Victor Klemperer (Martin Chalmers, Translator): I Will Bear Witness: A Diary Of The Nazi Years, 1942-1945

It's a strange phenomenon that the victims of genocide are frequently the sole witnesses to the atrocities directed at them. In the case of the Holocaust—the most horrific, extensive, and organized mass murder in modern history—millions of Europeans, including one-third of the world's Jews, were systematically slaughtered in secrecy, shipped out of society to die in secluded concentration camps. Recent years have seen a massive effort by documentarians and historians to interview all living Holocaust survivors so their experiences will serve future generations in the fight against totalitarianism and racism. The moving Voices Of The Shoah is a four-disc audio documentary that, narrator Elliott Gould aside, consists entirely of first-person accounts covering the rise of the Nazi Party through the terror of the Final Solution as experienced by Holocaust survivors. Included in the package is a book with complete transcripts that should further enhance the set's value as an educational tool. Victor Klemperer's I Will Bear Witness was not intended as an educational tool, but it certainly serves that purpose. The German academic, who was born a Jew but raised a secular Protestant, kept an extensive daily diary throughout his life, but only recently have his writings on the persecution of Jews been translated and widely released. What's remarkable about these entries is how each offers new and fascinating information on the rise of anti-Semitism: The devil is literally in the details. The second volume of I Will Bear Witness begins in 1942, shortly before Hitler stepped up his efforts to exterminate Jews. Klemperer, living with his Aryan wife in a house dedicated to a dwindling number of so-called "privileged" Dresden Jews, documents in harrowing detail the increasingly (and almost diabolically creative) anti-Semitic developments. Public transportation is made illegal. Food rations are cut. Haircuts are forbidden. Intrusive and abusive house inspection by the Gestapo becomes a regular occurrence. In a chilling foreshadowing of the Final Solution, house pets are banned and the Klemperers are forced to euthanize their cat. Gradually, the scant freedoms granted Klemperer and his few friends erode, and the omnipresent threat of the death camps grows more manifest. Klemperer's diary, kept surreptitiously under threat of dire punishment, is remarkably clear-minded and methodical, a levelheaded collection of terrible observations and personal dread. Each entry ends with the tacit implication that it could be his last, sometimes with the darkest sense of resigned and rueful humor. When rescue finally comes in the form of the infamous Dresden bombings, Witness makes palpable Klemperer's wary relief and his frustration when many people he encounters during his flight from Germany profess ignorance of what has befallen him and his people. That's why Klemperer's diary is such a valuable resource: His life on paper offers a first-person account of the Nazi atrocities from someone who was victimized but not an actual death-camp prisoner. It's a distinction of great worth in a time when Holocaust deniers still exist, as Klemperer's diary offers a story of equal courage and fear that's so thorough in its detail that it should make denial impossible.