The Diary Keepers

Nina Siegal, an American journalist and novelist living in Amsterdam, is the granddaughter of Emerich, a Holocaust survivor liberated from the Mauthausen subcamp Gunskirchen in 1945. Growing up on Long Island, Siegal absorbed fragments of her grandfather's wartime past through anecdotes shared at fast-food lunches, but the broader context of his persecution remained shrouded in family silence. He died when she was in seventh grade, and decades passed before she began researching his story. In 2019, her brother David obtained records from the International Tracing Service revealing that Emerich was born in 1905 in Volove, in what is now Ukraine, and was deported through forced labor camps before reaching Mauthausen. Separate online research revealed that the Jews of Volove who did not flee were confined to a ghetto in Bibrka and executed at a brickyard in March 1943.

Having settled in Amsterdam in 2006 on a Fulbright Fellowship, Siegal had already confronted the near-total absence of Jewish life in the city's historic Jodenbuurt, or Jewish neighborhood, where traces of centuries of Jewish presence remained but almost no visible community survived. She learned that approximately 75 percent of the estimated 140,000 Dutch Jews were murdered during the Holocaust, the lowest survival rate of any Western European country. While visiting the NIOD Institute for War, Holocaust and Genocide Studies in 2019, researcher René Kok led Siegal into the institute's basement vault, where more than 2,100 personal diaries written by Dutch civilians during the war were stored. The collection included voices from every part of society: shop clerks, resistance fighters, police officers, and Nazi sympathizers. Siegal resolved to use these diaries to tell the story of the occupation through multiple, often conflicting perspectives.

The NIOD archive traces its origins to a March 1944 radio broadcast in which Gerrit Bolkestein, the exiled Dutch minister of education, urged citizens to preserve their personal wartime documents. Anne Frank, listening from her hiding place, began revising her diary in response. After liberation on May 5, 1945, the Dutch government founded the institute within three days, and personal documents poured in. Loe de Jong, a Jewish journalist who escaped to England during the invasion while his parents and young sister perished at Sobibor, became the institute's director. De Jong later wrote a 26-volume national war history and hosted a television series that established a dominant narrative centered on Dutch resilience and resistance, a framework critics have since called the "myth of resistance" for minimizing both Dutch complicity and the scope of Jewish suffering.

Siegal selects seven principal diarists spanning the full spectrum of wartime experience. Douwe Bakker, a police inspector and member of the Nationaal-Socialistische Beweging (NSB), the Dutch Nazi party, kept a nearly 3,300-page diary documenting his collaboration with the German security apparatus. Inge Jansen (a pseudonym required by Dutch privacy rules), the wife of an aspiring Nazi medical official, recorded the social world of Dutch Nazi elites. Elisabeth van Lohuizen, co-owner of a general store in the small town of Epe, began her 941-page diary on the invasion's first day and became central to a resistance network that hid dozens of Jews; she and her family were later recognized by Yad Vashem as Righteous Among the Nations. Mirjam Levie, a Zionist secretary for the Jewish Council, wrote unsendable letters to her fiancé in Palestine that became a diary of the occupation from an insider's perspective. Philip Mechanicus, a prominent journalist, produced detailed eyewitness reportage during 17 months at Westerbork transit camp. Meijer Emmerik, a Jewish diamond cutter, recorded his efforts to protect his family while in hiding. Ina Steur, a 17-year-old factory clerk, observed the occupation's impact on working-class Amsterdam.

Siegal arranges the diary excerpts chronologically, interspersed with historical analysis, tracing the occupation from May 10, 1940, through liberation. The German invasion collapsed Dutch defenses within five days; the Rotterdam bombing forced capitulation, and the royal family fled to England. Hitler appointed Arthur Seyss-Inquart as Reichskommissar, or imperial commissioner, and anti-Semitic measures escalated incrementally: In October 1940, public servants were forced to declare their racial heritage; Jewish civil servants were dismissed in November; in January 1941, a compulsory Aryan Declaration extended to all citizens. After street fighting between Jewish self-defense groups and NSB members in Amsterdam's Jewish Quarter in February 1941, German Order Police rounded up more than 400 Jewish men. The roundups triggered the February Strike, a two-day work stoppage of more than 300,000 Dutch citizens, recognized as the only popular protest by non-Jews against Jewish persecution in occupied Europe.

The Germans established a Jewish Council under diamond factory owner Abraham Asscher and classics professor David Cohen as the sole intermediary between the occupation authorities and all Dutch Jews. When mass deportations began in July 1942, the Council distributed limited German-issued exemptions, a system that divided the community and shifted moral responsibility onto the Council itself. More than 107,000 Jews were ultimately transported from Westerbork transit camp to Auschwitz, Sobibor, and other camps. Mechanicus' diary provides meticulous reportage of the weekly transports along the camp's central road, nicknamed the Boulevard des Misères: the confiscation of inmates' last possessions, the loading of men, women, and children into cattle cars. He describes himself as "an unofficial reporter of a shipwreck," treating the work as a moral duty even as his own deportation remained a constant threat.

Elisabeth van Lohuizen's diary documents resistance. Together with headmaster Derk Hendriks and postman Tiemen Jonker, she formed Het Driemanschap (the Triad), a network that sheltered Jews across multiple houses in the forested Epe region; by late 1942, the group was hiding 35 people across five properties. Siegal also traces the apparatus of persecution: the Henneicke Colonne, a mercenary group of about 50 Dutch civilians, captured more than 8,000 Jews for bounty payments, while neighbors and former friends served as informants. Meijer Emmerik's diary records the lifesaving intervention of a Catholic resistance worker he calls "Miss Tini," Albertina Maria van de Bilt, who eventually helped save 114 children.

Mechanicus stopped writing on February 28, 1944, and was deported to Bergen-Belsen, then to Auschwitz in October 1944, where all 120 passengers on his transport were killed. Mirjam Levie was among 222 "exchange Jews" traded for German Templars held in Mandate Palestine; her diary records the journey through war-torn Europe to safety, where she reunited with her fiancé Leo Bolle and married him six weeks later. Meijer Emmerik was liberated in November 1944 when British forces reached his hiding place after days of bombardment. As the war ground toward its end, the Hunger Winter devastated western Netherlands, with German supply blockades causing an estimated 16,000 to 20,000 deaths. Elisabeth van Lohuizen, arrested in January 1945, spent five weeks in prison before her release; she heard the news of peace on May 4 while ironing.

In the book's final sections, Siegal examines the postwar decades of silence. Returning survivors faced hostility: billed for property taxes accrued during imprisonment and told "we suffered too" when they tried to speak. De Jong's national narrative emphasized heroism over complicity, while University of Amsterdam professor Jacques Presser's 1965 work Ondergang (Destruction), which foregrounded first-person testimonies, provoked a cultural reckoning by indicting Dutch indifference. Siegal engages with the "knowledge question," the scholarly debate about what ordinary Dutch people knew about the genocide, concluding that the moral distinction lies not in certainty but in willingness to act on available information.

The book closes in March 2022 at the National Holocaust Names Monument in Amsterdam, designed by architect Daniel Libeskind. Its 102,163 individual bricks, each inscribed with a victim's name, birth date, and age, make visible the scale of loss that decades of silence obscured. Siegal accompanies Rebecca Emmerik, a goldsmith who traced 144 family members lost in the Holocaust, as Rebecca places stones beneath the names in the Jewish mourning tradition. The diaries, Siegal argues, provide the intimate knowledge that transforms names and dates into lived experience, ensuring that the stories behind the monument's bricks endure.