I Will Bear Witness, 1933-1945

Unpublished until 1995, these diaries of a German Jew who survived the Nazi years have become one of the most essential records of the era. Klemperer, a scholar of language and literature, was ultimately spared the murderous camps by luck and circumstance, but in his meticulous diaries he furiously observed the incremental depradations that, step by dehumanizing step, robbed him and his wife of every freedom. There is none of the naivete of Anne Frank, just a grim—and equally powerful—hopefulness that there would be a time beyond the terrors when his observations of Nazi theory and practice would be read and valued.