Diaries play a unique role in Dutch World War II his­to­ry. While Anne Frank’s The Diary of a Young Girl is known world­wide, Frank was only one of thou­sands of Dutch cit­i­zens who saved their wartime diaries. They did so at the urg­ing of the Dutch Min­is­ter for Edu­ca­tion, Arts, and Sci­ences, who believed that jour­nals and let­ters would be essen­tial to paint­ing ​“the pic­ture of our strug­gle for free­dom … in its full depth and glory.” 

Two recent books — one non­fic­tion, the oth­er fic­tion — add new detail to this pic­ture by shed­ding light on over­looked diaries. Nina Siegal’s The Diary Keep­ers inter­weaves excerpts of jour­nals writ­ten by peo­ple who had a wide range of pro­fes­sions and polit­i­cal lean­ings. Yael van der Wouden’s debut nov­el, The Safe­keep, depicts a rela­tion­ship between two women in the 1960s that is pro­found­ly changed by the dis­cov­ery of a wartime diary. 

In the fol­low­ing con­ver­sa­tion, the authors dis­cuss long-held beliefs about Dutch resis­tance ques­tioned in their books, the anti­semitism that still lingers in the Nether­lands, and a cul­tur­al shift that might change the way the coun­try will remem­ber the Holo­caust in the future.

_______________

Bec­ca Kan­tor: When did you first encounter Anne Frank’s diary? What impres­sion did it give you of the Nether­lands? I know that both of you grew up elsewhere. 

Yael van der Wouden: Even though my father is Dutch and my moth­er Israeli, it wasn’t a sto­ry that I remem­ber fea­tur­ing promi­nent­ly in my ear­ly life. I grew up in Tel Aviv and first heard of Anne Frank when I was nine. There was a book dis­play at the school entrance that includ­ed The Diary of a Young Girl, an edi­tion with her pic­ture on the cov­er. You know the one: she’s writ­ing, pen in hand, look­ing up at the cam­era. My friend stared at it for a while and then at me, and then exclaimed that hey, I looked like Anne Frank. I was flat­tered to be com­pared to some­one impor­tant enough to be on the cov­er of a book. 

The Dutch con­nec­tion was both affirm­ing and con­fus­ing: As a kid, I always hoped that being half-Dutch would make me excit­ing, set me apart some­how. The Nether­lands was a vague, Europe-shaped blob in my mind — the place where my grand­par­ents lived in a pret­ty lit­tle house with a gar­den, which I under­stood wasn’t far from a place called Paris. I knew it was clean and I knew it smelled like wood and cof­fee. The fact that Anne Frank lived there, and that she was killed in the Holo­caust because she was Jew­ish, and we shared a pass­ing sim­i­lar­i­ty — would take us mov­ing to the Nether­lands for me to ful­ly comprehend. 

Nina Sie­gal: We were assigned to read it in my mid­dle school in Great Neck, Long Island when I was about twelve. Yael, it’s inter­est­ing that you were told you looked like Anne Frank. I imme­di­ate­ly thought Anne looked like my mom, who had been a raven-haired young girl when she went into hid­ing in Hun­gary dur­ing World War II. I actu­al­ly don’t entire­ly remem­ber what I thought of the book the first time I read it, but I do remem­ber that the same year an elder­ly woman who was a Holo­caust sur­vivor vis­it­ed our class. I already knew many Holo­caust sur­vivors, includ­ing my grand­fa­ther as well as my moth­er, so at the time, I thought, I don’t need any­one to tell me this sto­ry. But the woman who spoke to us made a deep impres­sion on me, because she told her sto­ry in a very direct, clear, and pow­er­ful way. It had been hard for me to get my moth­er or grand­fa­ther to tell me much about their expe­ri­ences in the war. 

My under­stand­ing from Anne’s descrip­tion of her life was that there was strong resis­tance to the Ger­man regime in Hol­land. I assumed that if these non-Jews had worked so hard to pro­tect the Franks from the Nazis, there must have been many more Dutch peo­ple who did the same for their friends and colleagues.

BK: How did this impres­sion com­pare to your actu­al expe­ri­ence as a Jew­ish per­son in the Netherlands? 

YW: We moved here when I was ten, so just a year after I’d first heard of Anne Frank. I hadn’t read the diary — I didn’t read much at all at that age (I was too rest­less and found it tedious). Dur­ing my first school year here, kids quick­ly picked up on the resem­blance between me and Anne Frank and for a while her name became my nick­name. I came to under­stand what hap­pened to her through con­text. What­ev­er con­fused thrill I had felt before was gone very quick­ly. Here, the com­par­i­son between her and me wasn’t a shal­low one any­more, but a mark­er of some­thing star­tling: the idea that I should be rec­og­niz­ably some­thing, and that once upon a time, in this very place, that some­thing would have marked me for per­se­cu­tion and death. 

