Publishers Weekly
★ 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.)
From the Publisher
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
Kirkus Reviews
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.
