This essay takes up the issue of the perpetrators, exploring the ways in which Yiddish diarists writing in the Warsaw and Lodz ghettos during the Second World War represented their Holocaust perpetrators. Delves into the questions of how Yiddish-speaking ghetto diarists understood their persecutors, as part of a long history of Jewish suffering. Simon traces the refusal of the ghetto diarists to attribute spiritual significance to their suffering, with representations of perpetrators as motivated and responsible individuals