“And so they are always coming back to us, the dead,” wrote W.G. Sebald. As so often in the German writer’s eerie work, what sounds at first like a metaphor turns out to be a statement of the literal truth. This month brings two new eyewitness testimonies of the Nazi conquest of Eastern Europe, written by ordinary men who died more than 60 years ago. Willy Peter Reese was a 23-year-old private in the Wehrmacht when he was killed on the Eastern front in 1944. Kazimierz Sakowicz was a 50-year-old Polish civilian, living in a suburb of Vilna in German-occupied Lithuania, when he was killed the same year under obscure circumstances. Each of them left behind manuscripts that remained totally unknown for more than 50 years.

It is fitting to approach these books through a Sebaldian lens, and not just because Sebald himself wrote so movingly about the war’s unexorcised ghosts. In his influential essay “Air War and Literature,” the novelist identified two possible ways of writing about the suffering and devastation of World War II. In most postwar German literature, he complained, the violence of the war was occluded and aestheticized, wrapped in a bombastic rhetoric that Nazism itself helped to popularize – the language of fate and destiny and decision. In only a handful of postwar works, especially “The End” by Hans Erich Nossack, could Sebald find a different approach – the egoless, accurate, detailed recording of events that he believed was the only ethical response to violence.

That literary and moral distinction could not be better demonstrated than by these two new books. Sakowicz’s “Ponary Diary” (Yale University Press, 176 pages, $25) is one of the most terrible documents of the century, and one of the most austere. A former journalist, he wrote down exactly what he saw – names, dates, and numbers – as though he were preparing a brief for some future trial. Reese’s “A Stranger to Myself” (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 208 pages, $23), on the other hand, covers his experiences in a swirling mist of bad, pretentious writing. Reading them side by side, in a way their authors could never have imagined, offers an important lesson. In striving to write literature, Reese almost vitiated his work; Sakowicz, aiming simply for truth, produced a work of permanent value.

The journal now published as “Ponary Diary” was kept from July 1941, when the Germans occupied Vilna (modern Vilnius), to November 1943. Sakowicz scribbled hastily on loose sheets and the margins of a calendar, and buried his pages in empty lemonade bottles, knowing that their discovery would mean his death. For what Sakowicz recorded, based on his first-hand observation and the testimony of his neighbors, was the Nazi extermination of Vilna’s 60,000 Jews, carried out in a series of massacres over two years.

It so happened that Sakowicz’s house in Ponary, a suburb of Vilna, was adjacent to a half-built airbase abandoned by the Soviets. When the Germans moved in, they realized that the base’s open pits and trenches could serve as a mass grave. Day by day, Sakowicz simply wrote down what he saw going on next door: how many people were brought to the execution ground, what they were wearing, whether they tried to escape or beg for mercy, how their bodies were buried, how much their possessions fetched on the black market. Sakowicz never uses words like Holocaust or genocide; he does not say that he is witnessing the destruction of one of the most important Jewish communities in Europe, known as “the Jerusalem of Lithuania.” He keeps strictly to what he sees with his own eyes, as on November 19, 1941: “More than 200 women and children were brought. It was cold, with a cool wind. They had no bullets; they went to the buildings to warm up. But instead of bullets they took the little ones from their mothers and killed them with rifle butts.”

Or on April 5, 1943:

At this time Jews, accompanied by three policemen, come out of the forest; two are carrying a Jew, the third a child. Together they go to the pit. Three shots are fired. Shortly afterward, 40-50 people rush to the pit, driven by rifle butts. Again shooting from above into the pit. Again the same. A man resists, shouts something, points to the children. A shot is fired – the man falls. A woman gets up, goes alone and crouches on the edge of the pit. She is followed by a teenaged girl in a red sweater shouting “Mama” who crouches next to her. A German then indicates 4 people and from behind shoots each in the back of the skull from a distance of two to three meters.

