Mirjiam van Hengel, Leo Vroman’s editor at Querido and former president of the Vroman Foundation wrote ‘How Lovely it All Is. Leo and Tineke Vroman, love during wartime’. The book was published on 10 April 2014, Leo Vroman’s 99th birthday shortly after his death on 22 February of the same year.

Mirjam van Hengel captured the start and the growth of the first few years of the Leo, the poet, and Tineke, the anthropologist’s, very long marriage; she used their letters, diaries and conversations to bring their origin story to life.

Leo and Tineke met each other in Utrecht in 1938 where they were both students. After a tentative start, especially for Tineke, they fell in love. After the invasion of the Netherlands by the Nazis in May 1940 ethnically Jewish Leo Vroman fled from his parents’ house to Scheveningen by taxi and then by boat to England. From there he travelled to Tineke’s family in Indonesia. This is the start of an eventful period in the army and a Japanese prisoner of war camp where he wrote the famous camp diary.

Back in the Netherlands Tineke had no information about what has happened to him since he left. Their love is strong and they wait for each other, she finishes her studies. Leo’s journey has taken many twists and turns but he finally arrived at a relative’s house in New York. Eventually, two years after the war, in September 1947, they were reunited as Tineke arrives by boat in New York with her microscope in her luggage. Sometimes love is forever, they remain inseparable until Leo’s death in 2014.

The photograph on the cover is their ‘wedding photograph’ taken a day after Tineke arrived in New York.