PRESSER, (Gerrit) Jacques

Pseudonym: J. van Wageningen. Nationality: Dutch. Born: Jacob Presser, Amsterdam, 24 February 1899. Education: University of Amsterdam, Ph.D. in history 1926. Family: Married 1) Debora Suzanna Appel in 1936 (killed by the Nazis in Poland during World War II); 2) Bertha Hartog in 1954. Career: Teacher, Vossiusgymnasium, Amsterdam, 1926-40, and Jewish Lyceum, Amsterdam, 1941. Went into hiding during World War II. Professor of modern history, University of Amsterdam, 1947-69. Awards: Wynaends Francken award for Napoleon: Historie en legende ; Van der Hoogt award for De Nacht der Girondijnen ; Jan Campert award and Remembrance award, World Federation of Bergan-Belsen Associations, for Ondergang: De Vervolging en Verdelging van het Nederlandse jodendom.Member: Historisch Genootschap; Maatschappij der Nederlandse Letterkunde; Royal Dutch Academy of Science. Died: 30 April 1970.

Publication

Novel

De Nacht der Girondijnen. 1957; as Breaking Point, 1958; as Night of the Girondists, 1992.

Poetry

Orpheus en Ashasverus (as J. van Wageningen). 1945.

Other

Das buch "De tribus impostoribus" (Von den drei Detrügern) (dissertation). 1926.

De Tachtigjarige Oorlog [Netherland's Wars of Independence]. 1941.

Napoleon: Historie en legende. 1946.

Amerika: Van kolonie tot wereldmacht (American history). 1949.

Historia hodierna (inaugural speech). 1950.

Gewiekte wielen: Richard Arkwright (biography). 1951.

Schrijfsels en schrifturen (essays). 1961.

Europe in een boek. 1963.

Ondergang: De vervolging en verdelging van het Nederlandse jodendom, 1940-1945 (2 vols.). 1965; as Ashes in the Wind: The Destruction of Dutch Jewry, 1968.

Meit hek werk van Dr. Jacques Presser (essays, addresses, and lectures). 1969.

Editor, Antwoord aan het kwaad: Getuigenissen 1939-1945 [World War II Prisoners and Poetry]. 1961.

* * *

Jacques Presser was born on 24 February 1899 into a secular Jewish family in the old Jewish ghetto of Amsterdam. He was the oldest child and only son among three daughters. Presser's father was a diamond worker, and when he found work in Antwerp the family followed him there. While they were in Belgium, Jacob's name was changed to the more assimilated-sounding Jacques. In 1907 the family moved back to Amsterdam, where Presser received his primary and secondary education. At the University of Amsterdam he studied history, art history, and Dutch; in 1926 he earned his doctorate in history. He then began to teach at the Vossius Gymnasium, a prestigious Amsterdam high school.

Presser's relationship to Judaism was complex but probably no more so than any European Jew who wrestled with the problems of assimilation: he never denied his Jewishness, but he never turned to Zionism either. He considered himself both a "ghetto Jew" from humble beginnings and a socialist.

In 1936, at the age of 37, Presser married Deborah Suzanna Appel, or Dé, also the name of a character in Presser's novel Night of the Girondists, a former student of his. Four years later, on 10 May 1940, the Germans invaded Holland. On the morning of 14 May, the day of the Dutch capitulation, Presser and his wife fled to Ijmuiden, where thousands sought to escape Holland by sea. Unsuccessful, the Pressers returned to Amsterdam, and together they attempted suicide. While already bleeding, however, Presser telephoned the doctor. Both Presser and his wife soon recovered from their self-inflicted stab wounds.

In November 1940 all civil servants who had identified themselves as Jewish in the "Aryan Declaration" of the previous month were removed from their positions. Presser, as a high school teacher, was considered a civil servant and was forced to leave the Vossius Gymnasium. The following year, he began teaching at the new German-mandated Jewish Lyceum in Amsterdam. In the course of 1942 he and his wife were twice arrested in large roundups in Amsterdam's southern districts; twice they were released. Their luck ran out in March 1943, however. Without her Star of David and in possession of crudely forged identification papers, Deborah was arrested on the train while en route to visit her mother, who was hiding in the east of Holland. She was arrested and sent to the penal barracks at the Westerbork transit camp. After only five days in Westerbork, she was sent to Sobibor in a transport of approximately 1,200 Jews and gassed upon arrival. Upon learning of his wife's arrest—but not, at this point, her ultimate fate—Jacques Presser went into hiding, spending time in various "safe addresses" around the country until the end of the occupation in May 1945.

After liberation Presser lectured at the University of Amsterdam and soon became a professor there. In 1950 the newly created Netherlands State Institute for War Documentation commissioned him to write the history of the Dutch Jews under German occupation. This monumental work was published 15 years later under the title Ondergang. De vervolging en verdelging van het Nederlandse jodendom 1940-1945. Its English translation, Ashes in the Wind: The Destruction of Dutch Jewry, appeared in 1968.

While working on Ondergang, Presser also wrote a number of shorter pieces, including the novel De Nacht der Girondjinen (Night of the Girondists ), which he anonymously submitted as the winning entry for a local literary contest. De Nacht der Girondjinen also won the Dutch Society for Literatures' Van Hoogt Prize for Creative Literature. It was published in The Netherlands in 1957, and within the next few years saw publication in English, Swedish, German, Danish, Spanish, and Czech translations.

Until his death at the age of 71, Presser remained involved in academe, writing about a wide array of historical subjects. He also wrote poetry and a number of detective novels. Ondergang, however, remains his most important work, as it widened and forever altered the discussion of the occupation period in Holland. Ondergang is, essentially, the history of the Jewish victims in The Netherlands, as experienced and written by one of these selfsame victims.

Jacques Presser died suddenly on 30 April 1970, only days before he was to address the queen and the nation at the televised National Liberation ceremony on 5 May.

—Jennifer L. Foray

See the essay on Night of the Girondists, or Breaking Point.