I Will Bear Witness: A Diary of the Nazi Years 1942-1945, Vol. 2 » (Reprint)

A professor of Romance languages in Dresden, Victor Klemperer wrote several major works on seventeenth- and eighteenth-century French literature before he was expelled from his post in 1935. He lived through the war in Dresden with his wife, Eva. Klemperer's secret diaries were thought for many years to have been lost or suppressed by the Communist authorities of East Germany, where Klemperer lived after the war. He wife deposited them after his death in 1960 in the Dresden Landesarchiv, where they remained until they were uncovered by Victor Nowojski, a former pupil, who edited and transcribed them for publication in Germany. Their reception there was a national event. The diaries have been translated into twelve languages.

About the Translator

Martin Chalmers has translated, from the German, books by Hubert Fichte, Hans Magnus Enzensberger, and Erich Fried. He is a frequent contributor to the New Statesman and The Independent, and lives in London.

Destined to take its place alongside The Diary of Anne Frank and Elie Wiesel's Night as one of the great classics of the Holocaust, I Will Bear Witness is a timeless work of literature, the most eloquent and acute testament to have emerged from Hitler's Germany. Volume Two begins in 1942, the year the Final Solution was formally proposed, and carries us through to the Allied bombing of Dresden and Germany's defeat.

KLIATT

Incredibly enough, numbers of German Jews managed to live through the Nazi years and avoid the Holocaust, not as emaciated death camp inmates, but as citizens openly walking the streets of Germany's cities. Endlessly harassed and humiliated, they nevertheless survived thanks to the meticulous thoroughness with which the Reich observed its own pitiless laws. Klemperer, a scholarly and endlessly fussy professor of classical history, was a full-fledged Jew who had married an "Aryan" woman. As such, the authorities classified him as a "protected" citizen; an awkward problem to a society that anathematized all Jews yet respected the status of their Aryan mates. Such second-class citizens were protected from immediate deportation yet were obliged to wear the yellow star and endure the systematic loss of job, car, ration cards and any other rights the authorities could think of. As the end of the war drew nearer and the plight of the Nazi government grew desperate, ever-harsher measures came into effect and the numbers of officially protected Jewish people dwindled. Ironically, Klemperer and the remaining Jews of Dresden were saved by the devastating air raids that incinerated the city in the final weeks of the war. With the Gestapo headquarters safely leveled, the elderly couple slipped away into the chaos of a dying nation and trekked to the Allied lines and safety. Professor Klemperer seems to have been anything but a "survivor" type. He was an effete academic and an eternally fretting hypochondriac with genuine health problems. Yet he not only walked out of the Goetterdaemmerung, but also brought with him a titanic record of the day-by-day fate of German Jewry. All through the years of theThird Reich, he had managed to keep a detailed diary of his experiences from 1933 until just after the German surrender. This, the second and final volume of his epic, is probably the most fascinating. It is dense with detail, but deftly edited to be readable and is clearly the best choice for YAs. Recommended to high school and academic libraries. KLIATT Codes: SA*—Exceptional book, recommended for senior high school students, advanced students, and adults. 1999, Random House, Modern Library, 558p. index. 21cm., $14.95. Ages 16 to adult. Reviewer: Raymond L. Puffer; Ph.D., Historian, Edwards Air Force Base, CA , July 2001 (Vol. 35, No. 4)