Читать книгу Rude Awakenings: An American Historian's Encounter With Nazism, Communism and McCarthyism - Carol Jr. Sicherman - Страница 6

Harry’s Berlin letters are not, for the most part, especially private. Knowing that his parents would save the letters, he rarely repeated himself in his diary. He confided his most intimate thoughts in the diaries, which in other respects were similar in scope to the letters. Forty-eight years later, he used his diaries for a talk before the UConn History Club that he called “The Rise of the Nazis–A Kind of Personal Memoir.” He seems to have used them the previous year to prepare for an interview for a UConn oral history project documenting the university. Some years earlier, he consulted the diaries when writing about the Dutch historian Jan Romein (see Chapter 8).

In order to highlight an apprentice historian’s direct encounter with history in the making, I have ignored nearly all the passages in Harry’s letters and diaries referring to family matters, as well as his (frankly boring) disquisitions on economics, lists of books he had read (or meant to read), opinions of opera singers, and so on. The letters that he received from German friends, in contrast, contain very little extraneous to my purpose. Almost all of them illustrate the writers’ experiences of unspooling repression; some contain requests to make certain information known to others who might help save people at risk in Europe. I cannot believe that the writers, if alive, would reprehend me for quoting their words or for trying to uncover additional information about their escape from Nazism. Those of their descendants whom I have met or contacted have been pleased, without exception, that their ancestors’ experiences will come to light.