War diaries | Highlighting the daily life of Amsterdam women
What did the daily lives of Amsterdam women look like during World War II? UvA researchers linked six war diaries of Amsterdam women to the archives. On Remembrance Day, the website at the Stadsarchief, the City Archive, will go online. “The diaries reveal a network of various women in independent positions.”
“Near us in Breitnerstraat, it is a garbage dump,” writes the foster mother of Jewish baby Berdi Vieyra-Pront in her diary on March 10th, 1945. “One sees poor people there, picking out the few cabbages which might still be, pushing aside the dirt with their hands. The people look black and dingy; some are covered with dirty scabs because there is no soap.”
On April 25th, 1945: “This afternoon, as we were walking along the Leidse grove, a poor woman fainted there with her baby. She had probably been begging. A gentleman gave her f. (florins) 25, but you can hardly get anything for that. Vegetables are free but shamefully expensive.”
This excerpt is an example from one of the six war diaries that Marleen Rensen, UvA researcher at the Faculty of Humanities, selected for the project The Amsterdam Diaries Time Machine, an interactive website where visitors can navigate through the war diaries of Amsterdam women. The diaries of resistance fighter and illustrator Toby Vos and kindergarten teacher-in-training Els Polak, among others, can also be viewed on the website starting May 4th. The diaries are illustrated with images from the Amsterdam archives linked to personal names, events, buildings, and streets.
What makes the diaries special?
“The collection of the diaries sheds light on women we didn’t know about yet or didn’t know very well. Their experiences vary; some women are still in school and write about limitations such as not being able to go down the street or travel by train. Others write about the air battles and famine, about standing in line for vegetables and going to relatives outside Amsterdam to get food.”
“A special story is that of two foster mothers from Amsterdam-Zuid who took Jewish baby Berdi Vieyra-Pront, less than two weeks old, into their care. They write the diary through the baby’s eyes, a form I have not often seen.”
“What also makes it special is that it is a lesbian couple adopting a baby through the family doctor, something that was not common at the time. That also illustrates that war is not only a crisis but also an opportunity. And it raises new questions: How much freedom was there in those days for a female couple who wanted a child?”
“Sometimes the extraordinary is also in small details. A lot is written about the cat in the house, which, during air raids and the bombing, always panicked and shot under the couch. Of course, you know there were bombings during the war, but reading about those domestic scenes brings the wartime city to life and makes the war more palpable.”
Why did you choose women’s war diaries?
“When it comes to war it is very often about battles and soldiers, and women are still underexposed in history. But the war also enters the living room and many women were active in the resistance. The diaries also tell about women taking over men’s jobs, for example, there are female conductors on streetcars and trains and there are more female letter carriers.”
To link the diaries to the archives, the researchers digitized all the diaries with Transscribus, an AI tool that scans handwritten texts and converts them to digital files. Then the researchers tagged all locations, people, and events to make the diaries searchable. “A lot of manual work, which is why it’s not more like 20 or 30 diaries,” says research leader Boudewijn Koopmans.
The diaries initiative is part of a larger project, the Amsterdam Time Machine, the digital infrastructure to link all archival data from Amsterdam. Through the location database Adamlink, all of Amsterdam’s historical addresses are used as a kind of coat hanger to link other archival records to them. Eventually, when the database is finished, visitors can then travel back in time and navigate through neighborhoods, streets, and houses like a kind of “Google Earth” of the past.
What does the Amsterdam Diaries Time Machine add to the war diaries?
“We deliberately chose diaries that refer explicitly to places in the city. This allowed us to map the locations, and certain movement patterns emerged from that. Everyone had to deal with the limitations of the war, and you can see in the diaries that the city literally got smaller for some city residents.”
“The foster parents walked a lot with the baby, mainly in Amsterdam-Zuid but also to the Jordaan. Logical perhaps, as during corona there was not much else to do, either, so people went for a walk. With the locations included, you start looking at the diaries from a different perspective. We often think that a diary is only about the inner world and the world of feelings, but they are also situated in space.”
“The Amsterdam Diaries Time Machine also links the locations, people, and events to images from the city archives. You can also find linked information about the writers and their families and friends through the website. Between the lines you can read, for example, that the foster parents Cornelia Hennekam and Margaretha van Hinte are independent women - one is a contractor, the other has her own business - and frequent intellectual circles. They are friends with the general practitioners Ben Sajet and his wife Thea Sajet-Venema. The later professor Maartje Draak also visits them regularly; she was the first female member of the Royal Dutch Academy of Sciences. The diaries reveal a network of various women in independent positions.
On Saturday, May 4th, between 2:00 and 4:00 p.m., the interactive website Amsterdam Diaries Time Machine will be launched at the Stadsarchief in Amsterdam. Mrs. Vieyra-Pront, the Jewish baby written about in one of the diaries will be interviewed there by Marleen Rensen. You can sign up through this link.
