During the German occupation of the Netherlands in World War II, painter Willem Arondeus and cellist Frieda Belinfante, used their artistic skills to make fake identity cards which saved thousands of Jews from the death camps. Knowing that the Nazis kept duplicates, Arondeus led a raid on the records office where they were kept. He was captured and Belinfante fled the country and went on to a post-war conducting career in the US. Stephen Fry, whose mother lost cousins in the Holocaust and is playing a Polish Auschwitz survivor in the forthcoming movie Treasure, signed on to front the documentary after hearing the Arondeus-Belinfante story from the producers.
How much did you know about the story of Willem Arondeus and Frieda Belinfante?
I knew nothing and I was slightly ashamed, but one of the things that so excited me was that a lot of Dutch people weren’t aware of them either. Gerrit van der Veen was a fellow artist and resistance member, but he is well known and has streets and schools named after him. We think of the Netherlands as this wonderfully tolerant, accepting country with all kinds of progressive ideas, but you could say that Willem and Frieda weren’t celebrated until recently because they were gay. Above all, I was fascinated by these two incredible people.
Was it the combination of the art, the sexuality, and your own Jewish roots that made this such a compelling subject?
Yes, there was something in it that appealed to me. If I weren’t gay and I weren’t Jewish, would I have the same deep sense of wanting to oppose injustice, the same sense of being apart from the main run of humanity? It’s impossible to answer, because your whole identity is bound up in so many different things, but one’s minority status does open up a questioning and inspection of the world.
Was there a uniquely Dutch flavour to this particular resistance movement?
Artists, wherever they come from, have their own country which we tend to call Bohemia, where their first loyalty is to art and ideas. That’s not to say that Willem and Frieda weren’t proud Dutch citizens in their own way, but the ideals they lived by were most important, and war gave them an opportunity to fight for those ideals in a unique and extraordinary way. It was a mixture of being able to fight for what they believed in, for the freedom of the oppressed and the Jews in particular, but also a way to belong, as they were both gay.
Willem came out at 17 and was thrown out by his family, since which time he had always been alone in terms of his ability to relax and settle and be himself. He left his lover behind because he didn’t want to involve him in the danger that he was embarking on, so Willem got himself a family, and gay people have always looked for a family. What was unique to the Netherlands was its bureaucracy which, before the Nazi invasion, was so impressive that they had the very best identity passes of any country in the world. They were also the hardest to forge because they had these incredible watermarks, but this allowed the artists’ resistance to use their specific talents most effectively.
Willem seems to have been a bit lost in his life as war broke out.
Yes, it’s fair to say that he wasn’t regarded as the greatest artist in the Netherlands, but setting up as a painter in Amsterdam means working in the shadows of the giants. He had the passion and the excitement, inspired by the decadent movements exemplified in Britain by Aubrey Beardsley and Oscar Wilde, but unfortunately, he was just too late. His work is enchanting and, had he done them 15 or 20 years earlier, would have put him in the vanguard. I think he recognised that and began to move more into writing. In a sense, the Nazi invasion gave him a purpose. You can use what you have, you don’t need to go out and buy a gun.
That courage and sense of purpose endured to the end.
Yes, even at the moment of his arrest, he literally cursed the Dutch policemen who were involved. They said, “In the name of the Führer I arrest you,” and Willem replied: “In the name of the Queen of the Netherlands, I shall accompany you.” How many of us would be able to do that? Sometimes, quiet fortitude is heroic in the face of natural disasters, disease, and poverty and so on, but there is this quality that only really exists in war and sport, and that’s glory. Doing things that are simply unbelievable in their courage, whether running over a trench and machine-gunning 30 enemy soldiers or living a secret life and giving new identity papers to Jewish people you don’t know. And then there’s how you respond to being imprisoned and marched to a place of execution.
Frieda had a flourishing career as a conductor – why did she join the movement?
She was outraged by injustice and cruelty and unfairness and had once suggested forging the papers of a lover who was a Russian girl, so she was always a bit transgressive. She’d exhibited courage by living, more or less openly, as a lesbian with lovers, and she was infuriated by the Philistine hypocrisy of Nazis, who were anti-art but loved to go to concerts and pretend to enjoy them. In classical music, there has always been a large proportion of orchestras that have been Jewish, particularly in the string sections, so she knew a lot of Jews who were being bleached out of the orchestra. That enraged her. Eventually, she was smart enough to dress as a man and make her way via Switzerland to America. Her contribution to the film is marvellous – for her to leave a recorded testimony is immensely lucky for us and for the world.
Was there a tipping point when they both thought: that’s it, we’re doing something about this?
I think it was more a slow realisation that they had to act. It began with Willem writing some rather vainglorious statements in magazines, calling for resistance, but he wasn’t really doing anything except calling for it. Among the resistance were artists, writers and printers who knew they wanted to do something but could hardly invade the Gestapo barracks.
The major problem was that Jews had identity cards with a big J on them. If they were doing a spot check and if you couldn’t produce your documents, you’d be in serious trouble; if you could and they had a J on them, they’d find a reason to apprehend you. Someone had a friend at the registry who got a few out-of-date copies to them, and they started to learn how to do forgeries. The final problem was when some of the forged passes were discovered, so the authorities were alerted to it and could call up the registry and ask about the duplicate of the pass. Someone said: “Well, if there’s no registry, how do they check the papers? Let’s just blow it up with an incendiary bomb!” I’m filled with admiration for that extraordinary bravery.
It’s very striking that they were almost as concerned that no one should die in the registry bombing, as that it should go successfully.
It writes, in very large letters, the difference between the Nazis and the humanitarian poofter artists: you can laugh at us as much as you like, but we actually care about people and about the world. Some things are worth fighting for. In the end, the way people are treated is the thing, and the artists understood that instinctively.
Stephen Fry: Willem and Frieda – Defying the Nazis screens on Whakaata Māori, Anzac Day, 8pm. Streaming on Maori+
