A Surinamese scientist in German-occupied Holland
Sources: Leiden University website and an article by Audry Wajwakana in De Ware Tijd.
Mariska de Jong of the Ma Jong Foundation wants to change this. “Paul Flu was a great man, who we may have let inadvertently slip into obscurity. He deserves better,” she says to the Surinamese newspaper De Ware Tijd, and: “It has taken far too long before it was realised. In 2024 we find that the development of the water supply which he initiated hasn’t kept pace with the growth of the city of Paramaribo and its population. That’s a great pity.”
Paul Christiaan Flu, who came from a prosperous Surinamese family, in his sixteenth year attended Medical School in Paramaribo, and later when he was 22, received his doctor’s degree at the Utrecht University in the Netherlands before continuing his studies in Paris and Hamburg. Subsequently, he returned to his homeland, then the Colony of Suriname, for three years as its Medical Officer. He became head of the recently established Laboratory of Bacteriology and Pathology, where he himself conducted research and taught his profession. In those days he also researched the Surinamese populace which was plagued by tropical disease.
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| Paul Christiaan Flu |
Doctor Flu was one of the organisers of an expedition to the Surinamese district of Groningen, where a clinic was established for people suffering of framboesia, a tropical infection that often results in raspberry-like skin ulcerations. The well educated Dr Flu had a hunch that this disease should be easily curable and tried an experimental treatment with salvarsan, a predecessor of antibiotics. Within three weeks, all his patients were cured and the clinic could close its doors.
In the towns, rubber plantations and gold mines of Suriname, living conditions for working people were extremely bad. Dominant and often lethal diseases at the time were yellow fever, malaria, bilharzia, filaria and leishmaniasis. Dr Flu quickly realised the solution went two ways: prevention and treatment.
Due to his knowledge of bacteria and parasites he knew the cause must be stagnant water, which was a source of many diseases contributing to the high death rate in Paramaribo. Dr Flu not only looked into medication, but also into the causes, and accordingly advised the Colonial authorities. One of his suggestions was to create a public water supply in Paramaribo, to enable the great number of open water cisterns to be removed from the contamination chain. Eventually it would take until 1933 before a mains water supply was created from the Para River to Paramaribo.
The ground breaking work of Dr Flu wasn’t just noted in Paramaribo, but also in the Netherlands. In 1911 he was knighted at age 27. Shortly afterwards he left for the (then) Netherlands Indies, to continue his work of tropical medicine there.
In 1921, the Leiden University recalled Dr Flu home, to become a lecturer in Tropical Medicine and the Director of the newly created Institute associated with the University. The peak of his career came in the second half of the 1930s. In 1936 he received a honorary doctorate from his ‘alma mater’, the University of Utrecht. Two years on, he was made the Rector of the University of Leiden, a function he would fill for a year, as was the custom in those days.
The war years 1940-1945
At the start of the German occupation of Holland in 1940, several colleagues of Professor Flu in Leiden openly refuted German meddling with the university. Well-known is Professor Cleveringa’s protest oration of November 1940, after his Jewish colleagues had been sacked. This didn’t leave Professor Flu unmoved, as can be read in his memoirs. The breaking point came in 1942, when the Law professor Roelof Kranenburg was sacked by the Germans. That caused 58 out of 93 of the professors in Leiden to resign, including Paul Flu.
Professor Flu and other prominent academicians were arrested and interned in the hostage camp of Sint-Michielsgestel. Flu was sent home after a while due to his weak health – just before the war he had contracted a progressive heart condition due to a laboratory accident. His freedom would be short-lived though, as he was arrested again in January 1944. Unknown to him was the fact that his son Dr Hans Flu, a young GP in Leiden, had just been foully shot by the German Sicherheitsdienst. At the time, Paul Flu was detained in the crowded Ortskommandantur in Leiden, with 34 other detainees before being carted off to the concentration camp at Vught in the south of the country.
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| Camp Vught |
The reason for all this was the shooting by the Resistance of a Dutch collaborator in the centre of Leiden, the previous day. The Germans had the nasty habit of taking reprisals – they habitually shot three prominent Dutchmen in retaliation of every Nazi shot by the Resistance, and taking dozens of hostages.
