As the Nazis swept across Europe during World War II, Jewish victims wrote diaries in which they grappled with the terror unfolding around them. Some wrote simply to process the contradictory bits of news they received; some wrote so that their children, already safe in another country, might one day understand what had happened to their parents; and some wrote to furnish unknown readers in the outside world with evidence against the Nazi regime.
Were these diarists resisters, or did the process of writing make the ravages of the Holocaust even more difficult to bear? Drawing on an...

Jewish Responses to Persecution: Volume II, 1938 1940 is the second volume of the five-volume set within the series "Documenting Life and Destruction: Holocaust Sources in Context." This volume brings together in an accessible historical narrative a broad range of documents including diaries, letters, speeches, newspaper articles, reports, Jewish identity cards, and personal photographs from Jews in Nazi-dominated Europe and beyond Europe's borders. The volume skillfully illuminates the daily lives of a diverse range of Jews who suffered under Nazism, their coping strategies, and their...