More than a year before the Second World War ended, the Dutch government in exile did a very smart thing. The minister of arts and sciences went on the clandestine Radio Oranje to ask people throughout the country to preserve their diaries and papers about everyday life during the war, documents that detailed their struggle to survive under the country’s occupation by Nazi Germany, which had invaded the Netherlands in 1940. Pushed by Dutch-Jewish journalist Loe de Jong, the minister announced that, post-war, the government would create a repository for the diaries, an archive for the use of future historians to study the lives of ordinary Dutch citizens during an enormously traumatic period in national history.

The government kept its promise, and three days after the Netherlands was liberated, on May 8, 1945, the project began. That fall, de Jong was hired to head the archive, now known by the acronym NIOD. He quickly collected a bunker full of diaries that had been kept by Resistance fighters, fascist collaborators, ordinary citizens of every political persuasion and religious background: Jews, Christians, atheists. Some people brought in their own diaries, others the ones written by family members who had been killed during the war. Anne Frank’s diary was among the first to arrive, and about 21,000 were ultimately collected.

Now American writer Nina Siegal has written a thoughtful and poignant book centred on the archive called The Diary Keepers: World War II in the Netherlands, As Written by the People Who Lived Through It. Siegal is the New York-born Jewish granddaughter of a Holocaust survivor and a former New York Times reporter. She first went to the Netherlands in 2006 to research a novel centred on a Rembrandt painting, intending to stay a year. She’s still there. 

When Siegel first arrived, she had a benign view of Dutch behaviour during the Second World War. Like many of us, she was influenced by Anne Frank’s diary, which showed a group of brave Dutch citizens hiding Anne’s Jewish family in an attic for two years, until someone betrayed them near the end of the war. Siegal soon learned that Holland was the only country in Europe where workers staged a general strike to protest the anti-Jewish policies of the occupying Nazis, taking to the streets in 1940 as the Germans ordered Jews to wear yellow stars. Yet Siegal would eventually learn a shocking fact. By the war’s end, 75 per cent of Dutch Jews had been killed by the Nazis in the Holocaust, one of the highest figures in Europe. In France, 25 percent of Jewish citizens died. In Belgium, 40 percent; Hungary, 60 percent. The death toll was higher only in Poland, where three million Jews were murdered, about 90 percent of the pre-war population.

Siegal wondered why this had happened. How much did ordinary Dutch citizen know about the fate of their Jewish neighbours after the Nazis put them on trains heading east? Do their diaries show they believed Nazi claims that Jews were merely being sent to work camps? When did they begin to notice that nobody came back, and to hear rumours about mass starvation, gas chambers, and the executions in concentration camps that would ultimately kill six million European Jews? 

In other words, to what degree were they complicit in the genocide? And why did they stop protesting after the first great anti-Nazi strike?

When I picked Siegal’s book, the title led me to expect a kaleidoscope of quotations from many diaries. Instead, she has wisely chosen to take excerpts from journals kept by six people, heart-stopping selections she has embedded in a history she has written of the Nazi occupation of Holland. 

We meet a Jewish diamond cutter who went into hiding during the war; a Dutch policeman who was an enthusiastic fascist even before the Germans invaded; a 17-year-old working-class girl with a keen eye and dry wit; an extraordinarily brave small-town shop owner, a devout Christian who worked with her family and friends to save the lives of many Jews; a Dutch Nazi socialite who schemed to advance her husband’s career; a Zionist woman eventually chosen for a prisoner exchange who made it to Palestine; and a Jewish journalist who survived for 17 months while recording the details of life in a brutal transit camp before he was finally sent to Auschwitz and his death.

I know a fair bit about the German occupation of the Netherlands, having written a book set partly in Amsterdam during the war, a novel called The Corner Garden. However, I would suspect a good percentage of Siegal’s English-language readership doesn’t know very much about the period beyond the story of Anne Frank.

Yet Siegal pulls off a neat trick. Her history is clearly written and thoroughly informative for people who don’t know much about the period, yet not too elementary for people who know a little more. At 482 pages (plus footnotes) it’s a long book but a compelling read. That’s partly because she keeps her focus by asking questions about who knew what and when, and partly because the diary excerpts she chooses are so often moving, occasionally funny, sometimes banal or infuriating (the Nazis) and altogether very human.

I was particularly moved by the writing of the journalist Philip Mechanicus, which like the other diary entries was translated by Siegal. Mechanicus managed to get some of his diaries smuggled out of the brutal Westerbork transit camp in eastern Holland and sent to a non-Jewish lover. She would give them to the archive after the war.

“Thursday, July 1, 1943. The first half of the year has passed. Strange. I didn’t choose to be here, and I have no purpose other than to wait, to wait. Yet, at least half a year has flown by. Every day I ask myself, as everyone does: how much longer? Waiting is an art. I don’t have any choice but to wait, but still it requires some talent. To practice patience is actually a kind of grace. It asks fearlessness for what’s in store. Whoever has the courage to look life in the eyes must also have the courage to face death… The waiting period is a time of moral education and maturation, of coming to the insight that life is a destiny beyond one’s control, that one has been given life on loan, and must calmly give it back when it is reclaimed from us.”

