All Ships Follow Me

by Mieke Eerkens

  My radio, my dearest friend

  We soon will have to part

  As that German thief has stolen you

  To chastise me, your owner

  For I pin my only hopes

  On the messages from Britannia …

  While the rest of the country has to turn in their radios, NSBers are allowed to keep theirs, and in fact are offered the very radios that have been confiscated from their neighbors. They are passed out to NSB members, but my grandfather refuses his, saying he doesn’t need a radio. He does help his brother-in-law Jan, the husband of my grandmother’s sister Ket, with fixing and hiding an illegal radio. Jan is both a police officer and an active member in the resistance, so my grandfather knows that helping him with the radio is highly illegal. But according to his and Jan’s written statements, my grandfather doesn’t believe that some people should have things that others don’t, and he’s critical of the Germans and their radio double standard, so he flouts the rules to help Jan and the resistance.

  This is the kind of mixed information that muddles my perception of my grandfather’s activity in the NSB. I bump up against these conflicting behaviors continuously, causing my feelings about my grandfather to sway wildly from one end of the spectrum to the other. When he and my grandmother go to visit her sister, he and Jan have heated arguments about politics while they work on the radio and drink jenever in the shed. The more they drink, the more the disagreement escalates. Jan scolds my grandfather and calls the Nazis animals, asks him how he can support a party that supports the Nazis. My grandfather yells back that he doesn’t support the Nazis, he supports the NSB. Jan says it’s the same thing.

  Meanwhile, even as he argues in defense of his membership in the NSB, my grandfather helps Jan with his illegal activities for the resistance, and he knows that Jan uses a typing course held in his living room to pass secret messages to other members of the movement.

  In the first few months of the occupation, the Nazis don’t take any overt action against the Jewish population of the Netherlands, which numbers at that point around 140,000 people, mostly concentrated in Amsterdam. Perhaps this lulls people into a false sense of security. According to several historical accounts, the Dutch public is naive in the beginning, believing the Nazis won’t actually do anything to their Jewish citizens, who are well integrated into Dutch society. In Amsterdam, one in ten citizens is Jewish, including some of the most prominent families in the city. In fact, to this day the Dutch nickname for Amsterdam is Mokum, the Yiddish word for safe haven. Prior to World War II, the quarter near the Nieuwmarkt is a bustling area of Jewish businesses where many non-Jews also shop. However, in November 1940, Jews are suddenly removed by the Nazis from public positions, in particular those in the education sector, such as university faculty. All the other faculty members at universities receive a letter, which they are instructed to sign:

  The undersigned declares that to the best of his/her knowledge, neither he nor she, nor his/her spouse, nor his/her parents or grandparents, have ever belonged to the Jewish belief or community … The undersigned understands that providing false information will result in immediate termination.

  This leads to student protests, but the demonstrations are ineffective. Faculty members who protest the firing of their colleagues and refuse to sign the declaration are immediately arrested by the Nazis and sent to prison, where they remain until the end of the war. The Dutch population, while agitated, either still don’t fully understand the danger their Jewish neighbors are in or are complacent and complicit, or a combination of both, depending on whose historical narrative is believed. It’s impossible to know one singular truth in this, as with any perspective of history. What is known is that not enough direct action was taken in response to the early arrests of professors and firings of Jewish public employees. The next uprising doesn’t happen until February 1941, when a small group of Dutch Jews is arrested and deported. Anger against the Nazis rises among Jews and non-Jews, and a fight breaks out between NSB members and members of the resistance on the Waterlooplein in the Jewish neighborhood. An NSB member is killed, and this is all the provocation the Nazis need. The day after the fight, they put barbed wire around the Nieuwmarkt neighborhood, raise the bridges, place guards at the entrances, and create an island-ghetto, prohibiting movement into or out of the neighborhood. It is forbidden for non-Jews to enter unless on official business.

