The Boy Between Worlds

by van der Zijl, Annejet

  Meanwhile, Waldy wandered through life in search of something to hold on to that he never completely found. Thanks to a chance encounter with a teacher, he picked up his studies again, and in 1951, at the age of twenty-two, he earned his high school diploma. He found a job as a trainee journalist at Het Parool, a Resistance-era newspaper that thrived after liberation, and started studying political science. He married a girl from a Socialist-Idealist family whom he had gotten pregnant. Neither his studies nor his marriage lasted long, but more than anything, he felt relief that he could finally leave the house of his aunt, who by then had sunk even deeper into her delusions. In one of her final moments of clarity, Hilda arranged for Waldy’s last name—which was still officially Van der Lans—to be changed to that of his father and grandfather.

  Koos Nods was heard from one last time. In a stiff letter to his daughter, he demanded that his grandson be sent to Venezuela, a country rife with opportunity and plenty of gold to be panned. This letter was one of the things that compelled Hilda to let Waldy marry so young. Shortly afterward, the old gold digger disappeared without a trace into the immense wilderness of central Brazil. Rumor has it that after finding a giant gemstone, he was murdered by a fellow fortune seeker. If the rumor is true, Koos died just as he had wanted to live—filthy rich.

  The past grabbed Waldy by the throat at the age of fifty. He had just returned from Suriname, where he had immigrated with his second family in 1962, in search of his father’s paradise and to get away from the Cold War hanging over Europe. But it turned out that he couldn’t escape the course of world history there either, for just a few months after his arrival, the Cuban missile crisis broke out, and Suriname, too, fell under the threat of a third world war.

  The psychiatrists didn’t find it particularly difficult to trace the source of chronic stress in Waldy’s life, and they recommended that he confront his sorrow. Following their advice, he decided to travel in his parents’ footsteps. He skipped Ravensbrück—his uncles had been there in 1946 and came home more confused than they’d been before. What he didn’t know was that the spot on the Schwedtsee where his mother’s ashes were thrown had since been designated as what the French so aptly call un lieu de mémoire—a place of remembrance. Every year to this day, Dutch schoolchildren scatter flowers over the water, so in a way, Rika does get the roses she always wanted on her grave. At the Baltic Sea, Waldy found a simple memorial next to a parking lot at the beach in Neustadt. It had been placed there on May 7, 1945, at the site of a mass grave containing the remains of several victims whose bodies had washed ashore. On the stacked stones was a plaque that read: “In eternal remembrance of the prisoners of Camp Neuengamme. They lost their lives in the sinking of the Cap Arcona on May 3, 1945.” Around the memorial were happy German families enjoying a picnic.

  When it turned out that the trip hadn’t really helped, the psychiatrists suggested that Waldy try putting his parents’ story on paper. He was, after all, a writer by trade, and perhaps it would help him find closure. Their suggestion, however, drove him even deeper into a corner, because, in fact, he had been trying to write down his memories of his parents from the moment he had heard they weren’t coming back. He had attempted to write about them in every way he knew: as a factual account (“I spent my early childhood in Scheveningen”); as a novel with his alter ego, Wam Strand, as the main character (“‘I am going to write a book in German,’ Wam thought, and then those rotten krauts can read for themselves how much I hate them”), and as a letter to his parents:

  Strange how you two have become strangers to me. I don’t remember what you look like. The image I have of you in photos seems outdated, as if the two of you would no longer fit in nowadays. I know the photos only capture a moment and you would have evolved with the times. Maybe the two of you didn’t want that. Maybe the misery you experienced was so depressing that what you wanted didn’t even matter anymore.

  I’ve recently been to Germany for the first time myself. Can you blame me? Everyone is going, everyone should go at least once. I met a student my age who was sent to the Eastern front when he was 16 years old. The Russians captured him and forced him to spend five years of his Führer-contaminated youth doing hard labor in Siberia. He too . . .

