The Boy Between Worlds: A Biography

by Annejet van Der Zijl

  The Nazis clung to their prisoners like, as historian Jacques Presser would later write, a wounded predator that had sunk its teeth into its prey. Cargo trains continued to arrive daily and were then transferred to other camps. Anton de Kom ended up in the subcamp of Sandbostel, where he died of hunger and exhaustion on April 24. But most of the prisoners were sent north, to the sea, the only direction the SS could go now that the Allied troops were making an unstoppable advance from the south.

  Within a week and a half, the main camp was totally dismantled. The last train departed on April 29 carrying the seven hundred prisoners who had been deployed for the evacuation and kept behind to cover up their tracks. Waldemar was among them. The Neuengamme concentration camp had officially ceased to exist. The ovens were still warm, but there was nothing left in the empty barracks but the whispering of lost souls.

  Partially on foot, partially via the still-functioning rail lines, the prisoners were driven toward the port city of Lübeck on the Baltic Sea, almost forty miles north of Hamburg. As pleased as they were to see the devastation the Allied bombers had caused, they lived in constant fear of being attacked by the Tommies flying over the Third Reich in search of prey. When they arrived at the coast, they were boarded onto cargo ships. In the vessels’ dark holds, which were not the least bit suitable for human transport, the prisoners found themselves in a battle of life and death over a bread crumb or a drop of water.

  Starting on April 26, the early shipment of prisoners was boarded onto the Cap Arcona, a majestic ocean steamer anchored about two and a half miles from the shore. When it was first launched in 1927, the Cap Arcona was fully equipped with electricity, propelled by twenty-four thousand horsepower and staffed with at least eighty-four cooks, making it one of the most luxurious steamers of its time. It was “the queen of the Hamburg-South America line.” In 1942 it was mobilized as a floating base for the German Kriegsmarine in Gotenhafen and used by propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels as the set of a movie about the Titanic. However, the film never made it to the silver screen because the violent evacuation scenes were considered too heavy for the already-demoralized German people. During the final months of the war, the ship, which had since been painted gray, was used to rescue German citizens and soldiers from areas threatened by the Red Army. The vessel had already taken more than twenty-six thousand refugees across the Baltic Sea to safety.

  Now the weathered, yet ever-luxurious Cap Arcona was host to thousands of broken, skittish prisoners. For the men, it was like ascending straight to heaven from hell. They ran their bony fingers across the sofas, silk-covered walls, marble chimneys, and lemonwood tables. They stretched out on the soft mattresses in the cabins and marveled at the hot and cold running water. There were even stewards on board who politely requested that they take care not to damage or dirty the furniture. The biggest shock of all, however, came in the dining room. There, standing under the crystal chandeliers, they stared at themselves in the full-length mirrors. Most of them hadn’t seen themselves in years and didn’t recognize themselves anymore. They had become ghosts.

  Meanwhile, what the Germans had hoped to achieve by boarding the concentration camp prisoners onto the Cap Arcona and the other smaller vessels anchored in the Bay of Lübeck was entirely unclear. Optimists suggested that in a humane gesture, Himmler had decided to send them to neutral Sweden, but others believed the decision was a variation of “Measure X,” which the Nazis had carried out a few weeks earlier: rather than allowing the prisoners to fall into enemy hands, the camps were blown up with everything and everyone inside. Likewise, if the ships were to sink offshore, thousands of witnesses to the regime’s crimes would disappear all at once to the bottom of the sea.

  On May 1 a rumor spread around the ship like wildfire: Hitler was dead. Officially, he had fallen “in the final battle against Bolshevism,” but in fact, he had committed suicide together with his mistress, Eva Braun, in his Berlin bunker on April 30. In his last will and testament, he left the remainder of the Third Reich to navy admiral Karl Dönitz. In an effort to save what little was left to be saved for the German people, Dönitz postponed the Nazis’ inevitable surrender to allow as many soldiers to return home from the war zones as possible. Meanwhile, the captain of the Cap Arcona tried to convince the SS commander on duty to let him take the ship into the harbor in Lübeck, and the underground camp leadership made frantic attempts to establish contact with the approaching liberators. The first Allied reconnaissance planes had been spotted circling above the bay, and it was not yet certain whether they knew that the Cap Arcona and the small ships around it were in fact a floating concentration camp.

