The Diary Keepers: World War II in the Netherlands, as Written by the People Who Lived Through It

by Nina Siegal

Overview

A riveting look at the story of World War II and the Holocaust through the diaries of Dutch citizens, firsthand accounts of ordinary people living through extraordinary times

 Based on select writings from a collection of more than two thousand Dutch diaries written during World War II in order to record this unparalleled time, and maintained by devoted archivists, The Diary Keepers illuminates a part of history we haven’t seen in quite this way before, from the stories of a Nazi sympathizing police officer to a Jewish journalist who documented daily activities at a transport camp.

Journalist Nina Siegal, who grew up in a family that had survived the Holocaust in Europe, had always wondered about the experience of regular people during World War II. She had heard stories of the war as a child and Anne Frank’s diary, but the tales were either crafted as moral lessons — to never waste food, to be grateful for all you receive, to hide your silver — or told with a punch line. The details of the past went untold in an effort to make it easier assimilate into American life.

When Siegal moved to Amsterdam as an adult, those questions came up again, as did another horrifying one: Why did seventy five 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 tolerance people in the Netherlands were always talking about? Perhaps more importantly, how could she raise a Jewish child in this country without knowing these answers?

Searching and singular, The Diary Keepers mines the diaries of ordinary citizens to understand the nature of resistance, the workings of memory, and the ways we reflect on, commemorate, and re-envision the past.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780063070653
Publisher:	HarperCollins
Publication date:	02/21/2023
Pages:	544
Sales rank:	86,446
Product dimensions:	5.90(w) x 9.10(h) x 1.80(d)

About the Author

Nina Siegal received her MFA in fiction from the Iowa Writers' Workshop and was a Fulbright Scholar. She has written for the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times, among other publications. She lives in Amsterdam.

Table of Contents

Prologue: Searching for Emerich 1

Introduction: "Vast quantities of this simple, everyday material" 21

The Diarists (in alphabetical order) 33

Part I Occupation, May 1940-May 1941

1 "Paratroopers came down everywhere," 1940 39

2 "One should make the best of it" 55

3 "Anger blazed in young hearts," February 1941-March 1941 63

4 "No graves, no gravestones" 81

5 "Now the games can begin" 97

Part II Persecution and Deportation, April 1942-February 1944

6 "It's so hard to know what to do," April 1942-December 1942 109

7 "Like a good gardener" 121

8 "Was this forced labor or slaughter?" 133

9 "A kind of gathering place" 147

10 "Until at last the truck was full," July 1942-December 1942 157

11 "If only there were more places for these poor people" 179

12 "The time had come to go into hiding" 189

13 "The worst year for all Jewry," January 1943-June 1943 199

14 "The man who goes about with his notebook" 209

15 "Like Job on the dungheap," May 1943-August 1943 223

16 "She just had a very large heart" 251

17 "The tension is sometimes too much to bear," September 1943-December 1943 267

18 "The diary becomes a world" 293

19 "The last of the Mohicans," January 1944-August 1944 313

20 "A journalist in heart and soul" 325

Part III Toward Liberation, May 1944-May 1945

21 "I really shouldn't miss the view," May 1944-July 1944 337

22 "All the trivial things" 347

23 "The silence is almost murderous," September 1944-December 1944 365

24 "What do you have to know to know?" 381

25 "The Empire of the Krauts is over," November 1944-May 1945 397

Part IV The War In Memory, May 1945-May 2022

26 "An archaeology of silence" 421

27 "Suffering and struggle, loyalty and betrayal, humanity and barbarism, good and evil" 435

28 "A gradual lifting of the collective repression" 449

Conclusion: "There were more" 459

A Note on Translations 475

Acknowledgments 479

Notes 483

Photo Credits 503

Index 507

Editorial Reviews

★ 11/07/2022

This diverse and enlightening collection of excerpts from journals kept during the Nazi occupation of the Netherlands is an essential contribution to the history of WWII. Drawing from an archive of more than 2,100 wartime diaries, novelist Siegal (You’ll Thank Me for This), whose Czech Hungarian grandfather Emerich Safar was a survivor, contextualizes her primary sources with exhaustive research and analysis of contemporaneous records, seeking to understand, among other questions, why 75% of the Dutch Jewish population died in the Holocaust, a higher percentage even than some Eastern European countries, including Hungary. The diarists featured include Philip Mechanicus, a Jewish reporter who documented his experiences at the Westerbork transit camp before he was sent to Bergen-Belsen and Auschwitz; two Dutch Nazis; a teenage factory worker without political affiliations; and a grocery store owner who became involved in resistance activities. Siegal uses their words to create a vivid portrait of the Nazi occupation as it unfolded, providing a wider lens than many Holocaust histories, and she incisively explains how the Netherlands’ willingness to confront its complex Holocaust legacy has evolved, culminating in the 2021 unveiling of the National Holocaust Names Monument in Amsterdam. Even those well versed in the subject will find much to discover in this treasure trove of firsthand perspectives. Agent: Marly Rusoff, Marly Rusoff Literary. (Feb.)