It is important to note what “Ponary Diary” does not do. It does not offer a historical overview of the Holocaust; it does not discuss the Nazi policy that led to the liquidation of Jewish Vilna; it does not speculate about the lives and identities of individual victims. It does not even tell us what Sakowicz thought and felt about what he saw. Yet by restricting his field of vision so severely, Sakowicz made his testimony all the more shocking and powerful. Over the last 60 years, the Holocaust has been thoroughly memorialized, theorized, explained, and condemned; but its sheer scale always threatens to turn it into an abstraction. The mind resists visualizing the specific, daily acts of atrocity that added up to the thought-defying number of 6 million dead. “Ponary Diary” is one of the few documents that succeeds in making evil concrete, right down to the license plate number of the Gestapo staff car that accompanied the victims. For Sakowicz to keep such a diary, not knowing whether it could ever be shared or published, was an act of heroic dedication to the truth.To read it is our almost unbearable duty. If “Ponary Diary” had been a best seller in Germany – or in Lithuania, since many of the killers Sakowicz identifies were Lithuanians – it would have been hopeful evidence that the perpetrators of the Holocaust were confronting their past. Instead, the German public conferred bestsellerdom on “A Stranger to Myself,” a deeply suspect memoir that reinforces some of the worst German myths about the war. Reese’s work is not a diary, like Sakowicz’s, but a literary composition, written during his last furlough, in early 1944. It remained in the possession of his mother, who bequeathed it to a cousin, who in 2002 handed it over to Stefan Schmitz, a reporter for the German newsweekly Stern. As Mr. Schmitz writes in his evasive introduction to this volume, it went on to sell 100,000 copies in a few months and became an important part of the renewed debate over Germany’s wartime experiences.

Unfortunately, the voice we hear in “A Stranger to Myself” is too self-pitying, grandiose, and irresponsible to bring any light to that dark subject. The substance of what Reese records everyone knows or could guess: that the life of a Wehrmacht soldier on the Eastern front was a perpetual nightmare of cold, hunger, sickness, and fear. When Hitler launched his surprise attack on Russia in June 1941, he sent his troops deep into Soviet territory with no winter clothing, then ordered them to hold their line at all costs. The result was that Germany’s huge initial conquests had to be forfeited, and after the middle of 1943 the Wehrmacht was in more or less constant retreat. Reese’s memoir shows what this meant for the individual soldier: the frozen feet, short rations, infections, hopeless stands against superior forces. Reese himself was sent home to the hospital three times, only to be returned to the front each time. As he recognized, there was no way out except death.

But Reese was too young, and too much under the sway of literary fashion, to write about his experiences in a useful or sober fashion. Without the editorial notes, it would be impossible to tell where Reese is at any given moment, or what battles he participated in. Instead, his writing is a miasma of Nietzschean nihilism, Spenglerian cultural despair, and Jungerian glorification of violence. Add to this the purple prose of an adolescent aesthete – before the war, Reese had planned on a literary career – and the result is truly lamentable:

The war began, and we saw God and his stars perish in the West. Death rampaged over the earth. He took off his mask, and his skull face grinned, chiseled with dementia and pain. We set out into no-man’s land, saw him dance in the distance, and heard the throb of his drums at night. And so he brought in his harvest of corn and tares.

It is a style in which the truth cannot be told. And though we learn some of what Reese had to undergo, we never get a remotely convincing picture of army life. Reese doesn’t tell us a thing, for instance, about his comrades or superior officers. Still less does he pay attention to the atrocities that were being committed all around him – a few episodes of looting are the worst he sees or participates in. Throughout, he insists on defending his fortress of inwardness, treating the whole war as just an episode in his spiritual Bildung: “I challenged my destiny to single combat … In Russia I had to gather together the stray pieces of myself.”

The whole book reeks of bad faith, making its appeal to contemporary German readers all too easy to fathom. Here is a German soldier who is poetic, sensitive, suffering; who does the best he can in a war someone else thrust upon him; who hates no one and seldom even fires his gun. The soldiers that Sakowicz saw massacring Jews at Ponary would not have minded having Reese as their ambassador to posterity. It is up to posterity to insist that Sakowicz, not Reese, captured the truth about the Nazis and their war.