  I am studying philosophy. Would you two have liked that? Would you have been proud?108

  But no matter how many hours Waldy spent behind the typewriter and how many crumpled pieces of papers were tossed into the wastebasket, he kept finding himself in a rut. And for as little as he had cried when he heard the news about his parents, he now found himself shedding helpless tears. For everything else he had always been able to find words, but he wasn’t able to bring his parents back to life. Every time he tried, the story would come to a screeching halt at the same point, at the same image: his father on the eve of the liberation standing at the railing of the mythical floating sea palace doomed to become his fate.

  THE SEA, 1945

  The order came from the headquarters of the Second Tactical Air Force in Süchteln. Rumors had been flying around for weeks that Nazi bigwigs were trying to escape via the Baltic Sea to Norway and would continue the fight from there. On May 1, military intelligence announced that there were German ships fully loaded with troops in the Bay of Lübeck. When the news arrived, however, the support of British armored divisions conquering Hamburg was still the main priority. But once the port city was brought under complete Allied control on May 3, Order 7—to “destroy concentrations of enemy ships in the marine area to the west of Poel Island”—was carried out by various RAF squadrons.

  At approximately eleven o’clock in the morning, eight Hawker Typhoons took off from the former Luftwaffe airbase Ahlhorn. They were among the newest and most advanced fighter-bombers, each with eight missiles under its wings that could be shot off in a salvo or aimed and fired one by one. Within a few minutes, a few dozen planes joined them from other bases, including Tempest fighters and a pair of smaller aircraft to cover the fighter-bombers. At around 11:35 a.m., the small air fleet arrived in Lübeck. In the meantime, however, a thick layer of cloud had formed over the Baltic Sea, and since the pilots had no idea what was lying below, they decided to turn back. On the way, they shelled a few military transports on the way from Schleswig-Holstein—shooting, as one of the pilots would later recall, at anything that moved.

  At around two o’clock in the afternoon, they received word that the sun had broken through over the Baltic Sea. For the second time, the planes flew over the smoldering ruins of northern Germany, and within a few minutes, they had their target in sight. At 2:16 p.m., the sirens in the seaside town of Neustadt wailed. Fifteen minutes earlier the town’s swastika flags had been lowered as a sign of unconditional surrender. On the ships off the coast, the passengers began waving white sheets at the approaching planes. In their striped jumpsuits, they shouted and cheered with joy.

  But looking down at the giant ship and the many small ones around it, the pilots saw nothing but enemy targets floating on the shiny surface of the Baltic. It was their third mission of the day, and they had already been dropping their deadly loads on German cities night after night for months. Their chances of survival had been next to nothing, especially in the beginning—they lost on average one out of three planes per operation—and they were living on amphetamines, alcohol, and bravado. They thought nothing of the citizens they had to bomb, let alone of the Nazi scum cornered like rats down below. This would be their last operation of the war, and as always, they were automatically focused on one thing and one thing only: carrying out their mission and getting out of there as quickly as possible.

  The attack started at two thirty in the afternoon. From a height of over eleven thousand feet, the bombers dived down one after the other, each one releasing its missiles in a salvo. Giant fireballs rolled across the Cap Arcona and the nearby vessels; the sound was deafening. The white flags of surrender vanished behind the clouds of smoke and towering splashes and were no longer visible to the small
er bombers and fighter jets handling the precision work. They rained their bombs down on any vessel that hadn’t been hit yet and wiped the decks clean with their machine guns. Ten destructive minutes later, the RAF planes pointed their noses back toward their home base and flew off, disappearing above the storm suddenly gathering in the sky.

  That night, one of the pilots wrote in his combat diary that the “Big Shipping Strike” was “nothing short of brilliant”: “Given the circumstances, it’s safe to say that a lot of Jerries found the Baltic Sea very cold today.”109 That evening, the following news arrived from the English front:

  Bombers and fighter jets carried out a massive and successful attack against concentrations of German troops on their way from Schleswig-Holstein on ships trying to reach Denmark from Kiel, Flensburg and other ports. Approximately 250 to 300 ships were attacked, including a convoy of more than fifty units. At the end of the day, the waters around Kiel, Flensburg and Lübeck were littered with burning ships.