NS: I first came to the Nether­lands in 2006, when I was in my thir­ties. I’d received a Ful­bright Fel­low­ship to work on my nov­el about a paint­ing by Rem­brandt (which was lat­er pub­lished as The Anato­my Les­son). While I was doing my research, I lived in the old cen­ter of Ams­ter­dam, just around the cor­ner from the Rem­brandt House, where the artist lived and worked. It’s sit­u­at­ed on the Joden­breestraat, which in Eng­lish might be ​“Jew­ish Broad­way.” Joden­breestraat is the cen­ter of the old Jew­ish dis­trict, where there was once a very vibrant Dutch Jew­ish cul­ture. I learned that before the war, Ams­ter­dam had been about ten to four­teen per­cent Jew­ish. The old Jew­ish street mar­ket was in the square just behind Rembrandt’s house, and there were five syn­a­gogues with­in spit­ting dis­tance — includ­ing the gor­geous Por­tuguese Syn­a­gogue with its enor­mous brass can­de­labras, which are still lit only by candlelight. 

But where were the Jews? I rarely came across any­one in tra­di­tion­al Jew­ish garb, or even wear­ing a basic yarmulke. It was an odd feel­ing, to see all these mon­u­ments and mark­ers of Jew­ish life but no Jew­ish pres­ence, espe­cial­ly after grow­ing up in a Jew­ish com­mu­ni­ty in New York. 

I was shocked to find out that sev­en­ty-five per­cent of the Nether­lands’ Jews had been mur­dered in the Holo­caust. I’d always thought that East­ern Euro­pean coun­tries, espe­cial­ly those where my fam­i­ly had come from, like Hun­gary and Czecho­slo­va­kia, had tak­en the great­est hit. But in fact, the Nether­lands had the sec­ond-high­est death toll (pro­por­tion­al to the Jew­ish pop­u­la­tion), after Poland. I won­dered how this could be. I’d thought that the Nether­lands was pro­tec­tive of its Jews, like the peo­ple who helped Anne Frank.

BK: How did your expe­ri­ence of present-day anti­semitism in the Nether­lands inform your book? Would it be fair to call your book (in some sense) a rebut­tal of the com­mon Dutch nation­al nar­ra­tive of World War II?

NS: Yes, to a cer­tain extent. I don’t know how many peo­ple in the Nether­lands cur­rent­ly think that ​“every­one resist­ed,” but that was a com­mon­ly held belief for many decades, espe­cial­ly in the imme­di­ate post­war peri­od. Now, I think many peo­ple know bet­ter, because there has been so much work done by Dutch his­to­ri­ans on the var­i­ous ways in which Dutch insti­tu­tions — the police, the stock exchange, the rail­way com­pa­nies, the big man­u­fac­tur­ers — col­lab­o­rat­ed with the Nazis. The last sec­tion of my book, ​“The War in Mem­o­ry,” traces how the ​“myth of resis­tance” crum­bled over time, although there have also been moments of what you might call ​“mem­o­ry back­lash,” dur­ing which peo­ple rebelled against the notion of see­ing the nation’s his­to­ry in a neg­a­tive light. 

YW: What’s always struck me as deeply frus­trat­ing about the way the Dutch engage with their own his­to­ry is that refract­ed knowl­edge. Some days they don’t know the big pic­ture, but they know details; oth­er days they know details but not the big pic­ture. There’s this Dutch nar­ra­tive about the Ger­mans steal­ing Dutch people’s bikes dur­ing the Occu­pa­tion. And they did — sev­er­al mil­lion bikes were con­fis­cat­ed. For years after the war, when a Ger­man tourist would, say, order a beer at a bar, a jok­ing response might be, ​“First give me my bike back!” My some­what glib emo­tion­al reac­tion to that piece of his­to­ry is always: I wish they would’ve cared about the Jews as much as they did about their bikes. That’s what I mean about detail ver­sus big picture. 

And with the big pic­ture, the sto­ry is always: the Ger­mans came in and did the bad deeds; the Dutch resist­ed and helped Jew­ish peo­ple hide. The truth is more spe­cif­ic, more chill­ing: in com­par­i­son to most oth­er Euro­pean coun­tries, the resis­tance in the Nether­lands was min­i­mal. The major­i­ty of peo­ple who helped Jews hide dur­ing the war asked for mon­e­tary com­pen­sa­tion in return. Most exter­mi­nat­ed Dutch Jews were poor, peo­ple who couldn’t afford hid­ing, and so were shipped off to the camps ear­li­est. Peo­ple don’t know about the small real­i­ties of liv­ing as a Jew in the Nether­lands before the war or after the war, but they know about Anne Frank, and that her sto­ry was sad. Some peo­ple might know where a Jew­ish fam­i­ly used to live. Some might know where Jews were round­ed up for trans­port. The inspi­ra­tion for my nov­el came from me ask­ing myself what might it have been like, to grow up on dif­fer­ent ends of the spec­trum of know­ing and not knowing. 