  However, the days that followed were calm. There was little to eat on board, but the six hundred crew members and sailors did what they could to help their unusual cargo recover from their hardships and to protect them from the SS guards on board. The weather was pleasant, and the prisoners basked in the sun on the decks. Waldemar was able to look out at the horizon for the first time in years—the same horizon he had looked at from the house on the Seafront. Across the bay was the green, steeple-dotted coastline of northern Germany, and between the trees were the shimmering seaside resorts that, in peacetime, had made the shores of the Baltic Sea such a delightful place to be.

  May 3 arrived. Grand Admiral Dönitz negotiated the conditions for a total surrender with Field Marshal Montgomery, and on the Cap Arcona the prisoners could already hear the sound of British artillery on land. Small boats traveled back and forth between the ships and the shore, and the atmosphere was almost festive. It was a beautiful day, a day to be free.

  9

  The Cuckoo in the Nest

  A few weeks after the liberation on May 5, while the Netherlands was still flushed with victory, Waldy had a dream about his parents. He was riding in the tram through The Hague, and all of a sudden, he saw them sitting together happily on a bench. They looked exactly as they had when he last saw them in the hallway of the police station on the Javastraat. He called out to them with joy and tried to push his way through the other passengers to reach them, but for some reason his legs refused to cooperate, and no matter how much he shouted and waved, he couldn’t get their attention. They looked past him as if he didn’t exist. And that’s when he knew.

  In the year and a half since the Pijnboomstraat raid, Waldy had made his own journey north-northeast. After six months at his grandparents’ house, he had to leave. They were old, and the economic crisis of the 1930s had cost them much of their former wealth—they simply couldn’t accommodate the needs of a lively, growing boy. When, after Mad Tuesday, it became clear that the war still wasn’t over yet, he moved in with Aunt Jo, who, of all his aunts, had always been his favorite. But money was hard to come by in her house as well, and when food became scarcer and more expensive that fall, Waldy was sent to live with Aunt Mien, the most well-off of all the sisters. But clearly, she too was ill prepared to take in a restless fifteen-year-old. Therefore, when the opportunity to send city children to the countryside presented itself in January 1945, the Van der Lans family was grateful to take advantage of it.

  Together with forty other boys, Waldy was taken by truck to the northern Dutch town of Hoogkarspel. There, too, he was transferred from one family to another—most likely it hadn’t occurred to everyone in the village that a soft-skinned city kid could also happen to be the first black boy they’d ever seen. Finally, he was lovingly welcomed into a large, hospitable farm family. It was there that he, already a lanky adolescent, celebrated the Netherlands’ liberation on May 5, 1945. And there, in the days and weeks that followed, he waited for his parents to come walking down the garden path, and for the day the three of them would be together again. No one seemed to have any doubts about the fact that his parents were coming home. As his aunts always said: “Your mother is so strong, so optimistic—there’s no way they could break her”; and his father was such a young, athletic man—he had said himself in his letters that he was coping with camp life.
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  But no one came. No telegram, no phone call, no word whatsoever—nothing. After a few weeks, Marcel and Jan van der Lans decided to go to Germany to pick up their sister themselves. But in the barracks on the Schwedtsee all they found were German prisoners of war guarded by the Russian soldiers who had liberated Ravensbrück at the end of April. The camp was mostly empty by the time they arrived, because in the weeks after Germany capitulated, all the prisoners left standing had been packed into cargo trains and sent to God knows where.

