Taken together, their stories create a fascinating mosaic of life in the Netherlands in the five harrowing years from Germany’s invasion to the end of the occupation.
They include narratives of Jews in hiding and imprisoned, a grocery store owner who became a member of the resistance, a young, unaffiliated factory worker in Amsterdam, and a police officer and Nazi collaborator who ran a special unit to hunt Jews. The author has chosen seven diaries from the collection, which she weaves together to tell the story of the war from varying perspectives, like a multi-character novel.
Intermingled with the modern observations of a conservator’s notes, The Anatomy Lesson causes us to pause and see beyond the brush strokes into the possibility of a man who could be “restored with beauty and love and light” through art.The Diary Keepers was born out of a New York Times article, “The Lost Diaries of War,” which explored a trove of more than 2,000 diaries collected by the NIOD Institute for War, Holocaust and Genocide Studies in Amsterdam. In contrast, “The Heart” is filled with the emotions of Flora, who cares for Aris and vainly tries to save his life. “The Body” goes back to Aris’s childhood, recounting the unfortunate events that led to his execution. The Anatomy Lesson looks deeply into the very soul of this painting to get at the story behind this lesson: that “before he became the centerpiece of this anatomy lesson, someone had cared for that man.” Thus begins the tale of “The Body,” “The Hands,” “The Heart,” “The Mouth,” “The Mind,” and “The Eyes.” Each section takes on a different perspective to provide the reader with the complete history behind a scene so thoughtfully depicted by “The Eyes” of Rembrandt. Tulp in the midst of his annual public dissection of a corpse-the body of Aris Kindt, a man executed earlier that day by hanging. This oil painting by the Dutch master Rembrandt displays Dr. Amsterdam’s Surgeon’s Guild commissioned “The Anatomy Lesson of Dr.
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