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.’

What use is it?

‘Dubois nodded proudly. “Ja, Mama, that is the skull. That is Pithecanthropus Erectus.” His mother looked up at him and he saw how much she had aged in eight years. ‘J, Mama, this is it,” he repeated softly, gently. “But boy” - she sighed heavily, looking bewildered at his treasure - “what use is it?” ’ This is a revealing anecdote about Eugène Dubois, a Dutch paleoanthropologist who died 80 years ago today, sourced from the diaries of an assistant. Dubois is remembered today for discovering Java Man, which he claimed was an intermediate form between apes and man. In 2001, he was the subject of a biography by Pat Shipman who notes in her sources that the assistant recorded, in his diary, many conversations with Dubois ‘apparently verbatim’.

Dubois was born in 1858 and raised in Eijsden, at the very southern tip of The Netherlands, close to the Belgian border, where his father was an apothecary, and later the mayor. As a teenager, he attended school in Roermond, boarding with a family there, and went on to study medicine at the University of Amsterdam, graduating in 1884. He married Anna that same year, and they had three children that survived into adulthood. Appointed lecturer in anatomy at the same university in 1886, Dubois spent several years investigating the comparative anatomy of the larynx in vertebrates. But, influenced by Ernst Haeckel, he became increasingly interested in human evolution. 

In 1887, Dubois went to the East Indies as a military surgeon and, on the island of Sumatra, began to excavate caves in search of remains of early hominins. After several futile years, he moved to Java, where a hominid skull had been found. In 1890, his team found a human-like fossil at Koedoeng Broeboes. Dubois excavated the rest of what came to be known as Java Man. Before his return to the Netherlands in 1895, Dubois published his findings, describing them as neither ape nor human but an intermediate species - a position he would stick to through the rest of his life. On the way back, the ship was caught in a storm, he, his family and his fossils barely survived.

Dubois expected that his discovery would be feted in Europe, but instead he found that many scientists refused to accept his analysis. In 1897, he was awarded an honorary doctorate in botany and zoology from the University of Amsterdam, and in 1899 he was appointed professor. Thereafter, he ceased discussing Java Man and hid the fossils away. He spent the next 20 years researching, especially in the study of proportions of brain and body weight. He was also (1897-1928) keeper of paleontology, geology and mineralogy at Teylers Museum. In 1919, he became member of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences. It was not until 1923, that Dubois again allowed scientists access to the fossils, which re-ignited the debates over Java Man, especially as his fossils were similar to other newly-found fossils which had been dubbed Peking Man. However, by this time Dubois had become set in his ways, stubborn; he lost his wife and friends. He is said (by Shipman, see below) to have died - on 16 December 1940 - ‘alone, bitter and misunderstood’. Further information is available from Wikipedia, Eugène Dubois Foundation, The TalkOrigins Archive, Strange Science, or The New World Encyclopedia.

More than half a century after his death, Dubois’ somewhat tarnished reputation was given a polish by Pat Shipman, an American professor of anthropology, in her biography: The Man Who Found the Missing Link - The extraordinary life of Eugène Dubois (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2001). Some pages of an American version (Harvard University Press, 2002) can be read at Googlebooks, and a review can be read at Nature. Although Shipman credits - in the after notes - her sources as Dubois’ ‘pocket agendas (a sort of daily calendar), his journals, diaries and notes; and various drafts of brief autobiographies’, it is the diaries of an assistant - Bernsen - that she quotes most often. She says: ‘I relied as well on the diaries of J. J. A. Bernsen, OFM, Dubois’ assistant from 1930 to 1932, in which many conversations with Dubois are recorded apparently verbatim.’ Here are several extracts from Shipman’s book (i.e. her quoting Bernsen, in his diary, quoting Dubois).

13 February 1931
‘[Much later he articulated these feelings.] I always knew that if I could succeed in concentrating my thoughts well on a problem, then I will my true life. Then I am absorbed by the problem. To achieve great things, one must cast aside the unimportant and the sentimental, one must follow truth.’

March 1931
‘Dubois nodded proudly. “Ja, Mama, that is the skull. That is Pithecanthropus Erectus.” His mother looked up at him and he saw how much she had aged in eight years. ‘J, Mama, this is it,” he repeated softly, gently.

