Books: Slow-Kindled Courage

THE NETHERLANDS AT WAR: 1940-1 945 by Walter B. Maass. 264 pages. Abe-lard-Schuman. $6.95.

For most Americans, the story of The Netherlands during the second World War is the story of a life in the attic: The Diary of a Young Girl by Anne Frank. What this concise new history of the Dutch experience demonstrates is that at the end of five years of Nazi occupation, the country itself had become a kind of attic of history —cold, cramped, empty of food, a dangerous refuge that the occupiers could still ransack to find men for their labor camps—but so strategically insignificant that...