Introduction by Gad LernerJerusalem’s Yad Vashem is the memorial museum to the victims and heroes of the Shoah. Its online archive (www.yadvashem.org) includes millions of names. “Anna Frank” returns over a hundred hits; depending on their country of origin, the names of the Diary’s author’s goes from Chana to Hannah, Ani, Anna, Anita. They lived in towns and villages of Eastern Europe, in the rural areas struck by Nazi rage. They are children, teenagers, elderly, housewives, students, workers, farmers. They have faced the triviality and the horror: the brutality of the gendarmes, the humiliation and pain of deportation, the degradation of the ghettoes and of the concentration camps, the anguish of the final agony. Telling their stories restores their existence from oblivion.