The Boy Between Worlds

by van der Zijl, Annejet

In the East Indies, Hilda mourned the death of her favorite little brother, and on the other side of the world, an old man received word of the death of his youngest son, whom he had last seen on the Waterfront docks in Paramaribo more than twenty years ago. Koos Nods was almost eighty by then and still the same old sly fox he had always been. But once again he had lost his fortune, and months later Rika’s family received a letter from the Brazilian jungle in which he claimed that he was first in line to the fortune that his promising young Waldemar had undoubtedly left behind in the wealthy Netherlands.

  The exact circumstances of Rika and Waldemar’s deaths were never completely clear, though the Van der Lans family would still try to find witnesses to their deaths in the 1970s. For his seventeenth birthday in 1946, Waldemar’s grandparents gave him copies of the first publications in which concentration camp survivors recounted their horrifying memories. Despite their good intentions, the booklets brought him nothing but nightmares about gas chambers, sadistic guards, and burning ships. He remained particularly preoccupied with his father’s death. How could that ship have been lost in the Bay of Lübeck so shortly before the end of the war? And how could such an excellent long-distance swimmer as his father have simply drowned?

  Waldy’s parents had disappeared without a trace, along with the millions of other people who never returned home from the East. In the first year after the end of the Second World War, the world gradually realized that something inconceivable had happened in Nazi Germany. It appeared that in total, more than six million Jews had been murdered. Of the 140,000 Jews living in the Netherlands before the war, only 34,000 survived; of the 11,000 that were rounded up in The Hague, only 500 returned. Only the Surinamese Jews had managed to escape unscathed: for once, their flexible views toward marriage and lack of precise registration in their country of origin had worked to their advantage.

  The numbers from the “typical” German concentration camps were shocking in and of themselves. Of the approximately 132,000 registered prisoners at Ravensbrück, only 42,000 survived; of the 100,000 forced laborers at Neuengamme, barely half made it out alive. The massive slaughter in the men’s camp mostly took place at the end of the war, during transport and the tragedy in the Bay of Lübeck.

  The Chardon group was almost entirely wiped out: the florist and policeman with whom Kees had worked both died, the former in Neuengamme and the latter by firing squad on the Waalsdorpervlakte. Most of the “sheep” they had tried to save didn’t survive the war either. Those who weren’t immediately sent to the gas chambers in Auschwitz on February 11, 1944, died of either illness or exhaustion in the labor camps. Herman de Bruin, the medical student Rika and Waldemar had housed on the upper floor with Dobbe Franken, held out the longest—he died on March 28, 1945, in Dachau, more than a year after he was arrested. The residents of the Pijnboomstraat found their final resting places in the Red Cross archive in The Hague, in the endless rows of brown envelopes that made up the only tangible evidence of all the lives that were lost. Rika and Waldemar’s envelopes were quite thick, a sign that there had been a considerable number of inquiries about their cases. Herman de Bruin’s, on the other hand, was nearly empty: by the end of the war, there was simply no one left in his family to look for him.

  The only one who had been able to mourn the once-so-promising medical student was the red-haired girl he had planned to spend his life with. Dobbe Franken survived forced labor, transport, diseases, and a total of five selections. On May 8, 1945, her camp in Czechoslovakia was liberated by the Russians, and she was one of the first Holocaust survivors to set foot on Dutch ground at the end of May 1945. At the crisis center in Eindhoven, she came across an old acquaintance who happened to have been with her Herman when he died. She was heartbroken, but thankful to have found out what happened to him so quickly. She was able to move on with her life, while others waited for years for news of loved ones whose cases were never truly closed. In 1946, she married a Jewish man from Poland who had served as a volunteer in the British army. Together they immigrated to Palestine, where Dobbe worked as a social worker and helped with the construction of Israel, the Jewish state founded to ensure there could never be another Holocaust.

