It is disappointing to me as I try to piece together my family’s story that my grandparents were so affected by their internment that they absolutely refused to ever speak of their experience after the war. Specifically, when I consider the things I have read about these camps, I think my grandmother must have been deeply traumatized, especially given her complete lack of involvement in the politics that put her there. To be identified as a verrader, a traitor, someone fout, wrong, when her worst offense was being married to a man who may have been these things, must have felt like a betrayal. And because she doesn’t exist as an individual in the record of this history due to her silence on the issue, I project onto her the other narratives that I read, filling in the vacuum of information that her shame left in the family history. This is hardly unique, as I read over and over in the words of NSB children that their parents refused to speak of what happened to them as well. The stories we are left with, the only ones that make it into the history books, become the mismatched pieces we jam into the gaps of our family puzzles. They don’t complete the picture, but they’re better than empty spaces.
In a video, a woman who was the young adult daughter of an NSB member, arrested along with her parents, speaks about being put into a group of prisoners who are the daughters of NSB-appointed town mayors. She was forced to walk with these women in a circle as they were hit with sticks and hoses. “Are you sorry?!” the guards yelled as they hit the young women. “‘No,’ we said, because there wasn’t anything we could have done about it. They hit us everywhere. [They felt] we had deserved it,” says the woman. In her book From Traitors to Good Patriots, Helen Grevers quotes a camp guard in an NSB internment camp in Velp: “Why we hit [the internees] I don’t actually know. The early days of the liberation were an abnormal time and a chaos. Such behavior toward the political delinquents found its roots mainly in the effects of the liberation excitement which we were experiencing, through which we couldn’t fully understand the consequences. Practically all the guards were in that state of mind that they hit the political delinquents.”
It is complete confusion as the NSB members come flooding into camps and prisons throughout the country, thousands upon thousands, among them my grandfather. They cram into the barracks, stack themselves into the bunk beds if they are lucky. The rest of them sleep on straw on the ground.
For the NSBers sent to Westerbork, in the barracks right next to them lie dozens of Jewish people who were saved in the nick of time before their transport to Auschwitz and Dachau but haven’t yet been repatriated. Many of these survivors have nowhere to go. So they stay in the camps, where they get a bed and food and time to make plans. Once again, as after the false alarm of Mad Tuesday, Jewish internees and NSBers mingle inside the camps. But this time, their statuses are switched, the Jews finally free and the NSBers prisoners. One Jewish survivor wrote to family members,
Every day now, large transports of NSB members arrive here. They don’t have it easy … We Jews no longer have to work, except we now are the supervisors. There are boys here from the Free Netherlands [magazine] and military police for security. They are extremely harsh towards all that is NSB.
There are not enough guards, and a handful of the Jews who had been liberated only days earlier are now offered jobs as guards.
The violence of revenge outside the camps that the NSBers were presumably saved from with their internment is in actuality just as bad inside the camps, if not worse. There do not seem to be any rules against flagrant abuse of the prisoners, and the Dutch authorities look the other way with regard to human rights violations. The most bizarre humiliations are invented for the accused collaborators. They have to “mow the lawn,” forced to get down on their hands and knees and bite grass and weeds off with their teeth. In the worst camps, they are made to walk on glass shards. At night, the guards get drunk and pull the prisoners naked out of bed and lead them around by a rope while they are beaten with sticks and bottles. According to one historian, “Abuse was more often the rule than the exception.”
Elderly people, many of whom had done nothing more than vote for the NSB party prior to the war, succumb first. Meanwhile, six months or more go by before those accused get a hearing before a judge. Some of them are innocent, including women who, like my grandmother, had never been active in the NSB but happened to be married to a member. The human rights abuses they suffered are waved away as irrelevant by the Dutch authorities because “if they had been released, they would have been murdered.”
