My mother was a toddler during the worst of war, during the razzias and the increasing anger. She recalls very little of that period, and her parents did their best to shelter their children. But her older siblings who were in school remembered a lot. They had very few friends during the war. Hannie was so ashamed, she often sat with her head down in the corner. As an adult, she told me she was thankful that the teachers didn’t throw her out of their classes and that the other children tolerated her presence. Still, while she and her siblings were tolerated, most of their classmates were forbidden to play with them, as they were “dirty NSBers.” At school, they ate lunch alone. They weren’t invited to birthday parties, except for those of the other children of NSB members. The neighbors cursed under their breath when they passed. All across the country, taunting songs were sung to and about NSB members in the streets. As she was under the age of five, my mother doesn’t remember the songs being sung to them, but her family would not have been an exception.
* * *
I learn about these anti-NSB songs not from my mother’s family but from an eighty-three-year-old woman whom I am introduced to in 2014 while on a writing retreat in Gelderland, in a village that saw a lot of fighting at the end of the war. The woman recalls being a child during the war in the village, where she spent her whole life, and having an NSB member as a neighbor. We sit in her garden and drink tea as I ask her about her memories of the war. When I mention writing about the NSB and my grandfather, she misinterprets this to mean that he fought the NSB, and she says, “Oh, we kids used to tease the NSBer on our street. We ridiculed him and his son!” and begins singing enthusiastically, apologizing for her shaky voice.
Ohhhhhh Jan de Bree, you’re a traitor to the country
Ohhhhhh NSB, we’re going to break your neck
You in your lil’ black uniform, you’re actually in mourning,
When Queen Wilhelmina comes back, we’ll beat you black and bluuuue.
When there is no more meat to eat, we will butcher yooooou.
She laughs. “That’s what we kids always sang about that nasty NSBer, Jan de Bree, and his son, who lived on this street. NSBers, you could see it in their eyes. Just mean.” There is an awkward pause as I try to formulate an elegant way to correct the misunderstanding that has transpired between us, but there is no tactful way to say it.
“Um, actually, I meant I am researching the NSB because my mother’s father was a member.”
She blanches and stammers, “Ohhh. Oh, I thought—It was just kid songs. We didn’t know any better. I didn’t know.”
“It’s OK,” I say. “Actually, this is good. I’m glad you shared this with me. Nobody ever wants to tell me how people really felt about the NSB members once they know about my grandfather. They’re afraid of being impolite. But I want to know how it really was. I can’t understand if I don’t know how it really was at the time.”
Later, I research anti-NSB songs and discover many others. One I find especially interesting:
On the corner of the street is an NSBer,
It’s not human, it’s not an animal, it’s a Pharisee-er.
With a newspaper in his hand, peddling his rag,
Selling out his Fatherland, for a coupla cents.
I am struck by the lines about NSBers not being human. I wonder how the children of NSB members internalized that messaging about their parents during the war. I wonder how that message influenced their relationships with the people they relied on for all of their needs, emotional and physical, at a young age. The Dutch, filled with rage and grief as they watched their neighbors being arrested and taken away, had little recourse left beyond verbal protest. So they did not hide their feelings about the collaborators during the war, and the children watch, extensions of their parents. “Fout!” my three-year-old mother hears yelled at them as she walks through the farmers’ market holding her mother’s hand. “Fout!” my mom’s big sister, Hannie, hears yelled at her as she bikes to school. “Dirty, filthy Nazi-lovers! Fout! Fout! Fout!” Fout. Wrong. Fout means not just incidentally wrong, but inherently defective and flawed, a deeper, unchangeable, all-encompassing kind of wrongness. How does a child like my mother metabolize that label on her and her family as she grows up?
* * *
Apeldoorn, the Netherlands, 1943
In early 1943, Hannie is enrolled by my grandfather in the Jeugdstorm, the NSB youth group for kids aged ten to seventeen, based on the Nazis’ Hitlerjugend. On weekends, Hannie is expected to put on a uniform that looks much like a Girl Scout’s uniform. She bikes across town to attend the meetings, where they do calisthenics and track-and-field exercises to keep their bodies fit. Healthy body, healthy mind! The blond, blue-eyed girls memorize songs and march back and forth on the frost-covered field at the local high school while singing in unison, their breath puffing from their faces in little clouds:
Our drumbeats sound throughout the land, marching with the Youth Storm!
The flags are waving in our hand, the flags of our Fatherland!
Stormer’s youth! Stormer’s youth! Stormer’s youth is marching!
Hannie, now eleven years old, shuffles along in formation in the cold, gray afternoons. She’s thoroughly embarrassed and doesn’t feel moved by the flag or the fatherland or these women standing in front of her shouting with their megaphones in their woolen skirts, ties, and silly hats. She’s a sweet, sensitive girl who likes everyone. She doesn’t understand why she’s supposed to mistrust Jews or feel proud to be a Germanic girl. To the contrary, her face flushes with shame when her non-NSB classmates bike by the field, and she tries not to catch their eyes. She would much rather be reading a book, walking in the woods, or even doing her homework. When it rains, the Youth Storm leaders force the children to sit inside and watch Hitler’s speeches projected onto a white screen, or they force the kids to write stories about being proud Dutch children for the Jeugdstorm newspaper, The Storm Seagull. Hannie daydreams and fails to apply herself to the cause with gusto. She is talked to sternly by the Jeugdstorm girls’ leader about her importance in the movement. “Young lady, your country is counting on you. Is that bird you’re staring at perhaps more important than your country?”
