CLIP ONE:
This is Writer's Voice, and I'm Francesca Rheannon. We're talking with Buzzy Jackson about her novel, To Die Beautiful.
It's based on the life of the heroic Dutch Resistance fighter, Hanne Schaft. Now, the Germans invaded Holland in May of 1940. Hanne was a student in Amsterdam at that time. Tell us a little bit about her then, both as a character. You mentioned earlier that you talked about her being kind of an innocent, but what was she doing in Amsterdam?

[Buzzy Jackson]
Yeah. She grew up in the town of City of Haarlem, which is about 20 minutes away from Amsterdam. And then she, as you said, she enrolled in law school at the University of Amsterdam, which had always been her lifelong dream, was to become a lawyer for the League of Nations, what we would now think of as sort of a human rights lawyer.

That was always her interest. Sadly for her, the League of Nations collapsed on the eve of World War II, and her dream disappeared. But she still planned on doing something in the law, so she persevered.

And at that time, she had just devoted her entire young life, she was 19, to getting into college, becoming a lawyer, having this kind of, you know, just trying to help people through legal, through being a lawyer. And she was described by all of her friends, people who knew her growing up, as a very quiet, sort of a bookworm. She sat in the back of class and was very shy.

Also, her older sister had died of diphtheria when Hanne was just a child. And so her parents, it is said that her parents were very protective of her after that, because, of course, the trauma of losing one child, they would do things like make Hanne wear a sweater during the summer in case she caught cold, or, you know, hold her hand while they cross the street at a fairly old age, just because they were so worried about her. Which is ironic when you read the book and realize how much danger she put herself in later.

But yeah, as the book begins, she's still kind of that shy, timid young woman trying to sort of find out who she is in the college setting.

[Francesca]
And she makes two friends there, two Jewish friends who were, you know, she kind of looks up to, she feels that they're much more worldly and glamorous than she is. Sonia Frank and Phileen Polak. Tell us about them.

[Buzzy Jackson]
Yeah, these were two real women. Those are their real names. And, you know, like many Jewish people in the Netherlands at that time, their Jewish families had lived in the country for generations.

It's important, I think, to understand that the Netherlands had been, by this time, for hundreds of years, was considered one of the safest places in Europe for Jews to live. It was a very religiously tolerant place, as it still is. So most Jews, including Sonia and Phileen, they were Jewish, but it wasn't the biggest part of their identity by any means.

I think they just considered themselves Dutch girls, just like Hanne. And in fact, Phileen later said that she didn't know she was Jewish until Adolf Hitler told her she was. Which is not to say that she was trying to deny her Jewish heritage at all.

But she was a fairly secular person, and so was her family. You know, so it just wasn't a big part of her life. For Hanne, I think, when she met them, the thing that was most striking to her about Sonia and Phileen, as you said, was they just were more confident, more outgoing, and sort of more at ease with themselves as people than she was.

And I think she really was attracted to that because those were the qualities she wanted to have in herself. But, you know, shortly after she started school and the Germans invaded, the fact of their Jewishness became a very big deal to all three of them. That was a pretty sudden thing.

[Francesca]
Sudden, but one of the features, in fact, of this time was how the screws were slowly tightened. Oh, yeah. The screws of the occupation.

I mean, at first, the Germans thought that they would be welcomed by their Dutch, air quotes, brothers, you know, their Aryan brothers. And there was a very strong Dutch Nazi party, had over 300,000 members at that time. But the Dutch in general did not look upon the Germans with quite the kind of joy that the Germans had expected.

In fact, you have a wonderful, I'm going to quote from something you've written, because it also gives a sense of how beautifully this book is written. So there was like this tightening noose. And this is from chapter five on page 44.

How does evil spread, like a disease from one human to another, or the way the new anti-Jewish measures sifted down into the private lives of Dutchmen, like dust in a closed room, mote by invisible mote, until one day we turned the key in the lock and found ourselves trapped, then looked back at our little room and discovered it so entombed and filth, it was not fit to live in anymore. And she says, now when I walk through the city, yellow stars screamed at me from street corners, do something. 

CLIP TWO:
Hani and also the Oversteegen family, which is another family that plays a big role in this book, their daughters, Truce and Freddie were members of the resistance with Hani. Their whole family had been involved as essentially social justice activists for decades.

And the way they started and the way Hani first started in resistance work was through helping refugees. And I really started to understand that a refugee crisis in a country is a little bit of like a canary in a coal mine of letting you know something bad is coming, is coming toward these shores, not the refugees. They're coming because they believe in our values.

They're fleeing something that we should take seriously. And, you know, as I was writing the book, it was right around the time when the Trump administration began locking families in cages on the Mexican border and separating parents from their children. And I was so horrified by this, not only because of the obvious human rights issues, but also because it was so similar to what I was researching in this book about the rise of fascism in Europe and specifically the Nazis.

In fact, Anne Frank and her family were themselves refugees from Germany who moved to the Netherlands because they thought it would be a safe place to live. And that's a story that I read over and over in doing the research for this book was how many of the people who were ultimately victims in the Netherlands were there because they had fled somewhere that they thought was worse.

CLIP THREE:
[Francesca]
You say, and I think it might even be before the novel starts, you have like an author's note right in the beginning. And I wonder if you're actually a little generous. You say that 5 percent of the population was involved in the resistance.

