Diary of the resistance heroine turned into a dance: “You feel the impact through translation in movement”

Hetty van der Togt’s diary of the last year of the war is no more than a collection of cardboard, wallpaper and toilet paper, in which she writes down her daily life in tiny print after her arrest. She was caught delivering the resistance newspaper Parool. And who knows, she might even do more. But her children don’t know about that. Hetty didn’t talk about the war.

The children also knew nothing about her writings and the diary was almost lost when Hetty died in 2011. While cleaning up the parental home, a box with archive folders and an old red handbag ends up in the hallway, ready to be put in the trash. Until one of her daughters-in-law goes to read what it contains.

‘This can’t go away’

“Oh, this must not go away. This is history”, Dorien Reitsma reminds her sister-in-law. Dorien from Alkmaar is a daughter of Hetty. It is only three years after her mother’s death that she really dares to read the notes. And she transcribes them to preserve Hetty’s story.

Should it be a book, a movie or a musical? Dorien can’t let go. Until she attends a performance by Dansgroep Haarlem by artistic director Haya Maëla. Then she knows: the diary must be set to music and dance. “I saw it,” she says when she attends a dance group rehearsal. “I thought, ‘I have to do something about this’. Not just for us, her children, but for everyone.”

Haya Maëla has written an impressive dance, which premiered last autumn. Only then was it only for a small audience due to corona measures. Now that it has been included in the program for ‘Theater Na De Dam’, the choreographer finds it ‘very honorable’ to be able to do the performance again just after the commemoration of the dead.

But she still remembers what a job it was to make the performance. “What a story and how are you going to turn that into a dance!” Haya talked a lot with Dorien, did a lot of research into the war and how people deal with so much suffering. “And there isn’t much in the diary, just small sentences. But it was visual enough that I immediately got ideas.”

Movement forms

During the rehearsal she explains to her dancers again how important the rhythm and direction of the movement is. “We have all looked for forms of movement to make the thought clear to yourself and to others: ‘I’m not participating in this, I’m going to do it differently’. So yes, will you stand still, will you follow along or will you run against it? .”

Dorien’s choice to translate the words into dance turns out well. Even without text and explanation you see a group of women who find each other and help each other in the cells, during the transport to Germany and in the labor camp. The emotion explodes, while Hetty’s text on the papers is very factual. “She writes very soberly,” Dorien says. “Almost nowhere does she write about missing her family, or about the boy she was in love with at the time. She even writes on the train to Munich that it is a ‘beautiful journey’, while she is very ill. I think that is cynical Dorian thinks.

Emotions

Hetty’s children barely know anything about her acts of resistance and the time she was a prisoner of the Germans. At the age that her contemporaries are willing to talk about the war years, Hetty gets aphasia and she can no longer put it into words. For Dorien, her action finally expresses the emotions her mother couldn’t write down.

The performance ‘Dagboek 44 45’ can be seen on Wednesday 4 May at 9 p.m. in De Schuur in Haarlem and will later also be performed in The Hague. After that, other dance groups from all over the country are allowed to work with Haya Maëla’s choreography and perform their own interpretation.