Underground Ivory Tower

There were two levels of the wartime underground in Europe: anonymous patriots who could sometimes fight back a little, and--farther down--wanted men who had to burrow and keep hidden. Gisele van der Gracht's Amsterdam apartment was a station in the subcellar underground. Gisele, a thin blonde in her 30s, was a first-rank Dutch artist, known for her stained-glass window designs. During the occupation she spent half her days on bread lines to feed the men she was hiding. To help them pass the terrible time, she also found pens, ink and paper.

Once they set foot in her apartment, Gisele's "boys" were there to stay. They dozed in the daytime, stayed awake nights "so there would not be too many warm beds in case of a Gestapo raid." Three of the hunted, Peter Goldschmidt (22), Simon van Keulen (19) and Harry Op het Veld (19) spent their nights sitting around a table lit by a wick in brilliantine, drawing. There was not much paper, so they took as long as possible on each picture.

The results, on exhibition in a Manhattan gallery this week, showed something of the lavish care and knotted intensity with which medieval monks illuminated the writings of the Church Fathers and the lives of the Saints. But their subject matter was more surrealistic than sacred. Their usual theme: the horror of war, illustrated by such symbolism as rotting flesh on temple steps. There were no heroics. In the new Dark Age, saints bore assumed names, and martyrdom was usual.

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