In THE DIARY KEEPERS, journalist Nina Siegal presents a wide-ranging panorama of characters and events from World War II as experienced in the Netherlands, revealing horrors, heroism and a mixed view of human nature.

Siegal’s family emigrated from Europe, where the planned annihilation of Jews was carried out --- day by day, truckload by trainload --- over a five-year period. The Netherlands sustained a reputation as one country where Jews were protected, hidden by non-Jews, often for the duration of the Nazi occupation. Because of her family’s direct experience of those harrowing years, Siegal grew up with questions that went unanswered until she decided to tackle the subject directly, in cooperation with Amsterdam’s NIOD Institute for War, Holocaust and Genocide Studies. There she accessed the diaries written by those who lived through and observed the happenings.

"Siegal’s remarkable work relates the facts fairly and plainly, containing courageous accounting seen by those who were there."

These diaries are presented day by day, starting in February 1941 when journalist Philip Mechanicus recorded that a group of Nazi sympathizers, along with German soldiers and local police, were prowling the streets, smashing windows in Amsterdam’s Jewish sector and beating or shooting anyone who raised an outcry against them. These incidents escalated until the Jewish quarter was closed off entirely, and people who lived there began to disappear, never to return. There were Dutch people who aided the Jewish population in a variety of ways --- hiding them in basements, storing their belongings for the day of their anticipated freedom --- while some cooperated with the invaders, either out of fear or because of a shared antisemitic viewpoint. During the years of occupation, the majority of the country’s Jews were killed.

Some Jews, like Siegal’s mother, managed to hide out and stay alive. But when Siegal would once refer to her mother as a “survivor,” she was chided --- that word was used only for those who had been in the camps. Such fine points of language and recollection are shimmering threads running through the diarists’ entries, combined with Siegal’s interspersed, assiduously researched commentary. Now, she notes, when so many sources --- including the world-heralded THE DIARY OF A YOUNG GIRL --- tell so much about “Dutch resilience, resistance, and triumph against evil,” there are still those who would gloss over the less savory truth of the Holocaust in the Netherlands.

However, Siegal’s remarkable work relates the facts fairly and plainly, containing courageous accounting seen by those who were there. As she states, their diaries should be regarded as a “first draft of memory.” Diarist and store owner Elisabeth van Lohuizen, noting that liberation was finally at hand in May 1945, perhaps speaks for all: “Will we be free of war in the future? I hope that God will grant it. We must make every effort to make that so.”