 for the Friends of the Library. They allow us to do so much. And so really, just like them. And what is that on Amazon? Smiles? Yeah, smile. Yeah, thank you. So I am thrilled to have Mary Digi Fillmore with us. And we have collaborated with the Friends of the Library Library. This year, March Book 1 was Vermont Humanities Council between 1993. And so we planned a host of activities beginning with depictions of a dream. I see some field trippers that came to that. And that was honoring. This was with a BYO, and that was honoring Martin Luther King as well as Duke Ellington with the music. And it was pretty terrific. You know the kind of weather we had this winter. So second try, we made it. Still, it was an ice storm. Following that, we had a cartoon workshop with Rachel Lindsay of Seven Days. And because March Book 1 is a graphic novel, so we were bringing in teens and tweens with that, and we had some adults as well. Following that, the history of the concept of race with William Edelblass was fascinating, fascinating talk. And that has, to the counten word, transmogrify into a monthly meeting of talking about race issues. So if you're interested in that, our first meeting will be this Tuesday evening, 6.30, upstairs in the green room. And so we look forward to meeting on a monthly basis so we can the third Tuesday of the month. And then, other than the book's discussion, which is pretty typical with Vermont Reads, we're culminating our wonderful winter spring activities with Mary Dainty Fillmore. And it tied in so beautifully, the remember and resist. And so the whole theme has been with, you know, fighting injustice and standing up for what you believe. And even in the face of, well, you know, unforeseeable violence or whatever that may come upon you to stand up for what you believe. And I just hold my, I just have such a respect for those that are willing to take those risks to stand up for what's true and right and good. So I'll just do a little housekeeping and then introduce Mary. So we have bathrooms right outside, either side, the Vermont Humanities Council does like us to fill out a audience survey. So it won't take you a few seconds. So please do that. They're here on the table before you leave. If you could just do that, that would be wonderful. So Mary Dainty Fillmore lived in the Jewish Quarter in Amsterdam. And the stories of the Holocaust gripped her. And so she devoted 13 years of her life to researching and writing her book and address in Amsterdam is back there. And it's an excellent, Mary and Almias, demonstrate, it's an excellent book. It's a novel about a young Jewish woman who joins the resistance. They've won the Kirkus Indy Book of the Month and the Sergeant Women's Book Award for Historical Fiction. And so Mary leads conversations to promote a fairer, more peaceful world. And I'm thrilled that she's here and I'm really looking forward to this talk. So thank you, Mary. Thank you. Thank you so much. Thank you so much. I am especially appreciative of everybody turning out on such a beautiful, beautiful afternoon. But it is always a good day to remember what was done by the people who did dare to defy the Nazis. And that's most of what we'll be talking about today. So first I wanna thank Linda Siegel, whom you met, and the friends of the library, Judy, who does all the adult programming here, and Almi Landauer, the librarian here in Waterbury, who has very kindly agreed to help me with book sales because the friend who was supposed to has the stomach flu that many of you may have suffered from at some point. So thank you again, Almi. So what we're going to talk about today is how I became fascinated by this topic and pursued it. We'll look at why the Dutch resistance began and what the choices were at that time for people either to collude with what the Nazis were doing by minding their own business to actively collaborate by helping them or resisting. We'll be looking at each of those, but mostly we'll be focusing on the decision to resist. And then what the resistors actually did because resistance is a big word that covers a lot of activities. Then I'm gonna speculate about what they might say to us now, what kinds of warnings they might be giving us in our own times and then some next steps. So my connection with Amsterdam began not because I'm Jewish and not because I'm Dutch. My partner, Joanna, who is an astronomer, was invited to the University of Amsterdam in 2001 for a semester of research. And at that point I'd spent about 20 years having my own business as an organizational development consultant and I thought, hmm, sabbatical for her, sabbatical for me, this doesn't sound so bad. So we agreed that I would come and go, I would be there for a month, come back, work with clients for a month and do that for six months. So it was really a dream come true, especially because we were able to live on a wonderful canal, Helder-Sakata, which is right in the center of Amsterdam, not too far from the train station, if some of you have been there already. It wasn't quite as swanky as you can see it is now, this is a picture I took this spring, but it definitely had the charm of an ancient Amsterdam canal. Right up the canal from us was this lovely castle-like building which completely fulfilled my sort of fairytale fantasies about what living in Europe would be like. There was a daily market there where I could go and get food and I just, I was enthralled by the whole situation. Pretty soon I did get myself around to some of the museums and one of the ones I visited for the first time was the Jewish History Museum and that gave me a whole different view of the city than I had had before. Amsterdam had a huge