Forgotten stories as a rich source for historical fiction
The Wartime Nurse: Book Three in The Dutch Girl Series
Readers of my historical fiction books will know that I have a passion for discovering stories about the Dutch who lived under brutal German occupation during World War 2. Over the past decade I have uncovered stories about a woodland hideout for Jews, the astonishing bravery of young boy who bravely smuggled letters into a Dutch concentration camp and the remarkable account of three young women (two were sisters) who became key members of Dutch Resistance.* I’m exploring two more for forthcoming novels.
My latest, The Wartime Nurse, is the third book in The Dutch Girl Series, and follows the story of Freddie Oversteegen, who was just fourteen when war broke out. Like her sister, Truus, and their friend Hannie Schaft, the three women banded together to take terrifying action against the Nazis and their collaborators. Women in wartime were expected to keep the home fires burning and let the men get on with the fighting. However, these relatively unknown women were prepared to give their lives for what they believed in, the right to defend their country from the enemy.
My interest in stories set in wartime Holland stems from my Dutch background and listening to my Dutch mother’s stories when I was growing up. She was nineteen and excited by the prospect of going to University in Leiden when war broke out. Four years later, the Universities had been closed by the German authorities who were still very much in control. The Dutch population was on the point of starvation as the weather turned bitterly cold. It was only through my mother’s resourcefulness and grit that she was able to feed her family by boiling tulip bulbs that she’d dug up from the frozen soil.
Discovering a forgotten wartime secret deep in the Dutch Veluwe woods
It wasn’t until years later that I had thoughts of becoming a historical fiction writer. It happened the day I stumbled across an underground hut hidden deep in the Veluwe woods in a beautiful area of the Netherlands. By the side of the cycle path I was on was a large granite stone with an inscription in Dutch to the local community who had sacrificed so much to help fugitives during World War 2. Close by was an information board with illustrations of a woodland village that had been created in 1943 to protect people who were on the run from the Nazis. I’d never heard about this place despite many years cycling through these woods.
Intrigued, I walked deep into the woods in search of the underground huts. They were so well hidden, that I could only imagine what it must have been like for these people, forced to keep quiet all day and forbidden to light fires, because smoke would have alerted the patrolling Germans to this woodland village of some eighty people.
Underground huts were cleverly concealed with branches and moss
Eventually my eyes focused on a slight indentation in the soil amongst the trees. It was covered with moss and pine branches. To one side was a low wooden door and I entered into a dark cramped dwelling. It took a moment or two to register bunk beds hewn from tree trunks and a central round wooden table and stools. It was hard to imagine what kind of a life the people who lived here must have had. How could so many people have survived here for so long without being detected by the Germans who were known to roam these woods in search of Jews?
Inside the hut where Jews successfully hid from the Germans
The very idea of it made my spine tingle and set my imagination on fire. It was a story that few people had heard about but I felt it needed to be told. I wanted to be the person to tell that story.
The next step was research, but I found very little had been written about the place, until I discovered a book called Het Verscholen Dorp (the hidden village) written in Dutch on a second-hand website. Together with my mother’s stories about her life during the war, I felt qualified to start writing.
After The Hidden Village had been published on Amazon and my publisher had persuaded me to write a sequel called Hidden in the Shadows, I thought about what to write next. A friend asked if I knew about Kamp Amersfoort, a Nazi-run concentration camp where 37,000 people, mainly Jews and dissidents, were imprisoned between 1941 and 1945. My friend told me that not many people knew about it and I should go and find out for myself.
While I was as the visitor centre shop at Kamp Amersfoort I bought a book about a local farmer and his son who were granted access by the German authorities to go into the camp daily to collect potato peelings for their cattle. I was captivated by this story, just as I had been the first time I visited the real hidden village, and the idea for a novel seeded itself in my mind. A novel that would hopefully give insight into a concentration camp that few people knew about yet was every bit as important as the German camps that have been extensively written about. That novel became The Girl Across the Wire Fence, based on the true story of ordinary people who risked their lives help prisoners at one Holland’s largest, yet least known, concentration camps.
With a new publisher (Bookouture) supporting my quest to write Dutch wartime fiction, I went on to write The Boy in the Attic, followed by the Dutch Girls Series: The Girl from the Resistance, The Girl with the Red Hair and The Wartime Nurse.*
Compelling stories such as these deserve to be better known, no more so than at the present time with so much conflict across the world. I believe we should always remember that the stories of the past can teach us much about ourselves and the lives of other people.
Discover the book inspired by Freddie Oversteegen, one of three female Dutch Resistance fighters, who stopped at nothing to protect the innocent: https://geni.us/B0CYHLVQXPauthor
*Find out more about these books by clicking on the above Books link