Quality of Witness: A Romanian Diary, 1937-1944

One might compare this diary to Victor Klemperer’s. Both diarists were intelligent, educated, cultured middle-aged Jewish men living under the Nazi terror. Both of them kept detailed diaries throughout the war, and survived the Holocaust.

However, there are significant differences. Klemperer was married to an Aryan woman and a nominal convert to Christianity, though he seemed to have no religion at all, and he didn't really have much to do with Jewish life. Dorian on the other hand was very involved with the Romanian-Jewish culture, literature in particular. Klemperer focused much more on his private life in his diary than Dorian did; Dorian usually wrote about the war or the Yiddish translations he was doing.

This book is quite show more interesting from a historical standpoint. Dorian is a keen and discerning observer of the events around him and it's intriguing to see just how much he knew about the persecution of the Jews in Europe. He knew, for instance, about the Warsaw Ghetto uprising. He knew that poison gas was being used to kill Jews in large numbers, though he significantly underestimated the death rate. Dorian also was a novelist and poet with obvious literary talent. I include a sample of quotes from his diary:

"I stopped in front of a florist's window. Behind me, the screeching and throbbing boulevard vanished. Gone, too, were the voices of newspaper vendors selling their daily poisoned flowers. Facing me, behind the glass curtain, a fairyland. Shining, plump carnations, with the pink voluptuousness of women about to reach maturity, poised for the first step of a sprightly dance; shamelessly lascivious gladioli; virginal branches of white lilac; roses lost in pure meditation, undecided between the metaphysical white and the unreal yellow of a sky after the rain." (page 17)

"The [park] is all decked out. Nothing new. The same bushes in bloom in the same spots, the same babies, like flowers, drinking the spring out of their bottles. The magnolias have shed their petals...the peacocks cry out their desolation." (page 28)

"The fatigue I've gathered year after year and stored inside now heaves a muted cry of helplessness. Nothing but fatigue, rounding my shoulders, heavier than ever on this late autumn day with a useless sun, a world of unforgiving disasters. So many struggles and tragedies, so much sorrow and egotism in this dark, in this rotting century of hate." (page 127)

"The garden has wrapped itself in autumn haze. An unusual autumn, lacking that thrill of vegetal warmth when the sap is still alive and runs up the trees, drunk on solar gold. It is the sorrowful climax of a summer's drought. Never before was I so struck by the cancerous emaciation in a garden. The leaves started turning yellow in July and began falling, like a dance of prematurely withered bodies." (page 226)

Another Romanian Jewish writer, Mihail Sebastian, kept a diary during this same time period. show less