This chapter analyzes two of the numerous zero generation diaries and argues that a hermeneutics of diary-reading is radically different than that of survivor memoir. Indeed, the theorist Philippe Lejeune has argued that the fragmentary nature of the diary makes its superior to “the unifying utopia” of the autobiography and that diaries represent an “antifiction,” a distinction that represents the contrast between survivor memoir and non-survivor diary. (Lejeune, Phillipe. On Diary. Trans. Katherine Durnin. University of Hawaii Press: 2009, 168, 201.) Using in particular the ghetto diaries of Dawid Sierakowiak (Łódź) and Chaim Kaplan (Warsaw), this chapter models this new reading of zero generation diaries in light of the theories of diary laid out by Lejeune and others, particularly the difference between the “past self” of the memoirist (Levi the memoirist writing about Levi the prisoner at Auschwitz) and the “present self” of the diarist (Sierakowiak and Kaplan writing about their daily lives when the end was unknown). The memoirist’s ability to write retrospectively, to choose paradigmatic examples, to create a narrative framework into which his experiences could be emplotted was unavailable to the diarists, who wrote in the moment without knowing how the text would end or what events would prove worth recording. As a result, diaries reflect an aesthetics of ambivalence, uncertainty, randomness, and an inability to recognize important from insignificant moments. Diaries, then, unlike memoirs, do not offer moral lessons, but rather represent the experience of daily living and slow dying.