I've seen the figure more like 3 percent. You also say that 5 percent collaborated, although I know that, you know, I think there was some 300,000 were prosecuted after the war. But I'm sure I would assume that that's an undercount.

So talk a little bit about the resistors, the collaborators, and then the vast number of bystanders and your own thinking about this.

[Buzzy Jackson]
Yeah, I mean, I should say that, you know, the numbers and statistics that I cite in the book, I looked at many sources to try to come up with, you know, as realistic and reasonable numbers as I could. That includes from the scholars at the Anne Frank House, the Yad Vashem, all sorts of different, you know, of different scholarly approaches to it. But as you said, and I think this is a really important point and one I couldn't get into too much in the book just because it happens before the story really starts, is, as you mentioned, the Dutch Nazi Party was already thriving by the time the Germans invaded.

They had had several election cycles in which this fascist party had been gaining more and more members under the leadership of a very authoritarian, kind of bombastic demagogue named Anton Moeser. And, you know, a lot of Dutch people were already worried about that before the war even began. You know, so you had some fanatics joining that party.

And then I think when the war began, yeah, I think a lot of people weren't sure exactly what to do and how radical they wanted to be in either direction. I will say that I think it's important to note sort of it's easier to look at historical actors who did something extreme like Annie Schaft and you say, OK, she was anti-fascist. Or you look at a person who joins the Dutch Nazi Party and say, OK, they were definitely collaborators.

As you point out, the vast majority of people fall somewhere in between those two extremes. And I think it's important both to recognize the value in very small acts of resistance by everyday people who are not necessarily going to join a resistance cell and are certainly never going to pick up a gun, but they're going to participate in resistance by doing things as simple as seeing their next door neighbor with a new person in the house or maybe just extra laundry hanging on their laundry line.

And instead of reporting it to the occupying forces, simply look away, simply say, I don't know if they're harboring a Jew over there, but I'm just going to I'm not going to make it any of my business. That's a form of support for the resistance that saved the lives of many Jews during World War Two. Also, things like some some people who sheltered Jews found they would just find extra ration cards left on their doorstep by some sympathetic person who knew that they needed they were feeding more people in their house than they were really supposed to be feeding.

On the other hand, you also have the kind of passive support for fascism by all the people who really did nothing to make life easier for those supporting the resistance and who kind of end up making the decision, I'm just going to go along with this and maybe even sign the Nazi loyalty oath, for example, not because they thought of themselves as Nazis, perhaps, but because it was the easier thing to do. And they also were scared for the safety of their family, themselves, et cetera.

I think all of those different types of actions are important to look at, especially today, when we're faced with a lot of similar choices about, am I going to, for instance, vote for this person representing my town, city, state, country, whatever, who seems like they're relying on racist ideology to try and get votes or they're relying on some kind of demagoguery to try to whip up support. Am I going to vote for them because they this other issue that they have? I kind of like you may not think of yourself as the most diehard member of that party if you vote for them.

And yet you're making those other reprehensible choices possible. And same on the other side. You know, I tried to I actually was inspired to become more of an activist myself during the writing of this book, simply because I felt like such a hypocrite reading about all of these incredible, courageous things that these young women in the Netherlands were doing against Nazis.

And I was seeing a lot of similar stuff here, you know, and so I decided, what can I actually do? I can go to protests. I can travel down to the Mexican border to protest the caging of children.

You know, I can do smaller things here in my community and region, which is the Colorado where I live, to at least provide support to let people know not everybody agrees with these policies, you know. And I really encourage anyone out there who wants to support, you know, the causes they believe in, the values they believe in, to just even take the smallest actions. It's it's all ripples on a pond and it all makes a big difference.

[Francesca]
Well, that's so inspiring. That's really great that writing this moved you to do that. And, you know, and I agree when you take action that you begin to feel not quite so helpless.

I mean, I remember my father writing about this. He witnessed this enormous Razzia raid in the Jewish community of Amsterdam. And he said, you know, they just cleared out the entire community like they were, you know, coming in and taking all the fish out of the sea.

And he witnessed his own friends' parents being taken away. They died in Sobibor, this terrible concentration camp. And he found a hiding place for his friend.

And it was, you know, what comes out so clearly is just he he just felt he had to do something like like Hani said, you have to do something. And then it really became a defining moment of his life as as it did for Hani and as he does for anyone who takes those steps as you have begun to take.

[Buzzy Jackson]
Yeah. And again, I didn't do anything very heroic, but just as you said, it sort of is if nothing else, it helps you feel better. And it also is a little ray of hope to people around you that actually not everybody is going along with this program.

You know, not everybody thinks that what's happening is OK. And that in itself is such an incredibly strong message to send out to your community, your neighbors, your friends and family. It's it's important because we often make assumptions based on the media or whatever that I guess everybody else thinks that this policy is OK.

So I guess I won't be the only one to speak up, but it can make a difference. You know, it really it really can. And there's a quote in the book that I think is from the Truce and Freddie's mother, who was a really heroic activist in her own right.

And the quote is, you know, which was an acknowledgment of how hard that work can be. It can be so frustrating to try and do the right thing and still see, you know, not much change. And the quote is where despair ends, tactics begin.

And the idea of, you know, and Hani has these moments in the book, too, of feeling like, is it even worth it what we're doing? Is there even any point to it? And the idea is, you know what?

Don't focus on how on your emotionally, how you're feeling about this. Just keep doing the right thing. Just try to keep doing the right thing.