Customer Reviews

Numbered Days: Diaries and the Holocaust

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Alexandra Garbarini's _Numbered Days_ is one of the most important books published on the Holocaust during the past several years. Based on long and painstaking work, she guides us through a wide range of diaries kept during the Holocaust, almost all previously untranslated and unknown. Her interpretations, deeply informed by her knowledge of the relevant history, bring to life what it meant to be a "victim of the Holocaust" during several phases and loci of the destruction. She takes us far beyond iconic images and assumptions and opens us to worlds - versions of our own world at its most horrific - that we have not visited before. It is no accident that Saul Friedlander's monumental history of the Holocaust ends with references from Garbarini. There are very few new books about the Holocaust that one can describe as genuinely path-breaking. This is one of those few.

This book is one that provides an entirely new look at the Holocaust. As the title suggests, what the author has done is to look at the diaries that were written during the Holocaust. This means both published and non published diaries. This provides an insight into what those who were there were thinking. Well worth reading.