All Ships Follow Me

by Mieke Eerkens

  During the mobilization I offered the Dutch Department of Defense my services multiple times. I know that I am one of the few Dutch experts in cryptology. If everything had been well managed in our motherland, then they surely would have at least taken note of my offer … Presumably the fact that I never received a single word nor a letter back is connected to the coincidence that I, as NSBer, was seen by them as “untrustworthy.” Should it come to pass, then I gladly offer myself as a consultant to the NSB in this regard.

  His words reek of bitterness. To me, they reflect the low self-esteem of a rejected man who, feeling the sting of disregard by his government, joins forces with the enemy purely out of spite.

  In the end, after the smoke of war clears and the horrible truth of it comes into view, he feels betrayed and undervalued by all parties. In a letter to the judge in his own defense, he states, “I have believed that the social needs of the Dutch people could best be met by a political party that, according to its stated platform, served them. Over the course of the last few years I have been disappointed and disillusioned in many ways. I have not profited from my membership [in the NSB] in any respect.”

  In another letter in the dossier, one sent to the courts after his arrest, he goes into even more detail, writing,

  I became a member of the NSB because, given the societal situation prior to 1940, the NSB’s platform was the only one I saw for building a just community. After 1940 I also believed that only that platform could help form a good society. The mistakes of the Germans can’t be projected onto the NSB members, in my opinion. I never profited from the political developments after 1940, as some would have done. I rejected a number of good opportunities that were offered to me, such that I stayed true to myself. I didn’t accept a radio, as other Dutch people also weren’t allowed radios. I never bought anything on the black market. Everyone could speak to me openly about their beliefs, without having to fear that I would turn them in. My students and character witnesses can attest to the fact that I consistently cursed and condemned the razzias, prosecutions, the concentration camps, etc. of the Germans. Further, I never once revealed anything; Germans never came in my house. I have never wanted to be anything but a good person. I reject the accusation of “traitor” with indignation. I think the aforementioned reasons are sufficient reason to release me immediately. Measured by my intentions and the way I conducted myself, it is my impression that I have not earned being arrested.

  Another document I come across was added after my grandfather was released from prison. It regards the “Cleansing” or “Purification” Act of 1945, which was enacted after NSB members and other collaborators had served out their sentences and many were due to reenter society. The Cleansing Act Advisory Commission sought to further “cleanse” the Netherlands of these fout people, removing them from jobs and all other positions and stripping them of their right to their pensions. In effect, the Cleansing Act added a life sentence to their prison sentences. I am struck by the specific use of the word cleansing, because it is so close to the language the opposing side used during the Holocaust. This is uncomfortable for me, because it allows for a conflation that should not be allowed to exist.

  MINISTER OF EDUCATION, ARTS, AND SCIENCES. JANUARY 1948.

  Given the advice of the Advisory Commission named in article 5 of the Cleansing Act of 1945 from December 10, 1945; Whereas, the person named below … having been found guilty of treason, the aforementioned Commission has approved:

  a. dismissal from his post for A.C. Kock, teacher at the “Dutch Institute of Community Education” in Arnhem;

  b. Expiration of all rights to current or future pension and other rights. The Hague, January 31, 1948

  2. Termination as Special Education Teacher for the Engineer and Automobile Technical School Apeldoorn per 11-2-45. “Was a member of the NSB.”

  Upon this decree, notes are handwritten in the space provided at the end of the document:

  Not NSB profiteer. Should be regarded as an “idealist.” Spread no propaganda at school. Warned some of the teachers about the [German] S.D., who wanted information from them. This man belongs to the group of “good” NSB members before the war. He disapproved openly of the Holocaust and razzias and resigned in Jan/Feb 45 as a member.

  I am perplexed. Who has written these extra notes on the form? The judge? An administrator? The form has been placed in the dossier by the government officials associated with the special tribunal, so the notes will have come from the hand of the same government that sentenced my grandfather. If these are the notes of the judge, or of persons at the Cleansing Act Advisory Commission, I can’t help but wonder what their advice would be for “bad” NSB members.

  My mother and I leave the archives drained, with hand cramps from copying down as much as we can. We talk in the car. One thing she realized in reading the dossiers was that she didn’t know her father very well. And now that her parents are gone, we cannot ask them why they made the choices that they made. We cannot ask them what happened in the internment camps for collaborators, about the lived experiences behind the typed sentences and forms in a dossier in a box in the national archives of the Netherlands. They refused to speak of it, and so the dossiers are all we now have. I discover that I have more questions than answers now, and must be content with the idea that the true character of my grandfather lies somewhere between idealist and monster.

  * * *

  Rotterdam, the Netherlands, 2016

  In all of the years I visited the Netherlands, I avoided Rotterdam. In the southern part of the country, it’s not where my people are from. But I also had a bias against the city. Because the center of Rotterdam was destroyed by the Germans in the war, it was rebuilt in the ensuing years, and the city became a European center for contemporary architecture.

