This short, taut and utterly gripping novel is set in wartime Friesland and was originally written in Frisian rather than in Dutch. Frisian, a language roughly halfway between Dutch and English, is spoken by less than half a million people in the northwestern corner of the Netherlands but has an impressive literary tradition. Friesland itself is a largely rural area dotted with lakes and canals. The main character in The Trap is a Frisian fisherman with a temper. From the moment he is arrested, early one morning in 1943, things get rapidly and inexorably worse. The decline is shown with remorseless economy.


Although the story is based on a real event, the fisherman remains nameless. He is one of a rebellious breed, a family of poor but stiff-necked country people who followed the great anarchist leader Domela Nieuwenhuis in the early decades of the century. With his father and brothers he helped to organize violent strikes, fought with police and was jailed. Being poor, he went off poaching on nearby estates and on one occasion nearly killed a pursuing game warden, which cost him another jail sentence.


Now he lives in an isolated cottage by the lake with his wife Gryt and their son Germ, who is twenty-one and the apple of his father’s eye. Germ is involved in anti-German underground activities and the family regularly offers shelter to resistance men and women. Germ is away the night when his father is arrested. At first the father assumes he is being brought in for routine questioning and refuses to be intimidated. Gradually he begins to realize something happened in the course of the night before his arrest. The Germans tell him they have his son Germ, too, so he may as well confess before they apply harsher interrogation methods. The father thinks they’re bluffing. The breaking point comes when he realizes his son was actually killed that night, caught red-handed and shot as he tried to escape. The father explodes into a self-destructive rage, is brutally beaten and tortured but remains stubbornly silent. He is summarily executed shortly afterwards. Having lost all that was dear to him, he had found dignity and a sense of liberation from responsibility, defying his torturers even as the interrogations increased in brutality. We are left with the poignant image of a doomed man facing impossible odds without flinching, beaten but unbowed.

He said: ‘I don’t know the people. If Germ was with them, he should know more about it. That’s why I have to talk to him first.’

At that moment he became unsure again. The boy’s tobacco case lay there, and his pocketknife and the lighter.

‘I’ve gotta talk to him first, I wanta see him.’

The man did not answer, he took a cigarette and searched for a light. When he felt his pockets in vain, he took Germ’s lighter and tried to use it. The thing wouldn’t work, as usual. The man flicked it several times and inspected it. When he put it down, he took his handkerchief and wiped his hands.

He took a step forward and looked at the spot where the cigarette lighter had lain. A few drops of water had spattered on the desk. He took another step forward and took the tobacco case. He opened it; the tobacco was soaked.

The man said: ‘Leave it alone,’ and got up.

He looked at the man. He looked him right in the eye, and then he understood.

He put the case down and at the same time grabbed the man by the chest with his free hand and jerked him halfway across the desk. Then with his other hand he grabbed him by the throat and squeezed hard.

Then the soldier jumped him. He staggered backward. He now had both hands around the man’s throat and squeezed still harder. He still held the man in his grip when the soldier hit him over the head with the butt of his rifle. (p. 123-4, tr. Henry J. Baron)