“But boy” - she sighed heavily, looking bewildered at his treasure - “what use is it?” ’

2 March 1932
‘I have not published enough. How little I have done about Pithecanthropus,’ [Dubois mourned miserably one day early in March 1931], [ . . ] I have too little ambition and was satisfied as soon as I knew it for myself. After finding the truth, my interest was gone. [. . .]

Only after 1923 did I start to work on Pithecanthropus in earnest and to publish the results, [Dubois continued morosely.] That will be of little account, that the discoverer says so little and so late about a famous find. And then Osborn was pressuring me through the Royal Academy that I should get the work finished and the publication done, so they will say I would never have done it without him and he will get the credit, not me. It has not been enough, what I have said about it. I should have written thick books, like the others who made famous discoveries. My work will be forgotten, overlooked.’

12 May 1932
‘You know, Bernsen, we must talk once more about our relationship. This is all your fault, from the beginning. There is something hostile in you toward me, I have always noticed it. You have repeatedly humiliated me, corrected me, pointed out every error, criticized and questioned my judgements. Even as a small boy I was always treated with special respect. But no, not you, Father, you cannot respect me. You must humiliate me and bring me down out of jealousy at my high position. In recent months I have gone through so much sorrow. It has aged me. I have even wished for the release of death to end this misery. Oh, not that I would commit suicide [. . .] for suicide is cowardly.’

[Bernsen could not contain himself, he was so indignant at being accused of torturing Dubois with his criticisms. ‘Is not the most important thing that the collection be correct? Have you not said this. Professor? Now I see that you are hard and that everything must give way to your interests. I personally mean nothing to you. although for two years I have done the tedious work for the collection, day in and day out. Now I see you differently and my sympathy for you has cooled.’ . . .]

‘Ja, Father, it is true. I am hard in that respect. I have always felt that everything must give way for the goal, everything must be arranged to serve the ends of science. So perhaps I have driven you too hard and given you only criticism, but it is for the collection, for science. I have driven myself as hard, sacrificed as much. Personally, I have always had compassion for you in this tedious work; I find you a good fellow, vou know. Father.’

Ye firme and stable earth

‘Being thus arived in a good harbor and brought safe to land, they fell upon their knees & blessed ye God of heaven, who had brought them over ye vast & furious ocean, and delivered them from all ye periles & miseries therof, againe to set their feete on ye firme and stable earth, their proper elemente.’ This from the famous journal kept by William Bradford, he who sailed on the Mayflower with other pilgrims to North America, and became the first governor of the new Plymouth Colony. He was baptised 430 years ago today; and this year marks the 400th anniversary of the sailing of the Mayflower.

William Bradford, born in Austerfield, Yorkshire, to a wealthy farmer, was baptised on 19 March 1590. Both his parents had died by the time he was seven, and he was sent to live with his uncles. Unable to work on their farm because of sickness, he read a lot, and became very familiar with the bible. As a teenager, he came under the influence of reformist religious preachers, such as Richard Clyfton and William Brester. When King James I came to the throne in 1603 and attempted to suppress criticism of the Church of England, the reformists continued to meet in secret. Some of them, however, were arrested in 1607, while others determined to leave England - unlawfully. 

In Amsterdam, then in Leiden, Bradford was taken in by the Brewster household, but in 1611, when he turned 21, he was able to take up his inheritance. He bought a house, set up as a weaver, and earned himself some standing in the community. He married Dorothy May, and in 1617 they had their first child. Although, the emigrants from England had been free to worship how they pleased, they were worried about their children being over-assimilated into Dutch culture. They began planning to travel to North America to set up a new colony, and for three years negotiated with financial backers and with the English authorities seeking permission to settle in the northern parts of the Colony of Virginia. Some 100 passengers set sail from Plymouth on the Mayflower in September 1620 (later this year will mark the voyage’s 400th anniversary - see here for the many events being planned). After various difficulties, they finally anchored first at Cape Cod harbour - the so-called Mayflower Compact (the first governing document of what would become the Plymouth Colony) was signed that same day - and then at (new) Plymouth. Bradford’s wife, though, had fallen overboard and died before reaching reaching Plymouth.

