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Diaries about genocide are works that provide the contemporaneous perspective and invaluable first-hand observations of individuals living under regimes that are either heading toward or overtly planning, even actively pursuing, genocide. They are a record of the experiences, sights, sounds, rumors, and insights into the daily life of such individuals, and sometimes even detail the actual events of the genocide. By their very nature, diaries offer one person's limited but on-the-spot observations, commentary, and questions regarding his or her own fate, and the lives of family, friends, and colleagues—and perhaps even the fates of people whom the diarist does not know personally. The most powerful and most valuable diaries often reveal the diarist's self-inquiry into his or her own beliefs, the facts surrounding his or her own existence, and the circumstances of the government and of those carrying out genocidal polices. They can also disclose the diarist's assessment of the possibilities, for good or ill, available in the face of approaching or ongoing genocide. For historians, diaries are of inestimable value for they, in most cases, constitute "authentic and reliable sources of information" (Gutman, 1985, p. 371).

Every genocide is the result of specific and unique antecedents, causes, decisions, and the enactment of such decisions. Nonetheless, the diaries written by individuals who suffered through it, survived it, or witnessed it (such as the missionaries from various nations serving in the Ottoman Empire during the course of the Armenian genocide) may share common themes. These may include propaganda issued by perpetrators against a victim group, the fear instilled by perpetrators in the general populace, the call for the removal of certain groups from society, the incipient incitement of violence against a particular group of people, the "disappearance" of people, or the outright mass killing of targeted victims. Diarists focus on those experiences, issues, concerns, anxieties, fears, and hardships that they personally suspect, witness, or experience.

What must be understood and appreciated is that each diary provides but a single piece—as significant as that is—of the larger "puzzle" of a specific genocide. Many genocidal acts last several years, take place over enormous expanses of land, and involve hundreds of thousands—if not millions—of people. For example, between 1915 and 1919, the Armenian people were persecuted in their villages. Many were driven out into the desert of Syria and Mesopotamia from all across the Ottoman Empire, the primary exceptions being those who lived in Constantinople and Smyrna, where there was a heavy foreign presence. The Soviet manmade famine in Ukraine, which took place between 1932 and 1933, claimed an estimated three to eight million Ukrainians living in an area of some 232,000 square miles. The Holocaust encompassed all of continental Europe, from which Jews, Romani, and others were rounded up, forced into ghettos, and deported to concentration, slave labor, or death camps, where, ultimately, approximately 5.8 million Jews were starved, worked to death, or outright murdered. In 1994, within a period of three short but chaotic months, some 800,000 Tutsi and moderate Hutu were slain by Hutu extremists in Rwanda. The point is that no individual can possibly provide a comprehensive picture of a genocidal act based solely on his or her observations and experiences. Instead, diaries provide uniquely personal views of specific acts occurring within the context of the larger genocidal crimes.

Understandably, diaries written during actual periods of genocide are relatively rare. More common are such first-person accounts as memoirs, interviews, oral histories, and autobiographies that are written or provided in the aftermath of a particular genocidal period. The rarity of on-the-spot, contemporaneous accounts is a result of numerous factors. During an ongoing genocide, individuals are understandably more concerned about securing their own welfare and that of their immediate family than maintaining a record of events; in many cases. During the deportations of entire Armenian communities by the Ottoman authorities, the withering work and horrific conditions in Nazi slave labor camps, and the chaos of the 1994 Rwandan genocide, few of the victims had the opportunity or means to keep such records. In numerous instances of genocide—the Nazi genocide of the Romani being a classic case—the local populace may not be literate, and thus may not be capable of maintaining diaries.

During the 1990s and the early years of the twenty-first century, an ever-increasing number of diaries concerning genocides have been translated and published in English, dramatically adding to the store of such first-hand accounts that have accumulated over the years since World War I. The vast majority of the more recently discovered diaries are being uncovered in different repositories across the globe, such as the Armenian Genocide Museum-Institute in Yerevan, Armenia, and Yad Vashem Martyrs and Heroes Remembrance Authority in Jerusalem. To a lesser extent, some are being discovered by the families of victims or survivors. Such a phenomenon is a direct result of increased scholarly appreciation of the value of such diaries, and the efforts of researchers and victim's advocacy groups to make such works available to other academics and the general public.

A notable diary by a survivor of the Armenian genocide is Vahakn Dadrian's To the Desert: Pages from My Diary. Reportedly, Dadrian began his diary on May 24, 1915, in order to document the Ottoman Turks' illtreatment of the Armenians and to keep track of the rumors then afloat regarding the fate of the Armenians. The members of Dadrian's community, Chorum, were deported to Aleppo and then to Jeresh (Jordan), where they struggled to survive. By the conclusion of World War I, half of Dadrian's family had perished or was murdered as a result of the genocide. In 1919 the surviving members of the family moved to Constantinople, where Dadrian assembled his diary notes for publication. Written in Armenian, the book was first published in 1945 and has only recently been published in English.

Some of the earliest diaries of a genocide were written not by victims or survivors, but by missionaries working in the Ottoman Empire during the Armenian genocide. One of the most informative diaries is Diaries of a Danish Missionary: Harpoot, 1907–1919, by Maria Jacobsen. Jacobsen remained in the area thoughout the period of genocide and World War I, and her diary is considered to be one of the more complete records of the Armenian genocide in Turkey. She observed the persecution of Armenians first hand, and attempted to save as many Armenian women and children as she could by pleading with the Ottoman authorities to release them and by providing clandestine assistance.