Aside from the conditions in the camp, I imagine that for my grandparents, and especially my grandmother, not being able to see their children is the greatest difficulty of their internment. My grandmother gets a letter in the camp from her sister telling her that the children have been taken to the children’s home. There is nothing she can do about it, and she feels helpless. She spends her days knotting fish nets or weaving place mats or making handbags or sewing jackets, or whatever her daily labor is, but her mind is on her children in that facility in Dordrecht. She is a mother who cannot go to her children in the night when they have bad dreams. She cannot check her children’s foreheads for fever when they are ill. She is trapped behind barbed-wire fences, unable to soothe her children’s worries.
* * *
Dordrecht, the Netherlands, 2014
On a drizzly late-spring day, my aunt, my mother, and I drive into the city of Dordrecht in the southern part of the Netherlands. We follow the GPS to locate the former home of my mother’s aunt Ket and uncle Jan, using an address I have copied down from my research in the archives, but the GPS leads us to a dead-end parking lot next to a factory abutting the freeway. We get out of the car and walk down the road, which is, as expected, a dike with some charming old cottages at the opposite end, but none of those is the right house. Eventually, we learn from a woman walking her dog that this dike used to continue but the freeway now bisects it, cutting one half off from the other. We get in the car and drive through a tunnel to the other side of the freeway and locate the other side of the dike, which now has a different name. New homes line this neighborhood, but a horse stable at the end appears to be old, and we stop there. My mother recognizes the stable as part of a farm that the dike house looked out on, but all around it, time has progressed, filling in pasture with cement. We never locate the dike house, though one small cottage is a contender. My mother isn’t sure. I realize that asking a woman in her seventies to remember a house she was removed from as a five-year-old may be unrealistic. I snap some photos, and we move on to locate the children’s home where my mother stayed when her parents were interned. This address pops up on GPS as being in the center of the city, so we drive downtown and park. Dordrecht is an old city, with cobblestone streets and church spires rising up from the center. It’s also a modern city, with the same kind of nondescript apartment buildings we’ve encountered everywhere. In the drizzle, we locate the address and find a huge concrete block. Inside is a retirement home. We use the restroom in the lobby, and I watch the residents, all appearing old enough to have lived through the war themselves, spoon yogurt into their mouths in the dining room. The trip to find my mother’s past here is a failure. I am left feeling a sense of emptiness about the ways that history is literally paved over. I will never be able to know my mother’s experience, and will only be able to fill in images based on my research, just as a reader will only be able to create their own vision of the truth based on the information I present. The true narrative is buried somewhere beneath Dordrecht’s rebar and concrete.
* * *
Dordrecht, the Netherlands, 1945
Elsje is in the little children’s wing of the Renate Home, separated from her brothers and sister. Hannie is in the older children’s wing, and her brothers are on yet another floor. The children sleep in bunk beds in tiled rooms. Elsje misses her mother intensely in the dark of the room. Every now and then she hears footsteps in the hall echo off the walls and waits for the door to open. But it rarely does. Hannie comes
to visit her once, but she and Pim contract diphtheria almost immediately and are put in quarantine, and thereafter they don’t visit for weeks. Elsje gets lice, which make her head itch. All of the kids get scabies. The meals are adequate, but thin. Elsje watches the staff of the home slather butter on their bread in front of the children, who aren’t afforded these luxuries, and she is envious. She loves butter. It has been a long time since she tasted it.