Hannie bikes home and bursts into tears as she walks in the front door. “I don’t want to be in the Jeugdstorm anymore,” she says to her father. “Please, please, Paps, can I quit?” My grandfather nods.
“OK. If you really don’t want to do it, I will see what I can do.” He goes to his desk and pulls out a sheet of letter paper. A week later, a response comes back to him from the regional girls’ director of the Jeugdstorm.
April 4, 1943
Comrade,
In regard to your letter of April 2, the following: You write that when your daughter is required to go to the Youth Storm, she has no free time left over due to all her studies, and this seems to you to be unhealthy for a child of eleven years old. Would it then not be a better solution to not have a child of eleven years old study so much? The Youth Storm is not stressful but in fact anti-stress, and is a moral obligation, Mr. De Kock! I would have expected more understanding from you as a national-socialist about the forthcoming new times and some sense of duty to your other comrades, whose own children are committed for the full 100% to realize their ideals, and are willing to sacrifice insignificant personal past-times. This is not a game anymore, but deadly serious. It is sink or swim now, and children cannot learn this early enough, comrade! I therefore see no good reason to excuse Hannie. However, you can consider her expelled from the Youth Storm as of the 1st of grass month. I would have liked to have seen her contribute something to this point. She is seven weeks behind, something which you should not have allowed to happen. If Hannie had been told at home what her duty was as a Youth Stormer, this would not have happened.
Her uniform pieces are owned by the Youth Storm and remain our property with her departure. Please have her drop them off as soon as possible. They are: a blouse, cap, tie, tie clip, and badge.
Stay the course!
The Regional Girls’ Youth Storm Director,
C. Wedekind
Some NSBers profit financially from their membership in the party, being appointed to important positions and getting salary increases, but my grandfather, sticking to his socialist ideals, rejects such opportunities. He is offered a better position at a better school but keeps his teaching job at the auto mechanics’ school, despite his low pay and lack of prestige having been a major point of frustration for him. He is offered a radio, illegal for all Dutch people not in the NSB, which he refuses. He is offered more food coupons during the rationing that takes effect throughout the Netherlands during the war, but he declines, and my grandmother stands in the same lines as everybody else.
* * *
Throughout the Netherlands, Jewish homes are looted during the war after their residents are sent to the camps. Priceless artwork, furniture, clocks, silverware—everything is stolen, leaving the buildings abandoned and bare. Later, the homes will be bought for pennies on the guilder by non-NSB Dutch investors. My grandparents never received any property from Jewish homes, even though both NSB and non-NSB Dutch participated in this practice. While this fact doesn’t absolve my grandfather of his sins, it begs the question of how clear the divisions are between the righteous and the collaborators they condemn.
When my uncle and I walk through the former Jewish neighborhood in Arnhem, it occurs to me that these homes sat empty after their inhabitants were deported and murdered. It’s a lovely neighborhood, with typical brick town homes near the historic city center.
“What happened to these houses when the Jews were sent to the camps?” I ask him.
“Dutch people bought them for next to nothing. Dutch people bought anything that wasn’t already looted,” he says.
This is something I never considered before. NSB members were not legally permitted to buy these properties after the war, so I realize now that any property not looted by the Nazis at the time of the razzias was bought or looted by those on the other side, the “right” side, something that seems perverse.
“You mean the people who were protesting the German occupation then turned around and got a bargain house or furnishings?”
“Basically,” says my uncle.
At the same time, I understand that with the exception of the Nazi officers and NSB members willing to profit from advantages, everybody suffered during the war, particularly at the end, as the Allied troops fought to take back territory from the Germans and bullets and bombs hit civilian homes as the air raid sirens screamed. With the Germans controlling the railways and waterways, there was a food shortage. The Dutch population suffered, regardless of which side they supported.
My mother’s family is no exception in 1944. They eat stinging nettle soup when there are no vegetables, knit underwear out of yarn from old sweaters. “Things will be better soon, kids,” my grandmother tells her children. “The war will be over soon.” How mistaken she is, as she halves, and halves, and halves again the number of potatoes included in each meal to make her rations stretch a few more days.
8
END OF THE WAR, BEGINNING OF THE WAR
The Netherlands, 1944
In June 1944, the Allied forces land on the beaches of Normandy in France. My mother is now four and a half years old. D-day is the beginning of a furious effort to liberate Nazi-occupied countries, as troops begin fighting their way toward the Netherlands. In September, they reach Belgium, and the Dutch hear rumors that the liberation operation is under way. This leads to Dolle Dinsdag, on September 5, 1944. Mad Tuesday. Believing they are about to be liberated, people celebrate in the streets and await the Allied troops. De redding is nabij! “The rescue is near!” radio announcers call into people’s living rooms. In most living rooms, the response is jubilation.