Another major diary of the Armenian genocide is entitled Marsovan 1915: The Diaries of Bertha Morely. Bertha Morely was an American music teacher who resided and worked in Marsovan, and who witnessed the Armenian genocide perpetrated in Marsovan between April and September 1915. In her diary, Morley comments on the arrest of Armenian community leaders and intellectuals in Marsovan, the subsequent deportation of the town's entire Armenian population, and the ultimate death of countless Armenians. She also describes how Armenian property was ransacked and stolen by Ottoman officials, and how Armenian women and children were forced, on the threat of death, to convert to Islam and then taken in by Muslim families, whom they served as anything from slave labor to concubines.

It is worth nothing that the officials of various governments, including the United States, maintained important documentation of the Armenian genocide, but these works were do not qualify as diaries, strictly speaking. Rather, they are narratives that reflect their own experiences, mediated by their role as representatives of other nations. A classic example of this type of work latter is Ambassador Morgenthau's Story by Henry Morgenthau, originally published in 1918. This volume is considered by many scholars to be one of the key sources on the Armenian genocide. Another significant work is Viscount Bryce's The Treatment of the Armenians in the Ottoman Empire, 1915–1916. This book, although not a diary, provides a massive collection of eyewitness accounts, and was written and published during the period in which the Armenian genocide was still in progress.

The Ukraine famine, is far less documented by diaries. Nonetheless, many first-person testimonies have been collected by the U.S. Commission on the Ukraine Famine, under the directorship of Dr. James Mace. In 1998, commenting in an article for the newspaper, The Day, Mace stated that

[A]s early as 1927 Serhiy Yefremov wrote in his diaries about hundreds of thousands of hungry in Kyiv, about the terrible lines for bread, about over 200,000 Kyivans who had been denied the right to buy bread at all, and about peasant unrest provoked by state grain seizures.

In an article for the Encyclopedia of the Holocaust (1995), Israel Gutman observes that diaries of the Holocaust can be classified into four distinct categories: day-by day records of public events; public diaries; private diaries; and diaries written by teenagers and children. He notes the relative abundance of such records, explaining it as follows:

[E]verybody was writing—journalists, writers, teachers, public figures, the teenagers, and even the children. Mostly they kept diaries, in which they described the tragic events unfolding before their eyes as the personal experiences that they indeed were [experiencing]. . . . Many of the diarists were Jews who were hiding among the Christian population or under their protection (as was the case of Anne Frank).

Many of the diaries and other writings composed during the Holocaust have been lost Even so, a tremendous amount of material has been preserved. In the Warsaw Jewish Historical Institute, which has a large collection of diaries, 272 of them are listed under "diaries," 65 of them from the Warsaw ghetto, in Polish and Yiddish. . . . A relatively large number of important diaries were rescued as part of the Ringelblum Archive. . . . So rich is the Warsaw diary collection in both quantity and quality, regarding the life of the Jews in the ghetto, the structure of the ghetto with its various institutions, and a range of details, that a day-by-day history of the Warsaw ghetto can be reconstructed based on this material alone (p. 272).

Among some of the most remarkable diaries kept during the Holocaust period were those of the Sonderkommando who were forced to work in the Auschwitz-Birkenau crematorium. The diaries provide extensive, vivid, and significant commentary on the horror of the death camps and the fate of the Jewish population and others. In addition, they provide significant information about the planning and execution of the Sonderkommando uprising in Birkenau. Although The Diary of Anne Frank is certainly the most famous diary related to the Holocaust, there are many diaries in English that supply much more in-depth and detailed commentary about a wide variety of issues and concerns, such as Nazi decrees and legislation in Germany, Nazi roundups and murders, and tales of life and death in the ghettos and death camps in Poland. They offer invaluable information to historians and others who seek to understand what transpired during the Holocaust and why it happened. Some of the notable diaries available in English are A Cup of Tears: A Diary of the Wars Ghetto by Abraham Lewin; In the Beginning Was the Ghetto: Notebooks from Lódz by Oskar Rosenfeld; The Last Days of the Jerusalem of Lithuania: Chronicles from the Vilna Ghetto and the Camps, 1939–1944 by Herman Kurk; I Will Bear Witness: A Diary of the Nazi Years (2 volumes, 1933–1941 and 1942–1945) by Victor Klemperer; In Those Terrible Days: Notes from the Lódz Ghetto by Josef Zelkowicz; The Diary of Dawid Sierakowiak: Five Notebooks from the Lódz Ghetto edited by Alan Adleson, and Salvaged Pages: Young Writers' Diaries of the Holocaust compiled and edited by Alexandra Zapruder. Also worthy of mention is Lódz Ghetto: Inside a Community under Siege, a compilation of diaries and notes, assembled and edited by Alan Adelson and Robert Lapides, and Children in the Holocaust and World War II: Their Secret Diaries, which contains, in part, excerpts from diaries by children who endured the Holocaust, edited by Laurel Holliday.

Most of the genocides perpetrated in the aftermath of the Holocaust and following the establishment of the United Nations (UN) Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide have not been addressed in diaries, but rather in first-person accounts by journalists, collections of interviews and oral histories by interested historians or survivor groups, and some major autobiographies (especially those related to the Cambodian genocide). Nonetheless, one book, Zlata's Diary: A Child's Life in Sarajevo, derives from the 1990s, when genocide was being perpetrated in the former Yugoslavia. Although the diary is not about any specific genocide, it does describe the conflict and war that eventually degenerated, in part, into genocide. Whether any diaries were written during the genocide of the Kurds residing in northern Iraq in 1988, the genocide in Rwanda in 1994, or the genocide perpetrated by the Serbs against the Muslim population in Srebrenica in 1995, is, as yet, unknown.

SEE ALSO Biographies; Memoirs of Perpetrators; Memoirs of Survivors

Samuel Totten