Ode to Debora Appel | Never got the chance to be your own person

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Dear Debora Appel,

I have hesitated for a long time whether to write this letter. The reason is that I am a great admirer of your husband's work. However much love for you his work shows, I do not believe it is in the spirit of this collection of letters to Amsterdam women to write a letter to someone because her portrayal by a man pleases you so much.

But since I was gripped by your husband's poems, and by the glaring unfamiliarity in which they find themselves in the world, hardly a week goes by where I don't think of you. And indeed, I then think of the image your husband painted of you. After all, I see you leaving the house ‘in a thin blouse, sunny and content’. When he praises you, he praises the qualities he had something to gain: ‘Rich was her fidelity, her love great.’

Even when I search for more information about your life from another source I come across your husband: ‘more information about Debora Suzanna Appel can be found in N. van der Zee, Jacques Presser. Het gelijk van de twijfel, een biografie (Soesterberg 2002).' And when I then search further, I read in yet another article about your husband that, as a teacher at Vossius, he often suffered from infatuations with 16-year-old pupils, a peculiarity at the time, a mortal sin in this day and age. Then I also read that it was you who, from your first year at Vossius, had been attracted to ‘him, the older man. But who do we know that from, him or you?

On 18 March 1943, you were picked up on your way to Lunteren, where you wanted to celebrate your stepmother's birthday. You wore no star and had a forged identity card, brave and reckless, and were put on a transport to Westerbork and from there immediately forwarded to Sobibor, where you were killed. You already know all this, but there are others reading along.

What you presumably do not know is that your husband started writing poems in Amsterdam. Many poems, as many as 60 between the day you disappeared and liberation, a little over two years later. They all have a date, allowing the reader to plot exactly how the process went from shock, through hope to mourning and even an admirable form of acceptance. His collection Orpheus and Ahasverus is one of the finest, most moving collections of poetry in the Dutch language. Its publication in 1945, illegally and under a pseudonym, you did not live to see. I am grateful that this document exists, but the more I read about your absence, the more I become curious about your presence.

Only: not only were you arrested, deported and murdered on 18 March 1943, you were also largely obliterated. The Nazis first cut your ties with others, then severed your life so that you could never return, comment, change your mind, set the record straight, in short, be a speaking man. And your husband, although he has erected an impressive monument of language to you, writes in it mostly about your absence, and what it does to him.

I want to know if, on the train from Westerbork to Sobibor, you cursed your husband's last powers, on 14 May 1940, a day you will no doubt have remembered, there in that train, on the way to a future as vague as it is uncertain, and with all the time to think. A crossing to safe England had failed, and your husband persuaded you to commit suicide together. Was that really how it went, him as the planner and you as the meek follower? In any case, he changed the plan of his own accord. The wrists were already slit, you were already unconscious, but he managed to alert a doctor just in time, who saved you both. Were you angry about that, now that you were riding to your death? Or were you grateful for the almost three-year reprieve it gave you, and the chance that your husband still had the prospect of a long life?

Today, if a teacher at Vossius falls for 16-year-old students multiple times, his career is over when it comes out. If, like your husband, he is a scientist and writer in addition to being a teacher, all three of those careers have become forever unthinkable. His deep suffering and loneliness after your death do not give the impression of a sexual predator who has lost his prey. Rather, he reminds me of a friend, of impeccable moral character, who began a relationship with a student after she had long since ceased to be a schoolgirl and he had long since ceased to be a teacher. Just because two people encounter each other in a way that, given the difference in age and power relations, constitutes a disapproving context for a love affair, does not mean that apart from that, they cannot genuinely fall for each other, and fit together. And after the necessary wanderings in a more equal environment can still move on together. You too married your husband when you were already 23.

But such a story stands or falls, especially in today's society, with all the nuances we can no longer ask you for. I would like to choose that your great love just happened to be a bit older, and your teacher. That, after a good and equal conversation, you decided together that life had no meaning any more, and that, when you woke up alive and well, you felt relief that he had done what you would have wanted afterwards. I would like to opine that with every metre that the train brought you closer to Sobibor, you cursed the growing distance between yourself and your great love, and that there is an afterlife from which you did get to read all those poems that your husband wrote madly about you, and that you then occasionally, at the most beautiful lines, and there are quite a few, cried softly, if there is grief in that afterlife.

What I want to say is: it angers me that you were never given the chance to be your own person. Not in your life, but in your death. That anyone who wants to know anything about you, and even I in this letter which is supposed to be about you and not Jacques Presser, has to go through your husband first, as if you were a child bride in a back room.

Once again a bleak sound is howling through the world. Each generation growing up is further removed from what it was actually like to live at war with Nazism. This morning I read what would happen concretely if the US elections are won by the fascist candidate, a perfectly real option. Then raids will start again. Then I hope some young woman manages to smuggle her phone along, and opens her camera, and records everything she has to say. And then pass the phone on to the next, and the next, just until the battery runs out. It won't be enough, and it had better remain a scenario. But her name will be great and eternal, and when her lover makes it into the finest anthology of the century, everyone will say: he was Debora Appel's lover, and not the other way round.

Heartfelt greetings,

Daan Doesborgh