Willy Wielek-Berg

Willy Wielek-Berg (June 14, 1919 – January 7, 2004) was a Dutch translator, film critic, writer, columnist and resistance fighter. She translated the work of dozens of writers, including Joseph Roth, Heinrich Böll, Theodor Fontane, Grete Weil, JRR Tolkien, Muriel Spark, Nina Simone and Russell Banks.

Life and work Wielek-Berg was born as Willy Berg in Steenwijk, the Netherlands, on 14 June 1919 to a traveling salesman Wilhelmus Johannes Berg and shopkeeper Jantje Klijzing. She attended the Hogereburgerschool in Zwolle and after finishing her education she was apprenticed to the regional daily newspaper Zwolsche Courant.

War years Wielek-Berg settled in Amsterdam in 1943. During World War II, she was influenced by a cousin to join a local communist-oriented resistance group called CS-6 (for Corellistraat 6) that was making bombs to sabotage the trains of the Nazi occupying forces. Wielek-Berg worked as a courier but with the other members of the group, she was arrested and sentenced to six months in prison in the House of Detention II on Amstelveenseweg. The Nazis murdered the rest of her group in prison but by feigning hysteria, Wielek-Berg managed to escape their fate and survived.

After the war, Wielek-Berg joined the Communist Party of the Netherlands and briefly wrote about art for De Waarheid (The Truth). But she was dismissed on the basis that her communist convictions were considered "not strong enough," as demonstrated by her decision to review the film The Third Man (1949). According to Amelink, "She shouldn't have written about a film that was ugly about the Russians."

From the 1960s, Wielek-Berg began to focus on translating books and radio plays, and from 1970 she started reviewing films and books for the newspaper Trouw. In doing so, she had to limit her reviews to films considered in good taste and avoid immoral or blasphemous books or movies. 1976: The Infant of Death Radio Play 1977: Tolkien's Fairy Tales 2 (translations) 1981: Radetzkymars (translation of the novel by Joseph Roth) 1992: The Lights (novel) 1995: Zwarte de Pik van Botha (Botha's Black Cock) (short story collection named after her cat)