  Today, the Nieuwmarkt neighborhood is one of the liveliest in Amsterdam, and I spend much of my time there when I’m in the city. Looking at a photo of the same square surrounded by a barbed-wire fence, Jews on one side, non-Jews chatting with them on the other, I am shocked by how casual they appear. I think of how easily the unacceptable can begin to look acceptable when people are inside an experience. There are Jews who have already gone into hiding by this point, recognizing the danger, but I wonder about the rest of the community. This photo of the ghetto was taken a full year and a half before the Frank family went into hiding. I wonder if people believed that this was as bad as it could get.

  The Dutch practice of meticulous record-keeping works against the Netherlands’ own citizens, as the addresses and names of all Jews have been neatly noted in the city halls and synagogues, giving the Nazis all they need to efficiently round up the Jewish population. These people are called to the Nieuwmarkt square to register at tables with the Nazis or face punishment, and each of them receives a Star of David armband they must wear in public. Frightened by the beatings and detainment they have seen happen to others who resist, they comply, standing politely in line and volunteering their names, birthdays, and home addresses, many sealing their fates. They have no idea what awaits them in the camps or the capacity for depravity in human beings. This Dutch efficiency and tendency toward bureaucracy is one of the main factors in the Netherlands’ having the highest percentage of its Jewish population killed among all Nazi-occupied countries in Western Europe.

  After the creation of the Jewish ghetto in Amsterdam, more fights and protests erupt throughout the city, causing Nazi officers to be injured. In revenge, the Nazis conduct their first large-scale pogrom on the afternoon of February 22, 1941, a Saturday. Driving their trucks into the Nieuwmarkt neighborhood, 600 Nazi soldiers flood the streets, rounding up 425 young Jewish men between the ages of twenty and thirty-five. The young men are held in a school and later sent to concentration camps, where all but two will die. In response to the pogrom and the detention of the young men, who are at that point still in the country, many workers in the city of Amsterdam go on collective strike, led by the non-Jewish dockworkers in the shipyards and the communist party of the Netherlands, which distributes a flyer:

  STRIKE! STRIKE! STRIKE! Organize a strike in all businesses! Fight the terror! Demand the immediate release of the arrested Jews! Show solidarity with the heavily stricken Jewish members of our working population! Halt the entire Amsterdam commerce for one full day!

  The flyers work. All commerce and public transportation come to a grinding halt that day. Other strikes in cities throughout Holland follow.

  Sadly, they do little to stop the assault on the Jews, and the leaders of the first protest strike are executed.

  After the February strikes, Jews are mercilessly rooted out of the city. The sound of boots echoes against the tall brick houses in the narrow streets of the city. Fists pound on doors, and if no one answers, doors give way with a violent splintering as Dutch Jews are taken from their homes and put onto trams to the Amsterdam Central Train station. From there, they are taken to Camp Westerbork for processing, and then are sent on to Auschwitz, Dachau, or Bergen-Belsen.

  The fact that most of the Dutch Jews are processed through Westerbork, 180 kilometers northeast of Amsterdam, is a bitter irony. In perhaps the cruelest twist of the occupation, in 1942 the Germans seize the Westerbork refugee camp, which had been established in 1939 by the Dutch government and wealthy Dutch Jews to take in Jews and Romani people fleeing the Nazi-occupied areas of other countrie
s. It is filled with Jewish refugees who are like sitting ducks when the Nazis invade the Netherlands. The Nazis put them on trains to the concentration camps almost immediately and turn Westerbork refugee center into a transit camp where over one hundred thousand Dutch Jews, including Anne Frank, as well as one thousand Romani and members of the resistance, are held before being sent to their deaths in extermination camps.

  * * *

  To this day, the trauma still runs deep in Amsterdam. My cousin told me about an old man he knows who grew up in a Jewish neighborhood of Amsterdam near the Amstel station. He was the only gentile living in the neighborhood, and all of his friends were Jewish. One day they came to his house with their parents to say goodbye, bearing gifts. “We’ll be back,” they said. “Don’t worry.” But not a single one ever returned. He lost all of his childhood friends and his entire community in one week. This man left the Netherlands and moved to France, unable to bear ever returning to his city.