BK: Could you both say more about your work in terms of bring­ing for­got­ten his­tor­i­cal sto­ries to light? 

NS: I start­ed my career as a jour­nal­ist cov­er­ing pover­ty in the U.S., and I found ear­ly on that peo­ple can con­nect to social jus­tice issues if they read a sin­gle, mov­ing per­son­al sto­ry. It’s much eas­i­er than try­ing to tell the whole huge his­to­ry of a cri­sis or a prob­lem. And per­haps because I was raised on folk songs, I have always been drawn to the voic­es of reg­u­lar peo­ple, peo­ple who are just try­ing to get by. I think the diaries spoke to me for that rea­son. The diary keep­ers in my book were not states­men and pol­i­cy-mak­ers; if they were heroes and hero­ines, they were acci­den­tal­ly so. The Holo­caust is not a for­got­ten sto­ry, but mil­lions — with­out exag­ger­at­ing — of the indi­vid­ual voic­es, ordi­nary sto­ries of peo­ple whose lives were dec­i­mat­ed have been lost. These days, I’m try­ing to move into dif­fer­ent realms of report­ing on this issue. For exam­ple, we hear almost noth­ing about the lives of Roma and Sin­ti peo­ple dur­ing World War II, except as a kind of adden­dum in lists of ​“oth­er” Nazi vic­tims. I’ve been try­ing to cov­er that sto­ry as a jour­nal­ist lately.

BK: Yael, what about the queer sto­ries that are often erased by history?

YW: When I was still in the phase of mag­pieing this book togeth­er from the themes and col­ors and flash­es of scenes I had in mind — there were two things at the fore­front of my thoughts: post­war sto­ries of those who stayed, and queer­ness. This didn’t come from a very noble place of, These sto­ries haven’t been told and now they must be told! I got frus­trat­ed that I was hav­ing con­ver­sa­tions with myself that I nev­er saw played out in pop­u­lar cul­ture. A lot of his­tor­i­cal queer sto­ries focus on queer­ness and desire despite some­thing; despite liv­ing at a time when it’s dan­ger­ous, despite being sur­round­ed by peo­ple who don’t allow it. I want­ed to write a sto­ry that didn’t have to deal with the despite—a sto­ry where the forces keep­ing char­ac­ters from their queer desire were pri­mar­i­ly inter­nal … Or at least that’s what we think at first, before the full sto­ry unfolds. I did hear that some ear­ly read­ers had an issue with the fact that this is a sto­ry both about sex and trau­ma. I under­stand the ini­tial shock of it, but I also think, That’s my life you’re react­ing to. Liv­ing and dat­ing and falling in love while being Jew­ish in the Nether­lands means deal­ing with the inter­sec­tion of Holo­caust mem­o­ry and desire. 

BK: Look­ing at the diary styl­is­ti­cal­ly, what makes it unique as a nar­ra­tive form? Nina, you point out that diaries can con­tain valu­able insights because peo­ple write them when ​“their mem­o­ries are still vivid, detail ori­ent­ed, and potent.” What are the par­tic­u­lar chal­lenges in rely­ing on diaries to under­stand history? 

NS: For a long time, World War II schol­ars con­sid­ered diaries to be sus­pect texts because they — like a lot of eye­wit­ness accounts of Nazi sav­agery — were thought of as sub­jec­tive, or too nar­row in scope. For exam­ple, wartime diaries often con­tained rumor and con­jec­ture. Or they con­tained reports of ​“news” based either on under­ground news­pa­pers or on out­right propaganda. 

In the post­war peri­od, his­to­ri­ans relied at first on ​“offi­cial” sources, and those often includ­ed the very metic­u­lous records the Nazis kept them­selves. But these were also prob­lem­at­ic sources. So, from an epis­te­mo­log­i­cal per­spec­tive, it’s hard to think of any wartime sources that aren’t taint­ed in some way. No source is entire­ly objec­tive, and that has become clear­er as time wears on and we attempt to move away from ide­o­log­i­cal­ly defined historiography. 