Jewish community before 1940. There were 75,000 people in it, which is a lot in the city of 800,000 people, which incidentally is about the population today as well. It's about, that is, the overall population is the same. The Jewish population obviously is much less and we'll talk about that. But it was extensive. Jewish people had been there since the Spanish Inquisition. They came as merchants initially and then a much broader population was included. By 1675 they had built a magnificent synagogue, the Portuguese synagogue, which is huge. It's the equivalent of four stories, I would think. It is lit by a thousand candles. They don't have electricity there, which was a fortunate thing because it was one of the reasons why the Nazis didn't take it over and use it as a deportation center. The Jewish people were represented in every profession and art, especially prominent in medicine, music and law. But of course they were also in the sort of classic more working class occupations of being tailors and peddlers. The diamond industry, both the trading of diamonds and also the actual fabrication or refining of diamonds, those were almost exclusively Jewish professions. And the first labor union in the country was organized by the diamond workers so that by the turn of the 20th century there was a significant population in Amsterdam who were making a very good living as diamond workers. More than subsistence level. It was also a world center of Hebrew publishing. And incidentally, there was some work published in Yiddish as well, but Hebrew publishing was centered in Amsterdam at that time and there are some large collections of the works that were published there, as you can imagine. But it was very diverse in religious practice. There were lots of secular Jews, socialists and communists at one end and then extremely orthodox people at the other and everybody in between. Many people were highly assimilated. As I was working on my book, which I'll tell you about why I got hooked on it in a moment, but the single person who was most helpful to me in the later part was a woman named Loreen Nussbaum who is now in her 90s. She was a friend and contemporary of Anne and Margot Frank just about between those two girls' ages. They knew each other in Frankfurt before they came to Amsterdam. And when I gave Loreen the first draft of this book to review, that was probably draft eight or nine, she said, no, no, no. All the Jewish people have Jewish names. Absolutely was not the case at that time. Everybody had the same first names. No, unless you were ultra orthodox because everybody was going to school together, everybody was in sports together, people were doing, their lives were so much more together than we can imagine now in retrospect. So I thought that was quite fascinating. But in 1940, everything changed. Here's my wonderful castle just up the street and it's enclosed by barbed wire to indicate that it's inside the Nazi-defined Jewish quarter. I say Nazi-defined because although there were a couple of neighborhoods in Amsterdam that were predominantly Jewish, there was never a ghetto in the sense that there was in Eastern Europe. So this photograph definitely gave me a shock. This wasn't the Amsterdam that I thought I knew a little bit about. So I went to the Resistance Museum and that's the place that even though I know everyone wants to go to the Anne Frank house, so did I. I was very glad I went there. I've gone there repeatedly, but I really recommend the Resistance Museum because it's a lot of stories and it gives you a sense of what happened more typically to Jewish people. What happened to the Frank family was in some ways typical in that they ended up with all but one family member dying. But in some other ways, it was very unusual and you're welcome to ask me about that after if you'd like. So at the Resistance Museum, for the first time I got a grasp of those three choices between collusion, collaboration, and resistance. And I certainly learned that there was a range of resistance activities much bigger than I had ever thought before. But I also learned that the resistors were only a handful, less than 1% if historians are accurate. And in spite of their efforts, ultimately 80% of Amsterdam's Jewish population was rounded up and murdered. 104,000 people from the Netherlands as a whole. So this is a very shocking fact. It was something I wasn't prepared for at all. This is the kind of percentage you see in Poland and in Eastern Europe. It's the highest percentage in Western Europe. And of course the mystery is why? Especially given that Amsterdam had been the safest place in the world for Jewish people for about 400 years before this. So for me personally, it all came home even more dramatically when I found this photograph. You can see the little circle is a roundup that's happening in August of 42. And the thing about this photograph, although it's typical in some ways that jolted me, is that we were living in the house next door to the roundup, the house on the left. We were in the top floor apartment. You can see if you look closely, one of the curtains is drawn aside, so someone is watching. And I felt that somehow I had to become that person. I had to become that witness. Because this was about my neighbors. It was no longer something far away or abstract. But for an accident of time and place, I would have been there at that moment and I would have been watching. So I already felt emotionally committed to learning more. Then to our amazement, we were invited back the next year. It all came much closer. This is Anne Frank's room, if you, for some of you who have seen it before. But it came closer for me because we were