All of the tragedy, nightmarish violence, and absurdity that accompanied the four-year German occupation of the Netherlands is captured in the highly finished cartoons and caricatures that Leendert Jordaan gathered in this "Memory Album." Jordaan was the political cartoonist for De Groene Amsterdammer ("The Green Amsterdammer"), a left-wing paper that the Nazis shut down upon their takeover of the Netherlands. Jordaan continued to draw during the long occupation, and even published occasionally in the underground edition of De Groene Amsterdammer. Almost immediately upon liberation, Jordaan and the journal issued this compilation of his anti-Nazi cartoons. Taken together, the drawings are a savage and ironic commentary on the horrors of the period, rendered all the more effective by Jordaan's refusal to take the Germans' propaganda and self-image as ferocious conquerors seriously.

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