Diaries give us a com­bi­na­tion of fact and fic­tion, a mélange of sub­jec­tive and objec­tive, some moment-by-moment detail and then con­jec­ture about the big­ger pic­ture, wish­es for the future, analy­ses of the past. For me, that’s what makes them riv­et­ing. A sin­gle page of a diary can touch on the grand, sweep­ing strokes of his­to­ry, and the small­est, most inti­mate moments of liv­ing a life. We went to buy cher­ries this morn­ing; they were round­ing up about 15,000 Jews in the main square; we played a game of tag, and the cher­ries were deli­cious.

BK: Instead of try­ing to rec­on­cile the con­tra­dic­tions among the dif­fer­ent war diaries, you inten­tion­al­ly jux­ta­pose them. Why did you decide on this struc­ture for The Diary Keep­ers?

NS: The diaries I excerpt in my book are all from the diary col­lec­tion at the NIOD Insti­tute for War, Holo­caust and Geno­cide Stud­ies. This col­lec­tion opened a few days after the Lib­er­a­tion of the Nether­lands in and was meant, from its incep­tion, to be a repos­i­to­ry of per­son­al doc­u­ments and cor­re­spon­dence from ordi­nary peo­ple across a broad spec­trum of soci­ety. The cura­tors of the col­lec­tion were inter­est­ed in hav­ing a round­ed view of Dutch life under Nazi occu­pa­tion: farm hands, school teach­ers, politi­cians, Nazi group mem­bers, resisters, mem­bers of the Jew­ish Coun­cil, et cetera. I want­ed to use the col­lec­tion as it was intend­ed: to tell the sto­ry of a whole society. 

A lot of the diaries have been pub­lished indi­vid­u­al­ly; and while I do like to read them that way, it some­times makes me feel as if I’m bur­row­ing my way through a nar­row tun­nel, as the diary writer lives one indi­vid­ual life, under a moun­tain of chaos. With Anne Frank’s diary, for exam­ple, we under­stand her life in hid­ing, but it’s hard to see the war out­side. We don’t know from her diary that a few blocks away, there are thou­sands of peo­ple being forced into a the­ater to wait for depor­ta­tion. Anne didn’t know this. So I thought that if I could jux­ta­pose the voic­es of many peo­ple in order to see what’s hap­pen­ing from mul­ti­ple per­spec­tives at the same time, I could tell a larg­er sto­ry, a sto­ry that func­tioned like a mul­ti-char­ac­ter nov­el, with both vil­lains and heroes and peo­ple in between. So, in my book we see what it was like for a sev­en­teen-year-old fac­to­ry work­er to decide to join a gen­er­al strike, and for a police­man who thinks these strik­ers are morons and can’t wait to put them in prison; then we hear from a Jew­ish strik­er who waits for the sound of the police com­ing up the stairs every time the out­er door of his build­ing creaks open or closed.

BK: Yael, the con­tents of Eva’s diary aren’t revealed until two-thirds of the way through The Safe­keep—but when they are, our under­stand­ing of every­thing that has pre­vi­ous­ly hap­pened changes. What was your process of writ­ing a fic­tion­al diary? How did you decide which parts of Eva’s past to include?

YW: Oh, that was hands-down my favorite chap­ter to write. I wrote the first half on a six-hour train ride to Berlin, and the sec­ond half on the return. It was such a relief to cast off Isabel’s restric­tive nar­ra­tive voice, and espe­cial­ly to do it in the form of a grand reveal. It scratched an itch I often have when in con­ver­sa­tion with non-Jew­ish Dutch peo­ple, when the war comes up: this desire to shout, You don’t even know what you don’t know! Choos­ing what went in and what would go was a more col­lect­ed, restrained exer­cise. I did so much research that didn’t make it in — I had to be care­ful and make sure that it still sound­ed like a diary, not a mouth­piece for a list of facts. When I sent it in to my edi­tors for a first round of edits, I was sure they would say that half of it had to go. Sur­pris­ing­ly they both said, More of this chap­ter, more of Eva’s voice. Great news for me, of course — I had plen­ty more to say! 

BK: Isabel and Eva have such dis­tinct nar­ra­tive voic­es. How did you go about cre­at­ing those voic­es, and how would you char­ac­ter­ize them? Is one more sim­i­lar to your own than the other?

YW: I knew Isabel inside out from the sec­ond I thought her up. I first wrote about her in a short sto­ry for a work­shop. The sto­ry was titled ​“Louis’s New Girl,” and it was about three sib­lings who go out for din­ner, and one broth­er brings his new girl­friend along. Every­one hates her, espe­cial­ly the main char­ac­ter, the mid­dle sis­ter, Isabel. Isabel is a repressed woman who is at once pos­ses­sive and obses­sive, and has very lit­tle self-knowl­edge. It’s all my worst qual­i­ties blown up to the extreme, com­bined with things I some­times wish I could be: care­less, rude. I gave Isabel all my worst anx­i­eties and ticks, poor thing. 