  * * *

  While Amsterdam was emptied of its Jews, my grandfather was ninety kilometers away in Apeldoorn, which had seen one Jewish teacher fired from the local high school. In the letters he wrote after the war, my mother’s uncle Jan maintained that my grandfather was not anti-Semitic. Other witnesses at his trial also insisted he was not anti-Semitic. He himself said he was not anti-Semitic. All of his children insist he wasn’t anti-Semitic. As members of the resistance, Jan and his wife had onderduikers in their house, people in hiding from the Nazis. My grandfather said nothing when he visited them on weekends. The neighbors had a Jew hiding in their home whom my grandfather knew about. My grandfather said nothing to anyone throughout the war about these onderduikers. My relatives all tell me that he had several Jewish friends and colleagues before, during, and after the war, friends whom he defended.

  In his dossier in the archives, I find a defense witness statement from his brother-in-law Jan:

  13 June 1945

  [De Kock] knew all kinds of information that in the last years of the war could not be brought into the light of day. For some time I had the family Fontijne in hiding in my home. De Kock knew about the entire situation and kept it secret. During the time that radios were confiscated, he even helped me to hide my own radio. In a shed behind my house I was hiding four horses that should have been confiscated and two contraband bicycles hidden for the farmer Schenk. De Kock came to my house, saw everything, was greatly amused by it all, and always kept it secret.

  Jan Enzerink, Police Agent, Dordrecht

  So how do I reconcile this portrait of my grandfather with the article I discover on microfiche in the National Library of the Netherlands in The Hague titled “Crisis of the Sciences”? Written by A. C. de Kock in 1942 for the NSB journal New Netherlands, it reads, in part,

  The Jews, one could say, have shown that they are capable of practicing science and even can be fairly successful. One could rattle off a whole list of names: Einstein, Lipschitz, Spinoza, Minkowski, etc.… But hard science, as degenerated as it is today, is no longer characteristic of our race … When the Jew from time to time succeeds in the current science, which has become disorderly partly because of him (as well as Humanism), that does not necessarily prove that he has anything to offer us in this area … On the contrary, it would certainly appear that the Jew has nothing to offer that would be of any interest to us, no more than the Papua, the Chinese, the Eskimoes, or the African Negroes …

  These are the words of my grandfather, someone supposedly “not anti-Semitic,” someone who supposedly had Jewish colleagues and friends whom he spoke highly of, writing clearly anti-Semitic, racist nonsense for a racist NSB publication. Was he pressured to write it? My cousins, much older than I, tell me that my grandfather was an intelligent man with Jewish academic colleagues whom he respected, and there is no way he actually believed what he was writing in the article. So why did he write it? They have theories. He was paid to write it and sold out to feed his family. He was threatened. He was afraid of being seen as disloyal. Ego; it made him feel important to be asked to write an article. Perhaps he was secretly more racist than his friends and family knew and felt superior to his Jewish friends. Sadly, nobody alive today knew he wrote this article until after his death—he never spoke of it. He refused to discuss any aspect of his involvement with the NSB later in life. I don’t know what the truth is about this article, or about his continued involvement with the NSB. He has taken his explanation and any possible defense he might have had to his grave.

  Further, there is a giant question mark for me regarding the arson of the Jewish synagogue in Apeldoorn. The Jewish population of Apeldoorn isn’t as large as that in Amsterdam, but they have a synagogue, a stately brick building with stained glass windows. One night in August 1941, it is set on fire. Three NSB members are caught in the act at 3:00 a.m., shaking gasoline from cans around the perimeter and onto the front door, striking matches. Their names aren’t printed in any of the newspapers, but as an NSB member, my grandfather must have known something via the local rumor mill, even if he wasn’t directly involved. The synagogue is only a ten-minute bike ride from his home, after all. If my grandfather had been alive in my lifetime, I would have liked to ask him about this, about the article and what he knew and when he knew it, what he really believed, whether he was pressured, and why he continued on in the party. But the documents—ink on paper—and the words of people who knew him who are still alive are all the evidence I have, and they are at odds with each other.

