I bike there on a rainy afternoon, my hair slicked wet to my face and my clothes damp and cold because I don’t have a raincoat. I cycle out of the center, through Westerpark, until I find myself in an industrial area. I bike under the freeway overpass, and still I keep going. It’s much farther than I anticipated, twenty to thirty minutes away, and not at all the kind of neighborhood I imagined it would be in when I arrive. I get a bit lost in the maze of project buildings, all identical to one another. The streets are empty. One woman, her eyes averted, passes too quickly for me to stop her for directions. I finally spot a man entering one of the buildings. “Hello! Hi! Excuse me? Fritz Conijnstraat?” I ask him. “Sorry, I don’t know,” he answers in English, with a heavy Eastern European accent. He turns and vanishes inside the building.
Cycling on, I find Fritz Conijnstraat just one block over in an identical housing structure, and see that my mother’s former home was in the middle of one of the large apartment blocks. I snap a photo of her former building, the brick now tagged with graffiti on the side. Laundry hangs to dry on most of the balconies, and the exterior is lined with a pipe wrapped in foil insulation. The balcony door to my mother’s former apartment is open, and I can see part of a stove, a woman cooking, and a toddler looking at me through the window. A man talking on his phone on one of the balconies looks down at me as I lurk by the tree in front of the building, and I give him a half wave and a smile, lamely hoping to connect and share with someone, anyone, that my mother lived in this building sixty years ago, maybe learn something more, be invited in. But he walks inside and shuts his door.
A few weeks prior to my visit, a newborn infant was found in a public Dumpster by a passerby who heard the baby’s cries echoing up from the depths next to these buildings, only steps from my mother’s former front door. Had the woman not passed the Dumpster at 4:00 a.m., the baby would have been crushed in the garbage-compacting truck that would have mechanically lifted the container into the compacter that same morning. The police are unable to trace the child back to its parents. In a newspaper article in Het Parool, residents describe the neighborhood: “There are some high-rises in this area, and who knows what goes on. In those blocks, it’s all very anonymous.” The tragic story of the discarded child only intensifies my deep sense of the isolation and depression my mother felt while living in this place.
After only a few minutes, I want to leave. So I get back on my bike to trek back to the city center, with its picturesque canals and romantic drawbridges. There is nothing more to see here. A dark melancholy settles over me while I ride back through the neighborhood. The difference between this place and the cottage in Hoog Soeren is stark. It seems an injustice to ask an introverted child who has spent the past decade in the woods in a fairy-tale chalet to adapt to this urban environment.
I visit my mother’s old school building in Amsterdam. Before it was my mother’s school, in the seventeenth century it was the home of one of the biggest slave traders in the Netherlands, the Coymans family. I think about the Coymans descendants today and whether they feel the inheritance of shame. Ironically, today the building houses Amnesty International. Between a slave trader and a human rights organization, my mother sat within the brick walls at Keizersgracht 177, and this too, feels symbolic to me, a child on the time line of history, existing between the extremes of human behavior and morality.
I am also struck by how close her former school is to the Anne Frank House. My mother would have been in school there the year that Otto Frank established the house one block over as a museum, saving it from demolition and development. She would have been well aware of the family and of Anne Frank’s diary, which had just been published and was a sensation in Amsterdam. She would have been aware of the reminders everywhere in Amsterdam of the fate of the Jews who had suffered in the city only a decade and a half earlier.
When I ask her about this, the conversation quickly becomes uncomfortable, though illuminating. “When you saw the Anne Frank House every day, were you reminded of your father? I mean, did you connect it to your father’s membership in the NSB?” I ask.
My mother’s face goes blank, and I realize that she had not connected the two until just this moment. “No. I didn’t. I mean, no. I knew what happened to the Jews, and I knew it was awful, but I didn’t think of that having anything to do with my dad. I mean, now that you ask, I wonder why I never thought about it that way, but I didn’t.”
“Did you think about why your parents went to jail?”
“He was a member of a bad political party.”
“But you didn’t connect it to the Nazis or the Holocaust?”
