BOISSEVAIN | Frans Polak Family

Engelein de Booij and Frans Polak,
before the Nazi invasion, 1940.

The following powerful letter is posted here by permission of the writer, Maaike Knottenbelt, in Adelaide, Australia:

Hello John,

...from a person you do not know, but one who is overwhelmed by reading your chapter about Hilda Boissevain de Booij and her daughter Engelien, and Engelien's husband Frans Polak, in your 2015 post.

Since I'm not so digitally literate, I didn't think I would succeed in leaving the following comment on your blog, so I am writing direct and hope this reaches you.  

[This is the post that Maaike refers to: https://nyctimetraveler.blogspot.com/2015/02/the-first-year-of-dutch-occupation.html. There is another one that fills in more details, here: http://warriors-families.blogspot.com/2014/12/the-dutch-resistance-goldberg-family.html - JTM]

I have not previously read any of your writing although I probably should have. I am a niece of that young Jewish man Frans Polak, whom Engelien your cousin married in 1940. I have a copy of a photo of them on their wedding day (perhaps you have photos of that occasion too). 

I also have in front of me a letter from Engelien written on 24 July 1999, after Frans had died. It confirms what you already know from a Boissevain source, that although they divorced after the war was over, they remained on good terms with each other until his death. I did not know the reason for their divorce but what Engelien said to you, that the debt he owed to her for his survival [the Nazis seem to have usually spared the lives of Jews married to gentiles in Holland] was too great to bear, seems so plausible to me. 

My mother Meta Polak was Frans’ younger sister. My mother went out to the Dutch East Indies in December 1939. She married my father, Robert Knottenbelt, the following year, in Batavia, 12 November 1940. It is therefore unlikely she was at Frans and Engelien's wedding in 1940 in Holland.

My parents both became Japanese prisoners of war – my father on the Thai-Burma Railway together with one of his older brothers; my mother in Sumatra together with the wife and three young children of one of my father’s cousins.  Elly, the eldest sibling of Frans and Meta was in different camps in Java, together with her two-year-old son.  Her husband Bert van Helbergen was also on the Thai-Burma Railway, but in different camps from my father and his brother (who were not always together in the same camps either).  My maternal grandmother’s brother Piet van der Goot, his wife and child died in camps on Java.  All other family members survived the Japanese camps.

My maternal grandfather James Joseph Polak left Holland with my grandmother Tetta van der Goot for North Carolina in early 1940 before the Nazi invasion of Holland; he worked for the Enka Corporation.  His brother Ernest Polak was a District Court Judge and second wife Renee Polak-Hirsch did not.  Stolpersteine [10x10 cm brass markers for victims of the Holocaust, at their last location seen alive] were laid for them in Rotterdam on 7 April 2010.

There are family war-time letters, including two postcards from Renée to Frans and Engelien written under very straitened circumstances.  

I was so moved to read the letter written by Engelien’s mother to your grandmother in Washington DC, which Engelien translated for you. Do you have more war-time letters from Engelien’s mother or Engelien? Have you finished your book [about the Boissevains in WW2]?  

I grew up on a diet of your mother’s unforgettable books: The Cottage at Bantry Bay, Francie on the Run, Pegeen, The Mitchells (oh Angela and the angel! ), Andries, Kersti and St Nicholas — I know there is another one there whose title currently escapes me. [A list is here: http://www.lib.usm.edu/legacy/degrum/public_html/html/research/findaids/vanstock.htm.]

With a great deal of help I am currently in the processes of collecting, transcribing and translating the family WW2 correspondence, and collecting also those primary source documents that support information about the writers. Unlike you I am not trying to compile a wider family history; just focussing on the wartime correspondents, their correspondence, and any subsequent correspondence that refers directly back to that time. This will always remain an incomplete collection: in the extant correspondence there are references to letters that do not appear to have survived. Perhaps also, more may yet emerge. [The Amsterdam Archief has a lot of Boissevain letters, well indexed.]

My father, mother, older brother and myself migrated to New Zealand in 1951, where the sibling count increased to six. I have lived in Adelaide, South Australia since 1979 with occasional excursions overseas.  I hope very much to hear from you —

Most sincerely,

Maaike Knottenbelt 

Second letter from Adelaide, Australia: 

I include below just briefly two quotations from my English translation of a letter dated 8 October 1945 written by my maternal grandmother Tetta (with a postscript by James) to their son Frans.  They lived in Asheville, NC, and Frans was in London at the time.  It was a momentous day, with the receipt of two family letters: the first letter from Elly in 3 1/2 years confirming that she and young Kees were still alive; the other from my father in Bangkok, confirming the same. No news yet from Meta.

“Aunt Olga writes that they will move soon to Montreal, where her son-in-law Marlin has become liaison-officer with the Inter[national] Civil Aviation Ass[ociation].”

and from the brief postscript written by my grandfather:

We also received recently a short letter from Willem van Marle, at Camp Davis.  He cannot get any leave, so I fear we shall not see him.”

