UNDER THE CLOCK / TV Series (5 seasons)
Nineteen-year-old Law student ANNE VAN DEN BOGAERDE witnesses the roundup and deportation of her Jewish friend BETTY VAN KLEEF during a brutal raid by the Nazis.
In the aftermath of this massive roundup, she stumbles across a group of Jewish children roaming the deserted streets. In shock, and at first unaware of the life-threatening position this puts her in, Anne decides to save these children, and to do so she needs to get them out of town as soon as possible. But how? And who can she trust?
Under the Clock is the heart-pounding true story of a group of very young Dutch students who, during the brutal regime of the Nazis, rescue hundreds of Jewish children by hiding them in the countryside. To minimize the chances of being caught, it’s mainly the girls who put their lives on the line by taking the children to their hiding places by train. The transfer of the children takes place at train stations: ‘Under the Clock’.
Initially, Jewish parents are not prepared to hand their children to total strangers, barely grown up themselves, but as the realization dawns that nobody returns from the death camps, the students’ service becomes their only viable option.
The children are first trained to take on their new identities, and coached to try to forget who they were, before being placed in foster homes. But very few people are willing to risk their lives by hiding a Jewish child, because the odds of getting caught are extremely high: not only do the Nazis want the Netherlands to be ‘Judenrein’, Dutch collaborators and Jew hunters have made it their jobs to defuse what little resistance there is by catching as many Jews as possible, and through them the people who help them.
While Anne, along with her student friends, musters the courage to set up a resistance organization, she is still searching for her Jewish friend Betty. Is Betty still in Holland or did they immediately deport her to Auschwitz? Rumor has it that Betty jumped from a moving train to escape deportation, but Anne has reason to believe that her friend took fate into her own hands and that her jump was not a leap to freedom. In her quest to discover the truth about Betty, secrets are revealed that she’d rather not know. But she also discovers her own steely resolve, transforming from a naive young girl into a ruthless freedom fighter.