After a gruelling winter, during which many of the settlers died, including the already chosen governor, Bradford was unanimously elected to be governor. He served nearly 30 years (with a few breaks) from the early 1620s to 1656. As early as 1621, the settlers held (what would later be seen as) a first thanksgiving, a secular harvest feast shared with native Americans. He married the widow Alice Southworth in 1623, and they had three children. Bradford is credited for his handling of judicial matters (land disputes), for establishing institutions, and for his religious tolerance. He died in 1657. Further information is available from Wikipedia, History.com, Evangelical Times, Biography.com, MayflowerHistory.com

Bradford’s journals - if you can call them that - are considered by historians as the preeminent work of 17th century America, and as the most authoritative account of the Pilgrims and the early years of the colony they founded. Bradford contributed to an early (1622) published history of the pilgrims: A Relation or Journal of the Beginning and Proceedings of the English Plantation Settled at Plimoth in New England. Although primarily by Edward Winslow, Bradford seems to have written most of the first section. This can be read at Internet Archive.

However, it is thanks to Of Plymouth Plantation (sometimes titled William Bradford’s Journal) that Bradford is best remembered. The journal was written between 1630 and 1651 and describes the story of the pilgrims from their time on the European mainland, through the 1620 Mayflower voyage and the setting up of the colony until the year 1647. The manuscript has a long and rather involved history. Bradford himself made no attempt to publish it, but it was passed down to his grandson and over the years borrowed by historians - see the History of Massachusetts Blog for more details. Then, the manuscript went missing until it was discovered in the Bishop of London’s Library in London in 1855. It was published a year later, and one consequence of this was a sudden interest in the Thanksgiving holiday idea. Another, was that there were calls for the manuscript to be returned to New England, which it was eventually.

Bradford’s journal has since been published under many different titles, and is widely available on internet sites (see Googlebooks, The Plymouth Colony Archive Project, Internet Archive, Project Gutenberg). The original manuscript is held by the State Library of Massachusetts in the State House in Boston. It has 270 pages, is vellum-bound, and measures​ 292 × 197 mm. Most of Brafrord’s text reads as a narrative or history, rather than a journal written day-by-day, and there are no dated entries as would normally be found in a journal. Here is one extract dating from the time of the Mayflower’s arrival in North America.

‘Being thus arived in a good harbor and brought safe to land, they fell upon their knees & blessed ye God of heaven, who had brought them over ye vast & furious ocean, and delivered them from all ye periles & miseries therof, againe to set their feete on ye firme and stable earth, their proper elemente. And no marvell if they were thus joyefull, seeing wise Seneca was so affected with sailing a few miles on ye coast of his owne Italy; as he affirmed, that he had rather remaine twentie years on his way by land, then pass by sea to any place in a short time; so tedious & dreadfull was ye same unto him.

But hear I cannot but stay and make a pause, and stand half amased at this poore peoples presente condition; and so I thinke will the reader too, when he well considers ye same. Being thus passed ye vast ocean, and a sea of troubles before in their preparation (as may be remembred by yt which wente before), they had now no freinds to wellcome them, nor inns to entertaine or refresh their weatherbeaten bodys, no houses or much less townes to repaire too, to seeke for succoure. It is recorded in scripture as a mercie to ye apostle & his shipwraked company, yt the barbarians shewed them no smale kindnes in refreshing them, but these savage barbarians, when they mette with them (as after will appeare) were readier to fill their sids full of arrows then otherwise. And for ye season it was winter, and they that know ye winters of yt cuntrie know them to be sharp & violent, & subjecte to cruell & feirce stormes, deangerous to travill to known places, much more to serch an unknown coast. Besids, what could they see but a hidious & desolate wildernes, full of wild beasts & willd men? and what multituds ther might be of them they knew not. Nether could they, as it were, goe up to ye tope of Pisgah, to vew from this willdernes a more goodly cuntrie to feed their hops; for which way soever they turnd their eys (save upward to ye heavens) they could have litle solace or content in respecte of any outward objects. For sum̅er being done, all things stand upon them with a wetherbeaten face; and ye whole countrie, full of woods & thickets, represented a wild & savage heiw. If they looked behind them, ther was ye mighty ocean which they had passed, and was now as a maine barr & goulfe to seperate them from all ye civill parts of ye world. If it be said they had a ship to sucour them, it is trew; but what heard they daly from ye mr. & company? but yt with speede they should looke out a place with their shallop, wher they would be at some near distance; for ye season was shuch as he would not stirr from thence till a safe harbor was discovered by them wher they would be, and he might goe without danger; and that victells consumed apace, but he must & would keepe sufficient for them selves & their returne. Yea, it was muttered by some, that if they gott not a place in time, they would turne them & their goods ashore & leave them. Let it also be considred what weake hopes of supply & succoure they left behinde them, yt might bear up their minds in this sade condition and trialls they were under; and they could not but be very smale. It is true, indeed, ye affections & love of their brethren at Leyden was cordiall & entire towards them, but they had litle power to help them, or them selves; and how ye case stode betweene them & ye marchants at their coming away, hath allready been declared. What could now sustaine them but the spirite of God & his grace? May not & ought not the children of these fathers rightly say: Our faithers were Englishmen which came over this great ocean, and were ready to perish in this willdernes;[AI] but they cried unto ye Lord, and he heard their voyce, and looked on their adversitie, &c. Let them therfore praise ye Lord, because he is good, & his mercies endure for ever. Yea, let them which have been redeemed of ye Lord, shew how he hath delivered them from ye hand of ye oppressour. When they wandered in ye deserte willdernes out of ye way, and found no citie to dwell in, both hungrie, & thirstie, their sowle was overwhelmed in them. Let them confess before ye Lord his loving kindnes, and his wonderfull works before ye sons of men.’