  Waldemar’s world ended in chaos and flames. As the sound of the planes faded away on the horizon, the bay that had been so peaceful that morning was transformed into a deadly inferno. The vessels were left adrift, burning like torches, and in the water around them were the bodies of the dead and drowning. A nearby freighter had been hit midship and was sinking. As it went down, there was one final bang: the sound of its captain putting a bullet in his head. The Cap Arcona was burning from three points. The roaring fire ate its way through the walls, the carpets, the wood paneling, and the deck of the once-so-handsome ship. The Russian prisoners who had lorded over the camps were now trapped like rats belowdecks. Locked in the cargo hold in the forecabin, they had no chance of survival. Their dying screams and cries for help were overpowered by the sound of shattering glass from the dining hall, where the SS ammunition supplies were firing off into the glass ceiling one after another.

  Thousands of people scurried around the ship like terrified ants. The prisoners who had been put in the cabins were struggling to make it up to the decks, meanwhile SS guards were firing shots in the stairwells, confiscating life vests, and shooting their way to the few lifeboats that hadn’t yet gone up in flames. Furniture was tossed overboard for the drowning people below to grab hold of, but many of them were crushed by it. Crowded onto the few decks that were not yet ablaze, the survivors were forced to choose between the flames of hell or the icy waters below. They searched the horizon in the hope that help was on the way. But help never came, for the few minesweepers that had attempted to leave the Lübeck harbor to rescue the drowning came instantly under fire from the Allied tanks outside the city.

  Approximately thirty minutes after the attack, the Cap Arcona began to capsize. Hundreds of passengers fell like ragdolls from her scorching hot flanks and were sucked down with the moribund ship. The seawater was breathtakingly cold—barely five or six degrees above freezing. There were even ice floes floating on the surface of the water, remnants of a winter that had been so severe that even the salty Baltic had nearly frozen solid. Many of the drowned were so exhausted and undernourished that they only survived a few minutes in the icy sea. The survivors fought with each other to secure tabletops and life vests, and from the lifeboats, the SS guards continued shooting at the people in the water. A few prisoners chose revenge over their slim chances of making it out alive. They overturned the lifeboats and strangled their former tyrants with their bare hands, ultimately going down with them.

  Waldemar, the swimmer, was one of those who chose the water. He took off his shirt and lowered himself down with ropes. He hadn’t swum in years, but as soon as his body hit the water, he found his rhythm. Finally, he was free. With long strokes, his arms and legs—quickly losing all feeling—cleaved their way through the water, away from the burning, smoldering ship and the terrible cries of those trapped inside it. The sun had disappeared by then, and it had started to rain; the icy drops lashed against his face. But the sea was calm, as the Baltic usually is, and the longer he swam, the calmer it became around him. Here and there were the heads of other swimmers headed for the white dunes along the horizon, roughly two and a half miles away. And even here, dead bodies floated on the surface of the water, but these had peaceful, almost blissful, looks on their faces. As horrible as the throes of death had been for those left behind on the ship, the end had been merciful for the ones in the water, who, as the hypothermia set in, were gently swept away by the waves.

  At around four o’clock in the afternoon, a regiment of tanks from the British Ninety-Eighth Field Artillery rode into Lübeck and took over the city without a struggle. A scout eyeing the horizon could have sworn he saw a gigantic, red-hot fireplace grate emerging from the sea, but he quickly realized what it was: the carcass of a ship. A few hours later, a small rescue operation would manage to save just five hundred of the eighty-five hundred prisoners from the water and the keel of the still-burning Cap Arcona—many of whom would die in the days to come. The event would go down in history as one of the greatest maritime tragedies of all time; it is also one of the most unknown.

  At around five o’clock, Waldemar reached the beach between Pelzerhaken and Neustadt. It was low tide, and he felt solid ground beneath his feet a few hundred yards before the shore. Together with another man from the ship, he waded through the final stretch to the dry land, one foot in front of the other, numb and exhausted. Suddenly, the spitfire of machine guns rattled from the dunes. Waldemar’s fellow swimmer quickly dropped down and played dead, but in that split second, he saw the black man beside him get shot and disappear under the water.

