On the Dutch - Nina Siegal in Haaretz:

‘When I moved to the Netherlands from New York in 2006 my first apartment was in the center of the city, around the corner from the Jodenbuurt, the Jewish neighborhood, known today as the Jewish Cultural Quarter.
I was struck by the monuments to deep-rooted Jewish cultural history in the heart of Amsterdam – several synagogues clustered together, a wonderful Jewish museum and a former Jewish theater. But I had a hard time finding other Jews. I rarely saw anyone in Orthodox or traditional Jewish garb; no kippas or wigs. Stranger still, people rarely openly identified themselves as Jewish, and I would only discover that they were years later.’

(…)

‘I included long excerpts, organized into a kind of polyphonic narrative, like a novel written from multiple perspectives. I provide the historical context and background to each diarist’s story, and explain how their views reflected larger aspects of the war. The book interweaves these historical narratives with present-day stories of the children and grandchildren of the diary writers, their archivists and inheritors. Thus, the title “Diary Keepers” has multiple meanings.
Three of the diaries I chose were from Jewish writers: Mirjam Levie-Bolle, a secretary for the Amsterdam Jewish Council; Meijer Emmerik, a diamond cutter who went into hiding; and Philip Mechanicus, a mid-career journalist who spent 17 months at the Dutch Nazi transit camp Westerbork.’

(…)

‘I also chose Elisabeth van Lohuizen, a grocery store owner from the small town of Epe who formed a resistance group that saved dozens of lives, and Ina Steur, a 17-year-old factory clerk who had no particular political affiliation.
To hold these diaries in my hands felt like touching the past. Some were written in worn school cahiers, the kind my daughter uses in class as exercise books, their covers faded and pages sepia toned.
Some were beautifully illustrated with drawings, maps, and watercolors. The handwriting was sometimes a confusing scrawl; in others, elegant, careful cursive. Some had been photocopied and others transferred onto black microfiche film papers – illegible without a machine. Every one of them was a voice that wanted to speak, a world of memory I wanted to grasp and pull out of the darkness of the archives folders and into the modern world.’

(…)

‘Loe de Jong, a Jewish journalist who fled to London after the German invasion and who also worked for Radio Oranje, became director of the NIOD and went from house to house asking members of the Dutch Nazi party, among others, for their diaries and personal documents.
The institute sought to represent a broad section of the population with these diaries – people from different professions, political backgrounds and every strata of society. As the diaries department head, A.E. Cohen, said at the time, the collection “need not be many, but they should be various.” Farmhands and teachers, lawyers and journalists, old and young, women and men, fascists, Jews and every shade of collaborator and resistor.
When I began working on a book, my idea was to use the collection of diaries as it was intended, to offer a broad view of the war from the eyes of those who witnessed it, a 360 degree perspective on key historical moments. But as I worked my focus veered away from Bolkestein’s “struggle for freedom” and toward the question of how “ordinary” citizens had understood, related to, and, to a greater or lesser degree, accepted the persecution of the Jews and the Shoah as it unfolded in the Netherlands. I wanted to understand, from many perspectives, how the Netherlands ended up with the largest percentage of victims of any Western European country.
There was no single answer, but through the story of each diary, I found part of the answer. One historian, for example, had argued that the Dutch Jews were “caught in a natural trap” because of the Netherlands’ geography and topography. Adjacent to Germany, the only exit was through Belgium and France, both occupied, or the endlessly-bombarded North Sea. The flat landscape with no mountains and few forests made hiding difficult.’

Read the article here.

Philip Mechanicus’ diary is an incredible document. It has been translated into English, but it never got the attention it deserved.

The question why so many Dutch Jews were killed remains difficult.

I’m not sure how important were topography and geography.

The fact that unlike Belgium the Netherlands had a civil government under German occupation and many of the civil servants worked with and for the Germans to avoid the worst didn’t help.
The Dutch Jews were not very religious, not very Zionistic and rather proletarian, in other words, poor and without connections, this might explain why many Jews believed that going into hiding was a greater risk than abiding by the rules.
The Jewish council didn’t help much, but the same can be said about Jewish Councils in other European countries. Poland is a slightly different story.

A Dutch historian offered the explanation that many Jews from Eastern Europe had fled to France and Belgium and that these Jews had a better understanding of what to expect from the Nazis than many others and were able to inform their fellow sufferers.

The efficacy of the civil register proved to be of enormous help for the Nazis.
And many of the civil servants among them the policemen wanted to be efficient as well.
I’m skeptical about any claim that the Dutch were more antisemitic than people in other European countries and not because I like the Dutch so much. They were perhaps used to being obedient. They were a bit more Prussian than their self-image was telling them. Rules are rules.