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-Hello and welcome to Book Lust.
I'm Nancy Pearl.
My guest today, from Amsterdam, is Nina Siegal,
whose book is “The Diary Keepers: World War II
in the Netherlands, as Written by the People Who Lived Through It.”
Nina, thank you so much for for coming on the show today.
I was really interested in talking to you about the book
because one of the things that I happened upon in the last few years
is the mass observation movement in England....
The people who to sociologists started this
with people keeping diaries and sending them in.
And and it's just such a wonderful way of approaching history.
So tell me what, tell us
what what motivated you?
What was where was the germ of this idea?
-Well, first of all, thank you so much
for having me and such a pleasure to talk to you.
What was the germ of the idea?
So I was introduced to this
diary collection at the NIA, which is an Institute
for War, Holocaust and Genocide Studies in Amsterdam,
in the course of doing some other reporting in relation
to World War II. I work from here as a New York Times reporter.
And I had been talking to a couple of researchers at the institute,
and one of them said to me after an interview,
“Do you have just another minute?
I want to show you something.”
And he took me
downstairs into the archive, which is behind this massive
bank vault door.
And it looks...
And then we went downstairs into what looks like a scientific laboratory,
just all white,
and and then there were, like, these walls that they could crank open.
And inside were files and files and files
on this one wall.
And he said “these, this whole wall is full
of diaries and letters that were collected during the wartime period.
And right afterwards, because we opened this institute
just three, three days after the liberation,
and the institute
set about collecting all these diaries
from people from all walks of life.”
So it wasn't testimonies of witnesses only.
It was also like farmhands and
people who
were housewives and teachers and and people who worked
in all different parts of the economy, but also across the political spectrum.
So not only did they collect diaries of Jewish
people who had been victimized by the persecution, but also they went
and requested diaries from collaborators who had been
either
tried for their collaboration or
who had in some
lesser way been involved in
in the in the
occupation and supporting the Nazis.
So they managed to collect a wide range of perspectives on the war.
And for me, that was an invitation
to to dig into it. Also,
because they had just begun to transcribe them.
So a lot of these diaries had been illegible,
or inaccessible for years,
because they had been
either copied,
back, they had taken
taken the diary, copied it, and sent the original back.
So they were very hard to read the copies, sometimes mimeographed or made
into microfiche, which is like on these tiny little letters, some of them.
But some of them were like on black paper
with white writing, and it was all handwritten in Dutch.
So it was very inaccessible.
But now they had started this process of transcribing it with a group of volunteers
who were turning it into digital files and which made it easier.
So my initial thought was, I'm going to work with the ones that have already been
transcribed and see what I
can find out about this period.
And I ended up not
only using those because there were many more that hadn't been transcribed
and some of the ones that I really wanted to read were only original.
So I ended up going back into some of the original diaries as well.
-The diaries that we read the the excerpts from the diaries that we read here
are from five different people, very, very diverse,
a very diverse group of five people.
How did you choose those, those particular people?
- So there were
there are five main ones, and then I use a number of smaller ones as well.
But I wanted to...
Like I said, sort of use the diary collection
in the way that it was intended to be used in the sense of this broad
perspective on the war from lots of different viewpoints.
So I wanted to have N.S. Behrs, which were the Dutch Nazis,
and I wanted to have
some Jewish perspectives and I wanted to have some resisters
perspectives and also people who were politically unaffiliated. So
I had the help of some of the
archivists, obviously, who work there.
They had done a beautiful job of sort of
organizing and summarizing the collection.
So there were 2,100 diaries in the collection.
And when they came in, about the first 1000 of them were summarized
and critiqued by the people who worked in the archive.
So I could go through those and sort of figure out
which ones I wanted, which sounded interesting to me.
And and then
of course, I had conversations with the archivists about which,
which were the best written ones,
which were the most interesting, compelling, and so on.
So they gave me some recommendations.
And then in the summary file they also had like post-it notes, like,
put on the ones that were the most interesting.
So that helped that help me narrow it down.
And what I was really looking for
were diaries that were very descriptive that gave a very vivid sense of the
world that person inhabited.
But I also wanted to choose
diaries that were emblematic of a particular kind of experience.
So, for example,
I chose a police officer who was an NSA or a Nazi.
And he
started his diary before the occupation of the Netherlands, and he stopped kind of
before the war was over.
We don’t really knowing why, but he had written 3,300 pages of diaries.
18 volumes, and just stacked like this big.
And I was really interested in his perspective, because
the Dutch police have been so instrumental
in the persecution of the Jews in the Netherlands.
