Anne Frank Was Only One of Thousands in Occupied Netherlands That Kept Diaries. Others Include Dutch Nazis, Farmers, and Resisters

History Unplugged Podcast

History Unplugged

Society & Culture, History

4.2 • 3.7K Ratings

🗓️ 28 February 2023

⏱️ 51 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Growing up in New York as the daughter of a Holocaust survivor, Nina Siegal had always wondered about the experience of her mother and maternal grandparents living in Europe during World War II. She had heard stories of the war as a child from her mother and grandfather, and read Anne Frank’s diary in school, but the tales were crafted as moral lessons — to never waste food, to be grateful for all you receive, to hide your silver — while the details of the past went untold to make it easier to assimilate into American life. When Siegal moved to Amsterdam as an adult, those questions came up again, as did another horrifying one: Why did seventy five percent of the Dutch Jewish community perish in the war, while in other Western European countries the proportions were significantly lower? How did this square with the narratives of Dutch resistance she had heard so much about? Siegal decided to get into the archives and look at wartime diaries of Dutch citizens from all walks of life and eventually wrote “The Diary Keepers World War II In The Netherlands, as Written by the People Who Lived Through It.” Siegal joins us to discuss a part of history we haven’t seen in quite this way before. We look at stories of a Dutch Nazi police detective, a Jewish journalist imprisoned at Westerbork transit camp, a grocery store owner who saved dozens of lives, and several others into a braided nonfictional narrative of the Nazi occupation and the Dutch Holocaust, as individuals experienced it day by day.

Transcript

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0:00.0	For those people interested in World War II, most haven't paid a lot of attention to
0:08.4	the Netherlands.
0:09.4	That's not where the turning points of the war happened.
0:11.8	It wasn't a major power or a major player.
0:13.8	And if you ask people to name one person from the Netherlands associated with World War
0:18.5	II, they'd probably answer Anne Frank.
0:21.3	She was a German-born Jewish girl who kept a diary in which she documented the persecution
0:25.1	of the Jewish people and her family's Heidi during Nazi persecution.
0:29.3	For her and her family, hidden concealed rooms behind a bookcase in the building worker
0:32.6	father worked.
0:33.6	For diary was published after the war and has been translated into multiple languages
0:37.2	and sold millions of copies, which has created the impression that the Dutch sheltered
0:40.8	its Jews and the resistance had been active and effective.
0:44.0	But that doesn't square with the fact that 75% of the Dutch Jewish community died in
0:48.7	the war while in other Western countries the proportion was significantly lower.
0:52.8	That's a question that today's guests, Nina Siegel, asked herself, she's the daughter
0:56.3	of a Holocaust survivor and she wanted to understand what were the wartime experiences
1:00.4	and perspectives of people from all walks of life in the Netherlands.
1:03.8	She went into the archives and found multiple accounts of different people such as a Dutch
1:08.0	Nazi police detective, but also a Jewish journalist in prison at Western Work Transit Camp, a
1:12.4	grocery store owner who saved dozens of lives, and a Dutch Nazi housewife who hoped for an
1:16.8	Aryan future that saw this hope slowly unravel until she had a mental breakdown.
	...

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