The Boy Between Worlds

by van der Zijl, Annejet

  Marcel van der Lans’s ad in the newspaper, June 1945.

  Rika’s prayer card.

  Rika’s prayer card.

  Waldy in uniform: “A scout whistles under all circumstances.”

  Waldy in the last year of war, Hoogkarspel.

  Waldy (top row, first from the left) with his school team, 1950.

  Waldy on the shore, spring 1942.

  Statuette of Sonny Boy in the library in Scheveningen, made by Teus van den Berg-Been.

  6

  Life in the Shadows

  As sad as Rika was about the loss of her guesthouse, it was the first summer in years that she didn’t have to work around the clock, and she enjoyed it. She and Waldemar didn’t last more than a few weeks in boring Rijswijk, and soon enough, they managed to find their way back to Scheveningen, where they belonged. They lived on the upper floor of a sunny villa on the chic Stevinstraat, surrounded by wild dune gardens. The home was owned by one of Rika’s good friends who had been widowed a few years earlier and now lived there alone with her five children. In the absence of carpet, Rika stained the wood floor of the new apartment dark brown and traded in the heavy furniture she had brought from the Seafront for lighter, more modern designs. And as she had done at her previous addresses, she made room for her oldest children, who had followed her for so many years like beloved shadows and were now finally starting to take shape in her life.

  In August 1942, she wrote to her daughter:

  I told Waldemar, if the lessons work out with little Waldy, then we’ll buy a piano later, because now that my kids are grown, I want our home to be a place of comfort and joy, if only for our dear children. All the beds are made—because I have five children, and they all have to be able to come stay with me, with their husbands, wives, and children, of course! You all are always welcome here. Really, Johan can sleep here from now on. And I have made sure there’s room for the children. I told Jan that Ria can most certainly come for my birthday, and if Aat wants to come, she is more than welcome. Everyone is welcome now.60

  Meanwhile, Waldemar was still trying to realize the dream he had come to Holland to achieve. Once he had earned his degree in English business correspondence, he began a course in commercial economics and pursued a license as a chief English correspondent. Then he asked the Ministry of Education for special permission to be admitted to the Rotterdam University of Applied Sciences, where his stepson Jan was studying. The officials, however, were unrelenting: no matter how much experience or how many degrees Mr. Nods may have had, his junior high school diploma from the Hendrik School in Suriname was not sufficient for entrance into a university-level program. Shortly afterward, he found a new job as a bookkeeping correspondent in the nonferrous metals department of the Ministry of Economic Affairs. His salary was hardly any higher than it had been before, but the chances for upward mobility seemed greater.

  It was a beautiful but ethereal summer, a calm before the storm. Scheveningen was strangely quiet without all the beachgoers, and concrete mixers were turning on the beach. The beach was off-limits by then, but from the balcony of their new apartment, the Nodses could still smell the sea. If Waldemar and Waldy wanted to go swimming, they had to take the Blue Tram to the Vliet canal in The Hague. Every evening, father and son listened to the Radio Oranje broadcasts from London. Just as they had once traced their vacation routes in the atlas together, they now used the maps to follow military movements. The tides of the war seemed to be turning. In North Africa, the British were driving the German soldiers farther and farther back, and in the Midway Islands in the Pacific, the Americans had dealt the first major blow to the Japanese fleet. In Stalingrad, the Red Army was still valiantly holding out against the “rotten krauts,” as Waldy liked to call them. When one of the Van der Lans nieces was visiting and she wondered aloud about when the war would ever be over, Rika laid out her tarot cards in front of her on the table. She studied them seriously for a moment, and then she was certain: it would be over very, very soon.

  In November 1942 the announcement came that the rest of Scheveningen would be evacuated so the coast could be fortified. Tens of thousands of people were suddenly forced to move. Rika’s friend and her children spent the first days of 1943 traveling to safety in Friesland to wait out the end of the war. Jan considered seeking refuge in the north as well. It had been decided in October that young Dutch men would be deployed for the German war effort, and he had already had a few close run-ins with the Arbeitseinsatz—the forced labor—roundups. He left to stay with his brother Wim in Friesland.