Eva is who peo­ple think I am when they first meet me: social and extro­vert­ed and a lit­tle flir­ty. All of which I am! In real­i­ty, I am both char­ac­ters. The feel­ing that they both have, that they’ve been treat­ed wrong­ly by life, and the desire to seek some form of revenge — that can be me, too, at my most tired and self-absorbed. Again, these are lit­tle flecks of per­son­al­i­ty that I know in myself or in oth­ers that I blew up to an extreme in both of these char­ac­ters — in part to exor­cize them and in part to expe­ri­ence them ful­ly. Both Isabel and Eva even­tu­al­ly get tak­en down a peg and have to go through a learn­ing moment to arrive at the end­ing. This is prob­a­bly also a hope of mine: that I can learn, grow, and become better. 

BK: Look­ing at the diary styl­is­ti­cal­ly, what makes it unique as a nar­ra­tive form? Nina, you point out that diaries can con­tain valu­able insights because peo­ple write them when ​“their mem­o­ries are still vivid, detail ori­ent­ed, and potent.” What are the par­tic­u­lar chal­lenges in rely­ing on diaries to under­stand history? 

NS: For a long time, World War II schol­ars con­sid­ered diaries to be sus­pect texts because they — like a lot of eye­wit­ness accounts of Nazi sav­agery — were thought of as sub­jec­tive, or too nar­row in scope. For exam­ple, wartime diaries often con­tained rumor and con­jec­ture. Or they con­tained reports of ​“news” based either on under­ground news­pa­pers or on out­right propaganda. 

In the post­war peri­od, his­to­ri­ans relied at first on ​“offi­cial” sources, and those often includ­ed the very metic­u­lous records the Nazis kept them­selves. But these were also prob­lem­at­ic sources . So, from an epis­te­mo­log­i­cal per­spec­tive, it’s hard to think of any wartime sources that aren’t taint­ed in some way. No source is entire­ly objec­tive, and that has become clear­er as time wears on and we attempt to move away from ide­o­log­i­cal­ly defined historiography. 

Diaries give us a com­bi­na­tion of fact and fic­tion, a mélange of sub­jec­tive and objec­tive, some moment-by-moment detail and then con­jec­ture about the big­ger pic­ture, wish­es for the future, analy­ses of the past. For me, that’s what makes them riv­et­ing. A sin­gle page of a diary can touch on the grand, sweep­ing strokes of his­to­ry, and the small­est, most inti­mate moments of liv­ing a life. We went to buy cher­ries this morn­ing; they were round­ing up about 15,000 Jews in the main square; we played a game of tag, and the cher­ries were deli­cious.

BK: Instead of try­ing to rec­on­cile the con­tra­dic­tions among the dif­fer­ent war diaries, you inten­tion­al­ly jux­ta­pose them. Why did you decide on this struc­ture for The Diary Keep­ers?

NS: The diaries I excerpt in my book are all from the diary col­lec­tion at the NIOD Insti­tute for War, Holo­caust and Geno­cide Stud­ies. This col­lec­tion opened a few days after the Lib­er­a­tion of the Nether­lands in and was meant, from its incep­tion, to be a repos­i­to­ry of per­son­al doc­u­ments and cor­re­spon­dence from ordi­nary peo­ple across a broad spec­trum of soci­ety. The cura­tors of the col­lec­tion were inter­est­ed in hav­ing a round­ed view of Dutch life under Nazi occu­pa­tion: farm hands, school teach­ers, politi­cians, Nazi group mem­bers, resisters, mem­bers of the Jew­ish Coun­cil, et cetera. I want­ed to use the col­lec­tion as it was intend­ed: to tell the sto­ry of a whole society. 

A lot of the diaries have been pub­lished indi­vid­u­al­ly; and while I do like to read them that way, it some­times makes me feel as if I’m bur­row­ing my way through a nar­row tun­nel, as the diary writer lives one indi­vid­ual life, under a moun­tain of chaos. With Anne Frank’s diary, for exam­ple, we under­stand her life in hid­ing, but it’s hard to see the war out­side. We don’t know from her diary that a few blocks away, there are thou­sands of peo­ple being forced into a the­ater to wait for depor­ta­tion. Anne didn’t know this. So I thought that if I could jux­ta­pose the voic­es of many peo­ple in order to see what’s hap­pen­ing from mul­ti­ple per­spec­tives at the same time, I could tell a larg­er sto­ry, a sto­ry that func­tioned like a mul­ti-char­ac­ter nov­el, with both vil­lains and heroes and peo­ple in between. So, in my book we see what it was like for a sev­en­teen-year-old fac­to­ry work­er to decide to join a gen­er­al strike, and for a police­man who thinks these strik­ers are morons and can’t wait to put them in prison; then we hear from a Jew­ish strik­er who waits for the sound of the police com­ing up the stairs every time the out­er door of his build­ing creaks open or closed.

