Paula Bermann as a nurse in the war (1915)

June 15, 1940

Since 10 May, the impossible has come true. Holland at war with Germany! For five days the Dutch soldiers fought bravely with great heroism, but due to the great superiority – air power and an army of millions and without outside help – Holland capitulated after a few days. Rotterdam was half destroyed on the very last day – a cruel fate suffered by this city and we must be eternally grateful to General Winkelman that he did not allow Holland to be destroyed. Rhenen, the Grebbelinie, Breda, Wageningen and especially Zeeland, where the battle raged for 13 days, show the traces of great destruction. I cannot write, too much has happened and my soul is still too shaken and I still too off balance to write down what is going on inside me, to gather my thoughts and cast them into form.

But I want to write again, maybe it will calm me down. But the best is already gone! I destroyed three books that I had written for Sonja since 1933, in which I wrote down all my emotional feelings in great detail and honestly, in the first horror, because I occasionally wrote down my opinion about politics and Judaism and thought that if the Nazi regime came here, they might find my books! Silly me! As if my own ideas were so interesting! Now I’m sorry and I’m suffering. I feel as if part of my soul and body is dead, because I wrote so much and it’s all gone.

All the suffering of the last years, the growing up of the children, the suffering they did to me, consciously or unconsciously, the joys, big and small, that daily life brings, the enjoyment of books – all my own reviews of the more than 600 books I wrote down, I destroyed. Good books I read, the brief contents of which I wrote down, and now I am back to where I was before. Books, they are my balm. Some books I burned because I didn’t want the books that contained political tendencies in my library and now I feel sorry for the poor books too. What have they done? Nothing.

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