Where a single street can tell the history of an era, a school may do that much more. I noticed when reading this week The school for ‘Jews’ and ‘Roden’. The Amsterdam Vossius-Gymnasium 1940-1945. by historian Johannes Houwink ten Cate. It is a revealing book that makes short work of the post-war resistance story, as Houwink calls it, of the non-Jewish Vossians. This makes the Vossius no exception to the rule that during the occupation, most Dutch people were particularly docile and did what the above them demanded. Not so much out of conviction, but out of fear, selfishness and self -preservation.
From the title of the book you can conclude that there were both Jewish children and children from working -class environments at the Vossius before the war. And that was something that parents of students from the chic part of Zuid had more and more trouble from 1938. They found the school ‘too Jewish’, ‘too red’ and therefore ‘too uncivilized’. And that could be disadvantageous for their children, who therefore did not come into contact with standards. While the Vossius, thanks to that mixed student population and the mess encouraged by rector PJ Bruijn was a special school that would yield many a celebrity.
Vossius, founded in 1926, was the second public gymnasium of the city and had to compete with the older, decent Barlaeus. That competition was mainly due to the falling number of pupils, which endangered the survival of the school. In addition, the municipal administration considered having the shrinking Vossius merged into a new lyceum.
The war seemed to speed up that process as a result of the removal of the Jewish students by order of the same municipal administration. Unlike his colleague Gunning from the Amsterdams Lyceum, Rector Bruijn carried out that command good, it now appears. Why he did that is somewhat condolences by his vulnerable position as a civil servant and his private situation, so that he could not afford any resistance. And even though he horrified the anti-Jewish measures, which would cost 143 students, he tried to do everything to prevent the occupiers from closed his school.
Houwink brings the daily atmosphere to the Vossius to life in a clever way during the war. He does this in addition to bed by his story in the recent historical research into the persecution of the Jews in the Netherlands also on the basis of the beautiful diaries of poet and Vossiana Hanny Michaelis. With that he pulls you into class and you almost feel the threatening downfall of the school.
Lecturer Jacques Presser, who was worshiped by his students, also comes back to life. Houwink not only puts him down as an unconventional teacher who dealt with his students on the same footing, but also as a spoiled vanity and fabulant, who, when it came to survival, mainly thought of himself. I do want to note that without Pressers help my best friend, who spent the most delicious time of her life on Vossius after 1945, had not blown her last breath this week at the age of 90, but would have been killed in Auschwitz.
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