living in a different apartment but just a little ways up the canal from Anne Frank's house in the Prinzengracht. And we learned that just over our heads in the attic, Jewish people had been hidden. And they were last seen fleeing over the rooftops as the Nazis shot at them. So that for me meant that not only were they my neighbors, they were living in my house. And so I had to learn as much as I could about what happened. And I knew I'd never find out, oh, it was Mr. and Mrs. Greenberg. I wasn't going to find out the exact details. But that I thought that if I learned enough about most people at that time and what was happening to most people, that I would be able to come up with a credible story about what might have happened. So that's how I came to 13 years of research and writing. This is a picture of me in that apartment where people were hidden right overhead with my best friend, Elian Vogelpolski, who was 22 years older than I. She had been hidden in plain sight as a Jewish teenager in Belgium. And so she was my first reader. She was the person who saw me through the first nine or 10 years of this process. And she had specific stories to tell me as did our landlord and landlady. So that formed an initial foundation for me. But in the course of the next 13 years, we were back in Amsterdam five times for six months and I stopped the foolishness of going back and forth. I just committed myself to being there and working on this project. So there were a lot of different ways that I went about trying to learn enough to write a credible historical novel that would be accurate in every particular that I could make it about events that happened to people of a different religion in a foreign country, speaking a language that I didn't speak. So to rise to that challenge, I went to many commemorations of important events connected to the Holocaust and resistance in the Netherlands. I'll talk more to you in a few minutes about the event that this commemorates. But this is a statue of the dock worker who's the symbolic figure of the only general strike in Western Europe to protest that first roundup of Jewish people. And in the foreground, not possible for you to see, but I can't with the more detail, there's a grandmother with her grandson saying this is what it's all about. So I also went to lots and lots of museums, both the specialized ones and then museums that were having particular exhibits. For example, there was a graphic arts museum that collected the artwork of the forgers. No, so not the forgery they did, but the art that they did before the war. I read, of course, many books. These are the two classics, victims and survivors on the left and ashes in the wind on the right. The one on the right was actually written by a man who was himself Jewish, who is a survivor, who survived through hiding. So he was commissioned to write a story of the destruction of the Jewish people in the Netherlands. For two years, he was supposed to do this. Well, he took 12, that made me feel that I was in good company. He took 12 and it's a telegram by telegram account of what happened. It's a quite amazing book to read. I do have a bibliography back there. Please help yourselves to a copy and there's an even more extensive bibliography in the book itself. I also went to lots of archives. Many people have asked me about the memoirs, where I got a lot of the information I got. There certainly are some very good published memoirs and interestingly some are beginning still to emerge. There was a new one published just two years ago online on Amazon, not available in physical form, but in electronic form. Because these old ladies on the hall, a lot of the men are gone, but the ladies in their 90s, some of them are coming forth with new books now, including Lorraine Nussbaum. And when her book comes out in October, you can be sure that I'll be donating a copy to the library here because it will be quite remarkable. But there's certainly a published memoirs, but I read lots and lots of memoirs that are little type scripts. Even some of them handwritten. Some of those I found in Amsterdam, some in Washington at the Holocaust Museum, but also some in the Simon Wiesenthal Center in Los Angeles. So these manuscripts are dispersed around the world. I also looked at many photographs. Photography was illegal during the occupation except for propaganda photos. So anything you see carries different weight because you know that the person who took that picture was risking arrest and then who knows what. And also artifacts. The first time I went to the commemoration of the liberation of the Westerbork transit camp, which was the place where all of the Dutch people who were going to be deported or virtually all passed through this camp at Westerbork. I was there for the 60th anniversary of liberation. And the Canadian officer who discovered the camp had with him a star, the leathery thick Jewish star that had been given to him by an old man who when the tank rumbled into the camp, this man climbed up and he ripped it off. And he said, take this. Take this. And so I got to hold that. Now, so these physical things bring you more into what actually happened there. I also spent lots of time just walking and watching in long stays and shorter ones. I spent many hours just sitting on a bench and writing about the weather. The people who were passing by in the cafes because those were the atmospheres in which all of these events took place. So the result of all that is a book called An Address in Amsterdam, which is the story of a young Jewish woman who joins the resistance. So double jeopardy, right? She's Jewish and she's a resistor. People often ask me why I wrote a novel