In this short but richly detailed book, Ben Braber centers the wartime experiences of one young Dutch-Jewish couple—namely, Arnold (“Nol”) Bueno de Mesquita and Tertia (“Ter”) Kolthoff—as a means to examine Jewish resistance to the Holocaust in the Nazi-occupied Netherlands. This book appears to be an English-language version or adaption of his 2015 study, Waren mijn ogen een bron van tranen. Een joods echtpaar in het verzet, 1940–1945, published in Dutch by Walburg Pers, an imprint of Amsterdam University Press, although neither Braber nor the publisher makes clear the relationship between the two books. Braber builds upon his previous work on the subject, such as This Cannot Happen Here: Integration and Jewish Resistance in the Netherlands, 1940–1945 (2013) as well as previous studies examining motivations driving various forms of Jewish resistance. More specifically, as he explains in the introduction, the new book responds to the question recently posed by Judith Tydor Baumel-Schwartz in her introduction to the edited volume All Our Brothers and Sisters: Jews Saving Jews during the Holocaust (co-edited by Tydor Baumel-Schwartz and Alan M. Schneider, 2021). Braber describes this question as follows: “Did Jews who saved other Jews during the Holocaust embody specific characteristics and personalities or share certain identities and worldviews?” (6) Braber's analysis points to some shared characteristics, such as “obstinacy” and a desire to help others, and, in this respect, his findings echo those of Samuel and Pearl Oliner in their formative study, The Altruistic Personality: Rescuers of Jews in Nazi Europe (1992). At the same time, as Braber aptly demonstrates, Jewish resisters confronted additional logistical and psychological obstacles, especially once it became clear that they were powerless to stop the seemingly never-ending deportations from the Netherlands.

In his examination of these Jewish individuals and their various clandestine activities, Braber relies in large part upon the numerous oral history interviews he conducted in the 1980s with Bueno de Mesquito, Kolthoff, and their surviving friends and former resistance colleagues. By corroborating information and experiences relayed in these interviews with other ego-documents such as memoirs, documentation held in archival collections, and published secondary sources, Braber has produced a deeply-researched and insightful account of Jewish-led resistance, undertaken with the explicit intention of saving Jewish lives. He describes his work as a case study, rather than a “comprehensive report on all forms of Jewish resistance in the Netherlands or a register of everybody who was involved in that activity” (6). Yet, I would argue, Braber has produced more of a detailed network analysis than might be expected from a simple case study: with each chapter, Bueno de Mesquito and Kolthoff recede into the background, where they will serve as supporting figures in a much larger cast of characters and organizations. This is not to minimize their involvement or contributions, far from it—rather, it is a testament to the scope and impact of Jewish resistance in the occupied Netherlands. This couple constituted but two nodes in a highly developed yet flexible and responsive national network.

Of particular importance in Braber's account are those recent German-Jewish émigrés who sought refuge from Hitler's anti-Jewish policies after 1933 but nonetheless found themselves under Nazi occupation once again. Drawing upon their experiences in other settings and working for causes such as the German Communist Party and the Republican side in the Spanish Civil War, these émigrés wasted little time throwing themselves into similar work in the Netherlands. Before the arrival of the German occupiers in May 1940, they helped provide material aid and other forms of assistance to Jewish émigrés and other refugees from Nazi Germany; after this point in time, they transitioned to numerous types of clandestine work, ranging from armed defense to forgery and courier work. If, as Braber maintains, Jewish resistance in the Netherlands was “symbolic, polemic, defensive, and offensive in character” (128), then German-Jewish refugees played a vital role in making it so.

Unfortunately, stylistic and other errors abound in this book. The Dutch names of organizations and areas are often translated into literal English, thus introducing unnecessary confusion for those readers familiar with the Dutch names. Sentence fragments abound, as do typographical errors, and both footnotes and the bibliography contain incomplete, inconsistent citations. The index does not include the names of the scholars discussed in the text itself, which is especially problematic since the introductory chapter aims to provide a brief historiography of Jewish resistance in the Netherlands. Naturally, the author is not solely responsible for all these issues, but these low production values detract from what is otherwise an engaging, important history.