Publishers Weekly

This diverse and enlightening collection of excerpts from journals kept during the Nazi occupation of the Netherlands is an essential contribution to the history of WWII. Drawing from an archive of more than 2,100 wartime diaries . . . [Siegal] contextualizes her primary sources with exhaustive research and analysis of contemporaneous records. . . . [A] vivid portrait of the Nazi occupation as it unfolded, providing a wider lens than many Holocaust histories. . . . [A] treasure trove of firsthand perspectives.” — Publishers Weekly (starred review)

“A beautiful, poignant book about the darkest period in modern Dutch history...This book gives a powerful voice to forgotten witnesses.”  — David de Jong, author of Nazi Billionaires 

“Nina Siegal has accomplished a remarkable feat. She has given us a day-by-day narrative of the Holocaust in the Netherlands by splicing together excerpts from a few of the hundreds of diaries stored in an Amsterdam archive...With thoughtful and insightful observations of her own, Siegal helps us understand how 75 percent of the 140,000 Jews of Holland, a prosperous and cultivated Western European country, could have been murdered, posing a warning for our own deeply fractured country.”  — Joseph Berger, author of Elie Wiesel: Confronting the Silence 

“The Diary Keepers is an astonishing, essential book that asks us to bear witness to an unbear­able history, even as it invites us to think hard about what history is—how it gets written, and what stories it tells. This book is powerfully moving and necessarily terrifying. By way of rigorous research and intimate storytelling, Nina Siegal brings us close to her diary keepers—making it impossible to turn away from the difficult, necessary questions their lives raise about survival, suffering, complicity, and memory.”  — Leslie Jamison, author of The Empathy Exams 

“Like an archaeologist excavating an ancient temple, Nina Siegal has dug up hundreds of stories of life under the unprecedented horror of Nazism, revealing the changing thoughts and shifting moods of heroes, villains, and victims. Until now, we only had a black-and-white image of these lives. Now, thanks to Siegal, we see them in living color.”  — Benjamin Moser, Pulitzer Prize–winning author of Sontag 

“This moving and masterful book tells the history of those fateful war years, and their aftermath, in a wonderfully intimate way.”  — Margot Livesey, author of The Boy in the Field 

“A work of orchestral power, moving among voices. I was riveted.”  — Patricia Hampl, author of The Art of a Wasted Day

"The history of the Dutch Jews is one of the most disturbing of the Holocaust, but we must engage with it, and The Diary Keepers helps us do just that." — Telegraph (UK)

“A compelling look at the story of World War II and the Holocaust told through the diaries of Dutch citizens in firsthand accounts of ordinary people living through extraordinary times.”  — Brooklyn Digest

“The Diary Keepers is an important addition to WWII and Holocaust studies. It reveals, through the words of the people who were there, how any one of us might respond to unprecedented calamity. And its coda is the unsettling reminder that nobody knows the ultimate ending to their story until it comes.“ — Washington Independent Review of Books

“Siegal intersperses artfully selected and translated excerpts from nine of those diaries with interludes in which she explores larger ideas they raise, allowing the diarists to speak in their own voices while offering the necessary background to place them in context.”  — Washington Post

"This moving and riveting book is a revelation, providing a glimpse into life under Nazi occupation. At once epic and intimate, it merits comparison to Marcel Ophuls' classic 1969 documentary about life in occupied France, 'The Sorrow and the Pity.'"
— National Catholic Reporter

“Though diaries may be myopic and self-images fallible—as exemplified in the puffed-up scribblings of a Nazi-sympathizing policeman—it’s clear these diarists saw enough, Siegal writes, to respond to horror. She casts 'bearing witness' as an impure but essential act and history as mutable, a story told and understood not by one but by many.” — New Yorker

From the Publisher

2022-11-08
A collection of firsthand accounts of wartime experiences in the Netherlands.

After the 1945 liberation, Dutch officials, anxious to document what happened during the war, pled publicly for writing, which resulted in an avalanche of several thousand journals and letters now housed at the NIOD Institute for War, Holocaust and Genocide Studies in Amsterdam. With few exceptions, such as Anne Frank’s diary, they possess little literary value, but journalist Siegal’s excerpts provide a vivid portrait of the daily lives of “victims and collaborators, bystanders and participants.” Three of her leading diarists were Jews, two enthusiastic Dutch Nazis, one a member of the resistance, and one a teenager with no political views. She also includes shorter dispatches from a dozen others. Hitler considered Holland a quasi-Nordic nation, so, after the bloody 1940 conquest, Nazi occupation was relatively benign. During the first year, there were anti-German demonstrations and strikes to protest German exactions, and when local antisemitic gangs began their attacks, many young Christian men fought alongside Jews. Matters settled down once the Nazi grip tightened, whereupon, although there was a modest resistance, most citizens and police cooperated in handing over Jews. When it became clear that the Nazis intended to kill them, about 15% went into hiding. Ultimately, 75% of the 140,000 Dutch Jews were killed in five years. Nazi policy deteriorated in the fall of 1944, when the Dutch welcomed the failed Allied invasion. Food deliveries were stopped, and a famine followed; thousands died of starvation. Siegal’s emphasis on the Holocaust makes for painful reading, but these are private writings, so much of the text records repetitious, day-to-day concerns, some of which readers may skim. Fortunately, the author steps in frequently to summarize events and describe her own life (she is the granddaughter of Holocaust survivors), and she concludes with an insightful account of how postwar Holland recalled the experience, a section that includes a surprising number of interviews with survivors and their descendants.

Occupation as recorded by the victims—an often depressing yet useful historical document.

Kirkus Reviews