DIARY KEEPERS

'A beautiful, poignant book about the darkest period in modern Dutch history.' - David de Jong. Nina Siegal gives us a day-to-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. She helps us understand how 75% of the 140,000 Jews in Holland, a prosperous and cultivated Western European country, could have been murdered 'posing a warning for our own deeply fractured country.' - Joseph Berger. The diary journals of collaborators, resisters and the persecuted - a Dutch Nazi police detective, a Jewish journalist imprisoned at the Westerbork Transit Camp, a grocery store owner who saved dozens of lives - are made into a non-fictional narrative of the Nazi occupation and the Dutch Holocaust. Siegal provides the context, both historical and personal, while trying 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. When Siegal moved to Amsterdam those questions came up again. Why did 75% of the Jewish community perish and how did this square with the narratives of Dutch Resistance she had heard so much about? She 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. The past is rewritten. Rigorous research and intimate storytelling. 527pp, photos and colour images.