To the bitter end : the Diaries of Victor Klemperer 1942-1945.

This is the second volume of Klemperer's diaries (you don't need to read them in order, but you ought to). It's January 1942. The war is swirling around him and the deportations have begun in earnest. One by one Klemperer's friends are arrested, deported or commit suicide; he himself expects to be

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picked up at any time and contemplates ending his life. But he is determined to live, to "bear witness" to the atrocities around him, the many greater and lesser agonies he and other Jews endure. He is reproached at one point by an acquaintance who tells him no one is going to care about the details he records, and Klemperer responds, "It's not the big things that are important to me, but the everyday life of tyranny, which gets forgotten. A thousand mosquito bites are worse than a blow to the head. I observe, note down the mosquito bites."

Curiously, Klemperer encounters a great deal of sympathy and friendliness from everyday Germans; many Aryan friends and acquaintances help in small ways, and strangers approach him on the street to tell him to bear up because it can't last forever. He writes, "Taken individually ninety-nine percent of the male and female workers are undoubtedly more or less extremely anti-Nazi, well-disposed to the Jews, opposed to the war, weary of tyranny..., but fear of the one percent loyal to the regime, fear of prison, ax, and bullet binds them."

Klemperer's description of the fire-bombing of Dresden was breathtaking. The bombing probably saved his life; the last of the Jews were being rounded up and he expected his turn to come any day now, but in the chaos that followed the attack on the city, he and his wife took the opportunity to take off his star, change their names and run like hell. So the reader follows them to their trek across Germany to the American occupation zone and safety. Then, after the armistice, their two-week journey back to Dresden (mostly on foot). The end of the war is not the end of their troubles, alas. But they reach Dresden and are well-received there, and will pick up their lives where they left off.

This is a very intelligent, observant and dedicated diarist, and these books are an inestimably important work of history. I look forward to reading the third and last volume, detailing Klemperer's life in post-war Communist Germany.

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