Camp Vught
After a month, Professor Flu was released from Camp Vught and returned to Leiden. But more than the physical hardship he had to endure, Flu was broken by the death of his son. He became depressed and lost the will to live. About his time in Vught he wrote that the hardship he had endured left him completely indifferent. And after his release, he only lived for his grandchildren, who had lost their father.
On September 17th, 1945, the University of Leiden celebrated its re-opening. Paul Christiaan Flu probably couldn’t take part because he was too weak. Three months later he passed away, only 61 years old. The Academy may have survived the violence of the occupying forces, but had lost one of its most prominent scientists.
Posthumous honour
The story of Paul Flu deserves more attention, as he is an example to every student of the University. On Remembrance Day, May 4th 2024, he was remembered in the central Academy Hall of the University. One of the speakers was Gin Sanches, who has researched the life of Paul Flu.
It isn’t just Mariska de Jong and Gin Sanches who are trying to revive the memory of Paul Flu. There are historians such as Wilfred Lionarons, andover 10 years ago, Luciën Karg made a documentary film about the scientific achievement of Paul Flu, which can be seen on Youtube.
Another historian, Eric Kastelein, together with the Directors of the Paramaribo University Hospital, in 2022 realised a memorial inscription next to the bust of Paul Flu in the entrance of the hospital. “There has already been done some preliminary work,” Mariska de Jong says. She adds that the Ma Jong Foundation and a local Surinamese foundation In Leiden have obtained permission from the descendants of Paul Flu to tell his story. She plans to do this together with other organisations in the Netherlands and in Suriname and calls upon everyone who can contribute to contact her to realise a great remembrance ceremony next year. “At any rate I am happy that the University has cooperated in allowing my colleague Gin Sanches to tell his story during Remembrance Day,” she says.
Recently she has set up a new training for funeral attendants in Suriname, where part of the training refers to cultural history of the country’s population. Recently her students were given an excursion to the University Hospital and the Medical Science Institute of Paramaribo to tell the story of the Surinamese professor who made such an impact upon tropical medicine. His name is only mentioned on a small plaque in the entrance of the Institute, but she feels it should be more prominent. “If we realise the contribution made to Leiden by Paul Flu, perhaps Leiden should do something for Suriname in return,” she says. Perhaps by creating a remembrance corner in the Institute, and an exchange program between the University of Leiden and the Medical Science Institute in Paramaribo.
Remembrance Day and the follow-up
May 4th is the Dutch Remembrance Day for WW2 victims. On that day we also honoured the memory of Paul Christiaan Flu, both in Leiden and in Paramaribo. I was privileged to attend the remembrance ceremony of Paul Flu at the University, and being present at laying a wreath in his honour at the War Memorial in central Leiden by Edwina Watson, another Surinamese friend.
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| laying a wreath |
The next Saturday (May 11th) I gave a lecture about Paul Christiaan Flu and wartime Holland, speaking to a small company of mainly Surinamese people, most of whose forebears haven’t experienced WW2 and the German occupation. Here is a summary.
Until recently, like many Dutch people, I didn’t know the name of Paul Christiaan Flu. It was only due to my recent involvement with the Surinamese community, following publication of my latest book. Paul Flu and his son Hans were both victims of the German occupation between 1940 and 1945. During the war years there were only a few Surinamese in Holland. One of them was author Anton de Kom, who died in a concentration camp. But there were more Surinamese war victims, most of them servicemen or sailors who perished during enemy action. On the monument on the river bank in Paramaribo they are also honoured.
What is my connection with WW2 and the German occupation? I am the son of a Resistance man, Theo Polet, who at a young age started collecting intelligence which through a teacher at his school he passed on to the Allies. After he moved to Amsterdam in 1943, he joined the Resistance and experienced the horrors of the Occupation at close quarters: the persecution and the razzias claiming the lives of fellow Resistance men and also, some of his Jewish friends.
I took a leaf or two out of my father’s war diary to give the audience an idea what life was like in occupied Holland, putting the dismal fate of the Flu family into perspective. My father was a Resistance man concerned with subversive action against the Germans such as spying and sabotage. But he was very much opposed to the liquidation actions of some Resistance groups against prominent Nazis and collaborators, more so because they resulted in reprisals by the Nazis against innocent civilians. Reprisals that also made Paul Flu and his son Hans a victim.
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