Precautions against Death

Mark Bastien was a Toronto-based journalist.

Maria Jacobs was just reaching her teens when the Germans occupied Holland in World War II. Her parents had separated a few years earlier, and she lived with her mother. Precautions against Death documents Jacobs’ youth under the German occupation in diary-like reminiscences and poems: how mother and daughter survived the war while clandestinely concealing Jewish friends.

Books of this kind can be difficult to read: often the writer, writing decades after the fact, gives memory mythic proportions. Not so with Jacobs — her story is straightforward, tautly written, and almost achingly offhand. This is not to suggest the author is flippant or distanced from her material; rather, she has tight control over her gripping story, which she tells in a surprising, unadorned way. I especially like Jacobs’ choice of detail: how she and her mother had to shop in twelve different stores (three grocery, three vegetable, three bakers’ and three milk) to escape suspicion that their stolen ration coupons were being spent to feed six people; how tidy the billeted German soldiers were (they put their cigarette butts in the lid of a jam jar); how her mother loved to read Katherine Mansfield and Virginia Woolf.

The book’s emotional weight, though, comes not from the anecdotal prose but from the poems — experiences of parents, lovers, and children of occupied Holland. In “Straw,” the author’s mother speaks:

I find my child in the park

disconsolate for failing

to get the morning’s ration

of water from a broken pump.

She cries

into her empty pail.

And in “Team”:

She sees what I see.

There is no option.

We’re a team of two

against the dark.