rather than a work of nonfiction. But I think a story is often the doorway to learning about something new, especially if it's something as horrible as the Holocaust and as inspiring as the resistance. And we need to reach beyond the people who are already interested. People who are already interested will read nonfiction. I hope a lot of people who aren't already interested will be willing to read fiction. So now we'll turn for a moment to what I learned. Let's talk first about why the Dutch had to resist. We're just past the anniversary of the invasion of the Netherlands by the Nazis. This was not at all expected. The Netherlands had been neutral in World War I and their expectation was that they would be able to be neutral in World War II. Only the most pessimistic and cynical people felt that this was going to happen. So it was a big shock to everybody. And the Germans did their best to keep the Dutch as complacent as possible by not acting too badly too quickly. Here they are riding their bicycles through a neighborhood in Amsterdam, just having a look around to see what's going on. So they started out very slow and small, but pretty soon they started scaling up the persecution. One of their first acts, serious acts, was to fire all the Jewish professors at the state universities. And in the Netherlands, virtually all the universities are state institutions. So they told this man, Professor Klaveringer, that his job was to go in to the class that was taught by his mentor, Professor Meyer. They were both law professors. And to teach the class instead of Professor Meyer because Professor Meyer had been fired. Instead, what he chose to do was a whole lecture about Professor Meyer, why his work was so extremely important, the contributions he had made, who he had affected, his worldwide reputation. And as soon as the word spread that this was what was happening, students just flocked to this classroom. And at the end, at a time when every expression of Dutch identity was illegal, everybody stood and sang the Dutch national anthem at the end of that lecture. And it was such a significant moment that still today, every year, there is a lecture in this man's honor. And there's a wonderful little YouTube video about it which is worth looking up if you'd like the reference. My cards are there and so on. So just email me and I'm happy to send it to you. So this was a beginning moment. And the word spread very fast. The speech was literally duplicated that night and sent all around the country. That was a small moment of outright protest because the Nazis started cracking down pretty hard pretty quickly. There were Jewish people who began to defend their neighborhoods against the attacks, mostly of the Dutch Nazis at that point, not yet the Germans. And they were put on the front page of the newspaper and labeled as terrorists. Of course, who instigated it, right? But that didn't count. Propaganda was all over the place. This is the poster for that film, The Eternal Jew that you probably have heard of in Dutch. And very quickly, the signs in cafes and other institutions that once said Jews not wanted were substituted with forbidden for Jews. This was especially ironic. In parks, one of the loveliest parks in the city was given by a Jewish businessman who then, had he lived, would not have been able to walk through it. The first roundup happened in February of 1941. And this actually involved more than 400 young Jewish men. It was a very cold day. In Amsterdam, they don't get snow and ice very often, but it was happening that day. And they were forced to squat, if you can see well enough on the left. I know it's in historic photographs, so it's hard to see, but they were forced to squat with their hands in the air. They were there for almost three hours before they were taken away. And one of the jobs that I felt was important for me to do in my book was to reconstruct that scene as much as I could from eyewitness accounts, to recreate it for the reader. And my heroine, Rachel Klein, who's only 18 at this time, is there and witnesses it alongside others. So it's a moment when she's beginning to see what's really happening. And I think that was true for a lot of people. That up to that point, they were saying, oh well, maybe we can live with it. It's not so bad, but this was such an overt thing that they finally began to get really upset. Still, then as now, most people tried to live normal life. They tried to keep up with minding their own business. And of course, the result of that was disastrous. That by ignoring the situation, most people colluded with the process of rounding up these girls, even if they sympathized with the resistance. If they didn't do anything, that was part of what made this possible. I don't know if any of you recognizes this photograph, but it's Anne Frank, who is their second person from the left. It's her 10th birthday party. I believe there was one survivor from that group only. Some people actively collaborated in lots of different ways, through the black market, through turning people in, noticing how much laundry was hanging out of somebody's house, what sizes they were. Was that the kind of laundry that had always been there before? Or was it somebody else's? A lot of people in hiding were actually caught by that sort of mechanism. So if we look at numbers with collaboration and resistance, 24 or 25,000 people are estimated by historians to have been in the resistance. I think we can safely triple that number, because I think they're really only counting the people who made it their full-time job. And I think there were a lot of people who did a couple of good things for people they knew a couple of