A Secret Journal, is a story based on a tattered journal maintained by one black survivor detailing his tribulations during the pogroms of Nazi Germany. The survivor, suffering from Alzheimer's disease, presents the frayed, forty-year-old journal to his grandson as a college graduation gift. The saga unfolds through the fading memory of the grandfather recalling the events, and the bewildered grandson struggling frantically to absorb the wealth of unrecorded historical facts, and place them in a modern day perspective.
Reading the journal and having his grandfather elaborate is therapy for the ailing grandfather, and a source of belated enlightenment for the grandson as evils of the holocaust becomes personal. But, as the reading comes to an end, so does the illness. And the grandson is left embracing the nagging realization that the nondescript "Others," so conveniently alluded to in all historical accounts of the holocaust to obscure real identities, had surreptitiously surrendered a face; a black face--his grandfather.