PORTSMOUTH ABBEY | Monastery in the 1940s

PORTSMOUTH PRIORY MONKS IN THE 1940s

Standing: Aelred (Barney) Wall, Andrew Jencks, Hilary, John, Crepeau, Julian, Peter, David
Seated: Placid, Crenier, Richard, Prior Gregory Borgstedt, Hugh Diman, Wilfrid Bayne, Joseph
Missing from Photo: Alban, Ansgar

The monks I got to know quite well when I was a student there in 1955-58 were Fr Aelred, Fr Andrew, Fr Hilary, Fr Peter, Fr Wilfred, Fr Alban.

WESTMINSTER ABBEY CONSECRATED | Dec. 28, 1065

Edward the Confessor (last of the great Anglo-Saxon kings)
directs construction of the Abbey. Drawing by Richard
Caton Woodville of Baltimore, Maryland, or his son.

December 28, 2019 – Westminster Abbey is today 954 years old.

The abbey church is formally called the Collegiate Church of St Peter at Westminster.

It is known as Westminster Abbey but is officially neither an abbey nor a cathedral. 

Elizabeth I made it a Royal Peculiar in 1560, which means that the church's dean and chapter report directly to the monarch. 

Henry III began building the present church in 1245. He  selected the site for his burial.

An abbey has existed on the site since around 1060, and the English Congregation of Benedictine monks occupied the area from  about 970.

King Edward the Confessor began building an abbey in 1042. On December 28, 1065, the abbey church was consecrated, a week before he died.

His successor Harold II was probably crowned there, but nobody much cares because he wasn't king very long. Harold was defeated and killed by William the Conqueror at Hastings. William was crowned on December 25, 1066 at the abbey.

Since then every English and British monarch has been crowned at the Abbey. Many royal weddings and funerals have been held there. Other notable people buried there include 16 monarchs, eight Prime Ministers and famous writers, actors, scientists and military leaders.

The Art. The impressive art showing Edward the Confessor directing construction in a manner that might ordinarily be better associated with leading a country into war, is signed by Richard Caton Woodville, although the History Today article that included the article says that the artists is "Unknown". Possibly the artist is Woodville's son, who had the same name and was also an artist and the "Jr." may have been stylized. See 

https://www.historytoday.com/archive/consecration-westminster-abbey, retrieved January 4, 2020. 

Your blogger has notified History Today that Richard Caton Woodville's name appears in the lower left of the art and he is a distinguished artist from Baltimore, Maryland. Baltimore's greatest 19th-century artist, Woodville was from a prominent family in the city. He was probably considered a black sheep for becoming an artist rather than a doctor or businessman, by marrying his first wife against their wishes, and then by divorcing and getting remarried to a fellow artist at the Düsseldorf Arts Academy in Germany, where he studied. He died in London in 1855, at just 30 years old, leaving behind only a few dozen works. His 16 known paintings were in a 2013 exhibition, “New Eyes on America: The Genius of Richard Caton Woodville,” at the Walters Art Museum in Baltimore. He died of a morphine overdose, and no one knows why, said Joy Peterson Heyrman, who curated the exhibition. 

Woodville was survived by his second wife, Antoinette Marie Schnitzler and their two children, one of whom was artist Richard Caton Woodville Jr.  He became a famous British battle scene painter. Woodville also fathered two children by his first wife. See the story by Philip Kennicott in the Washington Post, March 8, 2013.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/entertainment/museums/walters-art-museum-exhibits-baltimore-artist-woodville/2013/03/07/99cecf22-85dc-11e2-98a3-b3db6b9ac586_story.html.

NAZI PARTY | Birth, January 5, 1919

The original name of the Nazi Party, the
German Workers Party.

January 5, 2020 – This day in 1919, the German Workers' Party was created. Hitler joined it later in the year and it became his Nazi Party.

On September 12, 1919, Corporal Adolf Hitler was sent by the German Army to investigate the Workers’ Party, which by its name seemed to have Bolshevik leanings. 

Hitler was not impressed with the 25 people he found in the back of a Munich beer hall. He didn’t like what their leader said, and told them all so. https://www.historyplace.com/worldwar2/riseofhitler/joins.htm

The group, however, was impressed and invited him to join them. He did. The group became the Nazi Party. Within a year it had 2,000 members. In 1921, Hitler became its leader. https://www.history.com/topics/world-war-ii/nazi-party

By 1928, the Nazi Party had 100,000 members. https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/true-story-reichstag-fire-and-nazis-rise-power-180962240/

The Crash of 1929 gave Hitler the opening he needed. By 1934, he became Germany’s dictator. https://nyctimetraveler.blogspot.com/2016/08/hitler-aug-19-becomes-president-and.html

TIME TRAVEL | A. E. (George William Russell), Irish Futurist Poet

George William Russell ("A.E.")

George William Russell was an Irish poet, born in Lurgan, Ulster on April 10, 1867. He used as his pseudonym the letters A.E., signifying the diphthong "AE" as in Aeon. 