  And so, Waldemar Nods died on the shores of the Baltic Sea, on May 3, 1945, at approximately five o’clock in the afternoon, barely forty-eight hours before the official end of the war. He was shot dead by soldiers in poorly fitting uniforms, their frightened boys’ eyes peering out under helmets too large for their heads. Surely, they were not much older than his own son, Waldy, but they’d been raised in the glory and doctrine of their invincible Führer. They didn’t know what to do, so they fired. As his blood drained into the icy water, Waldemar no longer felt any cold or pain. He was rocked by waves, all filth and misery cleansed by the sea. The water was his friend, just as it had always been.

  At that moment, midday was approaching in Paramaribo. The calls of kiskadees could still be heard in the trees, but the vendors down at the Waterfront had already started packing up their wares, and shutters were being closed against the looming midday heat. The river’s warm, muddy waters sloshed languidly against the docks, and Waldemar swam. He swam home.

  AFTERWORD

  A Sort of Happy End

  I first heard the story of Rika van der Lans and Waldemar Nods while standing around the coffee machine in the editorial offices of the magazine where I worked. The couple’s life story was told to me by a new colleague in the design department. Rika and Waldemar’s only child, Waldy, was her father-in-law. “He is so frustrated by the fact that he has never been able to write his parents’ story himself,” she said. “He would be thrilled if you would do it.”

  Although I didn’t do anything with the story at the time—my editor in chief would have never given me the time and space to write an article about two totally unknown people—I couldn’t get it out of my mind. It was as if the story was still wandering around, tugging at my sleeve because it so desperately wanted to be told.

  Perhaps my fascination stemmed from the fact that I was working as a journalist specializing in the reconstruction of crime stories at the time, and I was constantly confronted with the same fundamental question: on what grounds and under what circumstances do people make the wrong choice? Rika and Waldemar’s bittersweet love story was a natural counterpart to my work. How, I wondered, could two people who already had so much against them—their difference in skin color, difference in age, the economic depression of the 1930s, discrimination, and the consequences of a traumatic divorce—find it in their hearts to risk their lives for other persecuted people? In o
ther words, what inspires someone to do something good?

  I guess you could say that this story became my own little investigation into the how and why of heroism based on the fates of two ordinary people who found themselves caught up in the great wheels of world history. Rika and Waldemar’s lives touch two of the darkest, most taboo chapters of Dutch history, namely the slave trade and the persecution of Jewish people. However essentially different these two episodes were—the motivations of the former were primarily economic and those of the latter were ideological—they had one thing in common: racial and ethnic discrimination.

  When, years later, I still couldn’t shake the couple’s story and finally met Waldy in person, I discovered another motivation for my desire to tell their story: the need to bring his parents back to life, if only on paper. Naturally, I realized that people disappear under the ruins of history every day, never to be found again. But still, it felt good to at least try to pull these two people out of the rubble. At the very least, it might offer some comfort to their son, who had last seen them as a fourteen-year-old boy in a prison in The Hague, and who, in his seventies when I met him, seemed to be suffering more from their loss by the day.

  The first few times I visited Waldy to talk about his parents, he choked up with tears within five minutes. As his dog tried to console him, he silently handed me one of the photo albums he had managed to rescue from his parents’ house. It was as if he wanted to say, “Here, look. Look how happy the three of us were together.” Rarely had I ever met anyone who so thoroughly embodied the adjective “broken.”

  My research took me to The Hague, to Suriname, to Germany, and every time I came home, I would update him on my progress. After a while, I started to notice a change. Waldy cried less and even seemed to be enjoying the project. When he called one day to tell me that he had found in the attic the long-lost letters his parents had sent him from the concentration camps, he sounded almost triumphant. When I presented him with the first copy of the book on his seventy-fifth birthday—despite all his previous refusals to give a speech—he stood up before an absolutely silent audience and said: “Annejet, with this book, you have given me back my parents.”