  In February 1943 the enormous evacuation operation stopped as quickly as it started. Among the approximately twenty-five thousand people still living in the military stronghold was the Nods family. They saw the paradise of Waldy’s youth transformed into a haunted landscape right before their eyes. Houses and hotels were boarded shut, the beach was littered with mines and antitank barricades, and the dunes were filled with bunkers. The clocks on Rika’s church were sent to Germany to be used in the war effort, and even the red lighthouses were painted in camouflaging colors. Where it had once boasted a sea view, Seafront 56 now looked out over an eight-foot-thick tank wall. In a mysterious fire on March 26, the party hall on the pier was reduced to a grim, charred stockade. All over the seaside town, entire housing blocks were being demolished to make room for an antitank trench with dragon’s teeth fortifications. Once completed, the barricade would be more than three miles long and nearly one hundred feet wide, hermetically sealing off the military base from the rest of the world. In the meantime, the once-bustling Scheveningen had fallen so quiet that even the timid nightingales had taken to building their nests there.

  It was around this time that Waldy noticed that his mother was housing people in the attic. Even from the first floor, which was half dismantled by then, he’d sometimes hear footsteps or voices coming from upstairs at the oddest hours. This surprised him—surely there weren’t any tourists anymore? Only after he was brought home by two German police officers, because he’d gotten in a fight with some boy who had called him a dirty nigger and thrown rocks at him, did his mother decide to tell him the truth. She was scared to death when she saw the officers at her door, she said, because the people living upstairs were Jews, and no one could know that they were there.

  As the cold weather had set in during the winter of 1942, it became clear that the Nazis were no match for the Russian winter, the tough Red Army, and the stubborn British, so Hitler turned his attention toward his second goal: the fight against international Judaism. Because no matter how many “inferior people”—Untermenschen—had been forced to leave Europe, and no matter how many had been annihilated in mass shootings in Eastern Europe, the Jewish race still hadn’t fully disappeared. On January 20, 1942, a number of National Socialist leaders had attended a secret conference at an estate on the frozen Wannsee southwest of Berlin to discuss the matter. As conference leader Reinhard Heydrich stressed, it was not enough to hunt them down and starve them out—the strongest would survive and reproduce, planting roots for an even stronger race. The problem needed to be addressed systematically, gründlich. And once the Nazi leaders agreed on this fact, they had no trouble developing an efficient strategy to execute their Final Solution.

  “Die Pflicht ruft”—duty calls—as the soldier had written in Rika’s guest book. With the same sense of duty and devotion, the German people once again followed their führer. On May 3, 1942, the Nazi regime in Holland ordered that no Jew over age six could leave the house without a Star of David clearly visible on their clothing. Just two months later, the Dutch newspapers published a declaration that all Volljuden (“full-blooded” Jews) would be sent to work in Eastern Europe. The calls for this massive transport came via the Jewish Council, a consultative body set up by the occupying forces that, in the spirit of democracy, tried to use negotiation to limit the damage of the anti-Jewish policies until the end of the war.

  Although the thought of being dragged away from ev
erything they’d ever known and taken to the very place their ancestors had fled from to escape the pogroms was terrifying, the large majority of the 140,000 Dutch Jews still answered the call of the Jewish Council. What else could they do? Hiding was expensive and extremely dangerous, and if you were picked up on the street during a raid, you would be transported directly to Mauthausen, a concentration camp notorious for its terrible treatment of Jews. Moreover, the Jews assumed they wouldn’t be the only ones who would have to do their part for the Nazi empire. Unemployed people had already been put to work for the German war effort, and most of the remaining Dutch men had been sent to Germany in large numbers as well. The Jewish Council had been promised that Dutch Jews would receive preferential treatment in the labor camps. And so, the people packed their suitcases with the approved items on the Council’s list, cleaned their houses until they sparkled, and locked the doors securely behind them so everything would be intact when they returned.

