Girl in the Blue Coat(78)

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.

There were some occasions in the book when I did veer from history books. A few examples: I have the nursery in the Schouwburg closing in January when in fact it didn’t close until several months later. Het Parool did not have a classified ads section, at least not in the winter of 1943, and it was not, as far as I know, used by individuals to pass secret messages. Those decisions, along with any other departures from history, were made solely by me for artistic purposes, and I hope that none of them are unforgivable.

Hanneke Bakker was not, after all, a real person. Nor were Bas and Ollie Van de Kamp, Mirjam Roodveldt, or any of the other characters mentioned by name. But as people continue to ask how an event as monumental and atrocious as the Holocaust ever could have happened, I wanted to tell a story of small betrayals in the middle of a big war. I wanted to illustrate the split-second decisions we make of moral courage and cowardice, and how we are all heroes and villains.





ACKNOWLEDGMENTS


Writing is a sort of lonely process, because at the end of the day only one pair of hands can fit on a laptop, and most of the time—at least midproject—I wish they were anyone’s but mine. For this book, I am grateful for the people who symbolically shared the keyboard and made writing feel like a team sport.

My agent, Ginger Clark, read three paragraphs of an early plot description and immediately informed me that the book I was describing should be about teenagers, rather than the adults I’d been envisioning. She was right, as she is about most things.

My editor, Lisa Yoskowitz, was instrumental in suggesting so many plot and character developments that I hesitate to enumerate them here, lest I reveal myself to be a total idiot.

Robert Cox, my husband, offered scrupulous notes over multiple drafts, and pancakes at IHOP when they became necessary. I could not have asked for a smarter reader or a better partner.

It’s daunting, and perhaps a little presumptuous, to try to tell a story about a culture and time that don’t belong to you. But I knew from the beginning that I wanted this story to be set in Amsterdam, in World War II, and I wanted it to feel authentically Dutch. Getting the dates and geography right was one thing, but getting the Dutch sensibility right required an entirely different level of nuance. And so I am grateful to the tour guide in Amsterdam who first introduced me to the phrase “God made the world, but the Dutch made the Netherlands.” I am grateful to the cyclists in the city who gently chided me when I misunderstood the rules of bicycle culture. I am grateful for Amsterdam’s exhaustive, absorbing museum collections, and for the private citizens who bothered to create websites—in English!—on topics ranging from the proper pronunciation of Dutch names to the fate of each naval torpedo ship during the German invasion.

I am deeply grateful, on a literary and on a humanistic level, for the Dutch resistance workers who later wrote about their experiences, which provided such rich, textured accounts of a time and place. Reading the memoirs of Miep Gies, Corrie ten Boom, Hanneke Ippisch, and Diet Eman, among others, taught me a great deal about what it felt like to live through World War II in Amsterdam. And finally: So much of what the world knows about the war, the city, and the human experience is because of one particular book, written from an attic, in the middle of the occupation. I am most profoundly grateful to Anne.





ABOUT THE AUTHOR


Monica Hesse (monicahesse.com) is an author and journalist with the Washington Post. She lives in Washington, DC, with her husband and their dog.