Let us go gracefully

‘Today I was filled with terrible despair, and I shall have to come to terms with that as well. [. . .] Even if we are consigned to hell, let us go there as gracefully as we can. I did not really want to put it so blandly.’ This is Etty Hillesum, a young, passionate Dutch woman, writing in her diary about ‘our impending destruction and annihilation’ at the hands of the Nazis. A little more than a year after writing this, she died at Auschwitz, 70 years ago today.

Esther (Etty) Hillesum was born in 1914 in Middelburg to a mother of Russian descent and a Dutch father who taught classical languages. In 1932, she moved to Amsterdam to study law, and then Slavic languages. As a student, she moved in left-wing circles, which included many Jews who had fled Hitler’s Germany. One of these was Julius Spier, a psychoanalyst and, apparently, an expert at reading hands, who became a mentor for Hillesum, and her great love. Their relationship eventually became physical, even though she was living with another man, and even though she knew he had similar influence over other women.

In July 1942, Hillesum took a job at the Jewish Council in Amsterdam, but after two weeks asked for a transfer to Camp Westerbork, a transit camp used by the Nazis to assemble Roma and Dutch Jews. There she became ill in the winter, and, on recovering, refused offers of help to go into hiding, preferring to continue working at Westerbork. In September 1943, she and most of her family were transferred to Poland. Etty Hillesum died on 30 November in Auschwitz. Further biographical information is available at Wikipedia, the Etty Hillesum Research Centre, and Catholic Ireland.

Hillesum began to write a diary in March 1941, probably encouraged by Spiers who she had consulted for the first time a few weeks earlier, and she continued to do so for 18 months until October 1842. Knowing she was unlikely to return from the camps, Hillesum gave her journals (eight closely-written exercise books - see a picture of them here) to the only writer she knew, Klaas Smelik, and his daughter. They tried to have them published, but were unsuccessful at the time.

Only in 1980, when the journals were shown to the journalist and publisher Jan G. Gaarlandt did they make it into print, in two volumes in 1981-1982, since when many editions and translations have followed. The first English versions, translated by Arnold J. Pomerans, were published in the UK by Jonathan Cape in 1983 and 1987. The following extracts are taken from An Interrupted Life: The Diaries and Letters of Etty Hillesum 1941-1943 published by Persephone Books in 1999. Some pages of the diary can be read online in a different edition at Googlebooks.

9 March 1941
‘Here goes, then. This is painful and well-night insuperable step for me: yielding up so much that has been suppressed to a blank sheet of lined paper. The thoughts in my head are sometimes so clear and so sharp and my feelings are so deep, but writing about them comes hard. The main difficulty, I think, is a sense of shame. So many inhibitions, so much fear of letting go, of allowing things to pour out of me, and yet that is what I must do if I am ever to give my life a reasonable and satisfactory purpose. It is like the final, liberating scream that always sticks bashfully in your throat when you make love. I am accomplished in bed, just about seasoned enough I should think to be counted among the better lovers, and love does indeed suit me to perfection, and yet it remains a mere trifle, set apart from what is truly essential, and deep inside me something is still locked away.’