  In a video I watch, a man close to my mother’s age stands at the grave of his father, who was in the NSB. “The first time I came here, I was so angry,” he says, “because of what he did. I think, Jesus, what is going on inside you that you would make a choice like that? I just can’t understand … The problem is that as a child, you can’t ask them what actually happened. [They] didn’t want to talk about it.” Grappling with the actions and the beliefs of your ancestors is a one-sided conversation. I will never have all the answers I want about my grandfather, and without a diary or letters in which he wrote freely, I will never have the chance to hear his side of the story. Recently, my cousin and I traveled to visit my grandfather’s grave site, which we had never seen. The family had received word that the body might have been disinterred. The site had never been paid for or maintained. I don’t know why we wanted to go. In the car on the way to the cemetery, we talk about our frustration that we will never get to ask him “Why?” The cemetery where he is buried is grim and gray, abutting a mobile home park. Almost too perfectly, a pair of black ravens sit on a gravestone in the drizzle, calling out. Our grandmother was not buried next to him. All expense was saved burying him, and he was buried in a public grave in the county where he died. At his grave site, we discover that he’s not alone. He’s sharing his grave with a stranger named Izaak. Izaak is buried on top of him in the same grave, something that we learn was done in public graves during the 1960s. My grandfather’s gravestone is plain and worn away, covered in lichen. We stand in front of it, looking down, getting no answers to our “Why?”

  * * *

  In 1941, my mother is two years old, toddling about the house, walking through the woods nearby, sitting on the banks of the Hill and Dale nature park with her brother Pim, now five. When school lets out, her face lights up as she sees her brother Bert, now eight, and sister Hannie, now nine, come in through the back door into the mudroom and set their book bags on the ground. Across town, thirteen Jews are removed from their homes in Apeldoorn and sent to concentration camps. My grandfather, like all Apeldoorn community members, will be told of their deportation, though he doesn’t know what their ultimate fate will be in the “detention” camps.

  At the end of 1942, my mother is three, and scooting around on her tricycle. Pim is practicing writing his letters: P-i-m. Meanwhile, all Jewish bank accounts are frozen, and in Apeldoorn, another two hundred Jews are removed from their homes during Nazi razzias, their doors kicked in, and men, women, and children dragged out int
o waiting trucks.

  In early 1943, my mother is four. My grandfather is still working at the auto mechanics’ school, cycling there and back every day. His Jewish students and colleagues are missing, and for most of the remaining faculty and student body, maybe it’s easy to forget they were ever there. He comes home, grabbing the newspaper off the stoop, and pours himself a cup of tea. Across town, thirteen hundred people in a Jewish mental hospital in Apeldoorn who had been allowed to stay up to that point are led out of the facility, loaded onto trucks, and deported to concentration camps, thereby emptying the city of all its Jewish citizens, with the exception of the onderduikers in hiding.

  By all accounts, both by witnesses in his postwar trial and by people who knew him, my grandfather condemned these acts to those who challenged him on his NSB membership. He agreed in their political debates at the time that the Nazis had gone too far, and that the NSB should never have allied themselves with the Nazi party to begin with.

  But did he rethink his NSB membership? Is knowing about one onderduiker in hiding and saying nothing an excuse for knowing about thousands of others being pulled from their homes and put on trains and taking no action to stop it? We could ask the non-NSB citizens the same thing. Here is where I always get caught up: If my grandfather was afraid of the repercussions of turning his back on the party, does it make any of it OK? What about the others, the hundreds of thousands of residents who cursed the Nazis, who weren’t in the NSB, but who bought their Jewish neighbors’ silverware at the market stalls and moved into their homes for a bargain?