Betsy van der Poel

Very little biographical information about Betsy van der Poel is easy to confirm from reliable online sources. What can be confirmed is that she is credited as the author of Van Smyrna naar Holland in oorlogstijd, a Dutch-language work published in 1917 in De Aarde en haar Volken and later preserved by Project Gutenberg.

From the opening of that work, she appears to write from personal experience, describing her return to the Netherlands after spending nearly three years on an estate near Smyrna in Asia Minor during the First World War. The piece stands out as both travel writing and firsthand historical witness, noting the upheaval of war, forced displacement, and the practical hardships of crossing borders in troubled times.

Because so little else could be confirmed, the best introduction to her is through the writing itself: direct, observant, and grounded in lived experience. Her surviving work offers readers a rare Dutch perspective on wartime travel in the eastern Mediterranean.