INTRODUCTION
Hans Keilson’s 1944 Diary, written while he was in hiding from the Nazis in the Dutch city of Delft, is a unique document.
Its most obvious counterpart is the diary of another German-born Jew in the Netherlands during World War II: Anne Frank. But they were very different people—Keilson a grown man and father, largely free to walk the streets and travel throughout the country; Frank, of course, never reaching adulthood, betrayed and arrested on August 4, 1944. Still, Keilson’s diary is an immensely revealing complement to Frank’s diary, helping show how much of Frank’s wartime experience was the product of its time and place and how much was particular to her.
And Hanna Sanders, Keilson’s lover, who plays such a large role in his diary and an even larger role in the mental and spiritual struggles lying behind it, was only seven years older than Anne Frank—a kind of alternate-reality smart, curious, sensitive, literary young Jewish woman in Nazi-occupied Holland. We see Sanders only through Keilson’s eyes, but he was too good a writer and observer for her own personality not to shine through, especially in the outpouring of poems he wrote for her and about her experiences, such as the destruction of her home during the bombing of Rotterdam.
Keilson was not just any writer. His novel Comedy in a Minor Key, published in 1947, was widely recognized as a masterpiece when it was finally translated into English in 2010. It is about a Jew in hiding in Delft who dies of natural causes, and now what are his hosts supposed to do with the body without getting caught? The emotional center of the novel is not the man in hiding, as one might expect from an author in hiding himself, but instead the ordinary people around him, doing their best in a dark time. The diary reveals that he wrote the novel between April and June 1944, about a real incident. Hanna Sanders translated it into Dutch.
Few such works of Chekhovian sympathy are written in such pressurized circumstances, and none that I know of are accompanied by a document like this diary—a kind of spiritual X-ray of the mind and heart behind the art. (Literature, Keilson remarks at one point, “can only be understood starting out from the person writing it.”) The closest analogy I can think of is the other most famous book written in Dutch, besides Frank’s: the letters of Vincent van Gogh. Keilson was writing for himself, and unlike the painter’s letters, the diary is often terse and cryptic, leaving out information a reader would need to understand quite what is going on. But both vividly bring to life their authors’ doubts about how to possibly pursue their true calling. In 1944, even while writing Comedy and the dozens of sonnets to Hanna, Keilson was not sure he was cut out to be a writer at all. The diary is not a writer’s notebook; it shows someone stepping back to struggle with what it might mean to be a writer, and a human being.
Perhaps the greatest surprise of 1944 Diary is that it is less about Keilson’s day-to-day life and survival than about the moral and artistic existence he was struggling to create for himself. There are a couple of showstopping set pieces in the book—an encounter with a Dutch pastor sick of having to help Jews; a long entry written in pencil, in real time, during a Nazi roundup in the neighborhood. But as a whole it is mostly about his affair with Hanna, his poems, his notes on reading Kafka, Rilke, Céline, Baudelaire, Buber, and others. News of the Allied reconquest of the Netherlands, the fall of Nazi Germany, appears only in passing. Wartime events, he writes, “however much they grip me, are no longer my real life”: what’s real is “the human being, the poem, people together.” This is why the poems are included in 1944 Diary: they are not just a crucial record of Keilson’s experience, they are the core of his experience.
The diary and sonnets to Hanna are a testament to finding one’s way amid horrors and conflicts of all kinds. Human struggles can outweigh even the Holocaust, world war, the Dutch Hunger Winter. When Keilson called 1944 “the most critical year in my life,” he meant its inner significance. As he would write near the diary’s end: “If you push and push you eventually force a way to your center.”
* * *
Hans Alex Keilson was born in 1909, in a town in eastern Germany near Poland. In 1933, he was twenty-three years old and leading a busy life in Berlin: studying medicine, qualifying as a state-certified swimming and gymnastics instructor, playing trumpet in a jazz band at night, helping support his parents after his father’s store had gone out of business, and awaiting publication of his first novel, the autobiographical Life Goes On, which would be the last novel by a Jewish writer published by Fischer Verlag before the war. Through Fischer, he met literary luminaries such as Bertolt Brecht, Alfred Döblin, and Franz Hessel.
One night, at a classmate’s party, he met Gertrud Manz, who had already been married and divorced and had a child, born in 1922. They stayed at the party until four in the morning, then walked through the streets of Berlin, sat down on a bench, and continued talking until dawn. Keilson would much later describe her appeal as follows: “She was an adult woman I could talk to as an adult man and who treated me as such. This was actually the first time in my life that I felt taken seriously by a woman, socially speaking.” She was “seven years older than me and opened up new perspectives; she was a completely new kind of person in my experience. Psychoanalytical, without having herself been analyzed; in contact with doctors, lawyers, psychologists; used to dealing with Jewish people. She was different, she lived differently, and she knew what was happening and what was going to happen.”
