Alexandra Garbarini's study of Jewish diaries written during the Holocaust is at once gentle and incisive. Influenced by the turn toward using personal accounts of victims of the Shoah, expressed in Saul Friedländer's call for an “integrated history,” Garbarini starts from the assumption that the targets of destruction are not only credible sources, but on many subjects, they are the only sources. Where else would one look to learn what the Holocaust did to individual and communal Jewish understandings of history, tradition, and faith? What else might reveal how Jews decided to go into hiding or entrust their children to strangers, how they struggled with despair and hope? And where else could one explore how people made meaning of events that seemed unfathomable? To Garbarini, such questions are not mere flashes of human interest or decorations to a narrative of destruction; they occupy the center of analysis.

As one might expect, the first insight in a study of diaries is recognition of the range of Jewish voices and experiences. Nazi policies and practices created the monolith of “the Jew”—everywhere and always the same, if concealed behind varied facades—and brutality and murder created terrifying sameness in the mountains of corpses, stripped of names, clothes, hair, and sex. But as Garbarini shows—and as even the briefest consideration of just a few diaries reveals—Jewish lives and responses were endlessly diverse. Where persecution and misery led Chaim Aron Kaplan in Warsaw to lose faith in a divine order and seek meaning and justice in rational, historical analysis, his French contemporary Lucien Dreyfus, a “bourgeois, acculturated west European Jew” (p. 25), moved in the opposite direction, away from belief in the values of western civilization and toward deeper religiosity. Even the same people found their responses transformed over time. In the early stages of the war, diary-writing offered solace and self-affirmation; by 1942 and 1943, in the midst of annihilation, diarists typically spoke of a burdensome duty, doomed to fail. “The desire to write,” according to a Warsaw chronicler, “is as strong as the repugnance of words” (p. 160).

The diaries reflect every other imaginable kind of difference: class, age, gender, even genre. Some of the diaries Garbarini discusses (including approximately one hundred unpublished diaries written in German, Polish, and French) were the work of more than one person, such as Max and Frieda Reinach, a couple in Berlin, who read and commented on each other's entries. In the process, Garbarini reveals, they conveyed a vision of continuing family life, comforting themselves and each other, and offering guidance to their children in Boston and Palestine. No doubt Max's words of reassurance in October 1942 were directed at the whole family, including himself: “Where we have to go, I shall always try, with the help of God, to protect and help your mother” (p. 112). A number of the “diaries” Garbarini considers took the form of letters to family members separated by distance, war, or death. Indeed, one contribution of the book is its recognition of the often arbitrary nature of divisions between “diary” and “correspondence” and between “private diaries” and “war diaries.”

It is the differences Garbarini reveals that make one want to read all the diaries oneself and to revisit those that are already familiar. Many works in Holocaust Studies would stop there, with what would already be a major achievement. But Garbarini does something remarkable: she adds a distinctive analysis to produce a whole that is more than the sum of its parts. Her findings are presented in an understated way, so it is only upon reflection that the reader realizes she offers new ways to think not only about Holocaust diaries but about significant aspects of the Holocaust itself.

Take the relationship between the Holocaust and the war, events scholars often treat separately. But the diarists Garbarini discusses understood their inextricability and, sometimes intuitively, often in hard-earned detail, grasped the life-and-death significance of those connections. One of four main categories Garbarini uses to analyze the diaries is “news readers.” The “news” that concerned—or more accurately, obsessed—Jews from Amsterdam to Lwów was, of course, news of the war. From the most isolated and horrific of hiding places—barns, bunkers, holes in the ground—Jews found ways to inform themselves about the course of events and to spread the news they heard, even if it consisted of nothing but rumors. The other categories Garbarini invokes are “historians and martyrs,” “family correspondents,” and “reluctant messengers.” Like “news readers,” each constitutes a chapter of the book. In some cases, Garbarini uses a small number of diaries to develop a theme, as with her examination of Kaplan and Dreyfus in “Historians and Martyrs”; elsewhere, she moves among a wide circle of informants.

All four themes involve efforts to make meaning out of suffering. That quest for meaning is at the heart of Garbarini's book and its underlying project of confronting “unbounded sorrow” yet preserving hope—not as a redemptive or cheaply optimistic stance but as an ethical position “undertaken with open-eyed awareness of its possibility and improbability” (p. 167). Elegantly written and theoretically informed, Garbarini's work achieves the analytical sophistication and profound and critical empathy that distinguish the best “integrated histories” of the Holocaust. Appropriately, she concludes not with her words but with those of “a person whose identity is unknown,” the author of a report on the mass transports from the Warsaw ghetto: “We want to believe that there is some sense in still being alive among the shambles, among human hyenas and jackals who live by stripping the dead. . . . We are noting the evidence of the crime. . . . The record must be hurled like a stone under the history's wheel in order to stop it [sic]. That stone has the weight of our knowledge that reached the bottom of human cruelty” (p. 167).