The Hiding Corner
After the success of the war comic De Ontdekking in 2003, Eric Heuvel has written another educational comic about the Second World War in the Netherlands: De Schuilhoek about the events surrounding the building Markt 12 in Aalten, where the National Hiding Museum is now located. The Hiding Corner was published in collaboration with the Anne Frank House and the National Hiding Museum.
The educational adventure was specially made for the National Hiding Museum in Aalten. The special thing about the album is that it is available in both Dutch and German. The production was financially supported by an interregional subsidy scheme of the European Union (Interreg).
The Hiding Corner is about Wim van Dort, a resistance character from The Discovery, who in 1943 to avoid the Arbeitseinsatz, goes into hiding in Aalten, a border town in the Achterhoek where a relatively large number of people were in hiding during the war (one in five). During the war, the office of the Kommandantur was billeted here on the Markt, while there were people in hiding in the attic, without the Germans noticing.
The idea for the comic book arose when an exhibition of the Anne Frank House traveling along the Dutch-German border visited the Achterhoek town. The target group consists of young people between the ages of 10 and 18 and schools from the border region around Aalten. The National Hiding Museum also has teaching materials for both Dutch and German schools.
The previously published comic strip The Discovery (The Discovery of the Anne Frank House and the Frisian Resistance Museum) follows the arrival of a Jewish family fleeing Germany to the Netherlands and deals in passing with the rise of Nazism and the German occupation and the developments in the Dutch East Indies. The Discovery was a great success in schools, as was the hardcover trade edition that Big Balloon released.
The Hiding Corner is for sale in the museum for € 4.95. For use by schools of 10 copies or more, the price per piece is € 1.50.
