47 pages • 1 hour read
Yael van der WoudenThe Safekeep
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2024A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Themes
The Nature of Home
In The Safekeep, both Isabel and Eva value the house and all the objects in it. However, their connections with the home contain significant differences—most notably, that Isabel’s family took over the home and dispossessed Eva’s family of their rightful possessions. Throughout The Safekeep, the nature of home thus emerges as a central theme, examining wider concerns involving justice and belonging.
From the beginning of the novel, Isabel demonstrates an anxious attachment to the house and its objects for two reasons. The first reason is that Isabel wishes to keep the house as a shrine to her mother. She maintains a careful inventory of the house’s objects and is constantly afraid that someone might steal something from her. She treats the objects with care and reverence, such as when she tells Henrik that the plates with the hare designs are “not for touching. They are for keeping” (3). The second reason is that Isabel fears she will eventually be turned out of the house once Louis inherits it. Isabel’s fears of losing her possessions and even the home itself echo the real dispossession and displacement experienced by Eva and her family during the war.
Eva, by contrast, cherishes the house because it is her rightful inheritance, representative of everything that was lost during the devastation of the Holocaust. In the pages of her diary, the fate of the house’s objects haunts her: “I’m thinking, What did they keep? What did they sell? I don’t know if it’s worse if they kept everything” (187). Eva does not view the objects as materially precious in the way that Isabel does. Writing about the hare plates, she says, “We used to eat off those plates every day, and then that birthday party and the wild hare and one of them broke, and Mum wasn’t even that upset. Life happens, she said” (205). Instead, for Eva, regaining access to the lost things is the beginning of justice for all the trauma she has experienced at the hands of the Nazis and the complicit community members.
Whereas Isabel’s entitlement to the home is built upon a shaky foundation of lies, Eva’s is based on a true historical injustice. Her sense of righteous anger over the loss of the home is reflected in her words as Isabel kicks her out of the home: “You were never supposed to have it. It was never yours” (178). Isabel returning the home to Eva at the novel’s end thus represents a form of reparations, with Isabel realizing that the home is not hers to keep after all. In choosing to live together in the house as a couple, Eva and Isabel build a sense of home that is truly theirs.
The Transformative Power of Unexpected Relationships
At the beginning of The Safekeep, Isabel is a very isolated and anxious figure who is struggling to know who she really is and forge meaningful connections with others. Upon meeting Eva, however, Isabel finds herself undergoing a rapid personal transformation. Through their love affair, the novel explores the transformative power of unexpected relationships.
Upon first meeting Eva, Isabel is very resistant to getting to know her and nurtures an impulsive hostility toward her. In her diary entry from the night of their first meeting, Eva writes of Isabel, “Her face, I swear. Not even honey could sweeten that vinegar” (209). Isabel’s disapproval of Louis’s latest partner is openly visible to Eva, which reinforces the sense that Isabel lacks social niceties and sensitivity toward others’ feelings. When Eva moves into the house, Isabel continues to behave in a cold and unwelcoming manner, turning down each of Eva’s attempts to engage her in conversation or outings.
Isabel begins to demonstrate significant changes in her behavior once she begins her love affair with Eva. Her sexual awakening with Eva inspires new confidence and contentment within her, allowing her to become more vulnerable and sensitive toward others. Whereas before, she kept track of her household inventory obsessively, her obsession quickly becomes peripheral: “Right before she fell asleep, Isabel spared an edge of a thought for her forgotten inventory […] and then she was gone. Fell, all at once, into slumber” (149). As Isabel falls deeper in love with Eva, she becomes less anxious and less guarded, learning how to treat others with greater respect and care.
Learning the truth about Eva’s identity and connection to the house also helps Isabel find a moral courage and confidence that she never previously showed. Instead of passively fearing that she will one day be turned out of the house, she instead confronts Uncle Karel and demands that she inherit it. However, she secures the inheritance only to then turn the house back over to Eva, the rightful owner. This act of reparation marks the high point of Isabel’s transformation, as it shows her letting go of her former anxieties and passivity and instead acting in a decisive, confident manner.
Isabel’s willingness to give the house back to Eva—the house she was so obsessively attached to—also reveals that Isabel has learned to cherish genuine interpersonal connections more than material objects or property. Her love for Eva has thus not only given her a sense of confidence and inspired her commitment to doing the right thing but has helped her realize that she does not need to live in fear about her future or her identity. Isabel’s love for Eva therefore illustrates how unexpected relationships can sometimes transform hearts and lives for the better.
The Complexities of Civilian Complicity
In The Safekeep, what goes unsaid is frequently just as important as what is said. A series of unspoken truths underpins the entire story but is only revealed in its final third. The revelation of Eva’s identity and connection to Isabel’s family home lays bare the book’s true subject matter: the Holocaust’s legacy in the Netherlands and the complexities of civilian complicity in the persecution of the Jewish community.
The novel is set in the early 1960s and examines the ways Dutch civilians try to ignore the ongoing legacies of World War II and the Holocaust. As Eva states, “No one ever knows anything in this country. No one knows where they live, who did what, who went where. Everything is a mystery. Knowledge is illusive” (244). Despite this overwhelming silence, however, glimpses of the dark past are interspersed throughout the text: the fully furnished house that Isabel moved into during the war, Eva’s distinct appearance and lack of family members, and Aunt Rian’s plate that belonged to her Jewish neighbor. All these elements foreshadow the revelations that Isabel will have to confront before the novel’s end.
In the final portion of the book, the terrible truth of the Holocaust is made vivid by the pages of Eva’s diary: Everything that has gone unsaid for over 100 pages is suddenly made explicit in her angry, cutting entries. It also becomes clear why people are not speaking about the genocide: They were complicit in it because they benefitted from it materially and have antisemitic prejudices. Eva summarizes this dynamic when she recalls,
Mum told me that she and the other Dutch people were the last ones to leave the camps. That the Red Cross came for the French and the Swiss and everyone and that the Americans kept saying, Oh you need to wait for someone to come get you to bring you back […] Later they heard it took a long time because no one was coming. The Dutch didn’t send anyone to bring back their Jews (204).
In other words, the Dutch government refused to confront the reality of the Holocaust and denied care to its Jewish survivors even after the war’s end, leaving their Jewish citizens unclaimed and unassisted in the camps.
Furthermore, the civilians who were complicit in the persecution of their Jewish neighbors have varying responses when confronted with their involvement. An old neighbor of Eva’s demands forgiveness in the same breath that she calls her a “pretty Jewess.” Uncle Karel and Aunt Rian become defensive and angry when it is suggested that they stole from Jewish community members: Karel even goes so far as to claim that the family couldn’t be bothered to come back and claim their house, even though Eva’s mother did precisely that and was threatened and turned away by Isabel’s mother. The reactions of people like Karel and Rian speak to how civilians who exploited their Jewish neighbors’ persecution for their own benefit remain unrepentant and unwilling to right these historical wrongs.
Only Isabel, who is initially rendered ill by the immense guilt, makes an attempt at reparation by returning Eva’s things and house to her. The incredulity with which Eva responds to this gesture—“Do you mean to trick me?” (256)—indicates how rare it is for Dutch gentiles to respond this way. Their reconciliation after this, however, offers a hopeful message for the future of Dutch Jewish-gentile relations, suggesting that the only antidote to injustice is truth and the full acknowledgement of one’s complicity, however deliberate or inadvertent it may have been.
