From January 1942 to October 1944 Johanna Ria van der Veen wrote down what was happening around her. Everyone called her Jopie.
She did it in a few ordinary school exercise books, the way a teenager does. What is in them is not history writing but something far more immediate: how slowly worked its way into an ordinary family's life.
At the start it is still about school and home. As the months pass it shifts. , raids, blackouts, aircraft over the house. The title a historian later gave her diary comes straight from her own words: the are droning, the windows are rattling.
The family lived on the Prof. dr. Magnuslaan, in a neighbourhood that became part of Utrecht in 1954. Her notebooks have been digitised and can be read at the Utrecht Archives.
What makes them remarkable is that she was nobody. Not a resistance heroine, not an official, not a victim with a monument. Just a girl writing down what she saw.
There is much more to discover in Utrecht, and our walking routes are how you do it!
Sources. Story: Source story: ‘De tommies brommen, de ramen rinkelen’. Het oorlogsdagboek van Jopie van der Veen, Vereniging Oud-Utrecht, april 2005. Photos: Het Utrechts Archief
