A field of purple lupins

Some 80 years ago today, Philip Mechanicus, a Dutch journalist who had been arrested and imprisoned in the Westerbork transit camp by the Nazis for being Jewish, was writing eloquently in his prison diary about lupins: ‘Around the camp, just behind the barbed wire, there is a majestic field of purple lupins in full bloom. It is a refreshing sight to the eyes of thousands of battered men, women and children who walk the barren streets between the lifeless barracks; a glimpse of nature for those who peer out the fogged windows of the filthy laundry sheds.’ Only very recently have parts of Mechanicus’s diary - which testify to the profound suffering of Westerbork inmates - been published.

Mechanicus was born in Amsterdam in 1889. His family was poor but large - he was the eldest of eight brothers (though three died young). Both his parents worked in the rag trade, but his father was a drunk. Aged but 12, his headmaster helped him get work on the socialist newspaper Het Volk. He rose quickly, from fact checker, to reporter, and by 17 was a member of the editorial board. All the while, though, he continued studying at night classes organised by the Social Democratic Workers’ Party. He did national service with the Dutch military, and thereafter secured a posting on the Sumatra Post in Medan (then in the Dutch East Indies). In 1913, he marred a Jewish woman, Esther Wessel, and they had two daughters.

On returning to the Netherlands in 1919, Mechanicus was employed by Algemeen Handelsblad, where he remained for over 20 years. He divorced Esther in 1922, and three years later married Annie Jonkman. This relationship led to a third daughter for Mechanicus, but it too broke down, with divorce in 1929. In 1941, at the behest of the Germans, Mechanicus was fired from the newspaper, and the following September he was arrested for not wearing the Star of David. He was transferred to Westerbrok transit camp in Drenthe; and subsequently he died in October 1944 at the Auschwitz concentration camp. Although there is a Wikipedia entry on Mechanicus, it is only a very brief one, with a few links.

Mechanicus has been brought to public attention thanks to a book compiled by Nina Siegal - The Diary Keepers - and just published by William Collins (though, bizarrely, I can find no reference to it at all on the publisher’s website). In her book, Siegal has woven extracts from seven Dutch diarists - Jews and Nazis alike - ‘into a braided nonfictional narrative of the Nazi occupation and the Dutch Holocaust’. These diaries - all unpublished - are housed at the NIOD Institute for War, Holocaust and Genbocide Studies in Amsterdam. Mechanicus managed to write 15 diaries during his time at Westerbork, and to smuggle them out thanks to his ex-wife (though only 13 survived the war).

The publisher says of the new book: ‘Siegal provides the context, both historical and personal, while she tries to make sense of her own relationship to this past. As a “second-generation survivor” born and raised in New York, she attempts to understand what it meant for her mother and maternal grandparents to live through the war in Europe in those times. . . Searching and singular, The Diary Keepers takes us into the lives of seven diary writers and follows their pasts into the present, through interviews with those who preserved and inherited these diaries. Along the way, Siegal investigates the nature of memory and how the traumatic past is rewritten again and again.’ A review can be read at The Washington Post.

Here’s two extracts from the diaries kept by Mechanics as reproduced in Siegal’s book.

29 May 1943
‘I have the feeling that I am an unofficial reporter covering a shipwreck. We sit together in a cyclone, feeling the ship leaking, slowly sinking. Yet, we’re still trying to reach a harbor, though it seems far away. Gradually, I have developed the notion that I wasn’t brought here by my persecutors, but that I took the trip voluntarily to do my work. I’m busy all day long, without a second’s boredom, and sometimes I feel as if I have too little time. Duty is duty; work ennobles. I write a great deal of the day, sometimes beginning early in the morning at five-thirty, sometimes I’m still busy until the evenings after bedtime, summarizing my impressions or experiences of the day.

I play chess a few times a day, read the papers attentively, speak with various people, with doctors, nurses, and other patients. I visit the camp in the afternoon hours, and smoke my pipe. What more does a man need to spend his time in this Gypsy camp?

Chief Rabbi Dasberg was sent back to Amsterdam today. One of my friends also received a letter from his wife, dated Wednesday afternoon, in which she writes that since Sunday she has been imprisoned in the Jewish Council building on Nieuwe Keizersgracht in 

Amsterdam. The children had been left to their own devices all that time. Last night, a transport of about 450 people arrived from Amsterdam. The commander has decreed that, during working hours, Jews are no longer allowed to go for a walk on the middle path of the main street, the Boulevard de Misères, and must only tread along the sides, and very quickly at that. Today, the commander was riding his bicycle and kicked a Jew in his backside, while he was loading a train, saying that as the man had his back turned toward him, he didn’t show the proper respect. That’s not such an easy thing to do.’

10 June 1943
‘Around the camp, just behind the barbed wire, there is a majestic field of purple lupins in full bloom. It is a refreshing sight to the eyes of thousands of battered men, women and children who walk the barren streets between the lifeless barracks; a glimpse of nature for those who peer out the fogged windows of the filthy laundry sheds.

Between the lupines, there are guard towers every hundred meters or so, where military police with grim-looking helmets on their coarse heads and armed with frightful carbines keep watch, ready to shoot anyone who tries to escape. Along the barbed wire, more military police, also with their carbines slung over their shoulders, are patrolling the fences. The lupines are also under strict surveillance: anyone who is not allowed out of the camp to work should not think of picking one of the pretty lupines. Nevertheless, the camp is teeming with lupines. There are bouquets on the rough wood tables in the resident barracks, they are in old tin cans on the windowsills. They add a little color, beauty and fragrance to the dirty beds that are crammed together, to the stench of unwashed clothes and sweaty bodies. Toward evening, when the young men and women return to the camp from the heathland, dusty and sweaty, marching apace, aware of their vigor and unquenchable thirst for life, they carry bunches of lupines, which they picked as a reward for their hard day’s work.’