times. And to me, that counts. I don't think we should discount those small acts at all. But in contrast, 66,000 were convicted after the War of Collaboration. And the Netherlands does get a lot of credit for doing that. I don't think there's another country that held people as accountable as they did after the War. But if you think that there were 8.7 million people in the Netherlands at that time, you come out with my less than 1% number, even if you triple. No, because you'd have to have a lot more people involved to be more. However, there were a few very honorable days as well as a lot of small actions which still count for a lot. I mentioned the only general strike in Western Europe to protest the first roundup of Jewish people. Here's that dock worker we saw before, but now we're seeing him face on. You almost never go to that statue without seeing a few flowers. And at the time of February 25th, when there's a big commemoration, there'll be mounds and piles of flowers all around. But people still remember and still honor this symbolic figure. And this is actually, it's situated in the place where that first roundup took place. Right between that magnificent Portuguese synagogue I told you about and the four Eastern European Ashkenazi synagogues, it's right between them. So they deliberately did this in the heart of the community, the religious and cultural heart of the community. However, the Germans were not counting on the Dutch reaction to the first roundup. Hell broke loose is really the only way to put it. These people, 300,000 of the population of 800,000 turned out on the streets. It began with the dock workers and the tram workers and then expanded from there and just kept going. Rachel, my heroine, meets someone at that strike who can link her to the resistance which is just barely beginning to get organized at that time. So she makes a decision to resist. And I'd like you to just chat about it just for a few minutes to think about what might make somebody in that situation say yes, I wanna join up, I wanna do something and what might make her hesitate. I'm not asking for an answer to this question but when you think about the things that might have stopped her from joining in and doing something, I wonder, are those the same hesitations that we have today? When we think about being active no matter what it's about, are some of those factors still at play? So let's talk about how the resistors tried to stop the Nazis. Only a few spoke up as directly as Professor Clevering of. They made sure that the cost of doing that was so high that very few people did that. The public demonstrations stopped almost completely after the February strike because that was repressed so fully and so brutally. I can tell you details if you want them. We always think first of armed resistance when we think of the resistance but in fact there were many, many, many other kinds. One of the most important was that there were more than 100 underground newspapers in Amsterdam alone. Some of them were just little mimeographed sheets but they all carried information that people had no other way to get and in fact today all of the major newspapers date from that time. This is a newspaper that still exists. The other four or five major ones all had their origins at that time and they were delivered mostly by women couriers. This was the commonest occupation if you wanna call it an occupation for women in the resistance. There were thousands and thousands of women involved in this endeavor and that may sound kind of boring to you or kind of dull. Consider what happens when Rachel, my heroine, is making a delivery and the guy who's receiving it spots the police over her shoulder down at the corner of the canal so they dash through his house to the basement stairs. I'm just gonna read you two pages of what happens. The steps squeaked under her uncertain feet. In the darkness at the bottom the ceiling was shorter than she was so she hunched over, breathing in dank air. The door closed above her. She heard the man's steps shuffle softly then felt his hands on her shoulders, steering her. He switched on a flashlight. Go left, about two meters. He moved in front of her and they crept along. When he stopped in front of a large storage wardrobe he pressed his lips against the crack between the door and the frame to speak. She could hear the sound of his voice but not the words. A weak answer came from inside the wardrobe as the door creaked open. How could somebody breathe in there? So many people were crammed into addicts and basements all over the city. At first, almost no one had taken the Nazis that seriously. Like them, Rachel had believed the Netherlands would protect all of its citizens, Jews as well as Gentiles. It had been a sanctuary for centuries but everything had changed incalculably since the German Nazis swarmed over the Dutch border in 1940. Although only a few years had passed the era before the invasion felt as distant as her early childhood. Get in, the man ordered. She began to step inside but drew back when she heard a soft cry. Be careful, someone whispered. There are six of us in here already. The couriers also delivered in addition to the underground papers, they also delivered all kinds of documents that were forged by artists. This is a very rare photograph because it actually shows the faces of the people. Normally you only see the hands and of course remember all this photography was illegal and this is the kind of photograph that could get people killed. So it was very, very uncommon. And notice that there are about half and half women and men in this picture doing the forgeries. Removing the J on identity cards was one of their