Bibliograph

The diary keepers, World War II in the Netherlands, as written by the people who lived through it, Nina Siegal

Type

Label

The diary keepers, World War II in the Netherlands, as written by the people who lived through it, Nina Siegal

Language

eng

Bibliography note

Includes bibliographical references (pages 483-501) and index

resource.biographical

contains biographical information

Illustrations

platesillustrations

Index

index present

Literary Form

non fiction

Main title

The diary keepers

Nature of contents

bibliography

Oclc number

1368050592

Responsibility statement

Nina Siegal

Sub title

World War II in the Netherlands, as written by the people who lived through it

Summary

Based on select writings from an exceptional Amsterdam archive containing more than two thousand Dutch diaries from World War II, this book 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, 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 - 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 during 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 narrative of Dutch resistance she had heard so much about? Searching and singular, this book 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

Target audience

adult

resource.variantTitle

World War II in the Netherlands, as written by the people who lived through it

Classification