Elsje is ill almost constantly in the home, probably due to anxiety. Her stomach is in knots, and she has intestinal issues that put her in the sick ward more often than she is in her assigned room. Her sleep is restless, punctuated by nightmares, and one night as she tosses in her top bunk, she rolls completely off the mattress and drops to the concrete floor below. She lands on her side and her face smacks the floor, causing it to swell and turn shades of black and purple. After that, one of the women who works in the home takes pity on the bruised six-year-old and begins to take her home with her to her house outside the city on the weekends. At Anneke’s house, Elsje gets to play outside with the dog and watch the chickens catch beetles in the dirt outside their coop. There, she gets a soft-boiled egg at breakfast with a tiny spoon just for her, and a bedtime story and a kiss on the forehead before sleeping on soft cotton sheets. She wishes she could stay there forever and be part of this family, this perfect family that is not hated by strangers, and maybe at some point she even expresses to them this desire to stay. It’s something that will plague her forever as an act of betrayal toward her own family. All week long at the children’s home, she waits for Friday to come so she can go home with Anneke. And after some time, maybe Elsje sort of forgets that she ever had another mother and father. Anneke’s family is a tiny sliver of normalcy in the fear-laced loneliness of being six years old and separated from your parents and siblings, rejected by your aunt and uncle, resented by your community as the child of people who were fout, like maybe there is something inherently fout with being born to that family.
In June 1946, my grandmother finally has her trial and is found not guilty of active treason, though she is found guilty of being an NSB member and loses her right to vote. She is released from the camp, as are nearly one hundred thousand other people for whom there is insufficient evidence to warrant a conviction for treason. She may not be guilty of more than signing her name on a form once years before the war, but the mark is already on her as an NSBer, and the punishment has already been delivered. All of the family’s possessions are gone. My grandfather’s assets have been frozen, and his bank account is now controlled by the state, which pays his bills via a state-appointed accountant. His salary, pension, and benefits have been revoked. Still, the bills roll in and go to collection when the accountant doesn’t pay them on time. Telephone service bills for a house they cannot enter, outstanding balances, all accrue late fees upon late fees. The children’s home in Dordrecht has also been charging astronomical fees that the family is expected to pay upon release—adding up to a bill of 1,913 guilders (the equivalent of approximately 10,000 dollars in current-day value, when adjusted for inflation). The government’s payment for the accidental bombing and deaths of my grandmother’s parents in Zutphen doesn’t cover all the bills. Because my grandfather is unable to organize mandatory repairs from inside prison on a house in Gorssel he owned that has been damaged by bombing, the government fines him.
Into this state of bankruptcy, bureaucracy, and accruing debts and fines that have compounded while my grandparents have been incarcerated, my recently freed grandmother emerges, walking out of the detention center with only the clothes on her back. She has no home and no money. Like a homing pigeon, she has one destination in mind, and she heads there immediately.
Elsje wakes in the children’s home one morning, ill with the flu and confined to the sick ward as she so often is. In the doorway of her room are two staff members and a woman. “Elsje, look who’s here!” Elsje sits up in her bed blinking her feverish eyes, cheeks flushed, looking at the thin woman in the shabby coat who is beaming at her. The women look at her expectantly. She smiles. “Is it … Aunt Nini?” Elsje asks, a tentative smile tugging at the corners of her mouth. Aunt Nini, her mother’s sister, lives in South Africa, and Elsje has never met her before. The woman’s face falls, and the staff members look at each other uncomfortably. “No, no, Elsje. Look again. It’s your mother!” Elsje isn’t sure what to think. Her mother was sent away. She was gone. In her child’s mind, this meant she was gone, no longer existed. Yet here she suddenly is, this person they insist is her mother, standing in her room. Her mother comes to her, reaches out her arms, her eyes full. Elsje reaches back.
Despite this reunion, my grandmother has to leave her children behind in this home because she has not a guilder in her pocket nor a home for them to go to. Answering advertisement after advertisement, she gets a job near the children’s home in Dordrecht, as a live-in maid for a wealthy man, and works for months to save enough to get them out, visiting the children daily. It’s a slow process, as the fees for the children’s home accrue simultaneously. Three, four, then six months pass, but she hasn’t saved enough, and nobody will rent a house to her. When she visits the children in the home, the eyes of the staff members turn to stone. She’s an NSB traitor. Her disloyalty has caused her children to suffer, and the staff to have to take over her parental duties and tie shoelaces, wipe noses, and pick lice out of these NSB children’s hair. What kind of a mother does this to her children? The judgments move across their faces like clouds. They don’t try to hide their disdain. But my grandmother’s only choice is to keep the smile plastered on her face every time she visits, the smile of attrition that has become second nature. “Thank you so much for keeping them longer,” she says. “I’m earning money now. I’ll have enough soon to take them with me and off your hands.” Anneke, the woman who brings Elsje home on the weekends, turns to my grandmother with daggers on her tongue. “I’ve discussed it with my family, and we’ve decided that we’d be willing to keep Elsje. She’s a very sweet little girl. Helpful and obedient. She deserves … a good home.”