“My dad never betrayed any Jews. He had Jewish friends.”
“Well … You say ‘friends,’ but he wrote racist articles and was a member of an anti-Semitic organization. You really didn’t think about that when you were in Amsterdam, next to the Anne Frank House every day?”
“No. It sounds weird now, but no.”
“If it were me, and I was fifteen, sixteen years old, reading and learning about the Holocaust, I think I would start asking questions and making connections, even if I was little and didn’t understand at the time it was happening.”
My mother falls silent again.
“Maybe you didn’t want to know?” I offer.
She nods. “Yes, I think there is something to that. I recall asking my mother something about the NSB when I was older, and she said she didn’t want to talk about that and I knew not to ask again. And my father definitely didn’t want to talk about it. It was not discussed. Ever.”
* * *
Amsterdam, the Netherlands, 1957
When my mother graduates high school in 1957, she isn’t sure what to do next. She wants to go to university to study to be a doctor, but there is no money in the family for the girls to go to university. The rest of her life, my mother will regret not having had the opportunity to become a doctor and being discouraged by her parents from pursuing a university degree while her brothers are encouraged and supported in attending university. (Pregnancy resolves the issue for Hannie, who resigns herself to her role as housewife, though later in life she will go back to school and become a psychologist.) So despite having studied math and science at the HBS B and having the qualifications for university, my mother lives at home and attends classes to become a home economics teacher. Her brother Pim studies biology at the University of Amsterdam, and Else visits him a lot in his little apartment across from the Artis zoo. When he spends a year abroad in Suriname, a colony of the Netherlands, to research marine life in Paramaribo, Else sublets his apartment and enrolls in the professional school for dietitians. There she learns to make meal plans for diabetics and people with a whole range of medical conditions. For the first time in Amsterdam, she makes real friends, including her best friend, Bouk, a tall, blond, blue-eyed woman after whom my sister will later be named.
When Pim returns from Suriname after a year, Else brings Bouk around to his apartment, and the two are smitten with each other. Else and Bouk are both accepted for an internship at a hospital in Paris, so the best friends eat croissants and practice their French for a year, a year of fun and adventure for my mother. When they return to the Netherlands, they both apply for the same job at the hospital in Leiden, and the hospital decides to create two positions, so the best friends can continue to work together, writing menu plans for patients in the hospital. Meanwhile, Pim visits his sister and his sweetheart a lot, and Else’s best friend becomes her sister-in-law when Bouk becomes pregnant.
Back in Hoog Soeren, a letter arrives at The Red Pan one day. The envelope reads merely, “Else de Kock, Hoog Soeren, the Netherlands.” The village is so small that the mailman knows the family has moved to Amsterdam; he forwards the letter to their address there, and the letter is forwarded from there to Leiden, where my mother works in the hospital. The letter is from my father, and it asks if she might want to correspond with him. In the United States, he has come to the conclusion that he w
ants to meet a nice Dutch girl, but he has found that there aren’t too many of those in California.
Before Sjef’s father traveled to Indonesia to work as a doctor, Sjef’s parents were friends with Else’s parents. The families rekindled a friendship when my father’s family returned to the Netherlands from Indonesia and my mother’s parents were released from prison. My parents often say that it was likely the friendship endured because my father’s parents weren’t in the Netherlands during the war and didn’t have the perspective of those who had lived under Nazi occupation. Further, they had experienced their own imprisonment. They did not have the context and judgment of the Dutch friends who turned their backs on my mother’s parents.
While she is eight years younger than he is, my father remembers meeting my mother once before he left for America, and his parents tell him she is now a young woman, and recently single. On a whim, he writes to her, and when she receives the surprise letter in Leiden, they begin corresponding. After years in Leiden, my mother, now nearly thirty, has split with the man she had been dating and feels stuck. In the 1960s, being thirty and unmarried is just about the same as being a spinster, and she is worried she will never find a partner or have a family. In Leiden, there don’t seem to be many options.
