"The best written, most evocative, most observant record of daily life in the Third Reich."  
-Amos Elon, The New York Times  

Victor Klemperer risked his life to preserve these diaries so that he could, as he wrote, "bear witness" to the gathering hor-ror of the Nazi regime. The son of a Berlin rabbi, Klemperer was a German patriot who served with honor during the First World War, married a gentile, and converted to Protestantism. He was a professor of Romance languages at the Dresden Technical Institute, a fine scholar and writer, and an intellectual of a somewhat conservative disposition.

Unlike many of his Jewish friends and academic colleagues, he feared Hitler from the start, and though he felt little allegiance to any religion, under Nazi law he was a Jew. In the years 1933 to 1941, covered in the first volume of these diaries, Klemperer's life is not yet in danger, but he loses his professorship, his house, even his typewriter; he is not allowed to drive, and since Jews are forbidden to own pets, he must put his cat to death. Because of his military record and marriage to a "full-blooded Aryan," he is spared deportation, but nevertheless, Klemperer has to wear the yellow Jewish star, and he and his wife, Eva, are subjected to the ever-increasing escalation of Nazi tyranny. The distinguished historian Peter Gay, in The New York Times Book Review, wrote that Klemperer's "personal history of how the Third Reich month by month, sometimes week by week, accelerated its crusade against the Jews gives as accurate a picture of Nazi trickery and brutality as we are likely to have...a report from the interior that tells the horrifying story of the evolving Nazi persecution...with a concrete, vivid power that is, and I think will remain, unsurpassed."

This volume begins in 1942, the year of the Final Solution, and ends in 1945, with the devastation of Hitler's Germany. Rumors of the death camps soon reach the Jews of Dresden, now jammed into their so-called Jews' houses, starved, humiliated, subject day and night to Gestapo raids, and terrified as, one by one, their neighbors are taken away. Klemperer is made to shovel snow, is assigned to do forced labor in a factory, is taunted on the streets by gangs of boys, but his life is spared, thanks to the privileged status of Jews married to Aryans. In the final days of the war, however, even Jews in mixed marriages are summoned to report for transport to "labor camps," which Klemperer now knows means death, and that his turn will soon come. He is saved by the great Dresden air raid of February 13, 1945; he and his wife survive the fiery destruction of their city and make their way to the Allied lines. "In the enthralling and appalling final pages of this miraculous work," wrote Niall Ferguson in the London Sunday Telegraph, "Klemperer all too soon encounters the deliberate amnesia of the defeated Germany: 'What is "Gestapo"?' declares a Breslau woman he encounters in May 1945. 'I've never heard the word. I've never been interested in politics, I don't know anything about the persecution of the Jews.'" Says Ferguson, "Of all the books I have read on this subject, I find it hard to think of one which has taught me more."  

The second volume of Victor Klemperer's searing diary, kept in secret during the 12 years he suffered under the Nazi regime, covers the period from 1942 to 1945. The humiliations visited on even such "privileged" Jews as Klemperer (whose wife was Aryan) grew increasingly severe, with house searches, arbitrary arrests, and brutal beatings becoming virtually routine. The 60-year-old historian is forced to shovel snow despite his heart condition; hunger gnaws at him as rations are mercilessly cut. Yet he clings to an intellectual life, continuing his reading and making notes on the lies and obfuscations of official Nazi discourse that would become his postwar masterpiece, Lingua Tertii Imperii. "The Russians, who have only just been annihilated, are tremendous and quite inexhaustible opponents," he notes sardonically after reading a mendacious fascist article in 1942. His lengthy account of his escape with his wife from Dresden after the Allied bombings of 1945 unforgettably captures the chaos of World War II's final days and the mixed feelings of a Jew who could never wholeheartedly gloat over the defeat of the nation that had persecuted him. Above all, his unflinching depiction of human nature and society in extremis amply justifies his cherished belief that even the Nazis "cannot prevent language from testifying to the truth." --Wendy Smith

The publication of Victor Klemperer's secret diaries brings to light one of the most extraordinary documents of the Nazi period. "In its cool, lucid style and power of observation," said The New York Times, "it is the best  written, most evocative, most observant record of daily life in the Third Reich." I Will Bear Witness is a work of literature as well as a revelation of the day-by-day horror of the Nazi years.
                          
A Dresden Jew, a veteran of World War I, a man of letters and historian of great sophistication, Klemperer recognized the danger of Hitler as early as 1933. His diaries, written in secrecy, provide a vivid account of everyday life in Hitler's Germany.
                          
What makes this book so remarkable, aside from its literary distinction, is Klemperer's preoccupation with the thoughts and actions of ordinary Germans: Berger the greengrocer, who was given Klemperer's house ("anti-Hitlerist, but of course pleased at the good exchange"), the fishmonger, the baker, the much-visited dentist. All offer their thoughts and theories on the progress of the war: Will England hold out? Who listens to Goebbels? How much longer will it last?
                          