BK: Yael, the con­tents of Eva’s diary aren’t revealed until two-thirds of the way through The Safe­keep—but when they are, our under­stand­ing of every­thing that has pre­vi­ous­ly hap­pened changes. What was your process of writ­ing a fic­tion­al diary? How did you decide which parts of Eva’s past to include?

YW: Oh, that was hands-down my favorite chap­ter to write. I wrote the first half on a six-hour train ride to Berlin, and the sec­ond half on the return. It was such a relief to cast off Isabel’s restric­tive nar­ra­tive voice, and espe­cial­ly to do it in the form of a grand reveal. It scratched an itch I often have when in con­ver­sa­tion with non-Jew­ish Dutch peo­ple, when the war comes up: this desire to shout, You don’t even know what you don’t know! Choos­ing what went in and what would go was a more col­lect­ed, restrained exer­cise. I did so much research that didn’t make it in — I had to be care­ful and make sure that it still sound­ed like a diary, not a mouth­piece for a list of facts. When I sent it in to my edi­tors for a first round of edits, I was sure they would say that half of it had to go. Sur­pris­ing­ly they both said, More of this chap­ter, more of Eva’s voice. Great news for me, of course — I had plen­ty more to say! 

BK: Isabel and Eva have such dis­tinct nar­ra­tive voic­es. How did you go about cre­at­ing those voic­es, and how would you char­ac­ter­ize them? Is one more sim­i­lar to your own than the other?

YW: I knew Isabel inside out from the sec­ond I thought her up. I first wrote about her in a short sto­ry for a work­shop. The sto­ry was titled ​“Louis’s New Girl,” and it was about three sib­lings who go out for din­ner, and one broth­er brings his new girl­friend along. Every­one hates her, espe­cial­ly the main char­ac­ter, the mid­dle sis­ter, Isabel. Isabel is a repressed woman who is at once pos­ses­sive and obses­sive, and has very lit­tle self-knowl­edge. It’s all my worst qual­i­ties blown up to the extreme, com­bined with things I some­times wish I could be: care­less, rude. I gave Isabel all my worst anx­i­eties and ticks, poor thing. 

Eva is who peo­ple think I am when they first meet me: social and extro­vert­ed and a lit­tle flir­ty. All of which I am! In real­i­ty, I am both char­ac­ters. The feel­ing that they both have, that they’ve been treat­ed wrong­ly by life, and the desire to seek some form of revenge — that can be me, too, at my most tired and self-absorbed. Again, these are lit­tle flecks of per­son­al­i­ty that I know in myself or in oth­ers that I blew up to an extreme in both of these char­ac­ters — in part to exor­cize them and in part to expe­ri­ence them ful­ly. Both Isabel and Eva even­tu­al­ly get tak­en down a peg and have to go through a learn­ing moment to arrive at the end­ing. This is prob­a­bly also a hope of mine: that I can learn, grow, and become better. 

BK. Both of your books address the idea of phys­i­cal spaces — espe­cial­ly homes — as repos­i­to­ries for mem­o­ry or lega­cy. Yael, how does the title of your book speak to this theme?

YW: It’s a bit of a strange title, isn’t it? You expect it to be fol­lowed by an “-er”: The Safe­keep­er. But I want­ed there to be some ambi­gu­i­ty in the noun-ness of it: it sounds like it’s refer­ring to a place more than an action or a per­son, and that’s the ques­tion that I want­ed to start the book with: what place, what ​“keep” are we talk­ing about? Isabel’s home, the things in that home? We learn very quick­ly that Isabel func­tions as a sort of archivist of her family’s mem­o­ry in that house, keep­ing every­thing in order and in one place. This order gets dis­rupt­ed by Eva, who upends every­thing for Isabel: if Isabel can’t keep the home ​“safe,” if she can’t guard mem­o­ries embod­ied by belong­ings, then what’s her pur­pose, really? 

BK: Nina, you write that it wasn’t until you were phys­i­cal­ly in Ams­ter­dam, liv­ing in an apart­ment that resem­bled Anne Frank’s annex, that you tru­ly felt the weight of the Holo­caust on your fam­i­ly and decid­ed to research it. Could you explain how that came about? 

