On October 24, 2025, the Institute of European Studies hosted graphic novelist Maria van Lieshout at UC Berkeley’s Philosophy Hall. She gave a lecture to about 35 guests on her recently published graphic novel, Blackbird, a fictional story set in Nazi occupied Amsterdam. She gave a historical overview of the occupation, detailed the impact of the occupation on her family, and how her family history influenced the creation of Blackbird. The event was also sponsored by the Benelux and Dutch Studies programs at UC Berkeley, as well as the Consulate-General of the Netherlands in San Francisco.The event was moderated by Institute of European Studies director, Jeroen Dewulf, who also opened it with an introduction. Kimberly Beijersbergen, Senior Officer of Public Diplomacy, Communications, and Culture at the Consulate-General of the Netherlands in San Francisco, spoke afterwards to commemorate 80 years since the liberation of the Netherlands from the occupation.
Van Lieshout started the lecture with stories of her childhood home in the Netherlands and grandparents. She recounted being told a story of how blackbirds sing because of the war, helping inspire the graphic novel. She spoke about her parents’ hesitancy to talk about their experiences during the war, leaving her with the impression that her family’s history with the war would be lost, until she discovered documents that her grandparents had written, detailing her grandfather’s association with the Dutch resistance. She gave a story of her grandfather, Hoyte, switching identities with a resistance fighter named Frits, in order to protect him. A detailed account was also given of Walraven “Wally” van Hall’s heist of the Dutch National Bank, which had been seized by Germany. With the help of an inside man, treasury bills in the bank were exchanged for forgeries, and the stolen treasury bills were exchanged for cash and used to fund resistance activities. An associate of Wally, Hanneke, was one of the women who distributed the cash around Amsterdam. After a resistance meeting location was leaked, Frits, Wally, and Hanneke were arrested. Frits and Wally were executed while Hanneke survived, later moving to Montana and writing about her experiences.
She also focuses on five distinct places in the story and explains each place’s significance in relation to the resistance, these places being the theater, school, church, office, and publishing house. The smuggling of Jewish children away from schools in non Jewish adoptive families was also described, including the uncertainty of reunification between Jewish parents and their children. Van Lieshout also reflects on her decision to tell Blackbird’s narrative in a dual storyline structure, one set in 1943 and the other in 2011. She had worked on the book for 12 years and recalled her mother crying when she read the graphic novel, and that she’d probably always cry when reading it.