Immerse In At The Edge Of The Abyss: A Concentration Camp Diary, 1943-1944 Presented By David Koker Offered As Printed Matter

forNational Jewish Book Award in the Holocaust category

David Koker's diary is one of the most notable accounts of life in a German concentration camp written by a Jew during the years of the Holocaust.
First brought to attention when the Dutch historian Jacob PresserKoker's history teacher in high schoolquoted from Koker's diary in his monumental history, published in English as The Destruction of the Dutch Jews, the diary itself became a part of the Dutch literary canon when it was published inas Dagboek geschreven in Vught Diary Written in Vught.
It has remained in print ever since, and is notable for its literary qualities, weaving poetry and powerful observations of the emotional life of a camp prisoner, including reflections after an inperson visit by Heinrich Himmler.
Surprisingly, the book has never before been translated into English,

During his time in the Vught concentration camp, theyearold David recorded on an almost daily basis his observations, thoughts, and feelings, He mercilessly probed the abyss that opened around him and, at times, within himself, David's diary covers almost a year, both charting his daily life in Vught as it developed over time and tracing his spiritual evolution as a writer, Until early February, David was able to smuggle some,words from the camp to his best friend Karel van het Reve, a nonJew,  

With an informative introduction, annotation, and list of dramatis personae by Robert Jan van Pelt, At the Edge of the Abyss offers an immediate and wholly original look into the life of a concentration camp prisoner.
"Dit was het einde van een veelbelovende jonge man, die van de Duitsers niet verder mocht leven omdat hij een Jood was, "

Het uitgegeven dagboek van David Koker is moeilijk te lezen, Dit komt niet door de bewoording die hij gebruikt of de verhalen die hij vertelt, maar op de makkelijke manier waarop hij zijn situatie weet te beschrijven, Als ik dit dagboek met de memoires van Max Cahen vergelijk, is dit veel emotioneler en completer, Logisch natuurlijk, dit is tijdens de tijd geschreven en heeft weinig last van verdringing, Het was apart om uit de eerste hand te lezen over de dingen die ik in secundaire literatuur ook al tegen was gekomen, Daarmee bedoel ik het PhilipsKommando en bijvoorbeeld het Bunkerdrama, David Koker brengt voor mij een compleet nieuw licht op de situatie, Hij is soms bitter, soms dankbaar, soms positief en dan weer heel droefgeestig, Het enige minpunt aan dit dagboek vond ik de overload aan namen, maar daar is eigenlijk niets op aan te merken aangezien David dit dagboek natuurlijk niet voor ons heeft geschreven.
Niet doorheen te komen helaas Most people think they know the Holocaust because they skimmed the notes, These people are wrong. Hence, people grow ever more jaded, ever more willing to close the book and bury it in the shelves what this means for humanity, I do not know.
This book was a book I was reluctant to start, Like any diary, it suffers from the flaws of the form which is mostly a battle with ego, This diary, however, is special, for obvious reasons it is miraculous that this document exists, David Koker was a young man of deep sensitivity and palpable intelligence perceptive, lucid, intuitive, as you might expect a young poet to be, But he is also young and you don't know very much before the age of, It is only when people get sick, have children, die around you, before life settles into its stark beauty and brutality all that comes before passes so fast that few see anything beyond the tips of their noses.
When you're sent to a concentration camp at the age of, if you're smart, if you're sensitive, the luxury of your ignorance shatters but you're still so young, so inexperienced, and you can only grasp at the shadows.
There is so much you cannot know because you have not experienced it directly, DK evolves, suffers, understands, but he also never loses his belief that he will get out okay, Inside, DK spares no one, including himself, and he even tries to see the best qualities in his jailers which he deplores in himself, but cannot help, And those around him thought this way too by no means unaware of their persecution as Jews but also convinced of the inevitability of their eventual release, So they took comfort as best they could, enjoyed the

packages mailed in, the letters snuck in, the music playing over the radio, the sunny slow days they paired off, had affairs, gossiped, prayed, squabbled, performed, and dared to live as normally as possible.
That was the most surprising thing for me how they continued to live, carefully optimistic, cautiously skeptical, fighting at the start the psychological toils of drudgery nearly as much as the psychological and physical humiliations of their overwhelming conditions.
How could they know Of course they could not know, And so they lived. Until it became impossible not to know and even then, it was impossible to know the exact nature of this greatest of all human evils, Vught, it should be noted, was a 'transitional' camp that did not experience, directly, the horrors of a place like Auschwitz, This diary illuminates so many things how did this happen and it breaks the heart because you know the end, There is little a person can say without appearing the fool, so I will leave it at that the heart breaks for all the great minds and souls lost.
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A review copy of this book was provided to me by the publisher upon my request,

