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

With Christmas fast approaching, I thought I would share one of my favourite seasonal reads, Noch’ pered Rozhdestvom (‘Christmas Eve’, also known as ‘The Night Before Christmas’, 1832) by Nikolai Gogol'. This whimsical and uproarious folk tale comes from a collection of eight short stories written in Russian and collected in two volumes, Vechera na khutore bliz Dikan’ki (‘Evenings on a Farm near Dikanka’, 1831-1832), which catapulted the author to fame almost overnight. If you like the sound of a winter story featuring flying dumplings and a witch hiding her suitors in rubble sacks, then read on, you are in for a treat. This delightfully eccentric and cliché-free narrative is certain to put you in a festive mood.

Cover of Vechory na khutori bilia Dykanʹky by Nikolai Gogol' (Kyiv, 2008) YF.2009.b.2030

Opening pages of Noch’ pered Rozhdestvom by Nikolai Gogol' (Kyiv, 2008) YF.2009.b.2030

However, you may wonder how the author of Mertvye Dushi (‘Dead Souls’, 1842) came to write such a lighthearted and, dare I say it, frivolous piece. To answer that question, we need to travel back to December 1828 when a young aspiring writer hailing from the small Cossack town of Sorochyntsi arrives in the metropolitan St. Petersburg to seek his fortune. Unable to secure a decent paying job in the civil service, Nikolai soon becomes disillusioned with life in the capital and the workings of the Russian bureaucracy. The disappointment with St. Petersburg coincides with his newfound appreciation of the homeland he left behind and the craze for all things “Little Russian” sweeping the capital’s literary scene at the time. Gogol' is quick to capitalize on this trend and eager to bring the beauty of Ukraine to the Russian reading public. Yet for all the enthusiasm with which the liberal circles received Gogol’s work, the nation reflected in Vechera was not Russia but Ukraine. Far from smoothing over this difference, the author deliberately accentuated it.

There is undoubtedly more to the joyous and seemingly carefree tone of Vechera than first meets the eye. The Ukrainian-Russian glossaries appended to each volume clearly underline Ukrainian linguistic separateness and cultural uniqueness, creating a boundary between the Ukrainian and imperial cultures. The narrator, Rudy Pan'ko, regularly engages in intense self-descriptions, offering equivalents for what his Russian audience may find unfamiliar. This is evident in Noch’ pered Rozhdestvom when he attempts to explain the tradition of house-to-house caroling: ‘‘Among us it is the custom to sing under the window on Christmas Eve carols that are called kolyadki. The mistress or master or whoever is left in the house always drops into the singer’s bag some sausage or bread or a copper or whatever he has plenty of (...) They often sing about the birth of Christ, and at the end wish good health to the master, the mistress, the children and all the household’’, or when he elucidates on the meaning of the word ‘German’: ‘‘By ‘German’, we mean any foreigner, be it a French, Austro-Hungarian, or Swedish subject - no matter, we will still call them ‘Germans’.’’ (English translations by Constance Garnett, ‘Evenings on a Farm near Dikanka’ (London, 1926), 12266.g.2. and Anna Summers, ‘The night before Christmas’, (New York, 2014), YKL.2016.a.6326; emphasis mine). Pan'ko clearly wants his Russian readers to be mindful of the divisions between the two worlds.

Glossary listing popular Ukrainian terms and their Russian equivalents

The great success of Gogol's work also owed much to its Romantic handling of folklore and the perfect balance of the familiar and exotic in depicting Ukraine. As a number of scholars have pointed out, Noch’ pered Rozhdestvom contains many staples of the traditional Ukrainian nativity play, vertep. It opens with the devil swimming through the starry sky and burning his hands on the moon he had just stolen. As the story is set on the night before Christmas, the evil spirit is allowed to roam freely around the Ukrainian village of Dykanka and torment its denizens before he must return to hell on Christmas Day. He unleashes a blizzard hoping to thwart the village blacksmith's advances on the beautiful Oksana as he resents him for producing a painting depicting the devil's defeat. However, Vakula is determined to win the village belle over, even if it means battling Satan himself. Amid carol singing, holiday gluttony (think kutia, varenyky, palianytsia, varenukha) and drunken revelry, he manages to trick the devil into flying him to St. Petersburg, where he hopes to get a pair of empress’s heels for Oksana, who has promised to marry him on this condition. Without giving too much away, Vakula finally makes it to St. Petersburg and is immediately overwhelmed by the hustle and bustle of the city. He seeks refuge in the company of Zaporozhian Cossacks, who reluctantly take him along for their audience with the empress...

Too busy to read this Christmas? Gogol’s Ukrainian folk tales have been adapted into numerous films and operas. The most renowned adaptations of Noch’ pered Rozhdestvom include the eponymous 1961 film directed by Alexsander Rou and the 1913 silent movie by Władysław Starewicz. The 1951 Russian animated feature film directed by Valentina and Zinaida Brumberg is also available in the public domain.

Official poster for the 1961 Noch’ pered Rozhdestvom film by Alexander Rou (Image from Wikipedia)

Gogol's Noch’ pered Rozhdestvom celebrates Ukraine and its rich heritage. It is fun and edifying but also mischievously subversive. Will the pious Cossack Vakula manage to win the affection of the most beautiful girl in town? Or will the devil reign supreme on this holy night? A perfect tale for the holiday season, this wonderfully bizarre work will leave you with a sense of warmth and quiet wonder long after the last page is turned. Z Rizdvom! Merry Christmas!

Hanna Dettlaff-Kuznicka, Interim Curator of Slavonic and East European Collections

References:

Edyta M. Bojanowska, Nikolai Gogol : between Ukrainian and Russian nationalism (Cambridge, 2007) YC.2007.a.11089

Christopher Putney, Russian devils and diabolic conditionality in Nikolai Gogol's Evenings on a farm near Dikanka (New York, 1999) 5761.407700

Two free events in the British Library Pigott Theatre (booking necessary)

Afternoon symposium: Collections in French at the British Library

Evening event: The World Library: William Marx, with the participation of French Ambassador Helene Duchene and Sir Roly Keating, CEO of the British Library, followed by a discussion with Artemis Cooper, F.R.S.L.

https://thebritishlibraryculturalevents.seetickets.com/tour/rendez-vous-at-the-british-library

French Collections at the BL - Illustration by Clo'e Floirat

To conclude a year of celebrations marking the 120th anniversary of the Entente Cordiale, enjoy an afternoon exploring of the wealth of collections in French at the British Library.

Listen to acclaimed author Michel Pastoureau, and renowned academics, writers, and translators talk about their current research and projects based on manuscripts and printed collections in French; hear Curators talk about their work, discover hidden treasures, and seize the chance to visit out of hours the newly opened Medieval Women exhibition! 

The programme can be found here. 

There will also be the opportunity to see two pop-up exhibitions in the Knowledge Centre: ‘Postcards for Perec’, curated by Linda Parr and ‘When Marianne and Britannia meet’, ] curated by Guillaume Périssol and Charlotte Faucher.

The talks will be followed by a separate evening event introduced by the French Ambassador and Sir Roly Keating, CEO of the British Library, with the chance to hear Professor William Marx, from the Collège de France, talk about ‘The World Library’, followed by a discussion with Artemis Cooper, F.R.S.L. - and a message from Kate Mosse!

The events are free, but booking is essential.

These two events are generously supported by the department of Higher Education, Research, and Innovation Department of the French Embassy, the French Studies Library Group, and Mark Storey, Friends of the Nations’ Libraries Trustee and book collector.