The Joy of Liberation
HANSER, RICHARD
The Joy of Liberation The Walls Came Tumbling Down. By Henriette Roosenburg. Knopf. 248 pp. $3.50. The bitterness and disillusion which followed so soon upon the Second World War have tended to...
...scrounging and pilfering provided them with food...
...Amid the innumerable accounts of heartbreak and agony, a glimpse at the other side of the picture certainly has its place...
...In the chaos and disorganization of the time what was needed was the agility and resourcefulness to thread a way through the broken field of natural and man-made obstacles which stood between them and home...
...Her style is simple and often slangy...
...As members of the Resistance, they had been arrested by the Gestapo under the notorious Naeht and Nebel decree, which meant being whisked away in secret from home and family and headed for the gallows without charges or trial...
...Their imprisonment did not last as long as that of others, but it was sufficiently agonizing...
...any step at any hour of the day or night along the prison corridor might mean the approach of the executioner...
...This is not to say that Miss Roosenburg's manner is in any way mawkish or sentimental...
...In the pervading gloom and dismay of the literature of our day, it is refreshing to have such a book as this casting its welcome little beam in a naughty world...
...She is too good a reporter for that, and too practical a person...
...A scrap of paper with something scrawled on it in Russian—they never found out just what—got them past bewildered sentries...
...The Walls Came Tumbling Down translates these two abstractions into the flesh-and-blood experience of three Dutch girls whom it would be hard to convince that the war was a pointless slaughter that served no purpose...
...Yet here I was in a first-class restaurant, with waiters hovering at my elbow, champagne flowing freely, my plate never empty, and myself blissful in the knowledge that my family was safe...
...feminine cunning evaded the lustful approaches of Soviet soldiers out to raise hell after months of battle: ingenuity and impertinence kept them rolling when bureaucracy and red-tape sought to bog them down...
...But the step that came first was that of a slouching Russian private in a drab tunic who began unlocking the cells...
...The fight did, after all, destroy the Nazi tyranny and for millions this meant, quite literally, life —life and liberation...
...They did not remain motionless long...
...It takes no Pollyanna to share the tingling surge of emotion that overwhelmed her as the prison was put behind and the road home stretched ahead: "Now, as we drank in the sunny openness of this peaceful-looking land, the immenseness of freedom rolled over us like waves on an ocean beach, engulfing us, taking our breath away, making us teeter on our weak legs...
...They all made it home to Holland, unscathed, unhurt, and each of them a living demonstration that sometimes, even in our sorry society, things do turn out right...
...The Walls Came Tumbling Down is not in any sense a major work, but one hopes that it doesn't get completely lost in the mounting mass of documentation of World War II...
...The book was written in English and is studded with unexpected Americanisms which sometimes strike the reader's ear oddly in the Dutch context—"hit the sack," "that's a lot of baloney," and so on...
...For the first time in history, Russian troops carried liberation on their banners...
...Millions were set suddenly in motion, away from degradation and the shadow of death, toward home and life...
...We all felt like singing, crying, shouting and laughing simultaneously, but for a long time we remained speechless and motionless...
...Aided and abetted by an emaciated but undefeated Dutchman named Dries, the three girls outfaced and outwitted the multitude of difficulties which barred their wav...
...Only five nights ago," writes Miss Roosenburg at journey's end, "I had been dining on a lump of sour bread and a little unsugared tea in a wood along the Elbe River, without a penny in my pocket, without an established identity, without knowing whether I had a family to return to...
...The Red Army had arrived...
...Happily, one of those millions was the Dutch girl Henriette Koosenhurg Reviewed by Richard Hanser Journalist, author of documentary films, translator who had both the inclination and the wit to record what she saw and felt on her journey out of the night, and her chronicle can stand as a record of what the inarticulate mass of her fellow prisoners also saw and felt...
...She keeps her tale moving briskly, relishes the fun of an awkward situation, and is frank and earthy where many another woman would have been coy and cute...
...All three were under sentence of death in a Nazi prison at Waldheim in southeast Germany...
...There followed a time, however tragically brief, when the dizzy exhilaration of long-awaited freedom bathed all Europe like the summer sunshine that accompanied it...
...The bitterness and disillusion which followed so soon upon the Second World War have tended to blanket and obscure its positive achievements, and this book performs the happy service of reminding us of them...
Vol. 40 • June 1957 • No. 26