Bouk and Pim, with their new infant, have moved to Curaçao, a Dutch colony in the Caribbean. Else misses them terribly and wants a change. When they tell her they would love for her to come live there and there is a job opening for a dietitian at the local hospital, she packs her summer dresses and heads across the Atlantic. On the way to Curaçao, she has to stop over in New York City, where my father’s little brother, Kees, is living with his wife and child. So she and my father make a plan to meet in New York at Kees’s house, where my mother has planned be a guest for a week. It’s enough to ignite a romance, and they take a spontaneous trip to Montreal to visit the World’s Fair, delaying their departures for an extra week. In the taxi to the airport, where my father will fly to Los Angeles and my mother to the Caribbean, Sjef asks Else to marry him. They’ve only been together for two weeks, officially, but my mother says yes, calling her mother in Holland with the news as soon as she arrives in Curaçao. “I have a surprise for you!” Else says through the crackling phone. “You’re getting a son-in-law!” “I’m getting a sunny log?” my grandmother yells back through the fuzzy connection. “A son-in-law!” Else laughs. “Son-in-law!” They marry in the Netherlands a year later, after Sjef makes a few visits to Curaçao. My mother moves to Los Angeles, where my father builds a house on a hill overlooking the Pacific Ocean, far from Indonesia, far from the Netherlands, in a country that knows nothing about their backgrounds and offers them a clean slate.
12
LET THE RECORD SHOW
The Hague, the Netherlands, 2014
In the shadow of the International Criminal Court, where they hold war crimes tribunals for global dictators, is the National Archives of the Netherlands. It is where the sealed transcripts of the war trials for NSB members are kept. It takes me years to see the dossiers of my grandparents. A request must be filed with a statement of intent, and only family members are permitted access to a dossier. This request, if approved, prompts a reciprocal request for photocopies of birth certificates, death certificates, passports, and other documents. After these have been submitted, the government assigns a date and time for you to show up. No deviation from these rules is indulged in the years I try to obtain access. The Dutch are nothing if not committed to a bureaucratic system of fairness. Every time I had started the process in years past, I had returned to the United States before getting a date or approval. Finally, one summer, I am able to cut through the bureaucracy and get an appointment. My mother decides she wants to go with me, though we discuss the possibility that there will be information contained in her parents’ records that she won’t know or like. “I am past being disappointed in my father,” she says. “I don’t think it will upset me anymore.” We have four hours on our assigned date to view my grandparents’ dossiers.
On the date of our visit, we are fingerprinted and photographed. We have to put all of our possessions in a locker, except for my laptop, which is inspected, and a notepad for my mother, who doesn’t have a laptop. My mother may use only an assigned pencil to transcribe what is contained in the files. She must leave her pen, eraser, and pencil sharpener in the locker with our other belongings. A guard sits with us at a long table with around fifteen other people looking at dossiers. I’m struck by the knowledge that most of these people are doing what I am doing: trying to find out the facts about their dark family histories. Hundreds of thousands of Dutch people carry this secret about their heritage. In our own quiet conference with the past, we all sit around a table, absorbing the only written record. Most of them inherited a silence about it too, the inheritance of a collective national taboo. I open my laptop to begin taking notes, and another guard walks over and places a sticker over the camera eye on my computer.
I am astounded at the volume of information the government was able to amass in their case against my grandfather as a collaborator. I can’t imagine the man-hours involved or how they managed to collect it all. Letters to and from the NSB office, private notes written by neighbors and family members, receipts, real estate papers, affidavits, employment papers, magazine subscriptions, ID photos, and, of course, the trial transcripts with my grandfather’s defense and the verdict finding him guilty of treason, along with his sentence:
THAT HE, CITIZEN OF THE NETHERLANDS, BORN 22 APRIL 1904
I. During the enemy occupation of the empire in Europe until Sept 1944 remained a member of the National Socialist Movement of the Netherlands …
II. During the enemy occupation of the empire in Europe as a member of the Technical Guild and the Teacher’s Guild and as an allied member of the Dutch Germanic S.S.; shall be deemed based upon foregoing facts to have acted knowingly and deliberately contrary to the interests of the Dutch people …
In view of the relevant Legislative Acts: We declare the accused guilty of: acting deliberately in contravention of the interests of the Dutch people;
WE SENTENCE THE ACCUSED TO
Internment, in which the Tribunal proposes to set a period calculated from 14 May 1945 to end on 15 September 1946; B. Revocation of the right to vote.