  In the summer of 1945, another survivor from the Pijnboomstraat returned to Holland virtually unharmed: Gerard van Haringen, the deserter SS man who had lived so comfortably with the Nods family. Back then, Rika had read his tarot cards and predicted that he would survive the war, and in his case, she had been right. He had managed to dodge the bullet intended for deserters and followed the same path as his host family. First, he was sent to Scheveningen and then to Vught, and finally he ended up in Germany at Dachau. His greatest fortune, he later described, was the fact that, unlike most of his fellow prisoners, he didn’t have a family or lover to worry about. All he had to do was survive, and survive he did. Armed with his iron physique and knowledge of German, he managed, time and again, to secure the good jobs in the camps. He spent his time at Dachau washing the officers’ cars, who in return shared their cigarettes and food with him. He was one of the few who could later look back and say that he had hardly ever been hungry in the camp.

  After the camp was liberated, Gerard worked as an interpreter for the Americans for a few months and then decided to return home. This was easier said than done, for the Allies were extremely eager to catch former SS men in civilian clothes trying to avoid trial. But even though Gerard had never been particularly clever in school, he had been smart enough to avoid the mandatory SS tattoo under his left arm during his short period of service and was therefore able to slip through all the checkpoints without any problems. When he got home, his father was waiting for him at the train station in Rotterdam. He took his son in his arms and said: “Tomorrow you’re going to turn yourself in.”

  But in the end, there was nothing to charge Gerard van Haringen with, other than his rash decision to join the SS, and he was released after a few months. A year and a half later, his case was dismissed. The judge decided that his time in Dachau had been punishment enough, and he didn’t even lose his civil rights. Gerard, the survivor, had slipped through every loophole.

  In Suriname, the war was—as the locals put it—fêted rather than fought. For once, the tables had been turned. Suddenly, they were the ones sending ships full of relief items to a plundered, impoverished Holland, rather than the other way around. The colony had prospered under American occupation, and the many dollars that had been exchanged for bauxite were now circulating in the Surinamese economy. A new sense of self-awareness had taken root within the population, which decades later would lead to a definitive separation from the motherland.

  By the spring of 1946, life in the free Netherlands had seemingly gone back to normal, and the beaches in Scheveningen could once again be opened to the public. But the resort town was scarcely a shadow of the joyful, cosmopolitan destination it had been before the war. Many of the major hotels had been demolished to make room for the Atlantic Wall, and those left standing were so thoroughly run down by the German soldiers and the prisoners of war who had been detained in them postliberation, that what little was left was bulldozed by an ambitious project developer. House number 56 on the Seafront—which regained its unobstructed view of the North Sea with the demolition of the antitank wall—was one of the few buildings that survived. In that first summer after the war, the elegant residence was immediately reinstated as a guesthouse under new management, ready to welcome new guests in search of a carefree holiday by the sea.

  While Dutch society was licking its wounds and trying to pick up where it left off, the Oranje Hotel was filled with Fascist prisoners. Maarten Spaans and most of the other members of the Jodenploeg were immediately detained in May 1945. They didn’t deny that they had worked as bounty hunters, but they claimed to know nothing of any cruelty or abuse. “We never witnessed anyone being hit. Our bosses didn’t tolerate that.” Spaans experienced firsthand what it was like to be turned over to violent interrogators. He was knocked
around the interrogation room like a human punching bag for hours, and in official reports he declared over and over again—sincerely or not—that he was sorry:

  I deeply regret what happened. We didn’t know the consequences. During my service, I was always led by the conviction that I, as a policeman, must enforce the laws established by the occupying power, which therefore included the German regulations against the Jews. Much of my bad behavior can be explained by youthful recklessness and folly.105

  His trial was held in 1948. Spaans was convicted of complicity in 362 arrests as well as the murder of a Jewish person in hiding who had tried to flee. Initially it seemed that given his leading role and—in the words of the prosecutor—“abominable diligence,” he wouldn’t be able to escape the death penalty, but the ill-treatment he received after his arrest was considered a mitigating circumstance, and he ended up receiving life in prison. One by one, his former buddies claimed that they had no idea that extermination camps existed and that they too were deeply sorry about what had happened. Most ended up receiving approximately twenty years in prison.

