Was God On Vacation? Review

A while back, an Iowa state representative by the name of John Kooiker gave me a book after church.  He was an old friend of mine, an elder I looked up to and regularly talked with after services had convened.  I meant to read it right away.

Around ten years later, I finally got around to it.  It's a shame that it took me this long.  I should be far more eager to complete a book when someone gives it to me.  It's the polite thing to do.  And anyway, I didn't read it because I remembered John Kooiker.  I read it because my father read it in my stead when I first took it home.  All these years, my old man has been asking me if I've gotten around to reading that book.  He really wanted me to read it, because he loved it, which is no surprise.  The book is about a Dutchman who did amazing things during World War II.  My father's a Dutchman, so the story was relevant to him.

Like the judge giving in to the persistent widow, I listened to him after a while.  A decade later, I finally picked the book up and put my nose to it from start to finish.

Overall, it was an interesting account.  It's the true story of Jakobus "Jack" van der Geest, who was a teenager when the Germans first invaded the Netherlands.  That much I knew from what John Kooiker had told me when he handed me the book.  The first few chapters is about how he fought in the Dutch underground, got reported on by his neighbor named Reita, ended up being shipped to Buchenwald, was mistaken for a doctor and forced to help the Nazi doctors with their experiments, became so thin that eventually he got away with faking death, being thrown into a pile of dead bodies, and eventually crawled out at night and killed the Nazi officer patrolling the pile, at which point he took the officer's clothes and sneaked out of the concentration camp.

This is non-fiction, so I don't think that it's a big deal to give away spoilers.  However, I'm not going to write up a summary of Jack van der Geest's story in this review.  I very well could.  After all, I knew most of the things that were going to happen in this book because my father told me about several of Jack's stories.  However, perhaps you want to read this for yourself instead of just getting a brief description of his adventures from me.  I don't want to take away your reason for going out and buying this book.

What I will say is that Carol Ordemann, who transcribed the story for Jack, didn't necessarily do the best job.  I noticed several typos, among other things, which is an objective flaw in its writing.  A published book shouldn't have any typos.  It's extremely unprofessional to have them.  That's the other complaint that I have about Ordemann's writing, that it isn't very professional.  The story is in the first person, which makes me wish that van der Geest didn't seek out someone else to write the book for him.  I'm not expecting him to have the writing ability of Elie Wiesel, but I still would imagine that he'd have enough of a knack for storytelling to write this book himself.  As it stands, Ordemann's first-person writing doesn't feel very personal and doesn't put me in his skin.  It feels emotionally distanced.  Also egregiously, there are times then Carol writes a person as having said something "while smiling" or some other expression, and it's really frustrating because it sounded to my ear like she was creatively filling in the blanks of various scenes in order to make them feel more like first-person recollections and not like they were actual memories of van der Geest.  This book could have felt a lot more reliable, but I didn't trust the illustrator when actual scenes were being illustrated.  Did I trust the overall story and the events therein?  Yes, but not the details of the conversations, which in the meantime were flat.

Another problem that this book has is the title.  van der Geest briefly implores if God is on vatation while in Buchenwald, but but he then figures that God is on his side when he escapes, and the subject isn't explored again.  Once more, I bring up Elie Wiesel, author of Night and God On Trial, who brought up the death of one's faith beautifully, poignantly, and personally in his memoirs, and does a good job of making the reader feel very invested in the question of God's goodness.  Was God On Vacation? doesn't explore this question and give a lot of insight into just what van der Geest was going through spiritually, or if he thought that much about his spirituality at all.  There are brief mentions of God throughout the book, but they aren't brought up with a lot of conviction, or a sense of urgency that says that says that the Divine is an important subject for conversation.  It isn't thematic of the book.  It's just a small detail, which makes me think that it doesn't belong in the title, especially when Jack van der Geest only struggles with the question in one of the early chapters.

It's frustrating, because the story truly is a good one.  However, I think I'd rather retell it myself in my own way, as a folk tale, to my children.  It's a story that's better told than read.