They had been very much involved in all the roundups,
all the implementation of all the regulation by the Nazis.
They were attacking resisters,
and they were very complicit.
So I was very interested in why someone would do that.
So that was one part, for example.
And then on the Jewish side,
I had one diary writer who was in hiding.
One diary writer who was in a concentration camp.
And one diary writer who was part of the Jewish Council.
And the Jewish Council of Amsterdam is a very controversial institution.
A lot of people blame the council for its role in also conveying
the information that the Nazis wanted them to give in and basically aiding it
somewhat in the deportations without knowing what was really happening.
And so there's a wonderful woman
who was at the time 21 years old,
and she was a secretary at the. Jewish Council.
And she was writing letters to her husband, her fiancé, sorry,
who was on his work, who already left for Palestine.
And so she wrote these letters to him all the time,
and they turned into a kind of diary because she wasn't allowed to send them.
And she has an extraordinary story.
She's still alive.
She's 105 years old.
And I got to meet her in Israel last year. So
her story gave me a way of looking
at that whole part of the narrative of what happened in the Netherlands.
And so each one
sort of illuminated a different aspect of the war period.
-One of the things that I was
so struck by, and I'm just amazed that
I didn't know this, is that
75% of Dutch Jews were killed
or exterminated
during that period,
which is higher, a much higher percentage than many of the Eastern
European countries that we typically
focus on.
Why? Why was that?
So why was that percentage so high?
-I can't answer that in one sentence, but it is a central
question of the book.
So I try to look at different
aspects of the answer, and
I try to do that through different ways of looking at the question. So
you're right, that in Western Europe it
is the highest percentage of any population.
In France, the percentage was 25% of
the Jewish population was deported and exterminated.
And then in
Belgium, which is just next door, it was
about 40%.
So the numbers are significantly different.
I think, of course,
there are many factors that played into it.
One of them is
clearly proximity to Germany was very hard for people to
get out.
You couldn't really cross the English Channel
by boat and very easily because it was constantly
under bombardment and also the borders were all closed
obviously. If you needed, if you tried to escape, you had to go
through
Belgium and France.
So you had to cross two more occupied borders before you got anywhere.
So it was basically you were caught
in a natural trap is what someone wrote.
And I.
So that's one aspect that's... but I also think there's a.
there's a much larger and more
important question about complicity and why the Dutch
co-operated to the extent that they did.
I'm not saying that the whole country collaborated.
But there were...
Many aspects of this society collaborated.
So the police collaborated, the train,
the National Railways collaborated,
the the Civil
Administration mostly went along to get along. The
the businesses,
the industry participated in the German war machine.
So you can say, well, I mean, there's there's ways
of talking about that
as to how much national guilt should be carried at this point.
And I think there's a lot. In the Netherlands, where I live here,
so I'm aware of all these discussions about
were we at indifferent or were we
unable to do anything?
Was it too much? Was there a great deal of terror?
You know, all these things are factors.
And I think
ultimately, ultimately, we don't, we haven't.
And they, the
country hasn't quite acknowledged
the extent to which
it really
participated in the Nazi Machine.
And that's one of the
things I really wanted to point out in this book and look at it
in a deep way, but also through the eyes of the people who lived here, not just
imposing a story of my own.
-Right.
So that was one of the things
that huge percentage of deaths.
But another thing that I was so interested
in that that you talk about is the silence
that the the almost
almost sort of deliberate
amnesia after the war
and and the the inability to come to terms
with what happened, to even talk about it in any way.
Talk about that, you know,
how did that how did that strike you?
What what what did you well, what was your response to that
or how did you understand it?
-I was having
coffee with a German friend of mine
this morning, and she was saying to me,
you know, in Germany, we just had to talk about this
all the time.
It was just constant education.
And constant,
like issues of reconciliation.
Just it was so much part of the curriculum.
And I don't think in the Netherlands it’s the same thing.
This country, although it
in many ways
was was part of the machinery, just has not
articulated its own role, has
not looked at its own past, has not been curious about what happened
in the same way. I mean,
there are definitely historians who are,
and there's a certain part of this population who does.
But I think in general,
there was in the immediate postwar
period, there was a silence for about
at least
at least a decade and at
least two decades, actually, until 1965, when the first book
about the destruction of the Dutch Jews was published by Jacques Presser.
And that was sort of a seismic shift in the population
in the in the public perception of the war.
And I spend the last chapters of the book talking
about how that shifted over the next several decades.
