“Is tomorrow soon enough?”
She laughs. “Fine. I’m always available, it’s one of the benefits of being old.”
D thinks I should first check whether she really knew Bommenneef that well. “You need your rest. You don’t want to make that whole trip for nothing.” But who would I ask? I’ve yet to speak to anyone who knew Frans well enough to know about his inner circle.
I decide not to expect too much from this meeting. If B is about the same age as Frans, then she’d be about a hundred now. There’s a good chance her memory has clouded over.
But no, B is as sharp as a tack. She is nearly ninety, and quite beautiful, with big dark eyes and a gray bun of hair that glistens like fresh fish. “Inscrutable” is the word that pops into my head when she opens the door. Everywhere in her apartment are portraits of the same three faces: her husband, her son, her grandson. She smiles as I enter. “Good to have a Van Heemstra drop by again. Frans was part of the family.”
I smile back, relieved. Finally, someone who really knew Bommenneef. Impatient to get to the heart of the matter, I wrestle my way through a slice of apple pie and the usual first-encounter small talk. When she gets up to fetch some more pie, I ask her what she can tell me about the attack.
She raises her eyebrows. “The attack?”
I nod.
“You mean that bomb thing?”
“Yes,” I say. “That bomb thing.”
She brushes off my words.
“I don’t know anything about that. I only met Frans in the fifties—at the racetrack my husband used to frequent.”
What she does know for certain is that he was convicted and sent to jail in Leeuwarden in 1947. She confirms the story that Juliana gave him a royal pardon. She reckons he served about three years in total.
For two hours, I ask and B answers. It is a strange conversation that seems to be going nowhere. I have the sensation that we are talking in circles, that I’m only seeing the periphery of Bommenneef’s story, because B never gives me a straight answer.
* * *
Me: How did he come into contact with the Resistance?
B: The Resistance came into contact with him.
Me: Did he murder many people during the war?
B: Is a murder in wartime still a murder?
Me: Was the bombing a murder?
B: According to the judge, yes.
Me: And according to you?
B: I’ll go make some more tea.
Out of all her dodging I am able to distill the following:
Frans’s shoes were always worn out. Whenever there was no woman in his life, B picked out his clothes for him. She loved knotting his ties, then running her fingers through his hair like a comb. She met Frans at the Zandvoort racecourse, where he and his friends watched the races, or even took part himself, for instance against his best friend, Maurice Schulp. Maurice was also the brother of Frans’s second wife, Nelly, whom he married in 1950, while still in prison.
The racecourse attracted people who—B hesitates briefly as she says this—wanted to live. She says it emphatically.
Frans once told her that he didn’t hate the Nazis because of their ideology per se but resented them taking over his country. But he didn’t mean it as crudely as it sounds, B says when I ask, shocked, if he really said that. He had a lifelong issue with authority, she explained, which the Germans’ jackboots and stinging orders only exacerbated. According to B, Frans was “duped” into taking part in that Sinterklaas Eve attack. By whom, and why, remains unclear. (Me: By who, then? She: The others. Me: Why? She: That’s just how it went. Me: How did it go? She: The way it did.) In prison, some of his cellmates had been conscientious objectors, men who refused to go fight in the Dutch East Indies. He couldn’t stand those “leftist idiots,” B utters with such acerbity that I am afraid she had looked up my politically correct profile on the internet.
But she’s already switched subjects: Frans’s women. Bad choices, the lot of them. The first wife, Carolina, was a Nazi sympathizer; the second one, Nelly, was young and reckless. They started a relationship shortly after the war and got married after the bombing. If anyone knew anything about the bomblet, it was Nelly, B says, but Nelly is dead. Her voice contains a whiff of triumph at the word “dead.” Frans’s third wife (B cannot, or does not want to, remember her name) took him to Vinaròs, Spain, where it was so scorching hot in the summer that he spent weeks on end lying on his bed under the ceiling fan. When the nameless wife died a few years later, he stayed on, alone. He chain-smoked, and when he wasn’t smoking, he coughed. In his last years, he was gradually consumed by diabetes. B was there when they amputated Frans’s legs in the hospital in Nijmegen. She hired a nurse to care for him in Spain, but she quit after a few months because he wanted more from her than just medical care.
