Most readers are familiar, at least at a minimal level, of The Diary Of Anne Frank. Some of us are familiar with a bit more, with the brave figure that the then teenager - around the same age, and living not too far away - Audrey Hepburn was, in playing her part in the Dutch resistance, and going through horrors personally, despite her family's aristocratic background that made it a voluntary and thereby that much braver an act.
This work fits with those somewhere, in that it's the story of a young girl a few years older than Anne Frank and Audrey Hepburn, living in vicinity of the two - it being after all a small country - and working in resistance, in addition to her family hiding a number of Jews and one resistance member in their home, a highly non trivial act of courage and more, and much, much more. This family was not wealthy as such, had over seven members if thrir own, and at the height of it all sheltered almost as many, hiding them for life and endangering their own. In addition Grietje - called Kieks - aldo delivered nesseges and did much, much more.
As dangerous and as personally sacrificing as it all was, and as traumatic the horrors that she went through, post war years were not a picnic, what with her trauma finding not a whit of sympathy or even recognition in her new homeland, Britain, when she had married a Brit and was living in Scotland with him and her four children. The psychiatrist whom the husband took her to for help, in fact, decided she was lying and threatened to take her children away, declaring her an unfit mother, if she did not stop insisting her stories of the war years were true. This had a long time devastating effect, of her being forced to shut up, being seen as a liar, and finally breaking up her marriage.
Fortunately her son began to have a clue at some point, and too, authorities in her own country back home recognised her and her family's work in resistance - and most importantly, Israel honoured them. Her son collected and worked through her memories related over time, and managed to write it all into a coherent story after painstakingly working out the timelines.
One feels the trauma and horror of it all, but more than it all, at the end one feels fortunate in that one could read this and know such brave souls, however much at a distance of time and space.
