Based on selected writings from an extraordinary Amsterdam archive containing over two thousand Dutch diaries from World War II, The War Diaries illuminate an aspect of history that we have not seen in this way before.

Nina Siegel, an acclaimed journalist and novelist, connects excerpts from diaries of collaborators, resistance members, and persecuted individuals—a Dutch Nazi police detective, a Jewish journalist imprisoned at Westerbork transit camp, a grocery store owner who saved dozens of lives—into a combined nonfiction narrative of the Nazi occupation and the Dutch Holocaust, as experienced by people daily.

Siegel provides the context, both historical and personal, trying to understand her own relationship with this past. As a “second-generation survivor” born and raised in New York, she tries to understand what it meant for her mother and maternal grandparents to live through the war in Europe during those times. When she moved to Amsterdam, these questions resurfaced, along with another terrifying one: Why did 75% of the Dutch Jewish community disappear during the war, while in other Western European countries the proportions were significantly lower? How does this relate to the narratives of Dutch resistance she had heard so many times, and in what way does it relate to the renowned Dutch tolerance?

Inquisitive and unique, The War Diaries leads us into the lives of seven diary authors and follows their pasts into the present, through interviews with those who preserved and inherited these diaries. During this process, Siegel explores the nature of memory and how the traumatic past is rewritten again and again.

(Previously published as The Keepers of the Diaries) Pages: 272, Dimensions: 12.9x12.9cm