Relatively few Holocaust victims and survivors kept diaries of their experiences during the war, which was quite understandable, given the inhumane conditions under which they lived and died.
Moshe Maltz and his family spent most of the war hidden by a gentile woman in a hayloft on her farm in southeastern Poland. Before and during that time, Maltz, a grown man with many family responsibilities managed to keep a regular, meticulous diary. Expertly translated from Yiddish into English, this eyewitness document is not only a primary source of information about daily life during the Holocaust, but also an extraordinary human document written by a highly sensitive person with a sharp eye for detail. 
Maltz has left us a heart-rending document, for what we learn from this diary is that not withstanding the German official policies of brutality and extermination, what really made the difference between life and death in many instances were interpersonal relationships among the various participants, victims and victimizers alike. 
Maltz’s diary takes its place on the growing bookshelf of Holocaust literature as one of the key books for understanding a period in time which defies understanding.