  Perhaps because I grew up in a midcentury modern house in Los Angeles, a city of eclectic architecture that tears down and rebuilds as if it were changing socks, I have a romanticized love for the historic architecture of European cities: the cobblestoned streets, the art nouveau and stained glass art deco buildings, the red clay roof tiles and spires of churches so old that William Shakespeare could have sat in their pews. I fetishize oldness. Rotterdam, with its glass cube houses and mirrored skyscrapers, never really appealed to me. But one day I find myself there when meeting a friend for a day of pure tourism and the delight of aimless exploration, and I begin to appreciate the juxtaposition of the old and the new in this strange city, as I see how the contemporary architects respected what was left of the old landscape. Progress works in harmony with history in Rotterdam, and while the last thing on my mind on this day is my parents, I suddenly see that this is a natural stop in their narrative. Rotterdam is a city ravaged by war, but it is redefining itself with its scars laid bare.

  My friend and I visit Hotel New York, which has been recommended to him as a nice place to eat in the harbor. What my friend doesn’t tell me is that Hotel New York is the former terminal for the Holland America Line, which carried thousands of immigrants to America. The restaurant where we have come to eat is the former departure hall where my parents left the Netherlands together for a new life in the United States. Standing in front of it, I look at the last landmark my mother would have seen of her home country before seeing the Statue of Liberty come into view on the other end of the Atlantic. The stone building has two green patinated clock towers and Holland Amerika Lijn spelled out across it in art nouveau lettering. Built in 1904 by a Jugendstil architect, it somehow survived the German blitzkrieg as the rest of the city burned. When I get home, I immediately play the home movie my father shot in 1967 as they left Rotterdam, and there it is: the same building, the two green clock towers exactly as I saw them. Below it on the wharf are my father’s parents and my mother’s mother, and Hannie and her kids, waving goodbye.

  For my father, the Netherlands was never really home. He had watched his home vanish into the horizon from a ship sailing out of the Semarang harbor two decad
es earlier. But for my mother, this was the home she loved, the home she deeply wanted to belong to, the home she left behind. The home where she would have preferred to stay. In grainy silent film, I see my mother standing on the deck of the SS Nieuw Amsterdam, newly married, waving her scarf to her family members standing on the quay below. As my father trains the camera on her, I see my mother waving and waving as they leave the harbor, her eyes full, a forced smile on her face. She hangs over the railing of the ship and waves until she cannot see them waving back anymore, and then she is watching this beautiful building with its two round clocks like goalposts recede farther and farther into the distance until it disappears for her and there is only the vastness of ocean and the things she left behind. As I stand on the same wharf in Rotterdam completely by chance, I think about how perfect this is, how it is a puzzle piece I didn’t realize was missing until I could almost see the whole picture come into view. Of course, this ends with her daughter following her through history, crisscrossing the Netherlands in search of the past, and ending that journey here, at this very point where she left it all behind on a ship spewing salt water back at the shore.

  PART III

  COMING TOGETHER

  We shall not cease from exploration

  And the end of all our exploring

  Will be to arrive where we started

  And know the place for the first time.

  —T.S. ELIOT

  13

  THE IMMIGRANTS

  Antwerp, Belgium, September 26, 1950

  The MS Edam is loaded up in the harbor of Antwerp, wind whipping under a clouded sky. Sjef and a group of young men and women stand on the quay, waiting to board. Sjef’s parents, my grandparents, are there to see their son off. My grandfather holds his fedora from blowing off as he gives his son his last words of advice and presses an envelope of guilders into his hand. To start you off when you get over there. My father is now a young man of nineteen, and he shakes his father’s hand. My grandmother hugs her son and kisses his cheek. We will miss you, but I know you’re going to do great out there. Make sure to write. The gangway is lowered, and my father and the other travelers walk up to the ship.

  This ship has come from Rotterdam, but Dutch maritime laws forbid passengers to travel on a freight ship. Belgium has no such laws, though, so Sjef has traveled to Antwerp for a cheap ticket as one of fifty passengers allowed to bunk in the makeshift quarters belowdecks. Destination: New York City. He has a giant steamer trunk filled with all of his possessions, which two muscular sailors hoist onto their shoulders and carry onto the ship for him. Sjef can barely contain his excitement as he thinks of the possibilities ahead in America.

  Throughout the trip, he gets to know his travel mates. They have impromptu dances on the deck and sing “Goodnight, Irene” in the dark, faces into the salty wind. Twice there are terrible storms, and the Edam is tossed violently in the waves. Sjef’s father has given him a camera as a going-away gift, and he snaps photos of it all: the storm, his new friends on the deck, the girl he develops a crush on somewhere in the middle of the Atlantic. He has people take his photo too, at the stern of the boat, beaming in every one. You can see it on his face: Finally, his life can start.

  He’s been accepted to UC Berkeley. His uncle Henk in Bolivia, as the Dutch ambassador there, has connections to the university and has written a letter on his behalf. Sjef wants to study aeronautics, having become obsessed with airplanes, but his application to Caltech indicated a year and a half wait time for aeronautics majors, and UC Berkeley has an excellent engineering program. It also has a waiting list, but Uncle Henk advises Sjef to apply to the College of Letters and Sciences and transfer into the engineering program later.