My grandmother snaps, her smile disappearing. “Keep her? Is that a joke? She’s my daughter, and she isn’t available to keep. I love my children.” Shaking, she wipes her eyes. “I know what you think, but I am not a bad person, and I wish to take my children out of here.”
So it is that a few days later, Hannie, Pim, Bert, and Elsje are retrieved from their respective wings, and their mother walks out of the Renate Home for Child Welfare in Dordrecht with her four children and an overwhelming sense of complete uncertainty about what to do now.
10
STARTING OVER
Dordrecht, the Netherlands, July 29, 1946
My grandmother doesn’t have enough money saved to rent a home for herself and the children, so she immediately begins finding temporary solutions, sending letters to friends and family to ask for assistance. The boys, now nine and thirteen, are sent to live with a farmer who needs help with chores like milking cows and mucking out stables. Hannie, the eldest, now fourteen, is sent to live with a family in Hoog Soeren—a tiny village about thirty minutes’ drive from Apeldoorn—helping them with sewing jobs. Elsje, too small to work for her keep, is taken in by the family of one of the family’s old neighbors in Apeldoorn. Meanwhile, my grandmother keeps working as a maid and searches for a home where the family can be together. But every rental application she fills out is denied. As she becomes increasingly desperate, and as the family that has agreed to take Elsje in begins to ask how long her stay is going to last, they find a solution for her.
They know a family that has a summer cottage in the High Veluwe, the nature reserve of heath and woods on land owned by the royal family, in Hoog Soeren. As a small summer cottage, it isn’t even insulated, the wind whistling through the cracks, but the matriarch who owns the place, the elderly Mrs. Parqui, now needs assistance. They work out an arrangement that my grandmother and the children can live there for very low rent
year-round if they take care of Mrs. Parqui during the summer months when she is there. My grandmother agrees immediately, and gathers her children into the tiny house between the cornfield and the woods to try to start life over. The painted wooden house is called “The Red Pan,” a play on words, as the Dutch word for the red clay roof tiles on the house is “roof pan” (short for pantile), and a carving of the horned pagan god of field and woods, Pan, dances on the top of the house’s peak on his goat hind legs. The cottage resembles a particularly elaborate Swiss chalet, with woodland creatures carved into the gables, forest gnomes in the garden, owl-shaped trellises, and bucks with antlers stenciled onto the exterior walls. At night, the frost spreads across their blankets and they wake up with ice crystals in their noses and their hair frozen to the pillows, but for Elsje, this is the best time in her life, back together with her siblings and her mother under one roof. And they are quite literally under one roof, as they sleep side by side upstairs under the folk-art-painted eaves in two rooms separated by an interior wall that doesn’t reach the ceiling. At night, Pim and Elsje lob things over the wall partition to Hannie and Bert, and they sing Dutch folk songs in the dark together until my grandmother, knitting socks and underwear downstairs by the fireplace, calls up to them to go to sleep.
* * *
Hoog Soeren, the Netherlands, 2015
On a sunny early summer day, my mother and I visit the sites of her childhood—and part of mine—in Hoog Soeren. We pass the school where I attended first grade, and where my mother attended grammar school. We are on our way to the The Red Pan, which is now on the National Register of Historic Places.
All Ships Follow Me Page 18