Join us on Monday 27 January 2025 for the event ‘Fragments of the Past: Holocaust Legacies and Commemoration’ and explore how the Holocaust has shaped memory, identity, and culture. Bringing together scholars, historians, and artists, this conference examines the Holocaust’s profound and enduring impact, as well as the varied methods used to preserve its legacy.

From antisemitism in post-First World War Hungary, the Jewish Resistance to the Holocaust, and the commemoration of hidden killing sites in postwar Poland, to Soviet depictions of the Shoah in film and contemporary counter-monument approaches, the programme offers insights into Holocaust memory and its ongoing significance.

‘Fragments of the Past: Holocaust Legacies and Commemoration’ event poster

The conference is organised by the European Collections section of the British Library in partnership with the Polish Cultural Institute. The event is open to all, and attendance is free, but registration is required. Booking details can be found here.

Programme:

Date: 27 January 2025
Location: Eliot Room, Knowledge Centre
Time: 2 pm – 5 pm

• Antisemitic versus Jewish Humour in Budapest Post-WWI
  Prof. Dr Béla Bodó, Department of East-European History, University of Bonn
  
  
• The Jewish Resistance to the Holocaust
  Dr Halik Kochanski, Writer and Historian, Fellow of the Royal Historical Society
  
  
• ‘The grave […] has been planted over with potatoes’: Transnational Jewish Fight to Commemorate Holocaust Killing Sites in Poland in the First Postwar Decades
  Dr Janek Gryta, Lecturer in Holocaust History, University of Southampton
  
  
• Representations of the Holocaust in Soviet Cinema
  Prof. Jeremy Hicks, Professor of Russian Culture and Film, Queen Mary University of London
  
  
• There and Not There: (Im)Possibility of a Monument
  Paulina Pukyte, Interdisciplinary Artist, Writer, Curator, and Critic
  
  
• Poetics of the Archive in Marianne Rubinstein’s ‘C’est maintenant du passé’ and Ivan Jablonka’s ‘Histoire des grands-parents que je n'ai pas eus’
  Dr Diane Otosaka, Postdoctoral Research Fellow in Holocaust Literature, University of Leeds

Usually around the start of a new year we look back over our previous year’s blogging before turning our faces to the future. This time we’re actually looking back over 2023 as well as 2024 because BL blogging activity was suspended for a while following the cyber-attack on the Library in October 2023, so we couldn’t do a review of that year at the time. And to break up the prose, we include some wintery scenes from the BL’ s Flickr stream.

Reindeer from Sophus Tromholt, Under Nordlysets Straaler. Skildringer fra Lappernes Land (Copenhagen, 1885) 10280.eee.13.

Both years saw our usual excitement over the annual European Writers’ Festival held in May. In 2023 we featured an interview with Greek Cypriot writer Anthony Anaxagorou,  winner of the 2024 RSL Ondaatje Prize, while in 2024 we published a series of posts, beginning with this one, profiling some of the authors featured in the festival. As usual, literature featured in many other posts. We celebrated the award of the 2023 Nobel Prize in Literature to Norway’s Jon Fosse and mourned the death in 2024 of Albanian author Ismail Kadare. We were proud to learn that our Curator of Italian, Valentina Mirabella, was one of the judges of the 2024 Premio Strega, a major Italian literary prize, and she wrote about her experience for us.

A theme that ran through both years was the work of the Endangered Archives Project to preserve cultural heritage from Eastern and Southeastern Europe. Our coverage included posts on the indigenous peoples of Siberia, minority communities in Bulgaria, an important Serbian family archive, and material relating to the Ukrainian writer Taras Shevchenko, who was also the subject of a small display in our Treasures Gallery. 

Polar scene from Die zweite Deutsche Nordpolarfahrt in den Jahren 1869 und 1870, unter Führung des Kapitän Karl Koldewey, edited by Alexander Georg Mosle und Georg Albrecht (Leipzig, 1873-4) 10460.ff.11.