  On July 14, 1942, the first trains left for Westerbork in Drenthe. A camp for escaped German Jews had been set up there before the war, and the Nazis were now using it as a transit camp. Internally, the camp was mostly run by the prisoners themselves; the SS simply supplied the barbed wire and manned the watchtowers around it. From Westerbork, the Nazis operated the exceptionally efficient transportation to Polish labor camps with strange names like Treblinka, Auschwitz, and Sobibor. The deportees weren’t told much more than that, but what did you expect? It was wartime and it was far away. And besides, there was hardly anyone left behind in Holland to wait for their letters or news anyway, for the Germans kept the trains running all summer, fall, and winter long, and even into the spring. Everyone had to go: women and children, the elderly and the sick, entire families and neighborhoods, until March 1, 1943, about one year after the Wannsee Conference, when the Entjudung, the “Aryanization” of Holland, was virtually complete.

  The Stevinstraat, where the Nods family was living, was located on the edge of the Belgisch Park, a neighborhood where many Jews from Antwerp had settled during the First World War. Once the trains to Westerbork started running, the Nodses’ world slowly emptied. The streets gradually became deserted, and more and more shops were closed. From the balcony of their house, Waldy would often see sad groups of people being escorted down the street by German soldiers. These were the ones who had tried to hide and been caught. First, they were detained in the Villa Windekind on the Nieuwe Parklaan, the headquarters of the Judenreferat, the department responsible for removing all Jews in the Dutch royal capital, and now they were being transported to the prison in Scheveningen, where so many members of the Dutch Resistance were being held that the building had become known as the “Oranje Hotel.” Sometimes Waldy spotted familiar faces among the detainees: friends of his father, colleagues of his mother, owners of stores where they used to shop. One fateful day, he was shocked to see their ever-cheerful baker, Rädler, who had often let him and Topsy tag along on his rounds with the baker’s cart. Waldy had always considered him a friend. Shuffling down the street in wooden clogs, his black beard long and unkempt, the small man was a pitiful sight to behold.

  Though the Netherlands had been somewhat passive during the early years of the occupation, resistance was growing now that Dutch men were being sent to Germany, and Dutch Jews were being shipped off to Eastern Europe by the tens of thousands. All over the country, care networks for people in hiding were sprouting up like mushrooms, and underground newspapers and gangs of Resistance fighters were on the rise. At the end of 1942, the regional Resistance networks organized themselves into the Landelijke Organisatie voor Hulp aan Onderduikers, or the LO, a national organization to assist those in hiding. At first, the organization was primarily focused on supporting non-Jewish Dutch people in hiding, but from the spring of 1943 onward, when essentially any person of Jewish descent who had not yet been captured was in critical danger, it increasingly offered help to Jews as well. The demand for safe houses exploded, and the LO often sought houses of people who moved in religious circles. It’s therefore likely that Waldemar and Rika got into Resistance work through the Catholic Church.

  Rika and Waldemar were ideal candidates: they had a small family and a large house, they had always counted many Jewish people among their friends, and most of all, they were experienced hosts. Furthermore, they had already been known before the war for their willingness to help and their boundless time and energy for other people. For Waldemar, hospitality was a natural byproduct of his culture; for Rika, it was simply her nature. Together, their urge to welcome people into their home was even stronger. And in general, happy marriages made for better safe houses, because love, unlike suffering, is much more likely to inspire noble deeds.

  For Rika, who had spent most of her adult life happily running a guesthouse, taking people into hiding was initially just a continuation of what she had been doing before. It appealed to her need to help people and her sense of justice, and on top of that, it was a good way to earn money. Because, as she wrote in a letter to one of her brothers in 1943, she had lost her prewar wealth along with her guesthouse:

  Money is tight, thank God I don’t have any debt. But these days I have to watch every penny. Everything is fine, and we are happy and content. I can’t blame myself for the fact that the war has made you rich and me poor. I leave everything in God’s hands, and every morning I kneel down and pray for the new day and for new courage and strength. And I will remain cheerful in spite of all the misery.61

  Host families received ration cards, and in most cases, the LO provided a stipend for each person hiding in their house. This stipend could amount to 45 guldens a month for gentiles and 60 guldens for Jews—no small sum in a time when a decent monthly salary was around 150 guldens.

