ON April 15, 1945, 14 people emerged blinking from the gloom of a house in an ordinary street in the Dutch city of Zwolle, a small provincial capital 70 miles or so east of Amsterdam.

They were Jews: and they had been hiding in the house's attic, many of them for years. German soldiers, all unsuspecting, had been billeted just a couple of doors down the same street.

The house belonged to Atie and Nico Noordhof, a perfectly ordinary Dutch couple who just happened to have extraordinary courage. Nico worked in provincial water management; his wife Atie was a music teacher. Both were keen on folk music. And both had been determined to save innocent lives...

York writer Tim Murgatroyd found out about their remarkable story through his wife, Ruth. Her elderly relatives - a great aunt and great uncle - had also been keen on folk music, and had been friends of the Noordhofs in the 1930s.

Through them, Ruth and Tim became aware of a series of letters and diaries detailing the wartime experiences of the Noordhofs and their house guests. The seed of an idea for a novel was born.

York Press:

Hidden secret: the Jewish families who had hidden in Atie and Nico Noordhof's attic

"Their (the Noordhofs) courage was just so extraordinary," Tim says. "It is something I have always wondered about myself - whether I would have the courage to stand up under those circumstances."

Press readers will know Tim as our regular Wednesday columnist. He's also an English teacher at Huntington School and an established writer with four novels and several volumes of poetry already under his belt. Two of his books - Taming Poison Dragons and Breaking Bamboo, both set in medieval China - have been translated into Chinese.

Writing a novel set in wartime Nazi Holland was something of a departure. But he was drawn to it both by Atie and Nico's story, and by the fact that, in this country at least, what happened in Holland during the war is so little known.

Following the German invasion in 1940, Holland had its own collaborationist government, run by the Dutch Nazi party, the NSB or Nationaal-Socialistische Beweging. It was a brutal, hapless regime, desperate to please its German masters, Tim says - even to the extent of creating false Dutch traditional dances to suggest a racial link with Germany.

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Atie and Nico Noordhof

It is in this Holland that he sets his new novel, The Nazi's Daughter. It is April, 1943. Pieter Goedhart, a thirty-something chef and cookery teacher whose wife and two daughters were killed in an air raid, returns to the windswept fishing village where he was born for his father's funeral. He inherits both his father's job - as village schoolmaster - and his father's house. And he finds that it comes complete with an unexpected guest: a Jewish man hiding out in the attic.

Pieter is a very reluctant hero: terrified of what will happen if the Nazis find out about his house guest, and only a grudging ally of the village's local resistance movement. But gradually more refugees make their way to his attic. A black American pilot shot down over Holland; and a terrified Jewish couple whose relatives have already been killed...

Then the spoilt daughter of a top Dutch Nazi official - a minister in Holland's Government - arrives in the village. Elise Van Thooft-Noman was a star at the Paris ballet until a leg injury forced her to retire in her 20s. She has retreated to live in an old windmill in Pieter's village owned by a family friend, to sulk and lick her wounds. And with her comes a contingent of German troops, determined to protect the high-up Nazi's daughter. Suddenly the war, and the oppressive presence of the Nazis, has come a whole lot closer to this quiet village...

There are some extraordinary scenes which paint a vivid picture of life under oppression; 'traditional' Dutch Easter dances around an open village bonfire which turn out to be a Nazi commissioner's idea to replicate Aryan customs; references to the 'conspiracy' of rich, sinister Jews; the forelock tugging obsequiousness of a Nazi soldier towards the daughter of a high official; the stink and fug of a farmhouse attic crammed with refugees each desperate to hang on to the last shreds of their dignity and humanity.

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Atie with her accordion

There's also an unforgettable scene describing a party at Elise's father's mansion.

"Chandeliers blazed across the ballroom... Gallant uniforms thronged, matched by long, trailing dresses and glittering diamonds," Tim writes. It's a fairytale party at a fairytale mansion - except that those 'gallant uniforms' are the black uniforms of the Nazis, and the trailing dresses are worn by women who are unthinkingly racist. The wine they drink is pillaged from the cellar of a wealthy Jew. And at dinner, Elise's mother "forgot to mention the dancing, complaining instead that the couple next to her looked decidedly Jewish. Mother could smell a Jew a mile off..."

It is a powerful account of how a creeping ideology of racism and hatred can pervert an entire culture. And part of the reason he wrote the book, Tim admits, is because he fears that we haven't learned the lessons of the past.

He is alarmed by the rising levels of intolerance and suspicion we see around us - and the corresponding growth of far right movements around the world. "The (Dutch government's) collaboration with the German invaders between May 1940 and May 1945 seemed a parable for the ease with which power attracts those longing for power and hatred draws those drawn to hate," he says. "A warning from history we'd be fools to ignore."

It is the ordinary Dutch fisherfolk, sullenly enduring a brutal, sneering regime, who are the real heroes of Tim's novel, of course. And at its heart, as well as being a novel about courage and collaboration, this is a love story. Pieter and Elise are gradually drawn to each-other, each changing the other in the process.

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A separate strand of the novel, set two generations later in New York, follows the story of Elise's granddaughter Jenni, and her slow unravelling of the secrets and lies surrounding her recently-deceased grandmother's life.

It makes for a poignant novel. And it is one that, breaking with the tradition of his previous novels - which were all published by Myrmidon - Tim has decided to publish himself.

It is available, as an ebook only, for £2.99 from a variety of online platforms.

E-publishing has been a liberating experience, the author admits. He has been able to be in control of every detail of the way the book looks and feels - including the stunning cover design, produced by the same firm that did his jacket covers for Taming Poison Dragons, his first published novel.

He's even enjoyed the marketing, he admits - though that's partly down to his eldest son Tom, who showed him how to promote his book on Facebook.

"I'll have to take him on full-time!" Tim says. A true tale of the generations...

  • The Nazi's Daughter by Tim Mugatroyd is available as an e-book in a variety of formats, including Kindle, from www.troubador.co.uk/ You can find out more about the book from Tim's Facebook page, www.facebook.com/TNDtimmurgatroyd/