Ben's Story - Holocaust Letters with Selections from the Dutch Underground Press
"It seems an overworked cliché to describe a piece of writing as 'deeply moving,' for which reason I hesitate to employ it. But it is hard to find a more fitting description for this vividly evocative manuscript. I found myself thoroughly shaken in reading it. The editor-translator has shown sound literary instinct in presenting Ben Wessels's letters to his friend Johan - in all their everyday simplicity - against the backdrop of the miseries and universal moral dilemmas revealed by the underground press. Knowing, as we now do, of the tragic fate that overtook the majority of the Dutch Jews, including Ben less than a month before the British liberated the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp, makes all the greater the poignancy of the existence Ben described in his letters to Johan: uncomplaining, concerned with practical matters of everyday existence, doggedly hopeful of an end to the misery and uncertainty, and a return to his home and friends by the North Sea. .. . It is a tragic history, distilled into personal experience."
H. Arnold Barton, author of A Folk Divided: Homeland Swedes and Swedish Americans, 1840-1940