4 July 1941
‘I am full of unease, a strange, infernal agitation, which might be productive if only I knew what to do with it. A ‘creative’ unease. Not of the body - not even a dozen passionate nights of love could assuage it. It is almost a ‘sacred’ unease. ‘Oh God, take me into Your great hands and turn me into Your instrument, let me write.’ This all came about because of the red-haired Leonie and philosophical Joop. S [Julius Spier] reached straight into their hearts with his analysis, but I still think people can’t be reduced to psychological formulas, that only the artist can render human beings down to their last irrational elements.

I don’t know how to settle down to my writing. Everything is still much too chaotic, and I lack self-confidence, or perhaps the urgent need to speak out. I am still waiting for things to come out and find a form of their own accord. But first I myself must find the right pattern, my own pattern.’

24 April 1942
‘[. . .] And this, too: how can I explain that, whenever I have had physical contact with S. in the evening, I spend the night with Han? Feelings of guilt? In the past, perhaps, but no longer. Has S. unleashed things deep down inside of me that can’t yet come out but carry on their subterranean existence with Han? I can hardly believe that. Or is it perversity? A matter of convenience? To pass from the arms of one into those of the other? What sort of life am I leading?

Last night when I cycled home from S., I poured out all my tenderness, all the tenderness one cannot express for a man even when one loves him very, very much, I poured it all out into the great, all-embracing spring night; I melted into the landscape and offered all my tenderness up to the sky and the stars and the water and to the little bridge. And that was the best moment of the day.’

26 April 1942
‘Just a small red, faded anemone. But I like the idea that in years to come, I shall chance upon it again between these pages. By then I shall be a matron, and I shall hold this dried flower in my hands and say with a touch of sadness: ‘Look, this is the anemone I wore in my hair on the fifty-fifth birthday of the man who was the greatest and most unforgettable friend of my youth. It was during the third year of World War II, we ate under-the-counter macaroni and drank real coffee, on which Liesl got “drunk”, we were all in such high spirits, wondering if the war would be over soon, and I wore the red anemone in my hair and somebody said, “You look a mixture of Russian and Spanish”, and somebody else, the blonde Swiss with the heavy eyebrows, said “A Russian Carmen”, and I asked him to recite a poem about William Tell for us in his funny Swiss burr.’

1 July 1942
‘My mind has assimilated everything that has happened in these last few days. So far the rumours have been infinitely worse than the reality, for us in Holland at least, since in Poland the killers seem to be in full cry. But though my mind has come to terms with it all, my body hasn’t. It has disintegrated into a thousand pieces, and each piece has a different pain.’

3 July 1942
‘Yes, I am still at the same desk, but it seems to me that I am going to have to draw a line under everything and continue in a different tone. I must admit a new insight into my life and find a place for it: what is at stake is our impending destruction and annihilation, we can have no more illusions about that. They are out to destroy us completely, we must accept that and go on from there. Today I was filled with terrible despair, and I shall have to come to terms with that as well. [. . .] Even if we are consigned to hell, let us go there as gracefully as we can. I did not really want to put it so blandly.’


The Diary Junction

Nooteboom in Berlin 1963

Happy Birthday Cees Nooteboom, eighty today. A noted Dutch novelist, Nooteboom has won various awards, not least the prestigious Prijs der Nederlandse Letteren, but is equally well known for his travel journalism. Recently, a translation into English of his writing about Berlin has been published in English, and this contains several diary entries about his first experiences of the Berlin Wall in 1963. They are so readable and interesting that one hopes Nooteboom has a stash of diaries to be published one day.

Cornelis (Cees) Nooteboom was born on 31 July 1933 in The Hague, Netherlands, the middle child of three. His parents separated, then his father died as a result of a bombing in 1945. After the war, Nooteboom’s mother took the family to live in Tilburg, and she remarried. Nooteboom was educated largely at religious schools. He made use of some early experiences hitchhiking around Europe for his first novel, Philip en de anderen (Philip and the Others), which, subsequently, became a classic of Dutch literature. After various clerical jobs, he found work as a journalist, with the weekly magazine Elsevier, then with the newspaper de Volkskrant, and then, in 1967, he became travel editor of the magazine Avenue. Meanwhile, he also published further novels and books of poetry.