main jobs. Sometimes they did it directly, sometimes they created a whole new card which was of course commoner and a lot harder but a lot more likely to pass muster. It's thought that the artists are the ones who saved the most lives. Isn't that interesting? And this is just a little glimpse of the forger's workshop where you see their equipment and the intricacy of what the work that they were doing. Ration coupons were essential to life. You couldn't get food without them except at astronomically high black market prices. And very hard to forge. If you look at those little streaks in the background, it's really complex. Another form the resistance was helping people in hiding. This is Mi Pris who you probably know as the friend of the Franks. But I wanted to show you a picture of her at the age that she was when she did this. Cause so often we see pictures of her as an elderly lady and we think of her that way but no, she was a young woman barely in her 20s really who had just met the guy she was going to marry. They were living together. She had a whole life apart from the Franks and she was risking so much at that time. No, she says I stand at the end of a long, long line of good Dutch people who did what I did and more but in fact what she did was very exceptional. Remember she actually used to spend the night with them sometimes. Imagine how much that increased her own danger. Just because that meant they could play a game until two in the morning if they wanted to. No, it was purely a contribution to them. Similarly, many of you probably know about Cory Ten Boom's Watchmaker Shop and The Hiding Place. This is actually in Harlem. It's just as small as it looks. It's tiny, how they ever hid 16 Jewish people in there. I cannot imagine. They came through quickly so they weren't keeping anybody there very long but even so it is a tiny place and well worth visiting. It's just 15 minutes by train outside of Amsterdam. This moved me very much when her father who trained her as a watchmaker was told by the soldiers that they could kill him for what he was doing to help Jewish people. He said it would be an honor to give my life for God's ancient people. Another way people helped was smuggling children to safety. And this photograph is of a little boy on the right who I met in Philadelphia at a book talk about a year and a half ago. This is a man named Lex Vega and his war brother that is the other child in the family where he was hidden who was 12, he was six. And he was very fortunate. His parents finally listened. There was a resistance worker who kept coming by the house and saying, you know, you gotta get out of here. You know, you gotta hide. Well, if you won't hide yourselves, at least let me take the little boy. And finally his parents who had said, no, no, no. We're completely safe. We're the only Jewish family in this town but everybody knows us, everybody likes us. They would not let this happen to us. And happily the resistance worker said, you are wrong, this is happening all over the country. At least let me take the child. And so they did. And in this case, eventually the parents did come to their senses. They all hid and unusually they all survived. But these two men knew each other just after I met Mr. Vega, he and his war brother talked for the last time before his war brother died. But they were in touch even as old men which is quite wonderful. Then there was certainly some violent direct action bombing the population registry being the most notable example. This was carried out by artists. It was significant because these were the cards that were used to organize the roundups of Jewish people because the cards indicated where people lived and what their religion was. Almost all of the artists who were involved in this were executed and it was a huge blow to the resistance and to the forgery operation in which many of them were involved as well. One of the few who did escape was a woman named Frida Belinfante who made it to Switzerland and to Hollywood where she spent her career as a symphony orchestra conductor continuing her work from Amsterdam. Amazing. There was also cultural resistance. Once all of the musicians were fired from the orchestras and once Jewish people were not allowed to perform on the stage then of course they had still had to have a means of livelihood. So there were lots of house concerts and lots of informal ways for people to get together. People studied the things that were prohibited like Shakespeare. There were groups of people who read Shakespeare's plays to each other. Every act of trying to keep the mind free and to maintain cultural life. To maintain the love of music and art that people had had long before this happened and hoped to have long after it was done. That seemed to have been an important part in maintaining people's spirits along the way. So if we think about what the Dutch resistance did and didn't accomplish certainly it's a sad fact that most people colluded then as now in all countries but the resistors did make information very widely available so that even the colluders knew what was going on in a way they would not have through propaganda. And while the resistance didn't stop the Holocaust they did save 16,000 Jewish lives of people who were in hiding. That's about two thirds of the people who were in hiding survived. One third were betrayed and rounded up. But also I think most significantly perhaps the resistance gave the example to us and to future generations that resistance is always possible no matter how powerful the oppressor or the tyrant is. When we think about people in the resistance in general it gives me a sense of awe. When I think about the Jewish