Diaries, testimonies, and Jewish histories of the Holocaust

The author's assessment of Holocaust diaries as sources separates them methodologically from postwar Jewish testimonies. In the first place they include in many cases the voices of those who did not survive the Holocaust itself. Perhaps more importantly, they provide a unique window into what Jews in different regions, at least on an individual level, understood concerning the new parameters of their lives, and the place of Jews in Hitler's Europe more generally, as well as their reading of German intentions, which remained in many cases opaque at least until 1943.