This symphony of voices is ordered by the brilliant, grumbling Klemperer, struggling to complete his work on eighteenth-century France while documenting the ever- tightening Nazi grip. He loses first his professorship and then his car, his phone, his house, even his typewriter, and is forced to move into a Jews' House (the last step before the camps), put his cat to death (Jews may not own pets), and suffer countless other indignities.
                          
Despite the danger his diaries would pose if discovered, Klemperer sees it as his duty to record events. "I continue to write," he notes in 1941 after a terrifying run-in with the police. "This is my heroics. I want to bear witness, precise witness, until the very end."   When a neighbor remarks that, in his isolation, Klemperer will not be able to cover the main events of the war, he writes: "It's not the big things that are important, but the everyday life of  tyranny, which may be forgotten. A thousand mosquito bites are worse than a blow on the head. I observe, I note, the mosquito bites."
                          
This book covers the years from 1933 to 1941. Volume Two, from 1941  to 1945, will be published in 1999.

When the Nazis came to power in 1933, Victor Klemperer (1881-1960), honored as a frontline veteran of World War I, was a distinguished professor at the University of Dresden. A scant few months later he was merely a Jew, protected from deportation to a death camp only by his marriage to an Aryan. He suffered every other indignity to which German Jews were subjected, from losing his job to having his driver's license revoked to being denied permission to own a pet, and all are recorded with bitter clarity in his diary entries, which cover the years 1933 to 1941. (A second volume continuing through 1945 will be published in English in 1999.) The German edition of this book caused a sensation when it was published in 1995, and it's easy to see why: the relentless, quotidian nature of Nazi racism comes through forcefully in Klemperer's litany of daily humiliations and insults, a painful chronicle of situations in which readers can readily imagine themselves. Like Anne Frank, but with a more adult understanding of political fanaticism and human weakness, he makes the abstract horror of genocidal persecution very intimate, very personal, and very real. --Wendy Smith

The diaries of a Jew in Nazi Germany; the most important documnet to emerge from the period since the publication of The Diary Of Anne Frank.The first of two volumes, this covers the period from Hitler's election to the beginning of the holocaust.

Joan Wester Anderson gathers together true stories of tender coincidences and inspirational healings that tell of God's loving presence, guidance, and protection. In the Nicaraguan jungle, a missionary priest's life is saved by the prayers of friends in Michigan. Teenage best friends Patty and Joni harbor a closeness even death can not erase. And a lonely Seattle man finds his life transformed by a mysterious little messenger. Simultaneous Ballantine trade paper edition. 2 cassettes.

The events of the novel Stones Don t Bear Witness take place at the beginning of the 20th century in Czarist Russia. In the provincial town of Dubossary, a young Christian boy, Mikhail Ribachenko, is murdered under mysterious circumstances. The local peasants accuse the local Jews of the murder, which is supposedly for ritual purposes. The anti-Semitic press, with Pavolaki Krushevan, the editor of Bessarabets (The Bessarabian) in the lead, blows the case out of proportion throughout Russia. An agent of the secret police is sent to Kishinev; making use of the overheated state of Christian-Jewish relations, he is able to instigate a bloody anti-Jewish pogrom. The writer, Boris Sandler, relying on documents found in the governmental archives of Moscow, St. Petersburg, and Kishinev, carries out his own investigation of those long-ago events. The book is written in the form of a historical detective novel.

A first collection of poetry, dealing with memories of childhood, issues of love, marriage, loss and renewal. The book explores the author's Jewish identity and family histroy, intermingling joy and sorrow.

Columbus discovered America. So they say. But what of Leif Ericsson? What of St. Brendan? Who inscribed that anguished message on the Kensington Rune Stone? And who was The Westford Knight? We are sure that Columbus made it to San Salvador - and back. And the Icelandic Saga shores up faith in Leif Ericsson's voyage to North America, although scholarly opinion of the Vinland map seems to change every 10 years or so. St. Brendan's adventure has been pretty generally dismissed as mere myth- as if myth could not be rooted in truth. And the case of the Kensington Rune Stone continues to generate controversy, despite an impressive accumulation of evidence, both environmental and linguistic. And then there is the Westford Knight. In 1954, the late Frank Glynn uncovered the figure of a knight in full armor incised on a slab of glacial rock along a roadside in Westford, Massachusetts. The Knight's helmet, sword and shield all date to a specific decade in the evolution of armor and arms. And the emblem on the shield represents the armorial bearings of Clan Gunn, a noble family based in Scotland's County Caithness. The figure is, in fact, a classic military effigy, a type of monument commonly found in ancient gravesites in Scotland and in the north of England. So what was the Knight doing here? Facts cited in this little book suggest that The Westford Knight sailed westward with his high-born kinsman, Henry Sinclair, baron of Rosslyn and Earl of Orkney, in the service of The Lady King. The author presents the evidence: THESE STONES BEAR WITNESS. The verdict is for the reader to decide.