J. Presser (1899–1970)

The 1957 Boekenweek novella, originally published anonymously, was written by the distinguished Dutch historian Jacob (Jacques) Presser, best-known for his research into the persecution of Jews in the Netherlands during the German occupation. Here, he compresses that catastrophe and his own experience into 88 pages of fiction set mostly in the notorious Westerbork transit camp in Drenthe, where Dutch Jews were held before being sent to Auschwitz. Presser himself survived the war, sheltering with the family of a fellow-teacher in Gelderland, but his wife was caught by the Germans and deported via Westerbork.

The teacher who narrates the story is an “assimilated Jew” who has accepted that deportation and death are inevitable as long as the Nazis are in charge, but who has done his best to postpone them as far as possible by joining the Ordnungsdienst, the “Jewish SS” who help the Germans (and Dutch military police) to run the camp, with the hateful task of deciding who is sent on the weekly train to Poland and who gets to live another seven days. We get plenty of opportunity to reflect on the way such extreme situations distort ordinary morality, but also about the point at which the tables are turned and rebellion (however futile) against unstoppable evil becomes necessary again.… (more)

Jacob (Jacques) Presser, who also wrote the 1957 Boekenweek gift De nacht der Girondijnen, was one of the leading Dutch historians of the immediate postwar period. He taught a whole bunch of future distinguished Dutch intellectuals at the university of Amsterdam, as well as writing the standard history of the persecution of Jews in the Netherlands during World War II — he was Jewish himself, and survived the German occupation in hiding with a series of families in rural Gelderland. His wife died in a concentration camp after being caught with false papers. Presser came to academic life relatively late, after working as a schoolteacher for a time, and he also wrote school textbooks.

This 1963 Boekenweek gift was, for once, not a novella, but a kind of slide-show with fifty black-and-white illustrations and matching short explanatory texts developing the idea of "Europe" as a concept in geography, culture and history from the Ancient Greeks to World War II. Presser's style is light and ironic for the most part, quite schoolmasterish, but he doesn't shy away from big topics where he feels it's needed (from the perspective of sixty years later, we notice that he gives rather less space to colonialism and slavery than we would, and lets the Great Men outnumber the Great Women, but he does manage to squeeze Rosa Luxemburg and Teresa of Avila in, as well as the slightly more questionable empress Theodosia...). Nothing very unexpected, but a nice presentation, a few good jokes, and probably a useful little book for anyone not very well up in European history.… (more)