In 1980, Nooteboom published Rituelen (Rituals) which was later made into a film. This book, Nooteboom himself says, marked the beginning of the second phase in his career as a writer, in which he produced many more poems, novels, novellas and anthologies of pieces on travel and art. In 1987, he taught for six months at the University of California at Berkeley, and in 1989 the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD) invited him to live for a year in Berlin, from where he witnessed the fall of the Berlin Wall, and wrote about it for many European newspapers. In 1991, his novel Het volgende verhaal (The Following Story) was given away free for Dutch Book Week.

Nooteboom has lived in Amsterdam since 1954. He married Fanny Lichtveld in 1957, but the marriage was annulled in 1964. For some years he was in a relationship with the singer, Liesbeth List, but is now married to Simone Sassen, and they divide their time between Amsterdam and Minorca. In 2009, Nooteboom was awarded the Prijs der Nederlandse Letteren, the most important literary award in the Dutch-speaking world. Further biographical information is available from Wikipedia or Encyclopaedia Britannica own website.

I do not know if Nooteboom keeps a diary or not - I hope so - but one of his recent books translated into English - Roads to Berlin - contains a few early diary entries. His first Dutch book on Berlin - Berlijnse Notities - was published in 1990 and a second book - Terugkeer naar Berlijn - in 1997. Texts from both these books were collected with new material for a more recent publication, Berlijn 1989/2009. This has now been translated by Laura Watkinson, and published in English by Maclehose Press, London (2012) as Roads to Berlin.

The Maclehose Press website quotes a few reviews: ‘It is a wonderful voyage of self-discovery, and a psychological exploration of a nation in turmoil’ in the Financial Times; ‘Nooteboom wears his erudition lightly, and weaves personal anecdote into memorable reportage’ in The Sunday Telegraph; ‘there is a melancholy in his writing and a nostalgia for the past, both of which are very German - or at least used to be’ in The Spectator; and ‘his Berlin reportage, from a 1963 Khrushchev rally in East Berlin to the tearing down of the Palast der Republik, brilliantly captures the intensity of the capital and its associated layers of memory,’ in The Economist.

Several pages of the Kindle edition (by Quercus) can be read freely online at Amazon. Here is one diary extract to be found in the Prologue.

15 January 1963
‘West Berlin. You drive down Kurfürstendamm, which is bedecked with high, white lights, to the corroded, mutilated Gedächtniskirche, and then onwards. To your surprise, you see that the West has its own ruins: magnificent, hollowed-out monuments and empty windows with no rooms behind them, chunks of fossilised war, bricked-up doors that no smiling father will ever pass through again, off for a walk with Werner the dog. The only crossing point for non-German, non-military personnel is in Friedrichstraße, but we end up at the Brandenburger Tor by mistake. Snow and moonlight. Nothing on the frozen square in front of the gate: no people, no cars. Along the edge of that space, the black columns topped by the quadriga, the triumphal chariot. Four horses race along, pulling a winged figure that holds aloft a wreath, towards the east. Beneath, a quarter of the height of the columns, the blunt teeth of the Wall. A West German policeman signals that we are not allowed to drive on. So we stay where we are and watch things not happening. Two Russian tanks stand up high on huge pedestals, a reminder of 1945. We see two Russian sentries, shadows amidst the marble.

Friedrichstraße is not far from here. The same checks as at Helmstedt: documents, pieces of paper, money being counted, barriers, a classic copperplate engraving through which we move, remaining as human as possible. Two low walls have been erected across the road so that a driver would have to perform a dramatic swerve if he wanted to get through quickly. When all the German boxes have been ticked, we are allowed through, and the city continues, the way cities do after walls: the same, yet different. It is probably just me being oversensitive, but it smells different here, and everything looks browner. [. . .]

Not much traffic. Lots of neon signs. Is it a disappointment? Would I have liked it to be more dramatic? And why do I think I have any right to expect something? Two motionless soldiers stand guard in front of a monument. At Alexanderplatz, a steam train passes over a viaduct, but otherwise there is nothing to report - the occasional sign with words that look rather unread, slogans talking to themselves.’

