Sonny Boy

I've been reading a lot lately. Just finished a book called 'Sonny Boy' by Annejet van der Zijl. It's in Dutch but my guess is that it won't be long before it's translated into English. The book was both a disappointment and a revelation. A disappointment because it turned out to be more of a biography, a story based on historical facts, than the novel I'd thought it was (should have read the back cover more carefully). The author is a journalist originally and she doesn't 'dive in' to the characters. They remain people in a journalistic account, seen from the outside.

It was a revelation because it describes what happened to the Jews in Holland during World War II - the war that seems to be my theme at the moment - and, believe it or not, I've read very little about the holocaust, full stop. According to this book, 11,000 Jews were deported from The Hague and only 500 came back. How is that possible? How? What went on in the minds of the people who did this? And what would I have done if I'd been there? And shouldn't I be doing something more with my life now - since I'm lucky enough to have one?

The central characters of the book are a black Surinamese man and a white Dutch woman - married and many years his senior - who fall in love and have a son 'Sonny Boy'. The woman's first husband gains custody of her four children by him and restricts her to seeing them once a year for two hours. Despite all their trials and tribulations, the two main characters remain together, marry and, during the war give shelter to Jews hiding from the Nazi regime during the occupation of Holland. They're arrested and deported to concentration camps just over the border in northern Germany (not so far from the route we took to Berlin a couple of weekends ago). For the rest, you'll have to wait for the English translation! If you want to know more, there's an interview with Sonny Boy himself on the author's website.

For anyone who takes the trouble, this book could form the basis of a cracking good novel or even a film.