27 June 1946.
The files fill four three-inch-thick folders. The contents are at times contradictory, and the apparent conflicts in my grandfather’s character confuse me: What was his true ideology and what was born out of pressure or ulterior motives?
There is a list of his positions in the NSB party. Committee member. Group leader. Committee Organizer. Branch Spokesperson. Inspector-in-training. Subscriber of NSB and Nazi newspapers and magazines. The list of official affiliations runs down one page. Member. Member. Member. His membership in the Germanic SS specifically upsets me. Like most people I know, I have always believed that the SS was made up of hard-core Nazis, and I assume that he is a member of the German SS, which absolutely shocks me. I don’t understand how this squares with his insistence that he was not in favor of the Nazis. Later, to some relief, I learn that the NSB had its own version of the SS, first called the Dutch SS and then changed to the Germanic SS in the Netherlands, not to be confused with the German SS or Waffen SS. The Dutch SS was a political designation established by Mussert under pressure of Hitler, and served more as a symbolic Dutch unit, as opposed to the German Waffen SS, which had Dutch recruits as well but was active in the persecution of the Jews. Further research reveals that my grandfather’s membership was due to the fact that he gave members of the Dutch SS lessons in genealogy, a hobby of his. While I am relieved that he wasn’t a member of the German SS, this detail rattles me. I cannot imagine what use the NSB or the Dutch SS would have had for a lesson in genealogy besides the obvious: a focus on Germanic bloodlines and racial purity and, worse, a tool to track down Jewish citizens. I have no proof of this, but to my mind, there can be no other expl
anation for the genealogy lessons. I can’t know whether my grandfather was specifically aware of how his lessons in methodology would be applied, but it’s one of the more upsetting things I find in the dossier. It is possible that he was naive about the implications of sharing his enthusiasm and knowledge of genealogy. An internet search of “SS” and “genealogy” returns several passages in a report on the Dutch SS and NSB assembled by the Netherlands Institute for War Documentation titled “The SS and the Netherlands, Documents from the SS Archives 1935–1945” that asserts that many NSB members were interested in genealogy as a hobby. It includes the following passage, which revisits a paganist theme found in the NSB philosophy and offers somewhat less sinister, if not nationalistic, motives for the high level of interest in genealogy in the NSB/Dutch SS:
The roots of the people and the unifying elements of blood and land resulted in the interest of … traditions, legends, folklore, old traditions, proverbs … and also in more concrete examples of the folk history: Saxon farms, runes, Germanic fairy mounds, Fresian folk art but also word origins, medieval art (the more primitive the more folksy), historic Dutch names, etc. etc. Knowledge of the ancestors added a new dimension to the present-day existence, also individually; one could fulfill one’s interest in one’s kinfolk via studying the history of tribes, or, to speak in Roman terms, genealogy (this turned out to occasionally be a rather risky hobby for race-conscious detectives).
There is also a lot of information in the dossier complicating the damning pieces of evidence about my grandfather’s involvement with the NSB and Dutch SS. There are affidavits from his neighbors that they had Jewish people in hiding and were in the resistance, and that my grandfather kept their secrets to the end. Affidavits that he helped members of the resistance in concealing radios, bicycles, contraband items. In a way, this dossier is as close to putting my grandfather on the psychoanalyst’s couch as I can get. Viewed together, the documents paint him as a fairly conflicted and pathetic man. Though most of my questions will remain forever unanswered, I do get a few more clues as to the “why” behind my search, the great “why” that my grandfather has taken to his grave. One of the more telling documents is my grandfather’s letter to the NSB head office after the Nazi occupation regarding his years-long study of cryptology:
All Ships Follow Me Page 20