  After coming home to Holland empty-handed, Marcel put out an ad in all the national newspapers and several local ones:

  Who can provide me with information about Mrs. Rika Nods-v.d.Lans, b. in The Hague, 29-9-91. Taken captive in Jan. ’44, in Scheveningen prison until May ’44, at Vught until Sept ’44, number 0988, later transferred to Ravensbrück (Ger.), no news since then. Also looking for Waldemar Nods (West-Indian), b. 1 Sept. 1908 in Paramaribo. Taken captive in Jan ’44, in Scheveningen prison until Feb ’44, at Vught until Jun ’44, later transferred to Neuengamme (Ger.), number 32180, worked in the post office. Last heard from him in Jan. ’45. Visits or letters most welcome, naturally, all costs will be reimbursed.98

  The ad was also read aloud on a radio program specifically dedicated to that purpose, Radiobaken on Radio Herrijzend Nederland. Finally, the family received a reply: a short letter from someone who had been in hiding on the Stevinstraat and was now looking for the bed frame and down-filled duvets he had left there. Marcel had seen enough in Germany to be realistic: for every day that went by with no news, the chances of his sister and brother-in-law coming home alive grew slimmer.

  On June 28, Waldy went to the Petrolea building in The Hague to submit an official request for information about his parents at the Dutch Red Cross. In his schoolboy’s handwriting, he filled in the form about his mother: “From Vught transferred to Ravelsbroek [sic],” next to which a civil servant later wrote: “Probably sent to Sweden.”99 But the glimmer of hope quickly faded when the Dutch embassy in Sweden confirmed with certainty that Hendrika J. M. Nods-van der Lans was not among the female prisoners who had been rescued from collapsing Germany in the final weeks of the war.

  Still, the Dutch diplomats inquired about her among the former prisoners recovering in the Swedish countryside. In early July, someone came forth claiming that she had indeed known someone called “Aunt Riek,” but as far as she knew, this woman had died. While the Red Cross was attempting to follow up on this lead with other survivors, a second answer to Marcel’s ad arrived on July 12. The letter was from the young pianist with whom Rika had developed such a close friendship in the camp. She had been boarded onto a train right after being selected for the Jugendlager herself. She was rescued by a Swedish diplomat, more dead than alive, and only now was she well enough to travel back to Holland.

  A few days later, Waldy was helping his host family with the potato harvest when he saw his foster mother making her way across the field with one of her daughters. She had tears in her eyes and a letter in her hand.

  Dear Waldy,

  You have probably heard the upsetting news from the Ooteman family that your dear Mother and our dear sister will not be coming home. It is terrible. How we have all longed for her, and you will surely miss her more than anyone. We talked to someone—we put out ads—who told us that she was transferred in February to the Knitting Department of the Jugendlager in Ravensbrück along with around 80 other women. In early March, about 20 of them came back, the others had died of dysentery. The young woman was sure, she recognized us immediately because Aunt Bertha and I look so much like your mother. She will ask the other survivors in Sweden to send us more information.

  I hope that you will never forget your mother in your prayers. It must have been so horrible for her to die alone in a strange place. Oh, how she must have longed to be with her children. Remember, Waldy, to pray for your mother earnestly and often, for she surely passed without any spiritual assistance.

  We have heard that there is still hope for your father. Several prisoners were taken to Ludwigslust or Porta Westfalica in March. These areas were liberated by the Russians, or that’s what we heard from a doctor who had known your father there. He claims that it was impossible to send any letters from there, so we shouldn’t give up hope quite yet. Waldy, I wish you strength with all my heart and urgently ask again that you not forget your mother in your prayers. God will surely have mercy upon her!

  Your Aunt Jo100

  In Groningen, Willem Hagenaar cried when he heard that his former wife and the love of his life had lost her final battle with fate. “It never should have happened this way,” he said over and over again. “It never should have happened this way.” A year later, he finally married Jans, the quiet village girl who had lived and loved for all those years in the shadow of her impressive predecessor.