resistors I feel that even more and that's why I wanted to give so much of my life to writing about them and learning about them. So when we think about what we can learn from these people I think there certainly are a lot of differences between our situation and occupied Amsterdam. We're in a constitutional democracy. We have separation of powers. All of our systems were designed to avoid dictatorship and our press is still freer than a lot of presses around the world and there are many other differences. Even so I think if the resistors could speak to us now there are some things that they would be warning us against. The first is demonizing people because of their religion, their race or whether they are immigrants or refugees. That would definitely be something that would raise red flags to the resistors of the past. They'd also warn us against closing our doors to refugees as we did with the St. Louis, a ship full of Jewish refugees, most of whom they came to Cuba, circled around Cuba, waited for US permission, never got it, went back, stopped briefly in England. The few people who got off the ship in England survived virtually everybody, a whole shipload who went on to Europe were killed. So we don't want to bear that kind of responsibility morally and ethically again. I think also that the resistors would be alarmed by the increased use of propaganda, the rise in anti-Semitic attacks but also in anti-Muslim attacks and more than 4,000 in the last recorded year based on race, hate crimes, according to the FBI. So whether these are warnings that you personally consider important or not, I think we are all in the same position as people in Amsterdam in that we have to decide whether we're going to collude or collaborate or resist. Things that we know are wrong. We may differ about what those things are but the question of whether we engage in our democracy and take action on the things that we care about is a very pressing one and we know what the resistors would say about that because everyone can resist what they know is wrong. In the Dutch resistance, all of these people were involved, bankers, surgeons, shop clerks, children, there's a lady in Middlebury who was about nine at the time that a German officer arrived in her neighborhood. She made a tail, a false tail and she tied it onto the back of his bicycle so whenever he rode around the neighborhood, the tail would go waving out behind and took a long time before somebody told him, right? But we also need to seek information so that we can counteract the propaganda that we're being given and it's coming from all sides now, just not just one or the other. And we have to be on guard against the hatred of any people as a group. Whenever we start those generalizations, we're going down a very bad path and that includes catching ourselves thinking like Nazis and stereotyping people or considering them as a class or as a group. We can't wait to be asked for help by people in desperate situations. We have to educate ourselves and reach out. I can't tell you how many accounts I read of people who needed a place to hide in Amsterdam who had to ask people proactively that nobody came to them and offered even though they had space and they had the situation that would have supported it but they didn't have the guts to say, yeah, I'll take a stand on this. When we see warning signs that bad things are happening to our democracy, we have to act early while we still have the freedom to do so. I think by the time a lot of Dutch people really realized how dire the situation was, it was too late and we don't wanna be in that position. So what does resistance look like in our own time? To me, it looks like this young woman who I met on the streets of New York, canvassing for Greenpeace. We had a wonderful conversation and I gave her a book and we went back and forth for a while. I think that to me is what resistance looks like. It's not just people my age, it's also younger people who are taking on some of these questions. So in terms of what's next, I hope you'll talk to people about that time in relation to our own. Read books, watch films about this time so that you can spread the stories to the people who need to hear them and find actions that match whatever your deepest commitments are. Whether they're about human rights, whether they're about refugees and immigrants, whether they're about the environment or something totally different. But be active, I think, is the main message that these people would want to convey to us. I know many of us have those famous words of Anne Franks about people being good at heart and blazoned in our minds, but there's another quotation from her that I'd like to close with that I like even better. How wonderful it is that nobody need to wait a single moment before trying to improve the world. Okay, thank you. So I'm eager to have any of your questions directly on exactly what I've talked about or they might be adjacent to it and that's fine too. Yes, please. What happened to the professor? What happened to the professor? He was arrested, he was stripped of his post, but he was not executed as far as I know. And what happened to Professor Meyer is even more interesting. Professor Meyer was arrested, he was incarcerated, but he wasn't killed and he came back to the University of Leiden, back to the law faculty and he authored the Dutch civil code that is in today. So you think about all the people who didn't make it and what they could have contributed to society. Do we know where he was during the war? I don't know which place he was in turn, but it's knowable, I can find out for you. Others? Yeah, please. I'll just share, when I went to college I was