As a kid, when I used to get sick, I was sent to my grandmother’s home to lie on a brown and orange velour couch. My parents were working in the orchard, and even if they weren’t, my grandmother was the best nurse around. She brought me stale ginger ale, dry toast and let me watch the Andy Griffith Show and Leave it to Beaver. After lunch there were only soap operas on television, so she turned to her bookshelves to find me something to read. Though I loved Anne of Green Gables, Little Women and Charlotte’s Web, none of those (WASP) classics touched me like Anne DeVries’ novel Journey Through the Night. This slim series of stories, commissioned to capture the war years, were popular in the Netherlands and in Canada in English translation. The story of one family’s heroism captured my imagination, but also perhaps coloured my imagination, and my self-perception. After devouring the harrowing survival tale of war, I concluded that I belonged to a salt-of-the earth tribe. My people were oppressed, resisted and survived to tell the story. If anyone (like say, Queen Wilhelmina) were looking to boost the self-esteem of a generation using the novel as a propaganda vehicle, it worked. I grew up believing that basically every Dutch citizen had tried to save Anne Frank. It wasn’t until I began interviewing my own family about the realities of the war that I realized life wasn’t, isn’t, so black and white.
It’s hard for me to imagine living on boats and barges, the life on the water that was my family’s prior to immigrating to Canada. My grandmother tried to explain to me what it was like to weigh down a slip with soaking peat moss covered in vegetables, in order to trade goods with the Germans.
“Wait… Gramma. Your father traded with the Nazis?”
“How else could he heat the house?”
“The same house where the Jewish girls hid with you during the war?”
She nods.
It’s amazing to me the actions a family, a nation, chooses to highlight or downplay. I’ve become an avid reader of WWII history in the decades since my sick days on Gramma’s couch, and each novel, play, biography or film has brought me one step closer to understanding the myriad of ways humans respond to adversity. Reading about the vast differences between the struggles of those in the countryside and those in the city, those liberated in the fall of '44 and those liberated in the spring of '45 has opened my eyes to the many different wars individuals lived. Each story brought a different layer of nuance. But it wasn’t fiction that gave me pause as much as the volume of data available on the Internet, statistics that condemn the Dutch for their level of collaboration with the Nazis. The numbers online stand in stark contrast to the portrait Anne Devries gives in Journey Through the Night. Of 140,000 Jews in the Netherlands in 1941, including refugees from Germany and the east, only 38,000 survived, a number much lower than the survival rates of neighbouring Belgium and France.
My curiosity to investigate the different theories about what kinds of conditions made it so that the Nazis found such willing collaborators in the Netherlands pushed me to read Paris 1919: Six Months That Changed the World by the award-winning historian Margaret MacMillan. Her book led me to The Occupied Garden, The Nazi Officer’s Wife, The War in the Corner, the Dutch in Wartime: Survivors Remember series and The Ambiguity of Virtue. I had a seed of an idea to write my own WWII story, and now I’d found the fertilizer to bring it to life. I wanted to tell a story that explored not just resistance and collaboration, but everything in between. How did a family to adapt to changing circumstances? What did this look like for the rich, the poor, and the marginalized? What happened to families if their values diverged in a moment of crisis? What story would be left to tell the next generation and what would be included in the version the grandchildren would hear? My plotting led me across the ocean recently, to the Verzet Museum in Amsterdam, where the same questions I’d been asking are beautifully told through intimate narratives of real people. (Read more about the places I visited to get inspiration in this post.)
Heading to Amsterdam? I highly recommend a visit here. Especially if you've already read Monica Hesse's YA debut, The Girl in the Blue Coat.
My kids devoured this book. Now when I tell them a story, they correct me if I leave out important details. By this I mean, if I say "taken to a camp", they say: "murdered."
#amwriting & finding inspiration
So many unexpected twists and turns. So many stories to ponder. I'm grateful for the anecdotes this museum has so artfully and carefully curated.
Don't bring your grandkids a wooden tulip, bring them a graphic novel. Travel should be about building empathy, joining a conversation, learning the stories. https://www.verzetsmuseum.org/museum/en/visitorinformation/museumshop
All my life, I’ve related to citizens of a country where *everyone* is an immigrant with seniority. Going “back” to Holland made me realize that my blood relatives have a relationship with time completely distinct from mine. For them, their history goes back centuries. Their sense of place and culture is older than the tilting canal houses or the creaking windmills. WWII, despite its traumatic legacy, was one event on a long timeline of wars and conflict. I realized that while the post war years in Europe were years of recovery, those same decades for immigrants were years of fresh starts, which I suppose is why I wrestle with an origin story that isn’t very old. I want to get the details right, even though I recognize the spectre of myth hovering above the facts.
Though no monarch is commissioning me to do so, I hope to find a way to tell the truth through fiction.
Sterkte!
Here's what trying to write truth in fiction looks like right now.
And here's to the fun parts of researching historical fiction! To seeing all this in print one day!