NS: There is dark irony in the fact that the Franks lived in the kind of space that some peo­ple rent these days, a con­vert­ed stor­age attic, because there’s such a huge demand for hous­ing in Ams­ter­dam that every avail­able space has been con­vert­ed into mod­ern liv­ing quar­ters. My first apart­ment in Ams­ter­dam was a fifth-floor walk-up that you had to enter by climb­ing up four flights, then going up a lad­der through a hatch. I’m sure it was once a stor­age attic, too. If some­one didn’t know there was an apart­ment up that high, they wouldn’t have found it.

Ams­ter­dam is a small, dense­ly packed city, and I could see so much of it from up there. When I start­ed to read the diaries, I real­ized how often peo­ple talked about look­ing out their win­dows to wit­ness things hap­pen­ing in the street. The first round-up of four hun­dred Jews, which hap­pened in Feb­ru­ary 1941, was wit­nessed by hun­dreds of peo­ple. There were accounts of peo­ple stand­ing on the bridge near­by who could see it all unfold­ing, and oth­ers who gazed out from their apart­ments. It made me real­ize how close it all was, how much peo­ple must have seen and known. Before liv­ing in Ams­ter­dam, I’d thought of the Holo­caust as tak­ing place in shtetls and ghet­tos and forests, away from pub­lic view. Liv­ing in Ams­ter­dam, inside this phys­i­cal space, I start­ed to under­stand just how close the Holo­caust could actu­al­ly have been to those who wit­nessed it.

BK: Nina, you also write that when you first arrived in Ams­ter­dam, you had the sen­sa­tion of ​“mov[ing] dai­ly through a neigh­bor­hood filled with mon­u­ments and muse­ums for a Jew­ish com­mu­ni­ty that seemed to exist as mere ghosts.” Yael, the house at the heart of The Safe­keep could eas­i­ly be called haunt­ed, too (at least fig­u­ra­tive­ly!). Can the past be described as a kind of haunting? 

NS: I hope I don’t sound too crazy when say­ing this, but because I have immersed myself in so much his­to­ry, I imag­ine ghosts around me quite a lot. When I was research­ing The Diary Keep­ers, par­tic­u­lar­ly when I went to places where cer­tain key his­tor­i­cal events had unfold­ed, I could con­jure the past before my eyes. That’s in part because Amsterdam’s land­scape is his­tor­i­cal; much of it hasn’t changed in hun­dreds of years. But it’s also because the sto­ries of these indi­vid­u­als feel so close to me that, after read­ing and writ­ing about them, that they feel like a pres­ence in my life. 

Through­out writ­ing The Diary Keep­ers, I dis­tinct­ly felt that I was being guid­ed to observe or dis­cov­er things. Here’s an exam­ple: I was deep into read­ing and trans­lat­ing the excerpts from the diary of Philip Mechan­i­cus, a Jew­ish jour­nal­ist for the Alge­meen Han­dels­blad news­pa­per, who spent 17 months in the West­er­bork tran­sit camp. One day, my daugh­ter had a play date with one of her new friends from school, and I went to pick her up at the child’s home. As I was enter­ing the build­ing I saw the Alge­meen Han­dels­blad sign on the facade, and while my daugh­ter was get­ting ready to go, her friend’s mom explained that the apart­ment had once been the office of a famous jour­nal­ist, named Philip Mechan­i­cus, who had been killed in the Holo­caust. I got chills from that expe­ri­ence. I was stand­ing where he had worked. That’s just one exam­ple of things that hap­pened dur­ing the course of writ­ing the book.

YW: Nina, that’s such an apt and rec­og­niz­able feel­ing. I’ve often talked about exist­ing with­in Dutch cul­ture as being a ghost your­self, like you are a mem­o­ry haunt­ing the city, even haunt­ing the lan­guage — Dutch is pep­pered with Yid­dish. I cer­tain­ly chan­neled that feel­ing into my writ­ing when I gave shape to life in post-war Over­i­js­sel, a province that once had sol­id-enough Jew­ish com­mu­ni­ties that some vil­lages even had a syn­a­gogue, but was devoid of Jew­ish life post­war. Grow­ing up there, I cer­tain­ly felt the past, and me with­in it, as a haunt­ing thing. 

BK: Speak­ing of the fan­tas­ti­cal, are there con­nec­tions between your mag­i­cal real­ist short sto­ry ​“Into the Mud,” which was pub­lished in the 2022/5782 issue of Paper Brigade, and The Safe­keep? 

YW: Oh, absolute­ly! In ​“Into the Mud,” I think you can see me work­ing out dynam­ics and themes that become cen­tral in The Safe­keep. For exam­ple, the way queer­ness in teen girls can get mud­dled, how these intense friend­ships can be con­fus­ing. Isabel has a very rigid and neg­a­tive view of the val­ue of friend­ship, and I think this comes from the fact that as a teen, she couldn’t under­stand her own rela­tion­ship to oth­er girls. Desire and dis­like and want­i­ng to be thought of as beau­ti­ful by anoth­er woman, not know­ing what that means, want­i­ng to be around some­one who also brings out the worst in you: all lit­tle threads I start­ed pulling on in ​“Into the Mud”! 