very young and met a young man there and we were very friendly. He was, I graduated from school of architecture. It was a year in our friendship of hanging out together before I learned that he had been hidden underground by his mom until he was still nursing at five or six years old and that the Philadelphia friends had funded some of these people coming to the United States and he was one of the fortunate ones and was enrolled in Gerard School for the Boys from which he graduated and the funder was my aunt. How wonderful. So she was just telling the story of a young man who she knew in college. They were friends for about a year and it took most of that year before he revealed that he'd been in hiding with his mother as a child and got out because of the generosity of some of the Philadelphia friends and the particular funder who helped him was this lady's aunt. Great, thank you, beautiful story. Do you think history, teaching of history or schools is strong enough? I always ask that question when I see these high school kids or doing the Nazi salute or something. I say, are they being taught this in school? What are your thoughts there? I think that a lot of history is being taught as something very abstract that doesn't have much to do with us today and so to me having this history in particular be taught in a more interactive way seems really important. I've known about some approaches that use theater, for example, to get kids to act out different parts and to start analyzing, well, what would cause a person to go in this direction versus that direction versus the other direction? One of the great things in the Resistance Museum in Amsterdam is that there is a whole section for young people and it takes specific children who actually lived, I think there are five of them. One of whom is the child of a collaborator, you know, one of whom is the child of a resistor, you know, all the different positions basically and talks about how were those decisions made? What did their lives consist of? And I think approaches like that that are very personal and that engage people are very important because it's hard to imagine that a person who had had that kind of education would be capable of wanting to replicate the horrors of the past. Yeah. If you were to make a parallel between that time and this time, where would you see us right now in comparison to that time? I'm as far as what is happening in this country. He's asking about parallels between that time and this time in our country. I think that the narrowing of the press is one of the things I'm most alarmed about. That facts are not considered to be intact and truthful, that we're being barraged with so much that isn't true all the time, that people are beginning to believe that there aren't facts that, you know, it's all propaganda. And of course that really, that isn't true. I'm alarmed about what we're doing on human rights in our country. To me demonizing and criminalizing asylum seekers people who have already suffered so much is just unthinkable. And to do that to children in particular seems so counter to the way that I certainly was brought up thinking of the United States. And I think we're at a point where people, people who care about a particular issue, whatever it may be, really have to take action. That we can't allow the people who are on the extremes to go on having, creating divisions and controversy in a way that prevent most of us from making alliances to do the things that most people in the country want done. That's a short, a short answer. One more and then I think we'll probably want to adjourn. Do you, just a second, did you have one more thing you wanted to say? I'd like to share. So I'm a member of Will, the Burlington chapter which is Women's International League for Peace and Freedom. It's about a hundred years old now. And there is an issue, a peace issue that has come up. Many Burlaponians and other people have been very concerned about the F-35s. And usually in the past for reasons of sound and development, in very, just a few months ago, we did learn that they are nuclear capable and that they will be carry nuclear materials. And we've had some very interesting testimony around that. So to me that becomes a peace issue. And so people can come and talk to you. Great. Sitting right here in the front row. Thank you. And then there was a lady in the back row who had a question and then we're gonna close. Yeah. Thank you. I was just kinda wondering how you learned the difference sort of when people are sort of either making conscious or unconscious choices to be either coworkers or resistors. Yeah. And sort of what the thinking was or if there was thinking that sort of pushed people in one direction or another. How do people decide whether to collude or to resist? Most of the resistors were people who had a strong belief system. Sometimes it was religious, sometimes it was political. Or they had a personal connection with people who were actually affected. And there were some who were adventurers. That was true too. But I think for a lot of people it was because they had an ethical framework or a religious framework in which they knew this is not right. And it was happening under their noses to their neighbors. And so that the people who say, oh no, we didn't know it's in Amsterdam that's really not credible. No, because people, because Jewish people lived all over the city, it doesn't wash. Okay. So I so appreciate your being here on this lovely afternoon. We have beautiful refreshments back there. We also have books. They're $12 for one or $20 for two. I'll be happy to inscribe them. And I'm so pleased that you were here today. Thanks again. Thank you.