Liberation Narratives August 1944 - August 1945
The twelve-part series Liberation Narratives focuses on individual experiences. These were experiences of combat, destruction, and evacuations as well as of joy and relief. Moreover, the Second World War played out differently in the Dutch East Indies than it did in the Netherlands. The alternating perspectives of the persecuted and the persecutors, of underground workers and members of the Dutch Nazi party (NSB), of civilians and soldiers, and of colonisers and colonised, show that liberation for some meant a loss of freedom for others, and that intense joy about the yoke that had been thrown off existed alongside desperate grief. From August 2019 to August 2020, a longread was published every month.
The episodes (in Dutch) can be found through the links below:
- August 1944
- September 1944
- October 1944
- November 1944
- December 1944
- January 1945
- February 1945
- March 1945
- April 1945
- May 1945
- June and July 1945
- August 1945
The Liberation Narratives project is linked to the ‘Adopt a Diary’ project. Immediately after the end of the war in the Netherlands in May 1945, NIOD started collecting wartime diaries. Today, the collection consists of more than 1700 diaries about the occupation of the Netherlands and approximately 400 diaries from the Dutch East Indies (Indonesia). The diary collection of the NIOD is a unique source that lets readers experience the occupation period from a variety of perspectives. In the ‘Adopt a Diary’ project, volunteers contribute to increasing the accessibility of this rich collection.
