-a Dutch Nazi police detective, a Jewish journalist imprisoned at Westerbork transit camp, a grocery store owner who saved dozens of lives-into a braided nonfictional narrative of the Nazi occupation and the Dutch Holocaust, as individuals experienced it day by day. Siegal provides the context, both historical and personal, while she tries to make sense of her own relationship to this past. As a ''second-generation survivor'' born and raised in New York, she attempts to understand what it meant for her mother and maternal grandparents to live through the war in Europe in those times. When Siegal moved to Amsterdam, those questions came up again, as did another horrifying one: Why did 75 percent of the Dutch Jewish community perish in the war, while in other Western European countries the proportions were significantly lower? How did this square with the narratives of Dutch resistance she had heard so much about, and in what way did it relate to the famed Dutch tolerance? Searching and singular, The Diary Keepers takes us into the lives of seven diary writers and follows their pasts into the present, through interviews with those who preserved and inherited these diaries. Along the way, Siegal investigates the nature of memory and how the traumatic past is rewritten again and again.

Product details

• Authors: Nina Siegal
• Publisher: William Collins
• Languages: English
• Product format: Paperback / Softback
• Released: 31.12.2021
• EAN: 9780008447700
• ISBN: 978-0-00-844770-0
• Dimensions: 153 mm x 234 mm x 17 mm
• Subjects: Fiction > Narrative literature > Letters, diaries; Non-fiction book > Philosophy, religion > Biographies, autobiographies; Postwar 20th century history, from c 1945 to c 2000, BIOGRAPHY & AUTOBIOGRAPHY / Jewish, Diaries, letters & journals, BIOGRAPHY & AUTOBIOGRAPHY / Survival, English, military history, Netherlands, Second World War, The Holocaust, United Kingdom, Great Britain, Later 20th century c 1950 to c 1999, True stories of heroism, endurance & survival, Diaries, letters and journals, Modern warfare, c 1940 to c 1949, c 1939 to c 1945 (including WW2), c 1945 to c 2000 (Post-war period), HISTORY / Wars & Conflicts / World War II / General, HISTORY / Modern / 20th Century / Holocaust