Cool lalo
I'm pretty sure this one is not too hard to find. It was BIG in France and got quite some attention here as well.
I'm near the end now and it's a pretty good book. It's definitely not perfect if you want to (quickly) read up on some factual history, there's a lot of novellish gibberish y'know
. But if you're more into that kind of literature it's probably a lot nicer to read.
I for one can't wait to get to the end. I never knew much about Heydrich, let alone about his assassination. That keeps some of the suspense
I would have finished a while ago, but I also got 2 other books to finish up on:
The original Dutch one has a less theatrical cover
It speaks for itself I guess. A little disappointing so far though. Fik Meijer is an awesome author on classical history, so maybe my hopes were a little high, but so far, it's not as entertaining as some of his other works. Still a good read though. And the fun stuff is still to come it seems (I'm halfway through). At the end of the book he compares the real stuff to the way gladiators are portrayed in movies, like
Spartacus and
Gladiator. Should be nice to read that as well
+
Won the award for best Dutch history book of 2012. It's a book about the Dutch people's knowledge about and thoughts towards the persecution of jews.
Komo-mode on:
I read a book about it last year, written by some lefty radical who pretty much butchered everyone involved for being 'indifferent' to outright 'cooperative'.
This study is WAY more balanced. It doesn't simply go by: 'Holland has the highest % of deported/killed jews, thus antisemite, or at least indifferent, or cowardice', but the author tries to reconstruct how people thought and felt about the occupation and the deportation and from there tries to understand why people behaved as they did (no intervention, 'sheepish' cooperation).
From diaries and other non-censored sources it quickly becomes clear that virtually all Dutch were appaled by the Nazi behaviour towards the Jews. Nevertheless, they (both non-Jewish-Dutch and Jewish-Dutch) failed to act. The reason for this is basically twofold:
1) they could not act, even if they wanted to. Any real resistance was quickly and very harshly surpressed by the occupiers. Acts of rebellion were paid back tenfold. Resistance, and particularly, armed resistance... the kind we admire so much today, had in practice almost solely very negative consequences. This is also why the government in exile in London warned civilians not to indulge in these 'foolish' acts, but to wait 'till the allied forces were near enough. In short, the people were powerless. Their intentions may have been right, but they were simply unable to make a stand. Hence, the vast majority of 'resistance' was limited to a very passive form: being extra-nice to the jews and generally being uncooperative in every way.
2) the people didn't actually know about the Holocaust as we understand it today. Stories of mass-executions were already known by late 1942 and stories of deathcamps and gas chambers followed soon after. But the information was often contradictory, sometimes correct, but also often false. The German project was purposefully misleading. The camp in Theresienstadt in the Czech Rep. for example was a 'model' camp where life was actually pretty good. From here letters reached the west stating that life was hard, but endurable. It was also in this camp that the Red Cross was invited. It was much harder, near impossible, to get any news out of the real deathcamps like Auschwitz and Sobibor.
This contradictory information led to skepticism in the West and the fate of the jews remained obscure. 'The East' stood for many things: colonization of Russian territory/hard work/hunger/executions/oppression/etc.etc. Everyone knew it was gonna suck over there, but nobody knew what really was at stake: 'merely' hard work and hunger or almost instant death in gaschambers or mass-executions. This is why most jews were not at all eager to be send there, but they still went.
For the Dutch civilians, the information was equally misleading. They knew the jews were hit hard by the nazi's, but they failed to see it as a special project, as an extermination campaign pur-sang. Rather, they saw it as just another expression of the German tyrannical rule that was aimed at the whole of the Dutch people, rather than just to one special group. Deportation was also not limited to jews only. POW's and political prisoners had been deported before, as well as a group of students who were sent to Germany as payback for resistance. After that came the large 'deportation' of Dutch workers who were sent to help out in the German industry. Naturally, all of this made it hard to make out the special place of the Holocaust in all these movements and oppressions.
Finally, there's the role of the English and American governments. They too were skeptic and it was only in late 1942 that they felt confident enough about the validity of the information that reached them that they send out a special message confirming the horrible faith of the Jewish populace in Europe. After that, however, they remained silent, almost to the very end of the war. The main reason for this is that they didn't want to entice the nazi's and to prevent the war from being explained in terms of supporters of jews -vs- enemies of jews. Thus, they could not single out the jews as sole, or at least, most important victims. For a unified homefront they needed to propagate the idea of a war between the nazi's and the entire free world.
Doesn't take away the fact though that more could have been done behind the screens, both in Europe and abroad. But yeah, it's not fair to say people knew what the Holocaust really was, or that they could have taken serious steps to prevent it from happening and certainly not that they chose not to act, out of indifference or even antisemitism.
The book doesn't present any real new insights to me, but it's nice to see that a book like this won the most prestigious prize in the field as it is certainly not the kind of stuff some people like to hear.
Cause yeah, the myth of Dutch collaboration with the deportation of jews has been a good beating stick of radical lefties whenever the topic of immigration pops up.
Don't think this book will fix that, as it's not in any top10 lists yet and the myth is very perseverant. But yeah, it's a nice start to see this book being valued by at least some people.
@dark: i'll put it on my to-do list.
@philie: woa, that's some serious shit!
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