But for a long time, there
was this construction of this idea that the Dutch have mostly been,
you know, valiantly
resistant
to the Nazi ideology, that nobody wanted
the Germans here, that most people were resistors, that
there were only a few people who were part
of the collaboration's effort. And
and that has that
has eroded over time.
Different generations have had different messages.
For a while, people were very focused on
what did we do wrong? And then
there was like a shift back.
And then there's been many sort of waves
of discussion about how resistant was this country and why.
And why was it not?
And right now, we're in
this moment of
a lot of controversy about it.
And it took until
2021 for there to be one
memorial that said all the
names of the 102,200
Jews who were murdered in the Holocaust in the Netherlands,
not in the Netherlands, but from the Netherlands.
And now we are this year, later this year, finally, we'll have a
National Holocaust Museum in this country.
And as you know, many other countries,
have already
had a kind of reckoning with this past to some extent.
There are other institutions and memorials.
And I think it it just it's been a hard struggle
for national identity that's been going on.
And I
try to sort of trace that in my history.
-So I want to talk about the the memorial, the recent memorial.
But but before that, before we get to that, there was a memorial
that that that the queen,
the Dutch queen had had feelings about.
Talk about that.
-It's called the Gratitude Monument.
It was...
so after the war, the Jewish community,
especially in Amsterdam, was just devastated.
I mean, most people who came home waited and waited and waited.
And none of their relatives returned.
You know 75% died.
So most people lost everybody and lost, you know,
their whole broad clan and
the people who came back
were also facing a lot of antisemitism.
This has been well documented, documented by other
historians that anti-Semitic actually rose after the war in Holland.
And people would
come back and they would be told that they had to pay back
taxes on their property with which they were unable to
pay, obviously, because they were in a concentration camp.
So I think there was a great deal of sadness and grief.
And so that the the them,
the general society wanted to move on and feel better.
And forget about this whole thing and basically say,
“You know, we were good to the Jews.
We did the best we could to support them and couldn't they just,
you know, say that would be enough eventually.”
So so there's a lot of debate about how this monument came into being.
But this first monument, and for a long time, the only monument that
commemorated the Jewish experience
of the Holocaust in the Netherlands was a
Gratitude Monument.
There was a monument that basically thanked the
non-Jewish population for all they had
done to support the Jews during the war.
And just to give you a sense of how
how some people felt about it, there wasn't any
member of the Jewish community that came to the opening ceremony for that
monument.
And it left a bitter taste in the mouth of a lot of
people for a very long time.
And then after that, there was not...
There was a there was a location that was used as a monument,
which was the former theater from which many, many people were
deported.
And that's called the
Hollandse Schouwburg, which was a state theater then it became a Jewish theater,
and that was a deportation center.
And then there they had the monument that listed names,
but it only listed liked names.
So for everybody named Cohen,
it was one name. And
what's beautiful about the new monument, at least from my
perspective is that you see every single
COHEN And it's like.
Row after row after row after row.
And and it's just a very
powerful and sad
and moving to see that.
-Yeah, when, when you describe
visiting it with some friends and, and
your friend going into it
with a list of names that she wanted to find.
And I was reminded of the Holocaust Memorial in Berlin.
The to the I think it's something to the murdered Jews of Europe,
which I also found extremely moving,
hard to see how you could not find that moving.
But that made me want to want to see
those names
that seemed to go on forever.
You know, that's a lot of names and it personalizes them
that it isn't just a last name, that it's everyone in the family.
This must have been a very, very emotional experience for you writing this book.
-It was.
My grandfather was a Mauthausen survivor.
And my mother was a child
in hiding and my grandmother was a child in hiding with her.
This was in Hungary.
So I don't have Dutch family connections, but of course I know a lot of
Dutch people who do, and
so for me it was a little bit of a
personal journey to try and understand what it was like for
people before, for what it meant to live through it or not
or not live through it, or to experience all
of that on a day to day basis.
And it was it was
I mean, I
did it during the lockdown.
Sometimes I went, as I describe in
the book, to visit places where people
were either in hiding or where people
were imprisoned,
and I've been to many of the
locations and this.. But I mean, I used to live around the corner from
many of the locations in the book and
it was it was I had some horrible dreams.
I had some deep, dark moments,
and I'm glad that I it was a kind of a
terrifying and hard.
Uhm, but I
feel like it was a very useful and powerful experience for me.
I mean, when I
translated the diaries myself, and when I started
and my Dutch is mediocre, I mean, I, my Dutch is
much better now, but when I started, I had to like look
up every other word in every sentence,
and when you
do that, you slow down to this very
intense pace
where and you get very intimate with the words.