Events in the library are a regular source of inspiration for our blog posts. In 2023 we highlighted events commemorating two colleagues who died in recent years: a symposium on Italian Futurism was dedicated to the memory of Chris Michaelides, former curator of Italian and Modern Greek, who did much to build our collection of Futurist books. The Graham Nattrass Lecture, in memory of the former Head of Germanic Collections is an annual event, and in 2023 marked the 80th anniversary of the arrest and execution of members of the German resistance group ‘Die Weisse Rose’. A conference on European political refugees in Britain generated posts on the same topic, including one on how the then British Museum Library became ‘a lifeline of books’ for Polish refugees from Soviet and Nazi occupation. On a lighter note, we celebrated the BL’s annual Food Season in May 2024 with a post introducing a selection of cookbooks from around the continent.

In summer 2024 we went a bit sports mad with both the European Football Championships and the Summer Olympics taking place. We highlighted the world-beating football tactics of the Hungarian ‘Golden Team’ in the early 1950s and the ‘Miracle of Bern’ that saw them unexpectedly beaten by West Germany in 1954’s World Cup, as well as exploring why the Dutch fans show symptoms of ‘orange fever’ at international matches. Our Olympic posts included explorations of the political side of the supposedly apolitical games in Czechoslovakia and the two German states during the Cold War, and a look at the Baltic States’ love for (and proud record in) basketball.

The northern lights, from Emmanuel Liais, L’Espace céleste et la nature tropicale, description physique de l’univers (Paris, 1866) 10003.d.10.

But not all our blog posts are driven by events and unifying themes. As ever, we continued to write about items from our vast and varied collections, from Georgian manuscripts to contemporary Queer writing in Poland, via a Russian Braille edition of The Hobbit, French caricatures from the Franco-Prussian War, and pamphlets from the Cypriot independence campaign.  We also explored stories of the Slovenian Enlightenment and the first Professor of Spanish in Britain, and discovered the hidden but crucial role played by women in underground publishing under the Polish Communist regime.

As we head into 2025 we would like to wish all our readers and contributors a very happy new year. We look forward to bringing you another year of stories and discoveries from the Library’s European Collections.

Susan Reed and Hanna Dettlaff-Kuznicka, European Studies Blog Editors

Ice-skating, from A.J. van der Aa, Ons Vaderland en zijne Bewoners (Amsterdam,1855-57) 10270.f.5

On Friday 15 November at the British Library conference European Political Refugees to the UK from 1800, I spoke about a little-known group of ordinary people who travelled to the UK from occupied Netherlands, between 1940 and 1944, called ‘Engelandvaarders’, or ‘England Farers’. It sounds simple enough, but it was a very dangerous undertaking and many did not make it.

One of those whose attempt failed was Binnert Philip de Beaufort (1919-1945)

Binnert Philip de Beaufort (1919-1945), from the fourth edition of his book Kerstmis in Scheveningen (Hilversum, 2021) YF.2022.a.7493.

Binnert had been on a mission to take some important papers to England via the Southern Route, which led from the Netherlands through Belgium, France, Spain and Portugal. Almost a thousand England Farers took this route to England. He set off for England in 1942, but when he arrived in Brussels he was betrayed, arrested and taken back to the Netherlands where he was imprisoned in Scheveningen Prison. This prison held people persecuted by the Nazis: Jews, gay people, Jehovah’s Witnesses and members of the resistance. The last group gave the prison its nickname Het Oranjehotel (‘The Orange Hotel’). Oranje refers to the Dutch Royal Family, particularly Queen Wilhelmina, who had taken refuge in London, from where she was one of the leaders of the resistance.

