The Diary Keepers: Ordinary People, Extraordinary Times - World War II in the Netherlands, as Written by the People Who Lived Through It

ISBN-13: 9780008447700 / Angielski / Miękka / 2022

Nina Siegal

Opis

Based on select writings from an exceptional Amsterdam archive containing more than two thousand Dutch diaries from World War II, The Diary Keepers illuminates a part of history we haven't seen in quite this way before.

Recenzje

Praise for The Diary Keepers

'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

O autorze

NINA SIEGAL is an author and journalist who works as a regular contributor to the Culture section of the New York Times. She is currently completing her doctoral dissertation at the University of Amsterdam's research school for Heritage, Memory and Material Culture. In addition to working as a journalist since the 1990s, Siegal has published three novels. She received a Fulbright Fellowship to the Netherlands for her second novel in 2006 and ended up settling down in Amsterdam, where she currently lives with her daughter and her dog. Siegal has won many grants and awards for her writing, including a 2021 Whiting Creative Nonfiction Grant.