The Diary Keepers World War II in the Netherlands, as Written by the People who Lived Through it

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 dedicated 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'd heard tales told as moral lessons or with punchlines, but the real details were often left out to make history easier to digest. When Siegal moved to Amsterdam and began researching this question, a haunting new one emerged: why did 75% of the Dutch Jewish population perish in the war while numbers elsewhere were lower? The Diary Keepers mines these personal accounts to understand resistance, memory, and how we re-envision the past.