  Only Kees Kaptein, who was also arrested in 1945, remained entirely entrenched in his degenerate worldview. He exhibited a doggedness that, under different circumstances, could have almost been considered heroic. In his eyes, he had done everything in his power to make sure that the people who were caught helping Jews were released from prison—with their cooperation, of course. The “few” times he had allowed himself to go so far as to use physical violence were in situations where it was simply in the prisoner’s best interest. Even the “Jews who were gassed” could only blame themselves, because “the Jewish attitude was such that it was simply impossible to have respect for them.” He claimed that the dozens of reports of blackmail, abuse, rape, and extortion that had been filed against him during the war were nothing but attempts to ruin him and labeled the countless witnesses, both men and women, who had spoken out against him since the liberation “whores” and “too cowardly to be [men].”106 On April 6, 1948, in what his counselor called a “room full of hate,” Kees Kaptein was sentenced to death. About one year later, his short, criminal life was put to an end. He was one of the last of the forty-four Dutch war criminals to be executed by the Dutch state.

  Neither Rika’s children nor Kees Chardon’s parents knew that their loved ones’ bully had been executed, just as they were unaware of the trial against him and the other Jew hunters. Even though most of the victims hadn’t lived to tell their stories, the evidence against their perpetrators was so overwhelming that no great effort was made to find witnesses, and even some of the people who had spoken out against them weren’t called to testify. The Nods and Chardon cases weren’t investigated, and no one was charged. The silence that had been so essential during the occupation seemed to have outlived the war.

  Therefore, there was never any clarity about the exact circumstances surrounding their arrests. However, there was no doubt in anyone’s mind that the residents of the Pijnboomstraat had been betrayed, if only for the fact that lists containing personal information about those in hiding had most definitely been seen by multiple people. Dobbe Franken was certain they had been betrayed by a Jewish Resistance fighter in her younger sister’s social circle. In a futile attempt to save his own skin, he had probably given the Nazis entire lists of names as they beat him in the interrogation room. The Chardon family assumed their betrayer had been Jewish, but unbeknownst to them, the raid on the Spoorsingel was the result of a slip of the tongue by a young deserter with too little imagination to realize the impact of his words. Meanwhile, Waldy was absolutely convinced that Gerard van Haringen had betrayed them on the Pijnboomstraat. When he heard that Van Haringen had survived the war and was living on one of the West Frisian Islands, he swore off the Dutch archipelago for the rest of his life. As for Van Haringen, he was entirely unaware of the consequences of his actions. He had no idea what had happened to the Nods family and assumed that the person to blame for their arrest was a Jewish woman from Schiebroek whom he had once seen at the house on the Pijnboomstraat; in his opinion, she had come into a suspicious amount of money after the war.

  The SD report of the Chardon raid simply stated that it was carried out on January 18, 1944, in response to a phone call from the Rotterdam secret police. Spaans and his colleagues confirmed this during interrogation, but the person who had tipped them off remained unnamed. In the end, the Pijnboomstraat traitor disappeared into the annals of history. The survivors lived on, each with their own suspicions, each with a hole in their heart. And they kept quiet, as Albert Helman described in his epitaph for victims of Nazi terror:

  Silently the people have dispersed: the dead lying in a heap—

  And I, I so often think: they haven’t passed away,

  those unnamed souls, each one was a name,

  a fate, a hope, a spark of the future.107

  In assessing what happened in the Netherlands under Nazi occupation, later generations were quick to draw hard lines between good and evil, but they hadn’t experienced the war and all its ambiguity firsthand, and it was all too easy to see things as black or white. But those who had lived through it knew better: only the dead were blameless. All survivors had something to feel guilty about—if only the mere fact that they were still alive while so many others, some of whom had surely been better, braver, more deserving than they, were not.

