This is not a diary but a memoir put together from scraps the author collected and notes he made during World War II. It was edited and translated by his son. Michael Diment was a young man living with his family in a small Ukrainian village. He and the other Jews were forced into a ghetto by the Nazis. Many of them, including Diment, escaped before the entire ghetto was massacred, but they were ruthlessly hunted and most of them did not survive until liberation. Diment was one of the few who did, living day by day: a few days in the forest, a few days with this peasant, a few weeks with that one. If he was lucky he could stay hidden for months at a time.

Diment would not have survived without the help of the Ukrainian peasants in the area, and I got the impression that many more would have helped him if they hadn't been too frightened. The peasants who assisted him and other Jews do, at any rate, seem to have outnumbered those who actively persecuted them. I find this interesting because Ukrainians tend to be characterized as the worst of all the nationalities in Holocaust literature. It is true however that many of the atrocities were committed by the Ukrainian militia rather than the Germans.

I think this memoir would mainly be of interest to people researching the Holocaust in rural Ukraine. It's not especially well-written, but there are very few Holocaust books out of Ukraine and this is as good as any. ( )