After
a Gestapo raid on May 27, 1942, Victor Klemperer wrote in his diary
that the journal's discovery "undoubtedly" would have meant death.
"But," the journalist and scholar vowed, "I shall go on writing. That is
my heroism. I will bear witness, precise witness." The surviving
volumes—a 1st-person account spanning the entire Nazi era—are unique,
invaluable pieces of Holocaust documentation.
Seven years before
that raid, Klemperer had been stripped of his position at Dresden
Technical University. Although his conversion to his wife Eva's
Protestantism spared him deportation, it did not protect him from the
Nuremberg Laws.
The 1942 raid took place in the Klemperers' rooms
in a segregated building called the "Jews' House." It was there that he
recorded hunger and fear, as well as tedious factory work, a jail
sentence, friends' disappearances, and all manner of indignities.
Though
his spirit at times flags, his will to live—and ultimately, to
write—never deserts him. The reader is swept along as his story
unfolds—all the way to Upper Bavaria, to which he and Eva eventually
flee, and back to Dresden, on foot, at war's end.
These diaries are masterful, essential reading for anyone with an interest in the Nazi years and the human spirit.
- Ken Sichel for Jewniverse
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