Behind Our Doors: A Memoir of Esther Warmerdam as Told to William Butt (2011) by Esther Warmerdam
Bibliographic record
Abstract
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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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.003 | 0.009 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.017 | 0.017 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.009 | 0.009 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.006 |
| Research integrity | 0.006 | 0.015 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.005 | 0.002 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".