(Episode 2! aka This Ended Up Longer Than I Intended and I Apologize)
Since I seemed to get some interest (and a lot of really amazing feedback) the last time I did this, I thought I would document and share another “history detective” project I’m working on.
Today’s project is this date book from 1945 kept by an ambulance driver working at the front along the Rhine in the last days of WWII.
This diary is an interesting one because, while it was very sporadically updated, its few entries are very long, very well written and contains some of the most compelling storytelling I’ve ever come across in a diary. All while mentioning hardly any personal information about our diarist! (Because why make it easy for me?)
The diary begins with one 22 page entry written on March 25, 1945.
The beginning of this entry states…
“With the New Year
come resolutions and mine are to be in the form of keeping a diary. I
wish that before I left New York I had picked up one of the same, for
now, on March 25th, that I try to begin this record, most thoughts and
experiences are old.”
This first entry covers events from December 1944 through March 1945 and ends in mid-sentence (”I had been scared never so much in my life. No one was asleep…”).
There are then 4 scattered entries throughout March and April and then the diary skips nearly seven months with no entries from April 20th to October 9th.
After picking back up on October 9th there are detailed daily entries through November 7th which tell of our diarist’s life working in Paris after the war, and then four entries in December. The last of which (December 18th) ends “Oh! Well! Life is at least interesting.”
Let’s see if we can track this guy down (as well as share some of his amazing stories from WWII and life in 1940s Paris)…