  After ten days, a journey twice as long as that on the big passenger liners, a speck on the horizon becomes a massive woman rising up from the sea with a torch. New York. America. The ship sails into the harbor, with dockworkers yelling, and anchor chains rattling, and ropes thrown to calloused hands that tether the Edam to shore. Sjef disembarks and stands dockside, waiting for his trunk. The luggage comes down a conveyor belt, and Italian men stand at the bottom, throwing the luggage onto the dock, yelling to one another with animated gestures. Attento! Mettilo lì! Dai! Dai! Idiota! Ho detto mettilo lì! Sei sordo?! Sjef understands nothing. He watches trunks and suitcases crash to the dock, rolling onto their sides, skidding across the planks. Everything he owns for his new life is in his trunk, and he begins to panic. He approaches one of the Italians. “Scuzi? Hallo? Thank you please, can you be more careful?” The Italians narrow their eyes at this goofy blond cheesehead with his white teeth and gullible eyes, quite literally FOB. They wave him away with irritation, and throw the suitcases even harder as if to make a point. Sjef looks to an immigration officer who has met the ship and stands to the side with a clipboard. The officer shrugs. “Why don’t you sue them?” he says, and laughs. Why don’t you sue them are the first words spoken to my father on American soil.

  It is difficult to articulate Sjef’s level of naiveté at that juncture, except to point out that four hours after leaving New York City in a Greyhound bus, my father approaches the bus driver and asks him if they’re almost in California. “Only if you consider three days ‘almost,’” says the driver. My father is shocked. “Three days?” The bus driver nods. “It’s OK; you can get off at the motel stops and get back on the next bus a day later.” Sjef has no money for motels. He barely has enough money for food. So he buys bologna and bread at the first stop and sleeps on the seats at the back of the bus, and spends the entire three days watching America go by his window: Illinois, Nebraska, Wyoming, Utah, Nevada. Then Lake Tahoe, and down the Donner Pass into Sacramento, California’s state capital. Finally, the bus pulls in to Berkeley, where Sjef steps out onto Telegraph Avenue with his enormous trunk, wrinkled and stinking.

  He drags his trunk with great effort the couple of blocks to the campus. Classes have already started; it is three weeks past the beginning of the fall semester. Asking directions, he finds his way to the International House, bumping his heavy trunk up the front steps. Breathing hard, he enters the lobby, now pushing the trunk in front of him across the Mexican clay tile. The woman at the reception desk looks up. “Hello. I am Sjef Eerkens,” he says, out of breath. “But you can call me Jeff.”

  The woman says, “Can I help you, Jeff?”

  My father, in his heavy Dutch accent, says, “I have been accepted to this university. I need a room.” The woman asks him if he’s applied for student housing in the International House. “Uh, no,” says my father. She asks him if he’s applied for student housing anywhere. “Uh, no,” he says. But because my father is possibly the most perseverant man alive, somehow he finds himself sleeping in a spruced-up closet at the International House that night. A few weeks later, a Chinese student drops out and returns home, and Sjef, now reinvented in America as Jeff, has a real room.

  His “coming to America” story makes me laugh because of his naiveté, but it’s also inspiring. I consider my father’s dogged determination no matter what the circumstances and see it as connected to his experience in the camps, where he had to learn to survive without any guidance and where giving in meant potential death. All he had was himself and his persistence. I see how this character trait carried on throughout his life. In some ways, it has been a source of tension in my relationship with him. But in other ways, his stubbornness and agathism have been an inspiration to me. I don’t naturally have his persistence. So I often ask my mother to put him on the phone when I am struggling with something. It doesn’t matter what the issue is or that he can’t possibly know the future. I just want to hear his standard line, the only setting he has: Everything will be OK in the end.

  Jeff has finally arrived at Berkeley, but classes have already started, so he enrolls in UC Extension math courses for the first semester to get started on his requirements. He takes English lessons to improve his English. He also gets the first of what will be many jobs, this one
at Cutter Laboratories, a pharmaceutical company that produces anthrax, cholera, and polio vaccines, where he works on the assembly line recycling blood plasma supplies. Later, Cutter Laboratories will be at the center of an incident in which live polio virus is mistakenly released in a vaccine instead of inactivated virus and forty thousand people contract polio as a result. But not my father. He will also go on to work in chicken farms, nursing homes, and factories; as a cabdriver and a truck driver; and harvesting crops. He works at a pump factory with the Jacuzzi brothers, and while eating lunch out back on the railroad tracks with them one day, he tells them his idea for a submersible pump that would give you a massage in your bathtub. To this day he says it is possible that the Jacuzzi brothers used his idea and we could have been millionaires soaking in Eerkenses. He works in the Alaskan canneries and gold mines in the summer, hitchhiking there with a tent to pay for his tuition and room and board at Berkeley on his own. In subsequent years, he buys a car and makes the journey over the Alcan Highway with friends. On one occasion, this leads to his sharing a small cottage in Fairbanks with, unbeknownst to him, a dangerous fugitive from Chicago who is apprehended by the Fairbanks PD.