ebooks Passage to Ararat (FSG Classics) by Michael J. Arlen in History

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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."