Love in the shadow of the Holocaust | Review of 2024 Booker Prize-shortlisted ‘The Safekeep’ by Yael van der Wouden

The Safekeep by Yael van der Wouden explores post-WWII Dutch society through a poignant tale of love and loss.

In The Safekeep, shortlisted for the Booker Prize 2024, Dutch writer Yael van der Wouden presents a portrait of a society grappling with the aftermath of World War II and the German occupation of the Netherlands. An unlikely romance buds in the quiet town of Overjissel but as the reader reaches the end of the story, it becomes clear that all this has been taking place in the long shadows of German occupation and concentration camps.

The Safekeep is the story of two families and four individuals: Isabel and her brothers Louis and Hendrik, and Louis’s girlfriend Eva. A mysterious stranger, Eva comes into Isabel’s home and upends her life. She is Isabel’s chance for love, for a life outside the loneliness she has known for a very long time.

Isabel lived with her mother and her brothers in a big family house. First, Louis left. Then Hendrik ran away when their mother could not accept his homosexuality. “He (Hendrik) has been half her life for so long, and then all at once he was gone.”

After their mother passes away, Isabel is suddenly all alone in a quiet town where nothing happens. She maintains the house and polishes the crockery that she believes belonged to her mother. She creates an armour around her that nobody is allowed to penetrate until Eva comes to live with her. Louis has to leave for a foreign assignment and he leaves Eva with Isabel in their family house.

Despite a passionate love affair, Isabel cannot give Eva what she desires. She cannot give her the family and stability that only men are entitled to in post-war Netherlands.

Van der Wouden writes about memory; about the history of objects of belonging such as a house and family crockery. What happened to the houses and property of Jews who were interned at concentration camps? Non-Jewish people would often “safekeep” such property. When the Jews returned from the camps, they found strangers living in their houses, using their cutlery and wearing their coats. Hatred, greed and anti-semitism ran deep in Dutch society. When the German occupation ended and Jewish people were returned to their home countries, Dutch Jews were the last to go. Nobody came to get them and many people died in the long wait.

Elegantly written, The Safekeep, tells a rare story that reveals a hidden side of World War II.