Diary of Defiance

In an airtight vault of a Wells-Fargo bank in College Station, Texas, lies a treasure. It’s not gold or a crown or jewels, and someone looking in from the outside might wonder at the value of a bunch of yellowed bundles of old ledger paper penned with thousands of lines in now-antiquated German script. But for Dr. Robert Scott Kellner, a retired English professor at Texas A&M University, it’s a precious heirloom of historic proportions. And for the past five decades, he’d been devoted to sharing its contents with whoever will pay attention.

These sheaves hold a sacred trust: They are the secret diary of Dr. Kellner’s grandfather, Nazi adversary Friedrich Kellner — one man’s courageous opposition to totalitarianism and the rise of the Third Reich.

A mid-level official in a provincial German town, Friedrich Kellner kept a stash of secret notebooks from 1939 to 1945, risking his life to record Germany’s path to dictatorship and genocide and to protest his countrymen’s complicity in the regime’s brutalities. Now, after an improbable and emotionally-wrenching series of events spanning nearly eight decades, Robert Scott Kellner, Friedrich Kellner’s Jewish grandson, has finally fulfilled his grandfather’s deathbed wish with the publication of those fragile folios in readable book form, by Cambridge University Press.

Dr. Kellner feels the diary has enduring significance, especially in these days of heightened, overt anti-Semitism. “My grandfather wanted his diary to serve as a guide, a warning, for the generations after him,” says Dr. Kellner, whose soft, whispery voice and positive disposition even in the face of crippling difficulties belies an early life fraught with profound personal challenges that could handily sink a lesser person.