The daughter and granddaughter of Holocaust survivors, journalist Nina Siegal always wondered about the experience of regular people during World War II. She had read The Diary of Anne Frank and heard stories of the war as a child, but the tales were crafted as moral lessons — to never waste food, to be grateful for all you receive, to hide your silver — while the details of the past went untold in an effort to make it easier assimilate into American life. When she moved to Amsterdam, those questions came up again, as did another horrifying one: Why did eighty percent of the Dutch Jewish community perish in the war, while in other Western European countries the proportions were significantly lower? How did this square with the narratives of Dutch resistance she had heard so much about and in what way did it relate to the famed tolerance people in the Netherlands were always talking about? Based on select writings from a Dutch collection of over two thousand diaries written during World War II and maintained on devoted archivists, The Diary Keepers illuminates a part of history we haven’t seen in quite this way before.  From the stories of a Nazi sympathizer to a Jewish journalist who documented daily activities at a transport camp, Siegal mines the diaries of ordinary people in extraordinary times to understand the nature of resistance, the workings of memory, and the ways we reflect on, remember, and re-envision the past.