Sylvia's Journal

A few months ago I was alerted to a the publication of a new book about WWII. I would not have known about this (Dutch) book except that it was announced in the alumni newsletter of the student society Minerva to which at least 2 generations in my family belonged. Moreover, the book was written by the grandson – Miles Fabius – of one of my father’s best friends with who he sat on the student council during the war years. The book is titled Breek Punt (breakpoint) and tells the story of the student resistance against the persecution of the jews in the Netherlands. 

It is a thick tome, some 500+pages with lots of photos, diaries, notes, letters, and newspaper clippings that had been sitting in a suitcase for decades and left to be opened someday.  My brother read the book without much of a pause. His wife told me he was deeply touched because of the many mentions of our father. My sister is reading the book too. I am staying at her house and saw the half read on her table. I started to look at the pictures, many of which are of very well dressed men in evening dress, sitting at dining tables set for royalty. And there was my father, in many of the pictures, and my mother in the only picture with women in it. I started to read and soon realized I wanted my own copy because this was a keeper, even though no one in my American family can read it, but they can see the pictures.

I have nearly finished the book; like my brother I could not put it away. And what has emerged is a history of my father’s resistance work I knew nothing about. My parents did not talk much about the war to us, the immediate post-war generation. I hear this from many others. I imagine it was too painful. They wanted to resume the life that had been so brutally disturbed and forget all about the bad things that happened. 

The resistance workers did not tell anyone outside the circle of trusted fellow students, what they were doing and about their whereabouts. The leaders of the student movement, my father being one of the them, were on the Gestapo’s radar and had to move from hiding place to hiding place to avoid arrest, prison and execution or transport to a concentration camp. He was dating my mother during those years. I have her diary (1939-1943). He may have told her not to write about any of his underground work or maybe she didn’t know.

The governance of the student society is in the hands of a presiding board called ‘collegium.’ It is the most supreme of the various structures that guide the running of the society and its assets. The club (Leidsch Studenten Corps) had already been in existence for 100 years by the late 1930s, when the book starts. Tradition has it that this group of young men (in their early 20s) – most from well off families – is selected to serve for a year. But times were not usual and this particular collegium ended up serving for 5 years.  The collegium occupies its own very well appointed room in the building, the president has a personal servant, and all their meals are served by liveried servants. Within the large club exists a myriad of other groupings, some by year (“jaarclub”), some by sport, some by intellectual interests (debate, chess, antique pistols), or even by province.

The names of the members of the various boards and year clubs are sprinkled throughout the book. These names were very familiar to me as these men stayed friends with my father for life, and one became my uncle. I got to know many of them during my childhood, including the main character, the grandfather of the author. These deep and long friendships are also true for my mother, sister and brother who also studied in Leiden. And I have kept a few of these friendships even though I live far away and left Holland more than 50 years ago.

Some of the people in the book disappear over the course of the war. Some are incarcerated in the infamous ‘Oranje Hotel’ prison in Scheveningen before being executed or shipped east to one of the many concentrations camps. A few were lucky and let go. Resistance work was dangerous and the Dutch authorities weren’t alway supportive out of fear of consequences. Earlier in the runup to the war, the terrible consequences of resisting had been demonstrated in Prague, and the students knew about this.

We are staying very near the Oranje Hotel, which is now a museum. I wanted to learn more about that place and the experiences of people who I was reading about and who were sent to that prison. It is full of oral histories, gotten in time before that generation disappears, most have by now.

Reading about WWII, listening to the stories of those who were kept there (some as young as 6 years old), seeing the cells, and reading the goodbye letters from the ones that knew they would be executed, fills me with dread and gloom, as so many of the early signs in 1930s Germany are now visible in the US. After calamities we always hear people say ‘we should never forget’ but the forgetting appears to be in full swing, even in Germany now.