  At first, Waldemar and Rika hardly realized how incredibly dangerous it all was. Pension Walda had always had German guests, and they had always known them to be polite and courteous people. They regarded the Nazis’ terror tactics as last-ditch efforts, which would most certainly not be supported by the reasonable people of Germany. At first, the Nodses were amateurs when it came to underground activities. When Henk came to visit his mother on the Stevinstraat, he discovered to his horror that the backside of their secret radio could be clearly seen through the bay window. But Rika dismissed his concerns: surely it wouldn’t come to that. A little while later, he found unmade beds and dirty dishes upstairs. Surprised, he asked his mother whose they were, and she replied nonchalantly that they were hiding people in the house. Their guests were out at the moment, she said, getting fish down at the harbor.

  During the course of 1943, the search for people in hiding intensified and the Resistance professionalized its efforts. Rika and Waldemar came into contact with Kees Chardon, a lawyer from Delft with whom they soon developed a fruitful collaboration. Despite Chardon’s young age—he turned twenty-four that year—and small stature, he was one of the most important figures in the South Holland Resistance. At the age of twenty-one, “Crown Kees” had graduated cum laude in law, and his firm in The Hague had been helping Jewish clients ever since, often free of charge. When the people in his care were forced to go underground that March, he didn’t hesitate to go with them. For, as one of his Resistance friends later put it, “he believed that it was a time when survival came first, and philosophizing came later.”62

  Together with florist and member of the Dutch Reformed Church Ad van Rijs, Kees specialized in what was one of the most difficult tasks in the underground network: finding reliable hiding places for Jews. During the weekly “fair” organized by the provincial department of the LO to match people who needed to go into hiding with families willing to take them in, it was easy enough to find places for the “regular laundry”—in other words, the non-Jewish Dutch—especially if it concerned a lonely widow or a family with an unmarried daughter who had specifically requested an “eligible bachelor.” Not only that, small businesses and farms were usually happy to have a helping hand. But when it c
ame to the “big laundry”—Jewish people—potential host families were considerably less eager. Not only was it more dangerous, but there was also the fact that Jews were generally harder to pass off as members of gentile families. This was partially due to cultural differences and partially to the fact that they were often not at their best emotionally, for, unlike the non-Jewish Dutch, they no longer had any savings or a place to call home. Another complication was the fact that some Resistance groups weren’t entirely free of anti-Semitism themselves. There was, for example, one group in Rotterdam that refused to help Jewish people in any way, shape, or form, because they believed that the Jews had brought this misery on themselves by crucifying Christ.

  Kees Chardon, however, an idealist through and through, traveled far and wide in search of safe houses for “his” Jews and helped hundreds of them find hiding places. Once, when he was urged at an LO meeting to take fewer risks, he replied: “If I’m going to help anyone escape, I’d rather help Jews—preferably in the forbidden zones and after curfew.”63 As an active member of the Resistance, Kees couldn’t house Jews for more than a day or two himself because it would be too dangerous for everyone involved, which was how the Nods residence on the Stevinstraat quickly ended up functioning as a transit house where people stayed for both short and longer periods until a more permanent place for them was found in the countryside. Practical support for the Chardon group was provided by Delft police officer Jan van der Sloot, who, together with his Resistance cohorts, raided distribution centers and police stations and hatched plans to free detainees.

  As different as Rika and Kees were in terms of age and intellectual background, they spoke each other’s language. They were both energetic and emotional by nature, and both courageous to the point of recklessness. “She was a noble woman,” wrote one of Rika’s secret Jewish houseguests about her hostess. “We spent three months at her place in Scheveningen, and we got along like old friends.”64 Both Rika and Kees found strength in their faith, though she was Catholic and he was Protestant. But no matter how divided the Resistance movement in The Hague was, local churchgoers managed to put their prewar denominational differences aside and work together.