Background
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.
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.
Jesus College; University of Amsterdam.
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. After the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor he was conscripted into the Dutch Army. After the Japanese Invasion of the Dutch colonies he was captured in Java and sent to a prisoner of war camp.
There he was subject to starvation and, after the discovery of a secret radio, torture in an iron hut known as "the oven".
Throughout his time in the camp, Bachrach retained a copy of Shakespeare"s works which the guards believed was a "holy book" and therefore permitted him to keep. He held regular secret discussion meetings, signalled by the wearing of creased trousers.
He was released in 1945 at Changi, weighing less than 37 kg (80 lb). 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.
While there he obtained a scholarship to Jesus College, Oxford and studied seventeenth century English literature, receiving a Doctor of Philosophy. From Oxford, Bachrach became the head of English Studies at Leiden University, remaining there for the rest of his career but with frequent secondments to galleries and museums in Britain and the Netherlands as well as a visiting fellowship to All Souls College, Oxford.
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. He remarried for the final time in 1990 to Harriet Jillings and settled to retirement in Twickenham.
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.