BK: Has your per­cep­tion of the Nether­lands changed the longer you’ve lived there? Has the Dutch approach toward remem­brance changed? Would you say that you feel ​“at home” in the Netherlands? 

NS: My per­cep­tion has changed over the past eigh­teen years as I’ve become more inte­grat­ed into Dutch soci­ety. At the same time, there has been a mas­sive shift in mem­o­ry cul­ture. Research has revealed the var­i­ous lev­els of sys­tem­at­ic col­lab­o­ra­tion between the Nether­lands and Nazi Ger­many, and I think the aver­age Dutch per­son is now more aware that they ​“weren’t all resis­tors.” I hope that my research and report­ing on the sub­ject for The New York Times has helped to shift the under­stand­ing of Dutch World War II his­to­ry out­side of the Nether­lands as well.

When I first moved here, there was only one memo­r­i­al in Ams­ter­dam that named those killed in the Shoah, and it only list­ed sur­names. More­over, one sur­name applied to whole fam­i­lies — mul­ti­ple gen­er­a­tions — as well as non-rel­a­tives who just hap­pened to share the same last name (Cohen, or Polak, or De Vries, for exam­ple). In 2021, Ams­ter­dam final­ly got a nation­al mon­u­ment that rec­og­nizes every sin­gle indi­vid­ual mur­dered in the camps: the Nation­al Holo­caust Memo­r­i­al of Names, designed by Daniel Libe­skind. It includes more than 102,000 inscribed bricks, one for each vic­tim, which I find to be a beau­ti­ful trib­ute. This year, the Nation­al Holo­caust Muse­um opened. Both of these impor­tant projects took years to come into being. It’s at last a recog­ni­tion of what hap­pened here.

YW: I’ve lived here longer than I haven’t by now, and my feel­ings seem to cycle through phas­es. I’m often frus­trat­ed with a lot here — with the influ­ence of Calvin­ism and the desire for sim­plic­i­ty and ordi­nar­i­ness above all else. I can get so riled up by it. At oth­er times I’m fas­ci­nat­ed by it. For instance, right now I’m doing research into how water land­scapes changed across the coun­try in the ear­ly twen­ti­eth cen­tu­ry and how that has fed into a cul­ture where any piece of land had to be made ​“use­ful,” — the inter­sec­tion of Calvin­ism and cap­i­tal­ism. Although I’m engrossed by the ques­tion of what’s giv­en shape to this place, I can’t say that the place is equal­ly engrossed by me. I often feel that I live here by the good graces of the Dutch, even with my Dutch pass­port and last name. This Nether­lands is built on con­for­mi­ty, and when you don’t con­form, liv­ing here is a princess-and-the-pea kind of exis­tence: fine and doable and often very priv­i­leged, but always with some­thing small and uneasy six­teen mat­tress­es below, remind­ing you not to get too comfortable. 

BK: Do either of you keep a diary? If so, I would love to hear your thoughts about diary-keep­ing and the rela­tion­ship between this and your oth­er writing. 

NS: Actu­al­ly, I don’t. I kept a diary until I was about thir­ty, but it was most­ly about my crush­es, my loves and loss­es. I doubt any­one would be inter­est­ed in read­ing even a page. And I kept lists of things I was think­ing about before bed­time. I write so much now, on such a reg­u­lar basis, that I don’t real­ly use writ­ing any­more to unwind. I often think I should go back to keep­ing a diary. 

YW: I go through spells of doing morn­ing pages. I wouldn’t nec­es­sar­i­ly call them diaris­tic. Most of them are utter ram­bling non­sense: three to five pages of run-on sen­tences of base anx­i­eties and what-ifs with­out punc­tu­a­tion. I put them down on the page in the hope of get­ting them out of the body and brain. Some­times it works, too. I encour­age all my cre­ative-writ­ing stu­dents to take up the habit, espe­cial­ly when they’re start­ing out and deal­ing with where-to-start issues; if the ​“bad” words are already in the diary, you can just start wher­ev­er, it doesn’t mat­ter any­more. My issue with keep­ing a diary is, and always has been, con­sis­ten­cy and bore­dom. I get bored report­ing back on events and I am very bad at con­sis­tent­ly doing just about any­thing. But occa­sion­al­ly pick­ing up a note­book and ram­bling about wor­ries and desires in the hope it’ll make me feel bet­ter, or make me a bet­ter writer? That I can do.