ABSTRACT
For understanding what life was like under a modern dictatorship, diaries are invaluable. Yet few diaries were written in such regimes and even fewer have survived. To write and keep a diary is exceedingly dangerous. It is difficult to hide, there is always the risk of discovery and the punishment could well be death. Thus it comes as no surprise that whereas many thousands of books and even more articles have been written by survivors of the Holocaust, only about one hundred and twenty diaries written by Jews in Nazi-occupied Europe have been published; most of them cover only a limited period and few of them, to the best of my knowledge, are very detailed. In addition, we know of some 300–400 unpublished diaries, or fragments of diaries.
