Voices of War

Many of us know of Anne Frank. The Jewish teenager who wrote the famous diary while hiding with her family from the Nazis in secret attic rooms in the Netherlands for two years. The Frank family had fled Germany to get away from the Nazis when Anne was young. When the Nazis overran the Netherlands in 1940, they started rounding up and departing Jews to concentration camps. In 1942, Otto Frank, Anne’s father, decided to hide the family in some attic rooms of a building he owned where some of his employees lived. With their help, the family lived for two years before being discovered and deported to concentration camps. Anne and her sisters ended up in the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp where it’s believed she probably died of typhus in February or March of 1945. Otto Frank was the only member of his family to survive. He returned to Netherlands and found that his secretary Miep Gies had saved Anne’s diary. He had it published in 1947 as “The Diary of a Young Girl.” It’s been translated into 70 languages.

Anne wrote of the her hopes and dreams and the stress of the family’s claustrophobic life and fear of discovery. The New York Times is reporting today that there where thousands of people who kept diaries in the Netherlands during the German occupation.  The piece is called “War Diaries Finally Speak” by Nina Siegel and Josephine Sedgwick. They report that on March 28, 1944, Anne Frank and thousands of others listened, as the Dutch Minister of Education, Gerrit Bolkestein asked them in a radio address from his government’s exile in London to save their diaries and letters. They quote Bolkestein, “Only if we succeed in bringing this simple, daily material together in overwhelming quantity, only then will the scene of this struggle for freedom be painted in full depth and shine.” Anne and many others had already started keeping diaries. After the war, people went to the National Office of the Netherlands in Wartime with their notebooks and dairies. Over 2,000 were collected. Most were filed away. The Times now reports the Dutch are starting to transcribe the material in digital documents for posting on the archive’s website.

Siegel and Sedgwick have shared pages of excepts and photos of some of the ordinary Dutch citizens who documented their thoughts and fears of their world at war. Elisabeth Jacoba van Lohuizen-van Wielink started her diary on the May 10, 1940 the day the Germans invaded. “A moment I’ll never forget. I’d always assumed they would leave us alone. We had been neutral until the end, and good to the Germans. We heard shouting, too. For a minute, we felt like we were paralyzed, and my first thought was, poor soldiers, there will be bloodshed.” Four days later the Dutch surrendered. Wielink heard the Dutch commander in chief announce it on the radio. “I was overwhelmed. I wept. We weren’t free anymore…To become part of Germany, how awful! What will the future bring? Poverty to our country.” Wielink’s diary is 941 pages.

Cornelis Komen was a 48 year old salesman with a family. He wrote about a train trip to a cherry orchard in 1943 while 2,400 Jews were being rounded up in Amsterdam for deportation. “The last Jews are being rounded up. Herded together and taken away like cattle…oh, the misery they must be going through. Separated from their wives and children. They may not be pleasant people, but they’re still human beings. How can God allow this?” He went on to describe the beautiful day of cherry picking and a wonderful meal. “We’re surrounded by nothing but rustling wheat fields, interspersed with beautiful orchards…While in Amsterdam, Jews are herded together like cattle…while we are eating cherries, one basket after another. Lazing around. How lovely this place is.”

Philip Mechanicus was a Jewish journalist in his 50s who was arrested for not wearing a Star of David on a public tram. He was taken to a transit camp in the Netherlands were Jews were then transported to concentration and extermination camps. He recorded what he saw. “The transports continue to evoke disgust. People are actually taken in animal wagons intended for transporting horses. And the deported no longer lie on straw but among their bags of food and small pieces of luggage on the bare floor-including the ill.” Six months later, in January 1944 people were hoping it would all end soon. “Winter is progressing, and people fear that if there’s no decisive battle this winter, the war will drag on all summer, and there won’t be a single Jew left on Dutch soil. Hope alternates with fear: Where are we heading? What is our fate? What is our future.” The war’s end was still almost a year and half away. In October, 1944 Mechanicus was put on a train to Bergen-Belsen then transported to Auschwitz where he was shot on arrival.

Real history is written by people who lived it and many who didn’t survive it. The voices of war shouldn’t be left unheard.

Read more at nytimes.com.