Behind Our Doors: A Memoir of Esther Warmerdam as Told to William Butt (2011) by Esther Warmerdam

Esther Warmerdam, a Catholic Netherlander, was born in 1929 in Hillegom, a small town to the southwest of Amsterdam.Eleven years later, on May 10, 1940, Warmerdam's country was invaded by Nazi Germany.In Behind Our Doors: A Memoir of Esther Warmerdam as Told to William Butt, Warmerdam recounts her experience of the Second World War.While central to her story is her parents' providing refuge to over 200 Jews in their home, at great risk to their family, Warmerdam's recollection is more of a coming of age story of a young girl losing her innocence while grappling with the effects of war.Warmerdam's memoir is rich in detail, told with a childlike honesty that reflects her age during the war.Its simultaneously chronological and thematic organization, alongside its simple writing style, make it easy to read and suitable for a young audience as well as adults.Considering the book's mature subject matter, this memoir could serve as an excellent educational tool for students of history aged 13 and above, as it advances the wartime narratives commonly taught in educational institutions.Behind Our Doors portrays life in the occupied Netherlands, a country that was directly affected by the Second World War, but which remained on the war's periphery through its limited experience of active combat.As such, the teaching of the Dutch war experience is often neglected in schools, Anne Frank's The Diary of a Young Girl (1947) aside.Yet despite living on the fringes of war, Warmerdam explores the all too common wartime dilemmas that she and her family faced.Not only did Warmerdam have to contend with food rationing, unexpected house searches, and the disruption of her education, but she also had to learn to live with the individual isolation that often accompanies times of extreme stress and uncertainty.Warmerdam's experience thus moves beyond the sensational, beyond active combat or bombing or the Holocaust, to demonstrating how the consequences of war, however unusual, however small, become something to integrate into one's life to simply live.Central to Warmerdam's wartime experience was her parents' decision to harbour Jews.According to Warmerdam, her parents were moved to do this by their Catholic faith, as well as the death of their infant daughter, Elizabeth, in 1942.In their minds, the death of their innocent daughter not only gave the family a guardian angel, but also reinforced that "life was what you loved and tended" (p.13).Hiding Jewish fugitives from Nazi authorities was a constant source of anxiety, stress, and danger to her family, something that Warmerdam represents very well in her narrative.While the decision put great strain on everyone involved, Warmerdam describes a myriad of coping mechanisms for allaying the constant fear of discovery and arrest, from her

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