About the Diary
The editor of this form of the diary, Leo Wiegman is the oldest son of Wilhelmina (Elders) and Joseph Wiegman. While growing up in New Hampshire, Leo and his six brothers and sisters had heard stories from their mother and father about the war years of living in the Netherlands under German occupation. Ample exchanges with other émigré families, especially with the Schippers of New York, who emigrated from the same village in North Holland to America, reinforced the bonds forged during the occupation and the struggle to rebuild thereafter.
In brief, from September 1944, a mayor, Jan Elders, and his family in a small village in North Holland took in a German couple, Georg and Edith Froehlich and their surviving child, Sabine, who had fled Nazi German four years earlier. The two families, plus other nieces, nephews and stranded visitors, sometime reaching sixteen overnight guests, shared the home until the day of Liberation nine months later in May 1945. Sabine married one of the locals, Cor Schipper, who had worked closely Mayor Elders in the Dutch Resistance in 1947 and emigrated to the US.
Willy married young physician, Jos Wiegman, a decade later and also emigrated to the US in 1959.
Both women remained lifelong friends and as did the children from both immigrant families with each other. Sabine and Cor’s eldest daughter, Agnes, was sent to be nanny to Wilhelmina and Jos’ young and growing brood. Their eldest son, skinny Andre, was sent to New Hampshire to be fattened up under the good doctor’s watchful eye. (Andre is still thin.) Twenty years later Wilhelmina’s youngest daughter, Marijke, spent summers being nanny to Sabine and Cor’s granddaughters at the beach house.
When Jan Elders passed away in 1992 at age 92, he bequeathed the diary kept during the last year of war in his home to Wilhelmina (Willy in the diary), his eldest daughter, who had helped their house guest-in-hiding compose it, Georg Fröhling.
By the late 1990s, Leo asked Willy, his mother, and, Jos, his father, to type out the diary. They did so on an old Macintosh. Thus, the journey of the diary of House Elastic through May 1945 into an artifact that can be shared today.
By 1999, Leo obtained the “macwrite.txt” disc from his mother. It contained both a transcription of the original in Dutch (and some scattered German, French, and Latin) and a translation into English.
Leo began to review it to make it as self-explanatory as possible to the next, now third and fourth generation of the member of the House Elastic household. Jos produced high resolution scans of each page of the diary, allowing Leo to compare the transcription and translation word for word. As can be expected, Willy’s transcription into Dutch and translation into English added more details from her own memory of persons and events and very occasionally elided over actual text in the handwritten version.
Georg had written in clipped and formal, impersonal style befitting his lifelong training as an attorney. On top of that, he only refers to any clandestine activity of the resistance in the most vague and coded references if at all. The diary mainly narrates the daily life of peeling potatoes, frying fish, washing clothes, organizing impromptu infirmary care when sickness strikes, all during a period of severe food and fuel and even water shortages.
As Leo worked through the diary, he often sent queries to Sabine and Wilhelmine, to find out the identity of nicknames or codenames that appeared in the story or the meaning of words or phrases no longer commonly used. The explanations, and many of Willy’s additions, ended up in footnotes to guide today’s reader without
By 2009, Leo had a footnoted and formatted version of the diary ready to publish on his website, where it could be shared among all the interested and extended families on both sides of the Atlantic. The format was simple and presented each page of the diary in scanned facsimile and full size form on the left-hand page. Each right-hand page contained two columns of text. The first column was a translation into English of the right-hand page, hewing as closely to the style and tone of the original text. The second column was a transcription of the handwritten narrative on the right into a typed version in Dutch and whatever other phrases Georg had used.
By that time, Sabine had begun a petition in Israel for the Righteous Among Nations on behalf of Mayor Jan Elders and his wite, Johanna Elder. Researchers at Yad Vashem came across the Huize Elastiek/House Elastic diary on the website through help from Leo’s cousin, Simone Hannema-Elders.
By 2016, Yad Vashem had written the Elders family in the Netherlands that the Righteous Amond Nations honor would be bestowed on Jan and Johanne Elders. Such an event would be a great occasion for a large gathering of the families that had shared House Elastic in Bovenkarspel some seventy years earlier.
With that incentive, Leo dove back into the diary to prepare it for publication in a full size paperback format to deliver to all the attendees and send to those unable to attend.
The day before flying to Amsterdam in June 2017, Leo picked up 250 printed copies in Manhattan. He and his family took them aboard the KLM flight as excess baggage.
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Once everyone began browsing through the book, a plethora of typos, suggestions, clarifications began piling up. Even on the flight back to New York, Leo marveled at how many notes he had made in the dog-eared pages of his own copy at the suggestion of uncles, aunts, cousins, second-cousins, spouses of cousins and even strangers who has found the diary, bought it and sent in emails with detailed feedback.
Hence, the second printing released online in late 2019 and updated in 2020 contains many more footnotes and a note about the Yad Vashem award as epilogue and, of course, corrected typos.
After careful deliberation with the Schipper family, the diary itself will join a collection of other documents from the Schipper-Froehlich family at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.
