On Sunday 26 July 1942 – eighty years ago – priests in the Dutch Roman Catholic churches read a letter in which they protested against the growing persecution of the Jews. Exactly one week later, the German occupier took revenge by rounding up and deporting Catholics baptized Jews. Among them the wife and five children of writer Herman de Man (1898-1946), best known for his novel the washing water, which was shown as a successful television series in 1985-1986.
In his work De Man gave a sharp picture of the rigid Calvinist peasant population in the Lopikerwaard. He denounced the conventions of that milieu, with its dead conservatism and soulless religiosity. Themes of his books are the struggle between tradition and innovation, rebellion against the social order and the desire for purity in an impure world. The latter was the result of De Man’s personal – and unsuccessful – struggle. With his work he hoped to renew and elevate ‘the farmer’. What would De Man have written about the current nitrogen unrest, you wonder.
His socially critical regional novels found a large audience and also received literary appreciation, but in 2022 it is only The washing water still available. Last year there was some renewed attention due to a month of activities dedicated to him in the Lopikerwaard. Frits Spits then spent in his radio program The Language State attention to De Man’s wry novel The harsh winter of the nineties.
Herman de Man is the pseudonym of Salomon Herman Hamburger. He and his also Jewish wife converted to the Roman Catholic faith long before the war and their children were also baptized Catholic.
On the summery second of August of 1942, a constable and a watchman – no Germans were involved – fetched Eva de Man and four of her children from their home in Berlicum, North Brabant. They were taken to Vught on an open farm cart. From there it went to Kamp Amersfoort and then to Westerbork. Eldest son Jan was taken from a monastery in Rijswijk, son Joost and daughter Marietje, who also stayed elsewhere, were able to go into hiding.
Immediately after arriving in Auschwitz, on August 9, Eva and her children Anneke, Jochie, Pietertje and Magdaleentje were gassed. Jan died in the same camp on September 30.
Herman de Man escaped the dance. He had left for the French Alps on April 30, 1940, to work on a new novel in a peasant’s attic, far from his busy family. It now seems incomprehensible, his departure ten days before the German invasion of the Netherlands, but that was not expected at the time. ‘Very competent authorities told him with confidence that there was nothing in the air for our country’, his wife wrote to the Flemish author Stijn Streuvels, literary example and friend of De Man.
When De Man heard that Germany had invaded the Netherlands, he immediately tried to return. At the consulate in Paris, however, he was told that he had embarked on an impossible undertaking – he had better go back to the Alps. He stayed there until early 1942, when he traveled via Lisbon to London, where he became an employee of Radio Oranje. Here he received the telegram informing him of the deportation of his wife and five of his children.
On July 29, 1942, five days before his family was taken away, De Man had spoken in a radio broadcast about thousands of ‘defenceless Poles’, who had been ‘put to death in gas chambers’. As far as is known, he was the first to talk about gas chambers at Radio Oranje. He could not have imagined that eleven days later the vast majority of his family would meet the same fate as the defenseless Poles.
In mid-1945 De Man returned to the Netherlands, from Curaçao, where he had been broadcaster of the Curaçao Radio Broadcasting for two years. There he found his only living children, Marietje and Joost. In the meantime, new residents had moved into his (rental) house.
Soon after the family was taken away, residents of Berlicum broke into the house. They left with looted stuff. Herman de Man’s literary archive was lost, his household effects were dragged by Berlicum. Among other things, the landlord placed the library in his attic and used it as collateral after the liberation when he confronted De Man with a small rent debt: if it was not paid, he could whistle for his possessions. A furious De Man did not pay.
Bitter and resentful, he turned his back on being a writer. Together with a friend he set up a company that focused on the import of English cars and motorcycles. On November 14, 1946, he returned from London from a business trip. The Dakota in which he was sitting crashed upon landing at Schiphol. All 26 people on board were killed. The life of 48-year-old Herman de Man, bereft of his wife, five children, his possessions and his illusions, ended as explosively as he had lived it.
Poesiealbum
At the end of last year, the Berlicumse Heemkundekring ‘De Plaets’ received the poetry album from Magdaleentje, the youngest daughter of Herman de Man. It came from the estate of a woman who bought it at a book fair over thirty years ago. It is most likely that it was stolen from the De Man family’s home in 1942 after the deportation.
The board of the Heemkundekring has accepted the acquisition. The fact that this is a question of stolen Jewish property was not a subject of open discussion. No contact was made with the only living daughter, Marietje Boserup-de Man, who moved to Denmark after the war. She is aware of her sister’s poetry album that has surfaced. ‘I wouldn’t have wanted it myself,’ she says, ‘but I would have donated it to the Literature Museum in The Hague.’