The Jewish Council, composed of leaders in the community, originally believed that their role as liaison between Nazis and the Jewish population would improve the treatment of Jews in the Netherlands. Instead, many today believe that the Council’s acts inadvertently made it easier for Jews to be tracked, persecuted, and deported to their deaths.
There were, however, extraordinary acts of heroism within the country. Ollie and Judith and their friends represent an amalgamation of several different types of resistance activities, but they are most closely based on the Amsterdam Student Group, an organization of university students who specialized in rescuing children, and on the mostly Jewish workers who were assigned to work in the Hollandsche Schouwburg. The Schouwburg was a place of terror, but also one of Amsterdam’s bravest rescue operations. An estimated six hundred Jewish children were sneaked out of the nursery across the street: sometimes hiding in laundry baskets, sometimes passed over the courtyard wall to neighboring buildings, and sometimes escorted out in plain sight by workers who conveniently “miscounted” the number of children they were supposed to be looking after. The acts of my characters were inspired by reading about, or listening to the oral histories of, many people who were affiliated with the theater. To name a few: Piet Meerburg, the cofounder of the Amsterdam Student Group; Henriette Pimentel, who ran the nursery and was killed in Auschwitz in 1943; and Walter Süskind, who falsified children’s records while running the Schouwburg and was killed in 1945.
The resistance work of photographers was real: A loosely joined network of professional photographers became officially known as the Underground Camera in 1944. They risked their personal safety to take secret photographs of soldiers and civilians, and their images remain some of the most illuminating records of Dutch life during Nazi occupation. Female photographers were particularly adept: They hid their cameras in purses and handbags. Lydia van Nobelen-Riezouw, though not a member of Underground Camera, did live in an apartment abutting the Schouwburg’s rear courtyard, and she did take photographs of the Jewish prisoners when she recognized a childhood friend among them. Mina’s storyline draws from this experience.
Het Parool was a real newspaper; in fact, it still exists today. The publishers risked their lives to print every issue: Thirteen of its workers were executed in February 1943, just a few days after the events of this novel conclude.
I’m a journalist by trade, and I’ve always believed that people’s real stories are more moving, more interesting, and more heartbreaking than anything I could invent in fiction. My initial interest in this project began with a vacation to Amsterdam and visits to several Holocaust-related sites there. I subsequently did a lot of research and have a lot of people to credit for helping me discover the real stories of Amsterdam in 1943.
Over repeated visits, the librarians at the US Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, DC, helped me find stacks of books and DVDs on topics ranging from ration coupons to what kind of coded language resistance workers would have used when talking to each other on the telephone.
Greg Miller at Film Rescue International had several patient exchanges with me about the tricky process for developing color images in the 1940s. Paul Moody, who directed the Dutch documentary The Underground Camera, was similarly patient in corresponding with me about the role of photographers during the war; he recommended the book De illegale camera (1940–1945), a collection of war photographs containing many of the images that I described and credited to Mina. Military historian Allert Goossens dug through his research files to help me come up with a plausible scenario allowing Bas to have joined the navy at seventeen years old, which was below the draft age. In Holland, Michigan, the staff at Nelis’ Dutch Village fed me lots of Dutch food, including banketstaaf, which makes an appearance as one of Hanneke’s favorite treats. Pat Boydens, a native Dutch speaker who now lives in Virginia, read the manuscript for linguistic truthfulness, helping me determine, for example, which types of curse words would be most likely used by a teenage girl. Laurien Vastenhout was a meticulous fact-checker, combing the manuscript for historical accuracy, and the staff at Sebes & Van Gelderen Literary Agency also provided invaluable historical feedback related to character names and Dutch culture.