And so, in 1936, the Catholic Gertrud convinced the Jewish Hans to flee Germany. They traveled to the Netherlands as “tourists,” with practically no money, and stayed first in Amsterdam, soon afterward at various addresses in nearby Naarden, where a relative of Keilson’s worked at the residence-permit office and could help them. Keilson mastered Dutch and was able to find work as a swimming and gym teacher, editorial assistant, and counselor in schools and other institutions. He and Gertrud lived in different houses on the same street. They had a stillborn son in 1940; their daughter, Barbara, was born in 1941, nineteen years after Gertrud’s first child. Gertrud pretended that the father was a German soldier, to protect Barbara and herself.
The Germans had conquered the Netherlands in May 1940. Despite the antiauthoritarian character of the people and the resistance activity of many of the Dutch, the Netherlands proved dangerous indeed to the Jews: the country would eventually be known as the Holocaust’s “Poland of the West,” with the highest proportion in any nation of Jews turned in, Jews murdered, non-Jews serving in the German war machine. By early 1941, the 160,000 Jews in the country, 137,000 of them Dutch, were required to register at the “Central Jewish Emigration Bureau,” resulting in their deportation via Westerbork transit camp; of the more than 101,000 Jews deported, barely 6,000 survived. The first razzias or roundups of Jews came in February 1941; the yellow star for Jews was introduced in May 1942. Gertrud and Hans had managed to get Hans’s parents out of Germany in 1938, but in April 1943 his parents were taken to Westerbork and, instead of being allowed to emigrate to Palestine as promised, sent to Auschwitz.
Keilson went underground himself in the spring of 1943, without Gertrud and Barbara. (In Dutch, the metaphor is “underwater”: to go into hiding is duiken, “to dive.”) From April 10 until September 7, he stayed with Henk Fontein, a friend from his time in Naarden and the adjacent village of Bussum—Fontein was former principal of the Bussum Montessori School and now the director of a psychiatric clinic and institution for youths with behavior problems in Rekken, a small village on the eastern edge of the Netherlands about half a mile from Germany.
In September 1943, after a new law was passed mandating that everyone had to live in the province where their passport was issued, Keilson decided to move back west from Rekken. He took the train to Delft, where he had been offered housing with another Dutchman he had met in Naarden, Leo Rientsma. As Keilson would later describe him: “A tall, skinny man with a duck’s bill face, extraordinarily composed and able to swiftly see through critical situations, endowed with tact and natural wit.”
Leo Rientsma, his wife Suus (Suzanna), and their two daughters, Lieske (Lies) and Hannie (Hanna), lived at Wallerstraat 3 in Delft. Leo was a member of a small resistance group that specialized in forging documents; he was horrified to see Keilson’s amateurish papers, which any routine inspection would have caught. With a brand-new passport in the name of Dr. Johannes Gerrit van der Linden, born in Semarang, Dutch East Indies, Keilson lived with the Rientsmas for more than a year, officially as a subletter and tutor for the two daughters.
Other Jews in hiding stayed with the Rientsmas for short periods, along with one other long-term refugee, Corrie Groenteman, officially their maid. The neighbors at Wallerstraat 5, the van der Leks, were also in the know—there was a secret passageway from one attic to the next in case of emergency. And some ten minutes away on foot, at Tak van Poortvlietstraat 20, lived two of Rientsma’s fellow resistance members, Arie Bakker and his wife, Evy. Their house contained the workshop where documents were forged, including Hans Keilson’s passport, using materials Leo Rientsma obtained in secret from a factory where he worked as a chemical engineer. The Bakkers also housed Jews in hiding, including a twenty-two-year-old woman whose father had been the head of the Jewish community in Rotterdam before the war: Hanna Sanders.
With his perfect Dutch and perfect fake ID, “Dr. van der Linden” was free to move about the country. “The new passport gave me such a strong sense of security that I almost forgot my old identity,” Keilson later wrote. His work in the resistance consisted of giving psychological counseling to children and teenagers in hiding throughout Holland—in those circumstances, a fed-up teenager threatening to break the house rules could be life-threatening—before returning to Delft and his own life in hiding.
The diary was closely written in pale blue ink on forty-one and a half folio pages, later bound by hand. He wrote it in German, as he did his novels and the poems to Hanna, though here the German is marked by occasional phrases in Dutch and numerous Dutchisms. The Dutch edition of the diary, Dagboek 1944, was often useful for interpreting difficult parts of the text and has a different set of notes than the German edition; I consulted it throughout my translation. All footnotes in the text are mine, many of them translated or adapted from the German or Dutch notes, both by Marita Keilson-Lauritz. I am also grateful to Marita for thoroughly reviewing my translation and clearing up many obscure passages.
Many paragraph breaks have been added to the translation, since Keilson omitted them wherever possible to save space, and German tends to be written in longer paragraphs anyway. Section breaks have been added for the English reader as well, to indicate or provide pauses in the narrative.
The diary opens in early 1944. Hans Keilson is thirty-four years old.
—Damion Searls
Copyright © 2014 by S. Fischer Verlag GmbH, Frankfurt am Main
English translation, introduction, afterword, and notes copyright © 2017 by Damion Searls
