Fred Bachrach

Albert Gustave Herbert "Fred" Bachrach (9 December 1914 – 18 December 2009) was a Dutch literary and art historian of French and German descent whose academic work featured in a number of prominent exhibitions and research works in Britain and the Netherlands and who founded the Sir Thomas Browne Institute for the study of Anglo-Dutch relations at Leiden University. Bachrach had also served in the Dutch Army during the Second World War and spent three years as a Japanese prisoner of war, suffering starvation, torture, and deprivation that haunted him for the rest of his life.

Early life Bachrach was born in Frankfurt in December 1914 to a French father and a German mother and was educated at Amsterdam University before becoming a teacher, first in Alkmaar and subsequently in the Dutch East Indies. After the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor he was conscripted into the Dutch Army. After the war, Bachrach spent a year with French special forces in Saigon during the First Indochina War before returning to the Netherlands to work for the government. Among the exhibitions he worked on during this time were The Orange and the Rose at the Victoria and Albert Museum and Turner's Holland at the Tate Gallery. He also published numerous works on literary and art history, including the Dutch An Introduction to Shakespeare in Five Letters and founded the Sir Thomas Browne Institute for the study of Anglo-Dutch relations at Leiden.

Family

He was married three times: after his first divorce he married Catherine De Vries in 1947, but subsequently divorced with three children. He remarried for the final time in 1990 to Harriet Jillings and settled to retirement in Twickenham. He had been made an honorary Commander of the Order of the British Empire and a Knight of the Order of the Netherlands Lion and was a keen painter and exhibited his own work. His wartime experiences remained with him throughout his life, but it was not until 1995 that he was able to speak openly about them after a meeting with Eric Lomax. He died in December 2009.