David Koker was onlyyears old when he died on route to Dachau in earlyjust one of almostmillion Jewish victims of the Holocaust, But his legacy, published in English for the first time as At The Edge of the Abyss: A Concentration Camp Diary,, has lived on, The diary, published by Northwestern University Press, is nothing less than a remarkable and essential read, David Koker was interned, along with his mother, father and younger brother, in the Vught camp in February, He began his diary soon after, and maintained it until February of the next year, when the diary was given to a civilian employee working at Vught, who smuggled it out to a friend of Koker.
The diary is not only a welldetailed account of life in the Vught camp, but a testament to Koker's internal struggles as he and those around him attempted to come to terms with the growing horror of their situation.
Koker was a budding poet and intellectual, and some of the verses he drafted while interned in Vught are included in his diary, Also quoted in the book are several surviving letters and notes that Koker wrote and received while in the campletters and notes were often hidden in parcels, such as in loaves of bread.


In his introduction to At The Edge of the Abyss: A Concentration Camp Diary, Robert Jan van Pelt explains why the diary's existence is unique: ", . . the number of postwar memoirs written by Holocaust survivors is enormous, and the number of diaries and notebooks written during the Holocaust by people who were at home, or in a ghetto, or in hiding is substantial, the number of testimonies that were written in the inner circles of hell, in that German concentration camp, and that survived the war is small.
" The ability to write a diary under such circumstances would have been difficult enough, both emotionally and logistically, but David Koker managed not only to writebut to write a substantial and and highly observational diary, full of factual observations about life in the camp and an increasingly psychological probe into the “abyss” that surrounded them.
Koker was able to obtain a relatively privileged position in the camp, which was one of the reasons why he was able to maintain his diary and maintain a sense of detachment from camp life.


At first glance, David Koker's diary is remarkably subdued and even subtle, Many of his diary entries describe unreal circumstances with an almost nonchalant attitude, One reason for this apparent “normalcy” in his diary could be that Koker felt assimilated and yet detached from camp life early on, In March of, less than a month after having been imprisoned at the camp, he wrote to his girlfriend in hiding: "I immediately accept everything as normal, That's why I don't experience things sufficiently, You must believe me: from the second day on everything was quite normal: the German detachments, being together with so many people, the strange food, taking care of the most essential daily matters, etc.
I didn't notice the passage from one kind of life to the other, . . even the strangest and most awful things become normal and agreeable, " Koker, at least, was selfaware of how imprisonment had changed him: "You become selfish, even towards your own family, . . Sometimes I treat the children with bitterness, yet the friendliest treatment hides a bit of sadism and lust for power, A kind of feeling of being in charge, "

In several passages throughout his diary, Koker mentions Poland and in particular, Auschwitzthe inevitable destination that we, in hindsight, know meant certain death, However, many of the people in Vught and other camps were not aware of the ultimate fate of people sent to Polandor “to the East”until much later.
In September of, Koker wrote: “ good reports are coming in from Poland, Its only too bad that people really are working in the coal mines, But the work isnt all that heavy, many writer, ” A footnote goes on to explain that a special project was created in which Jewish inmates were, prior to being murdered, forced to write postcards to relatives, which were then sent out at intervals to give the impression not only of life but of relatively good conditions in the camps.
In November, Koker wrote again: “ the administrator has spoken about Auschwitz, where the Escotex branch will go in its entirety, Stories have a more or less sunny aspect, Jewish camp leadership. A lot of agriculture, the camp is largely selfsupporting, If you ask me, it sounds livable, ”

But the reality of “the East” came crashing down only a few weeks later, Novemberth, on Kokers birthday: “The morning of my birthday: Spitz reads an excerpt from a letter from Poland.
Three people are living with Moves expression meaning “they are dead, ”. And Movess business is working overtime, Seldom have I seen anything set out so clearly in writing Our optimistic messages from Poland are not incorrect, They have simply been incomplete, A probably relatively small group is working and doing reasonably well, And the rest: wiped out, The world has changed. ”

Kokers diary is, at times, a difficult read, The diary is essentially a raw, first draftunlike many of the writers who penned diaries in hiding or wrote postwar memoirs, Koker did not have the chance to edit his diary for his intended reader his girlfriend or a broader audience.
However, numerous citations and footnotes provide ample information about almost all of the people and events mentioned in the diary, But perhaps the raw nature of Kokers diary is part of what makes it such an important read, in addition to the irreplaceable information about daily life in the Vught camp.
We are reading, at its heart, the inner thoughts of a human beingimperfect, as we all arewhose life was cut short by events he could not control,

I highly recommended At the Edge of the Abyss: A Concentration Camp Diary,by David Koker, which was edited by Robert Jan van Plet and translated from Dutch by Michiel Horn and John Irons.
It is one of the most important contemporary accounts of a concentration camp currently published, and one of the most insightful and raw accounts of a human being put into an impossible situation that I've personally read.
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