  Waldy, who had once posed so candidly for his father’s camera as a boy, never appeared that way in photos again. Later photos of him reveal something bewildered, almost ashamed, in his eyes. That safe island that he and his parents had created in the middle of a skeptical, sometimes hostile world was gone, and their “Sonny Boy” had become a cuckoo in the nest, a situation in need of a solution. He was, in short, a problem, an unwanted package that was passed around from one person to the next.

  Though his grandparents tried to be sweet to him, they had no idea what to do with their mixed-race grandson whom they had taken in mostly out of guilt. For Grandpa Van der Lans, the news of his rebellious oldest daughter’s death had taken its toll on his health, and he barely survived a heart attack. His wife processed her sorrow and remorse with such Catholic devotion that her living room started to look more like a parish hall. When Waldy’s aunt Hilda and uncle Jo settled in Amsterdam in 1946 and announced that they were prepared to take in their orphaned nephew, the Van der Lanses promptly took them up on their offer. Perhaps, when it came down to it, the boy would be better off with his own kind, they thought.

  At first, Waldy was relieved that he would be leaving his grandparents’ stuffy, incense-infused house for the laid-back atmosphere of his father’s family. In Amsterdam’s Surinamese-Indian community, the small-minded, bourgeois mentality of people from The Hague was even somewhat frowned upon. He got nice new clothes, they danced and went out, and he no longer had to go to church every morning. But Hilda and Jo, who had never had any children of their own, found raising their nephew to be more difficult than they had imagined. So much had changed since they had stayed on the Seafront in the shadow of the looming war. Waldy was no longer the chatty, charming moksi-moksi little boy that he had been back then, but rather a lanky young man with hunched shoulders and a skittish look in his eyes. “He has gotten so quiet,” his Surinamese aunts said to each other, shaking their heads.

  Around his eighteenth birthday, Waldy encountered the extremely nationalistic West Indian and East Indian student community, where he discovered ideologies that promised justice for all and no more war. He became politically aware and rebellious, and decided to quit school, though he had already fallen hopelessly behind anyway. Meanwhile, his aunt Hilda, who had left the Japanese POW camps badly bruised, was having trouble untangling the threads between the past and present. She became convinced that there were people around her who were out to get her and had charged her doorknobs with electricity. She suspected Waldy of giving them signs from behind the window. He did his best to navigate his aunt’s paranoia,
but it got increasingly worse, and eventually he no longer dared to invite people over for fear that his aunt might become aggressive.

  Waldy had scarcely any contact with his family in The Hague anymore. Most of them still felt uncomfortable about the whole situation, especially since they had judged Rika and Waldemar so mercilessly before the war. No one wanted to be reminded of the drama, and on top of that, they were busy putting the pieces of their own lives back together after five years under occupation>. And so, they all assumed that someone else would take care of Rika and Waldemar’s only son; and in the end, no one did. Bertha was the only one who faithfully sent letters and invitations to Amsterdam. For her, her mother’s death—which came just as she had escaped her father’s dictatorial rule—had been a disastrous end to a far from tranquil youth. As she got older, she developed into the spitting image of Rika, both inside and out, and even though she had a young family of her own by then, she did what she could to hold the family together and to make sure Waldy was included.

  Waldy’s brothers, on the other hand, seemed content to simply forget their younger half brother, who had always been such a thorn in the family’s side. The oldest, Wim, devoted his life to his family, patients, and two brothers, whom he cared for like the father he wished he’d had himself. He never spoke a word of his mother or the little brother he had never met. Only once, when his own children were nearly adults did he tell them “the story,” one time and one time only: their Grandma Jans wasn’t really their grandmother, their real grandmother had abandoned her family a long time ago and later passed away. The topic was then closed for further discussion. It wasn’t until much later that Wim agreed to meet Waldy, and in the months before his death, he started talking about the mother he had so rigorously cut out of his life as a young boy. Only then did he confess what had held him back all those years: his sorrow over an irreversible decision and the fear of his own failure as a son.