And so when you're reading about someone's life in this
in a transit camp where every day they're waiting to find out if their name
is on the list to be deported, they,
and you're inside, you're inside every sentence, you know.
So it feels very intense.
And I'm I'm kind of glad
it's over now. (laughter)
-I have one more question for you, which is what do you want
the readers of this book to take away from it?
-I, I want people to, uhm,
there's a couple of things.
I want people to see it as a resource, as a tool.
I want people to tell
more stories because we've come to rely so much on Anne Frank's diary,
which is a beautiful book, but it's limited
in its scope and its vision.
I mean, she was trapped in a hiding
place and couldn't and didn't know what was happening.
And other diaries do tell us more parts of that story.
They give us a broader landscape.
And I think I want people to use it
in that way, too, to see what
people had to say.
Philip Mechanics, for example, writes so beautifully
from an adult perspective about what's happening and then persecution of the
Jews in the Netherlands,
and we really need to read this,
and it's not that there aren't
obviously there are
many, many books about the Holocaust, and there are many, many writings.
But what I feel I
want people to take away from this
is the immediacy of the
way diaries are written, that their moment by moment.
That we live as moral
creatures in an environment where we can’t
know what's going to happen.
We make choices based on what we can guess,
and it's so easy for
us now to look back on history and say, I would have done
this or we should done that.
When you're, you know, you have a limited scope
like living day to day.
I think that it's we really I would like people to start thinking
about how the war unfolded, because when you start
to look at it that
way, then you look
at your own choices now day to day.
And you think, what choice am I
making and what resistance of my showing? Like what,
how much
could I stand up to what's happening
today?
Because all these things are so relevant.
I mean, you know, I don't think this is I hope it's not a book about history.
I hope it's a book about
how we choose where we stand in our lives.
-Uhm, there's a novel that I read
several years ago that was set in Holland during this period
by by a writer named Harry Mulisch,
and it's called “The Assault.”
And I, I had forgotten all about that book
until I read “Diary Keepers” and then it brought it all back and
and my experience just reading the book,
which is so wonderful,
such an experience of terror
and sadness and horror and all of that.
I think those are in a way
good feelings to have because it shows that we still have the capacity
to be appalled by events
and your book made me feel that same that same
thankfulness, that that we can still respond that way.
Does that make sense? -Yeah, of course.
Harry Mulisch is a very
famous Dutch national writer.
He's written a lot about the war period,
and I think his work,
Yeah, it does also have that kind of immidiacy.
-Yeah, yeah. Right.
And I, I just thought it was very.
You're talking about what a diary is.
That it isn't that we look at it as a piece of history, but we forget that
it was written as it was happening, you know, moment by moment by moment.
I don't know.
It made me want to go back and start keeping a diary again, which I hadn't done
since I was like 16 or 17.
-When I wrote this,
so this book came out of an article that I wrote for
The New York Times that appeared, well,
I had started working on it in 2019,
and my editor became more and more interested in it,
and he kept asking me to send more materials.
So we were excerpting parts of the collection,
and what ended up happening was that the
lockdown came in March 2020,
and my editor said to me, you know, a lot of other stories that we
were working
on are less relevant now.
But yours is more relevant because
people are in a new, people
are thinking about what does it mean to be forced to grapple with the
situation and
so alien to their own experience.
And then what I was thinking at that time was like, I hope this
I mean, I wanted to write a thing at the bottom
of it, like keep a diary
of the Corona period, because it's so like the world
changes and people want to have a record of that.
But of course, people did. People
instinctively do, and people do,
people do in every
war period as it happens,
and I recently wrote a piece about people keeping diaries in Ukraine.
Like, it's just it's a natural response.
Diaries are...it’s also
interesting because we think of diaries as adolescent girl writings.
Right?
And when you you can think of it as like but then there's this
other form of diary writing, which is Wartime Diaries,
where people are writing down...
So actually, but they're the same in a sense, because they're both
a record of subversion.
It's a record of keeping track of things that nobody is allowed to talk about.
And so, like, you're not allowed to talk about your your politics and war time.
You're not allowed to talk about your menstrual
period in public.
So so it's like what you keep it in this intimate way is a reportage
of the personal experience that's subversive in one way or another.
-Yes. Yes.
Nina, thank you so much for being on the show.
I mean, the time just flew.
I feel like we could keep talking.
But thank you.
Thank you for the “Diary Keepers” of your new book.
And I have a good evening over there.
-Oh, Nancy, it’s been a pleasure speaking with you.
Let's talk more on the flip end. (laughter)
-Okay, all right, bye bye.
-Goodnight, bye.
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