The Night of the Girondists

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 show more 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. show less

haunting story of bertrayal and failure.