In The Diary Keepers (Ecco, Feb.), novelist Siegal recreates the Nazi occupation of the Netherlands with firsthand accounts from the ordinary people who lived through it.
Seventy-five percent of the Dutch Jewish population was murdered by the Nazis. Why was the death toll so high?
There were a combination of factors. One was that the Netherlands is close to Germany, and locked in, so that it was hard for people to get out. There was also a fair amount of complicity on the part of the Dutch civil administration. Those reasons have been given before. But I think what you have to look at also, is what would it have taken to save the Jews of the Netherlands? How would people have had to act for that to happen? There would have had to have been a lot more resistance. And in the Netherlands, you don’t see any resistance, really, on behalf of the Jews, except for the February strike, which was short lived.
Was there something about Dutch society that contributed to that minimal resistance?
I’ve been told so many times since I moved here the popular Dutch proverb: “The nail that sticks up gets knocked down.” People want to behave in a way that goes with the expected norms. Most of the time, when people talk about the war period, they say, “we went along, because we didn’t want it to be worse,” or “we just thought if we went along, it would be easier.” And I think that is a little bit of the Dutch mentality. It’s not a culture of protest. It’s not a culture of rebellion. If you’re not used to rebelling, then you’re more likely to go along with an authoritarian regime when one appears. I think most Dutch people feel, “we were good, we were taken over by this aggressive regime, and we did our best.” But at the same time, what actually did they do to stop this decimation? It’s particularly striking, given that Jews have been living here, basically unmolested, since the 16th century. The Diary of Anne Frank is a literary classic, but it suggests that Dutch Jews were protected in attics by their non-Jewish Dutch neighbors. Mostly, that was not the case.
How did you select the diarists whose excerpts you used to craft this narrative?
The NIOD Institute for War, Holocaust and Genocide Studies in Amsterdam has archives that hold more than 2,000 diaries written during the war. I wanted to have a diversity of voices. I definitely wanted to have some Nazi sympathizers, some resistance members, and some Jewish diarists. I also wanted compelling stories. One woman wrote summaries of the diaries, including a brief critique, and one of the archivists also added notes, which I read, to help me narrow the choices down. There were many others I could have chosen. But I was really amazed. Each one of them had this powerful narrative inside.
