Privately published by Yad Vashem. This is the second English printing, 1971

The 1942 - 1943 diary of a sixteen-year-old Dutch Jew living in Belgium, who eventually died in Auschwitz. He and his parents and six siblings were hiding with false papers in Brussels. I'm a bit confused about this, actually. Apparently they were posing as Gentiles, yet Moshe writes about borrowing Hebrew books and religious books from the library, and about associating with other Jews including a shochet and so on, which makes me wonder just how hard they were trying to pass. Yet pass they did, for a couple of years, until the entire family was betrayed and arrested in 1944.

This is an intensely religious chronicle; Moshe was a pious boy who spent a lot of time pondering how the sufferings of his fellow Jews fit into God's plan of the universe. Not knowing much about Judaism (and being an atheist at that), I couldn't really get into it. Nevertheless it is a valuable addition to the small number of Holocaust diaries out there. ( )