"Willem and Frieda - A Story of Resistance" (2023) by John Hay

Despite the cornucopia of various streaming sites, what really makes me happy these days is a local Dutch channel npodoc  dedicated to documentaries and every time I am not in the mood for anything commercial or violent, I simply turn to these documentaries as my preffered comfort watch. I watched almost everything about the local history here and last night I saw something really interesting, this was a story about Amsterdam in WW2 and even though I have previously heard about the 1943 bombing of the civil registry office (where all the registered identity cards were stored) I was not aware of the identity of people involved in it.

The documentary is presented by Stephen Fry who walks trough the streets of Amsterdam, tracing the footsteps of Willem Arondeus and Frieda Belinfante who were both involved in the resistance - Aroundeus was impoverished, shy artist who joined resistance from the sheer conviction (not Jew himself), while Belifante was Jewish and one of the first female conductors in Europe. Both were involved in forging of identity cards for Jews and organisation of 1943 bombing of the civil registry office (I had to look it up, where it was - nowadays its a building next to entrance to Artis Zoo). The destruction of civil registry office was important in order to stop Nazi attempts to compare forged documents with documents in registry. Arondeus was arrested, tried and executed, while Belifante went into hiding and dressed up as a man, later emigrated to United States where she continued her music carer as a conductor.

It was an excellent documentary - Stephen Fry was a perfect choice for a presenter and the story itself was hugely interesting, pointing again how dangerous was to live trough WW2 (for example, it was not enough to be a Jew, simply being gay person could result into arrest and imprisonment in concentration camp). What is specially interesting is that after the war, the names of both Arondeus and Belifante were quietly erased from the history books, even though they were both clearly heroes of the resistance - something about them being gay, did not sit well with than current atmosphere and they were not often mentioned. This has now being corrected and I am so glad that people now more about them, I specially loved 1995 TV interview with elderly Belifante who comes across as the most wonderful, warm and likeable person.