The so-called ‘Oranjehotel’, the prison in Scheveningen. (Image from Wikimedia Commons)

It was from the Oranjehotel that 250 prisoners were taken to the dunes, executed and buried there. Binnert knew he was going to be among them. So did his friends outside the prison. They hatched a plan to get him out. Binnert was admitted to a hospital nearby, from where he managed to escape in May 1943. He went into hiding for fourteen months, and this is when he wrote his account of his time in prison, about Christmas 1942. In December 1944 it was published anonymously and clandestinely in Amsterdam by Th. E. Nije as Kerstmis in Scheveningen (‘Christmas in Scheveningen’).

Title page of Kerstmis in Scheveningen (Amsterdam, 1944) X.809.4019.

Nije was a small printers house and publisher, who was acquainted with a larger publishing house, owned by the family with whom Binnert had stayed.

In February 1945 Binnert was walking down the Kalverstraat in Amsterdam when he ran into some German police who shot him. Although he managed to climb onto the rooftops, he fell and died. He was buried in the dunes, amongst many other resistance fighters. This burial place was later made into the Cemetery of Honour in Bloemendaal. 

Kerstmis in Scheveningen tells the story of how Binnert became aware of his strong Christian faith. Faced with enormous pressures of the endless interrogations, the hunger and cold and terrible conditions in prison he found strength in the words ‘As long as God is with me, who can be against me?’ Christmas 1942 was very challenging for him. On 23 December the Germans had taken away 500 inmates, including his two cellmates. He did not know where they had been taken. His block was almost empty, and he felt lonely. On Christmas Eve he was again taken for interrogation to the Binnenhof, or Inner Court in the centre of The Hague. His technique of getting through these long hours of questioning was to concentrate on something else, mainly his faith. On the way out of the building he had to pass tables groaning under all sorts of Christmas treats, whilst he had hardly eaten anything. That evening he was at a particularly low point, but his spirits were lifted by the arrival of a new cellmate and Christmas parcels from the Red Cross. After having eaten, Binnert felt inspired to read the Nativity story to his cellmate. However, other prisoners wanted to hear this too. Standing on a little stool so he could talk through an air vent, Binnert found himself preaching a Christmas sermon. Other prisoners told Christmas stories and the evening ended by all of them singing ‘Silent Night’. The carol reverberated throughout the prison. It was a true spiritual experience, and it gave him strength to sit out the next five months, before his escape.

Kerstmis in Scheveningen was printed in 3000 copies. Proceeds went to various resistance groups in support of their work. This was how the publishing of clandestine titles worked. Nearly 1100 individual book titles were printed clandestinely, ‘with much trouble and danger’, as stated on the title page of Kerstmis in Scheveningen. Both amateur and professional printers risked their freedom and indeed their lives in making these books. Some print runs were tiny, around 25 copies, some were large, counting thousands of copies. Their aim was the same: to give the readers hope, as well as to raise funds for the resistance. That is also why not many titles appeared in later editions after the war, but Kerstmis in Scheveningen did see a second edition. In 1945 the publishing house De Bezige Bij (‘The Busy Bee’) published a new edition with a tribute to Binnert. In 1960 a third edition appeared, published by Buskes in Amsterdam and in 2021 a new, fourth edition was published by Verloren, with a prologue and a biography of Binnert by Esther Blom.

Cover of the fourth edition of Kerstmis in Scheveningen

Kerstmis in Scheveningen captures the spirit of those who resisted the Nazi occupation like few other titles. It shines a light on the involvement of young people; some of whom paid with their lives. It is part of a very special collection of almost 600 clandestinely published books held by the British Library.

Marja Kingma, Curator Germanic Collections

Further reading:

Agnes Dessing, Tulpen voor Wilhelmina: de geschiedenis van de Engelandvaarders (Amsterdam, 2004) YF.2005.a.31442.

Dirk de Jong, Het vrije boek in onvrije tijd: bibliografie van illegale en clandestiene bellettrie. (Leiden, 1958) 11926.pp.34.

Anna Simoni, Publish and Be Free: a Vatalogue of Clandestine Books Printed in the Netherlands, 1940-1945, in the British Library (The Hague; London, 1975) 2725.aa.1