An existential statement from a transit camp where trains left weekly for Auschwitz, Bergen-Belsen or Theresienstadt. A statement of life as it always is, even at its most peaceful, for those who look it in the eyes.

It’s clear from his diary that Mechanicus knew what was going to happen to the people who left on the trains to the concentration camp at Auschwitz, and had known before he was transported out of Amsterdam. Nina Siegal slowly and cumulatively proves that by 1942, most people in Holland had a good idea that the Nazis were murdering the Jews they sent to “work camps” in the east. They knew, she says, but also suspected that what they knew wasn’t true. Double think, their confusion brought on in part by Nazi propaganda, which they didn’t really believe, or didn’t quite, although it made them wonder. 

Of course, most people were also terrified of helping Jews or the anti-Nazi Resistence in case they were shipped east themselves, few rising to the bravery of the shop owner in the small town of Epe. Her name was Elizabeth van Lohuizen, and she was a religious woman in her 50s who was active in the Dutch Reformed Church. In 1982, she and her family were named by Yad Vashem in Israel as Righteous Among Nations. Van Lohuizen’s diary is entirely matter-of-fact, even to the point of banality.

Also riveting. Hardly anyone in any occupied country in Europe took the risks she and her family took every day or suffered what they did: arrested, threatened and cruelly beaten.

“Friday, September 2, 1943. Today was an awful day. I was headed to the village at 10 o’clock, when Van Essen stopped me and told me two men had gone into Ger’s (her adult son, also in the Resistance) while three others stood outside. First I went right home to put things away, and then I went back to the village. I sat with Dick (her husband) and Siny and they told me what had happened. It was five Sicherheitdienst men (from the intelligence agency of the German SS) who had apparently behaved very roughly. They accused Ger of delivering ration cards and food to Jews, and they said Ger and Gert-Jan (a friend) had to accompany them to Tongeren. Where will they go, do we need to warn anyone, do we need to go after them, what could be the matter? What will happen? All kinds of things went through our minds. Hendriks went to look around in Tongeren. We had to just wait, and do nothing. It was miserable. Oh, I imagined all kinds of things.” (Ger survived the war.)

I have another thought about the reason for inaction, after living through three years of the Covid pandemic. I’m not comparing Covid to the Second World War. Fascists were (and are) only a metaphorical virus. They’re people with plans and will, and the Covid virus operates without either, although so far it’s been somewhere between a third and half as deadly. About 73 million people died during World War II, while The Economist magazine rejects the official Covid death toll of six million, calling it under-reported, and puts their “single best estimate” of the real toll as I write at 24.2 million, with a 95 percent chance that the actual toll lies somewhere between 17.3 million and 31.3 million. There’s trauma here too, and so I wonder if some of the behaviour I’ve noticed might have a bearing on Siegal’s questions.

Herd instinct. We laughed about some of it at first, how everyone started making sourdough bread at the same time, hoarding toilet paper or growing green onions on their windowsills. During the initial stages of lockdown, city streets were empty around the world. Most people stayed home compliantly, wore masks when they went out, practiced social distancing and beat their pots with wooden spoons at 7 p.m. to show support for frontline health care workers. 

This spring, three years after the start of the pandemic, the World Health Organization declared the global health emergency over, while noting in a “however” paragraph that the virus simmers along. Worldometer reports that as of today, there are 20,691,923 active Covid cases worldwide with 37,192 people reported to be in serious or critical condition. Canada reports 5,865 active cases.  

My husband has MS and the doctors say he won’t do well if he gets sick. Neither will most older people and younger ones who are immunocompromised. So he and I mask—and let’s look at the herd instinct three years later, when behaviour has reversed from those first careful months. 

Most people don’t social distance, don’t avoid crowded venues and don’t wear masks anymore, although many tell me they’re uneasy about it. Recently, I ran into an older couple at a matinee of a play, neither of them wearing masks even though the man has serious health issues. The woman told me quietly they’d brought their masks, but didn’t put them on because only a couple of people besides me were wearing them, and they didn’t want to stand out. A good friend who is a cancer survivor told me she would only go to a memorial service if I went with her, so she wouldn’t be the only masked person there. If I didn’t go, she’d stay home. I could list many other examples. 

So I would say to Seigal, I’m sure you’re right, and few Dutch people tried to save their Jewish neighbours because they were terrified of Nazi brutality, and because they felt a degree of confusion about their neighbours’ true fate in the “work camps.” But I wonder if part of it was also that most people didn’t help because most other people didn’t help. They kept their heads down. Unlike Philip Mechanicus, they didn’t look life in the eye. 

The Diary Keepers is a sober, fascinating and terribly moving book. Congratulations to Nina Siegal for writing it. The book is available in local libraries, and you can buy a copy here.