FINDING THE BOOKS

Leentje had got the court records and the tv programme had been long out.

There was one element in the tv programme which disturbed me enormously and the court records seemed to place obstacles in the way of rehabilitating Folens.

One of these was the court not believing his resistance work. They made a hash of enquiries in that area with Folens himself having to provide them with a book which he claimed had evidence that Zielens was in the Resistance.

The second thing was from the programme itself. That was where the programme said that Albert had declared himself a war criminal in a noble cause. Crazy stuff. If that was the case, we have somebody who defends himself in court after the war, comes to Ireland, tries to keep his wartime past under wraps in Ireland, and at the same time, but much later in 1988, is happy to boast in Flemish in Flanders that he was in fact a war criminal, implying he did all sort of awful things.

These two matters needed to be sorted. I hate loose ends. That meant finding the two sources, both of which turned out to be books, and finding out what the real score was.

The first source I managed to run down was where Albert supposedly boasted about having been a war criminal. The reported version of that had me up in a heap. I had got a broad reference from a footnote in Daniel Leach's book on Fugitive Ireland.

Following this up brought me to a site which I took to be offering the book to anyone prepared to pay €30 for it. I ordered it, as I thought, but was informed after a while that my "offer had been turned down".

Back on the hunt I came across a copy in a small bookshop in Brugge (Bruges) run by Willy Tibergien. He was offering it for €8 so I ordered it, and following some small confusion with IBANS, my payment was accepted and the book duly arrived. You can read my reaction to it here.

I couldn't find a copy of the book, which Albert had given the court and which showed that Zielens was in the Resistance, anywhere. Google gave me nothing. Then I had a brainwave, yes one of those. I searched for an image of the cover and when I found that, it had a link to a major Dutch bookshop which was offering a copy for €10. I ordered it immediately and waited for my payment to go through so they could send it to me. This is a major bookshop so that took a while. Meanwhile they told me that if they didn't have the payment within a week they would put it back on sale. My heart was in my mouth for the week and I asked them to hold it a little longer if they hadn't found the payment, which my bank told me had gone through on the day I ordered the book. Finally it was found and the book dispatched. You can read my reaction to it here.

Make no mistake, it was absolutely essential for me to have access to the primary sources in both these cases.

In the war criminal case, Albert had been both misquoted (wrongly translated) and taken out of context, a context I might add that was extremely damaging to the journalist who made the allegation in the first place.

In the matter of Zielens and the Resistance, it was very reassuring to have the actual texts that Albert was referring to and which had been dismissed by the Court. I certainly found it convincing.

All of this was just some of the "fun" in tying up these loose ends.

Get Leentje's book.

The book is available to readers in Europe here, and to those outside Europe, and particularly in the USA here