  Waldy couldn’t cry. In the weeks after Jo’s letter, he buried himself in his work in the countryside. It was as if he already knew, he later thought. July and August went by, and in The Hague, Marcel did his best to take care of his late sister’s affairs. He had nearly given up all hope of his brother-in-law’s return. “I haven’t heard anything about Waldemar, only a vague message that he could be sick. But if I can be honest, I am convinced that he is dead too,” he wrote to his brother.101 He gathered information about potentially suitable boarding schools and spoke with David Millar in the hope that he would consider adopting his nephew into his family. Neither option worked out, and when Waldy returned to The Hague in September to redo his second year of high school, there was a large room reserved for him at his grandparents’ house. It was furnished with his parents’ sofa and a few other things that had been divided up among family members when the house on the Seafront was emptied, so that Waldy might feel a little more at home.

  A little while later, a solemn requiem for Rika was held at Saint Anthony Abbot Church. The sanctuary was draped in black and everyone was in tears; everyone except Waldy. As he would later describe it, he just sat there brooding:

  If they had died in a normal manner, I would have had to attend two funerals, and there would have been a casket at the front of the church with my mother’s body in it, I thought. But fortunately, that wasn’t the case, otherwise I would have had to walk up to it. Still it was a shame, because Mama would have loved to have had flowers on her grave. She once said that she wanted to be buried in the churchyard on the Kerkhoflaan. Papa only wanted a stone. “No way, that’s too cold and heavy,” she would have said. Where are they lying now?102

  But his thoughts were preoccupied with the Bible verses that the family had selected for Rika’s prayer card. The one on the front he considered somewhat acceptable—“Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends”—but the one on the back was such a clear reference to his mother’s supposedly sinful life that he swore off Catholicism then and there forever:

  I will arise and go to my Father, and will say unto him, Father, I have sinned against heaven, and before thee, and am no more worthy to be called thy son: make me as one of thy hired servants. But the Father said let us eat and be merry: For this my son was dead, and is alive again; he was lost, and is found. (Luke 15:18–24)

  He that is without sin among you, let him first cast a stone at her. (John 8:7)

  Judge not, and ye shall not be judged. (Luke 6:37)103

  Meanwhile, Marcel van der Lans made one last attempt to find out what had happened to Waldy’s father. He sent out a request for information to twenty-five people who, according to the Red Cross report, had returned home from Neuengamme. Slowly, their replies trickled in, some of them on recycled stationery because survivors received so many of these sad inquiries. Most of them began with “To my deepest regret . . . ,” though there were a few who tried to offer a bit of hope: There may still be some Dutch people in Russia—perhaps Mr. Nods is there? But others implied that, given that five months had passed since the liberation, there was very little c
hance that he was still alive. Perhaps, they wrote, Mr. Van der Lans had heard about the terrible May 3 naval disaster involving the Cap Arcona that had taken the lives of thousands of prisoners from the Neuengamme camp.

  On October 10, a telegram arrived from Waldy’s aunt Hilda and uncle Jo. Both had survived the Japanese POW camps: “Safe in British hands hope to be home soon,” they wrote.104 When Waldy arrived home from school a few days later, his old grandma greeted him with tears in her eyes. She hugged him and said that he had to be strong, because they had just received a letter from someone who had known his father and was certain he had seen him on that ill-fated ship in the Baltic Sea in early May. They could now safely assume that Waldemar was never coming home. Waldy ran upstairs to his bedroom, but a few minutes later he rushed back down, a cigarette in hand and—much to his grandparents’ bewilderment—whistling a happy tune. He bottled up his tears and upheld the scouts’ motto: “a scout whistles under all circumstances.” His grandfather was quick to scold him: How could he be so heartless?

  The next day, Red Cross file number 7991—W. H. Nods was closed. There was no memorial service, but there was a short announcement in the Haagsche Courant newspaper, inconspicuously placed among dozens of similar messages.

  Following the previous notification from the Red Cross that Mrs. Hendrika Nods-van der Lans died in the “Ravensbrück” concentration camp, the Red Cross has recently confirmed that her husband, Mr. Waldemar Nods, last imprisoned in the “Neuengamme” concentration camp has died in the “Cap Arcona” disaster. On behalf of the family: M. J. H. van der Lans, Rotterdam, Statensingel 93-c.