Suicide
By March, Ter Braak's money was running out and he had to change the dollar bills through a fellow lodger who worked at a bank. At the end of the month he no longer had the money to pay his landlady. On 29 March he deposited a large case in the left luggage office at Cambridge station, and went to the air raid shelter where he committed suicide using an Abwehr-issue pistol. His body was not found until 1 April; the possessions found on him included a forged identity card also carrying numbers issued by SNOW which had obvious errors, a Dutch passport without an immigration stamp, and 1/9d in cash. The case at the station was found to contain a radio transmitter.
Ter Braak's story was suppressed at the time. An inquest was held in camera; its findings were released, along with other information about him, on 9 September 1945.
Read more about this topic: Willem Ter Braak
Famous quotes containing the word suicide:
“Unless democracy is to commit suicide by consenting to its own destruction, it will have to find some formidable answer to those who come to it saying: “I demand from you in the name of your principles the rights which I shall deny to you later in the name of my principles.””
—Walter Lippmann (1889–1974)
“Most of the folktales dealing with the Indians are lurid and romantic. The story of the Indian lovers who were refused permission to wed and committed suicide is common to many places. Local residents point out cliffs where Indian maidens leaped to their death until it would seem that the first duty of all Indian girls was to jump off cliffs.”
—For the State of Iowa, U.S. public relief program (1935-1943)
“However great a man’s fear of life, suicide remains the courageous act, the clear- headed act of a mathematician. The suicide has judged by the laws of chance—so many odds against one that to live will be more miserable than to die. His sense of mathematics is greater than his sense of survival.”
—Graham Greene (1904–1991)