Of about 140, 000 Dutch Jews registered in the Netherlands in 1941, 102, 200 were murdered in the camps. Indeed, about seventy-five percent of Dutch Jews died in Nazi concentration camps, a striking difference from neighboring Belgium, where the proportion was forty percent, or France, where it was twenty-five percent. I began exploring the diaries in 2019 for a particular purpose: I wanted to understand how the Netherlands, a famously tolerant country, known for welcoming Jews as early as the sixteenth century, had lost a greater proportion of its Jewish population to the Holocaust than any other Western European nation. The collection, housed at the NIOD Institute for War Holocaust and Genocide Studies, contains more than 2, 100 diaries gathered in the immediate postwar period. This daily trip took on an increasing poignancy for me over the past three years, as I delved into an extraordinary collection of World War II journals from the Netherlands for my new book, The Diary Keepers: World War II As Written by the People Who Lived Through It, forthcoming from Ecco/Harper Collins. What was far less likely was that I would end up living around the corner from Anne Frank’s hiding place, in the attic of Prinsengracht 263 in Amsterdam, and that I would bike past it while taking my own Jewish daughter to school. I couldn’t help noticing that my mother’s face in war-era photos bore a striking resemblance to Anne’s: black bob, bright eyes, and glint of intelligent mischief in her smile.

As the daughter of a Holocaust survivor who spent her Hungarian childhood in hiding, I am not entirely surprised that I was drawn to the diary of Anne Frank as a girl.

Diarey book