The following notes are based primarily on the entry for A.E. by JC in the Internet Speculative Fiction Database, and the entry by JE and JC on A. E.'s friend Joseph James O’Neill.

Much of A.E.’s work reflects a mystical agenda that he shared with William Butler Yeats. In 1886 they helped found the Dublin Lodge of the Theosophical Society. 

A. E.'s first book was a collection of supernatural tales, The Mask of Apollo, and Other Stories, published by Whaley in Dublin and Macmillan in London in 1904.

I have a copy of the first edition of The Mask of Apollo, illustrated by hand by my mother, Hilda van Stockum, in 1956, when we had left Ireland (having lived in the Dublin area for three years 1951-54 and in Paris for one, 1954-55) and were living again in Montreal. I am thinking of publishing the book with my mother's drawings. The book itself is now in the public domain, but not my mother's drawings.

Another book by A.E., published 18 years later, is described by JC as "more coherent" than The Mask of Apollo. It is called The Interpreters (Macmillan, 1922), set in a great City in the indeterminate future, as a long-lived Pax Aeronautica dissolves into factional warfare involving great Airships; those captured in this schism then engage in philosophical debates.

In another, later book set in a future Ireland, The Avatars: A Futurist Fantasy (Macmillan, 1932), two supernatural beings hauntingly invoke a vision of a world less abandoned to materialism. Their seductive discourse draws the protagonists to "the margin of the Great Deep", as Monk Gibbon puts it. Gibbon’s long, informative essay on A.E.’s work introduces The Living Torch (collected, Macmillan, 1937), a posthumous volume of nonfiction. "The House of the Titans", the long narrative tale that dominates The House of the Titans and Other Poems (a chapter in Macmillan’s 1934 collection), inhabits similar territory.

A.E. wrote an introduction to Joseph James O'Neill's book Land Under England (1935). A. E. takes the book to be a Satire on Hitlerian totalitarianism, an impression strengthened on the appearance of Day of Wrath (1936), a Future-War novel which describes the destruction of civilization in 1952 by advanced aircraft following a coalition between Germany, Japan and China (see Pax Aeronautica; Yellow Peril). 

A. E. died at 68 in Bournemouth, Dorset, July 17, 1935, at the height of his powers.

NIXON SIGNS ECO LAW | Endangered Species Act, Dec 28

Nixon Looking on as William Ruckelshaus
becomes the first EPA Administrator, 1970.

December 28, 2019 – On this day in 1973, President Nixon signed the Endangered Species Act.

In 1970 he created the Environmental Protection Agency and put it in the capable hands of the late William Ruckelshaus.

In 1972 he sent his environmental program to Congress, developed by the new EPA. Nixon said of it:

"This is the environmental awakening. It marks a new sensitivity of the American spirit and a new maturity of American public life. It is working a revolution in values, as commitment to responsible partnership with nature replaces cavalier assumptions that we can play God with our surroundings and survive."

He asked for the new Endangered Species Act to identify and protect threatened species. It also made hunting or capturing endangered species a federal offense. In 1973, the House and Senate versions were combined, and it was passed unanimously by the Senate and in the House by a vote of 355 to 4.

BIRTH | Marlene Dietrich, Dec 27

Marlene Dietrich

December 27, 2019–This day was born in 1901 the film actress and cabaret singer Marlene (originally named Marie Magdalene) Dietrich, in Berlin.

Her family called her “Lena”. Her father, Louis Otto Dietrich, was a former military officer who became a police lieutenant under the Kaiser. Her widowed mother married her husband’s best friend, Eduard von Losch, who was killed in World War I.

Lena Dietrich and her older sister Liesel were tutored at home in Germany, learning French, English, ballet, violin and piano. They attended the Augusta Victoria School for Girls. Lena also took up playing the mandolin.

When an injury precluded her pursuing a musical career, Dietrich pursued an acting career. continued acting in a diverse range of small roles before American director Josef von Sternberg discovered her in 1929 and put her in his famed film, The Blue Angel (1930), as Lola-Lola, the seductive cabaret singer in a top hat and silk stockings over whom a professor becomes obsessed.

Dietrich was appalled by what was happening in her beloved Germany in the 1930s and applied for U.S. citizenship in 1937. Adolf Hitler approached her and offered her a lavish income to return   to Berlin. She refused and Hitler banned her films and burned all copies of The Blue Angel, except for one he kept for himself.

In the United States, she spent time at the North Shore resort of Asharoken on Long Island (between Northport and Fort Salonga). It is where Antoine de Saint-Exupéry stayed on vacations, self-exiled, during the war years when he was writing The Little Prince. Eugene O'Neill was another artist who stayed there.

She decided to join the U.S. war effort, recording anti-Nazi broadcasts in German and taking part in war-bond drives. She entertained half a million Allied troops across North Africa and Western Europe. The troops loved her. She slept in dugouts and played a musical saw. Of her war efforts, she said, “This is the only important work I’ve ever done.”