This cruelty too shall end

Today is the 50th anniversary of the opening of the Anne Frank Museum in Amsterdam. Anne Frank, who died aged 15 in a German concentration camp, is famous because of her diary, one of the most widely read books in the world. To mark the occasion, Queen Beatrix of the Netherlands took part in a special ceremony held at the Westerkerk cathedral. She also formally opened a new room in the museum to house the diary and other manuscripts.

Anneliese Marie was born in Frankfurt, Germany, in 1929, but, with her family, moved to Amsterdam in 1933 to avoid persecution. When the Germans occupied the Netherlands, her family hid for two years in a secret annex located in her father’s business premises - the business’s employees helping to provide supplies. During this time, Anne wrote a diary. The family was betrayed to the Germans in 1944, and deported to the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp, where Anne died of typhoid aged only 15. Her sister and mother also died in concentration camps.

The diary, which was recovered by one of the employees, was later returned to Anne’s father, the only member of the family to have survived. He published it under the title Het Achterhuis (The Annex) in 1947. A few years later, in 1952, it was translated into English and published as Anne Frank: The Diary of a Young Girl by Doubleday & Company in the US and Valentine Mitchell in the UK. Since then it has been the source for many other published versions and translations (as well as for films and plays) and is widely read all over the world - a Fox News article in 2007 reported that the diary had been translated into 65 languages and had sold 30 million copies.

There is a mass of information about Anne Frank and her diary on the internet. The websites of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum and the Jewish Women’s Archive both have biographies, as does Wikipedia of course (with an additional article on the diary itself). The Diary Junction has a few links to extracts from the diary.

The Anne Frank House, a museum based in the very place where the Franks lived secretly, was officially opened on 3 May 1960 - half a century ago today. The first year saw around 9,000 visitors, but the museum now averages around one million visitors every year. A few days ago, on 28 April, some 600 invited guests attended a special ceremony in the Westerkerk cathedral to mark the anniversary. A highlight of the ceremony, according to the museum’s website, was a presentation of the Online Secret Annexe, ‘which allows people all over the world to make a virtual visit to the hiding place of Anne Frank and those who sheltered there with her’. Before the ceremony, Queen Beatrix visited the museum and opened a new ‘diary room’ where all the diaries and other manuscripts of Anne Frank will be on display for the first time.

Here are a few excerpts found on the websites of the Anne Frank Center USA and the BBC.

9 October 1942
‘Our many Jewish friends and acquaintances are being taken away in droves. The Gestapo is treating them very roughly and transporting them in cattle cars to Westerbork, the big camp in Drenthe to which they’re sending all the Jews . . . If it’s that bad in Holland, what must it be like in those faraway and uncivilized places where the Germans are sending them? We assume that most of them are being murdered. The English radio says they’re being gassed. . . Have you ever heard the term ‘hostages’? That’s the latest punishment for saboteurs. It’s the most horrible thing you can imagine. Leading citizens - innocent people - are taken prisoner to await their execution. If the Gestapo can’t find the saboteur, they simply grab five hostages and line them up against the wall. You read the announcements of their death in the paper, where they’re referred to as ‘fatal accidents’.

13 January 1943
‘At any time of night and day, poor helpless people are being dragged out of their homes. They’re allowed to take only a rucksack and a little cash with them, and even then, they are robbed of these possessions on the way. Families are torn apart; men, women, and children are separated. Children come home from school to find their parents have disappeared. Women return from shopping to find their houses sealed and their families gone. The Christians in Holland are also living in fear because their sons are being sent to Germany. Everyone is scared.’

3 February 1944
‘I’ve reached the point where I hardly care whether I live or die. The world will keep on turning without me, and I can’t do anything to change events anyway. I’ll just let matters take their course and concentrate on studying and hope that everything will be all right in the end.’

15 July 1944
‘It’s a wonder I haven’t abandoned all my ideals, they seem so absurd and impractical. Yet I cling to them because I still believe, in spite of everything, that people are truly good at heart. . . It’s utterly impossible for me to build my life on a foundation of chaos, suffering and death. I see the world being slowly transformed into a wilderness, I hear the approaching thunder that, one day, will destroy us too, I feel the suffering of millions. And yet, when I look up at the sky, I somehow feel that everything will change for the better, that this cruelty too shall end, that peace and tranquility will return once more.’