For collaborators, however, it’s complete panic and a reckoning. They are certain they are about to be killed or arrested. About half of the NSB members, particularly those in leadership positions, pack their suitcases. Nazi leaders inform them that they should flee to Westerbork, where they will be transported on to safe houses in Germany. Some thirty-five thousand NSB members take them up on this offer and flee to temporary camps and Camp Westerbork, which is still occupied by Jews who are also due to be transported, but to entirely different fates. In an unattributed diary cited on the “Drenthe in the War” website, a Jewish Westerbork prisoner purportedly writes,
The first NSB’ers have arrived, most in cars stuffed with suitcases, baby buggies, chests and blankets. The stream of NSB refugees flows through the camp. On foot, in cars, on bicycles and wagons, and at the end on freight and passenger trains, they arrive. We are all staring at each other, we can’t believe our eyes. “Now it’s your turn,” that’s what all our faces say.
My grandfather chooses not to flee. He doesn’t believe he has done anything to put him in danger. He doesn’t feel complicit and naively assumes that the authorities will look at his circumstances and agree with him. So my mother and her family stay where they are, in their house in Apeldoorn.
But the Netherlands’ liberation will not come that easily, and Mad Tuesday turns out to be a false alarm. The Allies enter the country to ticker tape parades, but they are en route to fierce battles and roadblocks, particularly along the country’s rivers, where bridges are the key to controlling the territory. The Allies aren’t assured of success; the Germans put up a furious fight. They block bridges to cut supply lines, a tactical move to starve the country and force the Allies to back down. In return, the Allies focus on gaining control of some bridges and bombing others in order to prevent the Germans from moving troops to fight them, an operation made famous by the film A Bridge Too Far.
In Operation Market Garden, thousands of Allied troops are dropped from planes with the goal of taking key Dutch bridges, including the main bridge over the Rhine river at Arnhem. But weather and other circumstances create a chain of disastrous events. The troops are dropped far from their targeted landing sites, and as they make their way through the Dutch countryside, high-stepping through soggy fields past dairy cows, they unexpectedly encounter German troops. Fierce fighting between the troops goes on for several days, with Allied and German soldiers alike losing their lives, their corpses loaded onto stretchers in the days that follow, to be sent home to their families in bags.
After nine days, the Allies fail to take control of the intended bridges, which was key to expediting the Allied forces’ advance into Germany. The Dutch are not liberated. The failure of the Market Garden campaign means that the war will last another year, one of the most difficult of all the war years for the Dutch citizens as German troops double their efforts to retain territory, engaging in ferocious fighting with the Allies. In Gelderland, the province where my mother lives, the fighting is particularly bad. The woods near Apeldoorn are filled with munitions bunkers and German soldiers guarding them. Bullets whistle past the trees her brothers love to climb. Booby traps are dug into the cool, damp soil and covered back up with moss.
Air raids are common during this time, and families are ordered by the Nazis to black out their windows at night so they can’t be seen by Allied bombers from the air to use as guides. My mother, now five, listens to the growing and ebbing moans of air sirens that sound like a cat in heat, rubbing her eyes in her little bed. Her eleven-year-old brother Bert whispers in the dark, “Elsje, don’t be scared. Come on, you have to get up. We have to go to the cellar.” The door to their bedroom opens, and my grandmother scoops Elsje up to carry her down, with Hannie behind her carrying blankets and pillows pulled from their beds. Many nights are spent in the cold cellar on mattresses between the potatoes and the jars of blackberry jam. Elsje listens to the airplanes drone overhead, explosions in the distance, afraid of the noises but not sure what they mean. Her siblings know. They help my grandmother by playing with Elsje. They tell her stories about the twin babies Mapje and Papje who are found in the forest after wandering
away from their mother and raised by rabbits in a warren under the ground until Elsje falls asleep, the cellar around her filled with her rabbit siblings in their rabbit hole.
* * *
On October 14, 1944, my mother’s family gets a devastating reminder that the war is not over. On that afternoon, my mother and my grandmother visit my grandmother’s father and stepmother in Zutphen, a town about an hour and a half from Apeldoorn by bike. My mother’s grandparents run a printing press and a stenography training school out of their home. My mother loves visiting her oma and opa. It will be Oma’s birthday the next day, Sunday, but they celebrate today. My mother sits on Oma’s lap and they read books together. She gets apple cake with whipped cream. Opa is helping the stenography students who are practicing in the study, but he pops in to kiss her.
At 3:15, my grandmother looks at her watch and says they need to get going to make it back to Apeldoorn before dark. They drink the last of their tea. My grandmother stacks the cake plates and offers to wash them, but her stepmother says, “Leave them. I’ll do that. You guys need to get going.”
My mother hugs her opa and oma and thanks them for the cake.
“Oh, my pleasure, sweet thing. Be a good girl,” Oma says, helping Elsje on with her coat and buttoning it up to her chin. She kisses my mother on the forehead.
My mother and grandmother put on their scarves and hats, mittens for my mother. Elsje’s grandfather winks at her. “See you soon, meiske.”
All Ships Follow Me Page 15