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 it was bypassed by the liberators until the very end.
Perhaps nothing better illustrates the changes wrought by the occupation than two wartime jokes that Author Walter Maass—a Vienna-born chemist who worked with the Dutch resistance—retells in his book. In 1940, when the occupation began, the Dutch stores were so well stocked that German officers spent much of their time shopping for delicacies unavailable at home; a British agent in a German uniform was caught, the story goes, because he wasn't carrying any packages. In 1945, the humor was more of the gallows variety: facing a German firing squad, two Dutch boys smile when they are told that their sentence has been changed to hanging. "They are losing the war," says one to the other with satisfaction. "They lack ammunition."
The Dutch sense of humor may have persisted during the ordeal; very little else did. The Dutch surrendered to the Germans shortly after invasion, only hours after the bombing of Rotterdam and with only 2,100 army dead: they meant to survive. For the first three years of the war, most of the Dutch went about their business with inexplicable efficiency. The trains operated on time even when they began carrying Jews off to concentration camps. Then two things began to affect the Dutch mood: the growing hope for an Allied victory, and the increased tyranny of the conquerors. Reprisals soared. The country was stripped of consumables. Out of hope and anger came courage.
In the most vivid passages of Maass's book, the railroad workers finally rebel. In September 1944, the nation's trains simply grind to a halt. But the gesture is both too late and too early. An airborne invasion is stopped at Arnhem, and Allied forces drive past The Netherlands into Germany. Crippled by their lack of transportation, the Dutch freeze and starve. In January 1945, the food ration is down to 500 calories a day; families eat tulip bulbs and "roof rabbit" —cats and dogs. Bread on the black market is $27 a loaf. Abandoned houses are torn up for firewood. Not until just before the German surrender do Allied food drops begin.
"Barricades are rarely built by bureaucrats," writes Author Maass in explanation of the slow-kindling Dutch resistance. But sometimes circumstances drive them to that point, and Maass's book—orderly and stolid as the people he writes about—derives its fascination from showing it happen.