And so it went with subsequent nurses as well. He got the short end of the stick, B says—as if the victims weren’t the women, but poor, legless, needy Frans under the ceiling fan.
After an extensive search, B says, they managed to find an ex-marine who agreed to move in and care for him. Frans spent his last months in the arms of the bald, burly seaman, who moved him between bed and wheelchair, and bathed him whenever Frans allowed it, which was seldom.
Then the marine would phone B: “The captain won’t take his bath.”
Sometimes she would go to Spain to care for him herself and found he had been wearing the same clothes for months.
B wrote regularly, but Frans never wrote back.
Whenever she visited, all he wanted to talk about was car racing.
She knows little about the bombing except that the man who was killed was a collaborator, and therefore had it coming. The story about Frans swimming across a river with a knife in his teeth vaguely rings a bell, but she’s forgotten whom she heard it from, and when.
Her long monologue leaves me feeling disoriented.
The women, the cars, the marine—red herrings.
I want to understand his act of heroism, the moment he put it all on the line, the mindset it reflects.
B rises to make more tea.
A hero is someone who got away with being reckless.
Who wrote that again? Hermans. The Darkroom of Damocles.
But Bommenneef didn’t get away with it. He sacrificed his freedom for his principles.
B returns from the kitchen with a wood-framed certificate. “I found this while cleaning out the house in Vinaròs after the funeral. He was given it right after the war; it’s a commendation for his work in the Resistance. It really belongs in the family, so here, please have it.” As I take it, she runs her finger over the ring on my hand. “He wore it day and night.”
I can’t quite read her expression. Melancholy? Yearning? She says that Frans was a good man, no matter what—she says that last bit in English, with an exaggerated British accent.
The frame contains a yellowed document, its text in faded block letters. With this Certificate of Service I record my appreciation of the aid rendered by … as a volunteer in the service of the United Nations or the great cause of Freedom. Frans’s name is written in brown ink on the preprinted dotted line.
In the lower right corner is the dark-blue signature of Field Marshal Montgomery, the renowned British war hero. A row of elegant curls with a short flourish at the end. I get out of my chair, carefully put the frame into my bag, and thank B. This is what I was looking for. Proof of heroism. Something that makes the traffic tickets and stale gossip pale by comparison.
When I get home, I hammer a nail into the wall of the baby nursery and hang the certificate above the foot of the cradle, in full view of my son-to-be.
22 WEEKS LEFT
D, TOO, IS impressed by the dark-blue signature. Just yesterday he mockingly referred to my quest as a “retirement home national tour,” but now he gazes admiringly at the certificate on the wall.
“I had no idea it was such a big deal.”
I glow with pride, as if Bommenneef we
re my very own son, not some distant uncle I’d never met.
D asks what my next step is.
“Maybe this is it,” I reply. I’ve spoken to everyone familiar with the incident, and according to B, all his other close acquaintances are dead by now. I think back on what she said as I was leaving. “Frans was a good man, no matter what.” It’s a tidy-sounding conclusion. A good person. And a framed citation to prove it.
“But this can’t be everything, can it?” D exclaims. “Just look at that signature! This is the kind of stuff that becomes a bestseller. And you don’t write a bestseller by chitchatting over coffee with well-meaning family. This story deserves better. If you’re going to do it, then do it right.”
A few months ago I would probably have been irritated by his comments, but now his sudden encouragement does me good. It feels like we haven’t had a normal conversation in days. Sometimes I think it’s my belly: the bigger it gets, the less we talk. As though there’s not much else to say, now that the cards have been dealt. He a father, me a mother, end of story.
“I already googled the bombing long ago and didn’t get any hits.”
“There are other ways.”
“Such as?” I sound more eager than I’d like to.
D smiles the way you smile at a dimwitted child.
“For starters, this was covered in the newspapers, so it must be archived somewhere.” He reaches for his telephone and types a message. “I’ll text Stefan, he works at a news desk. He’ll know where to look for this kind of thing.” One second later his telephone pings. He walks over to the dining room table, flips open his laptop, types something in, and stares at the screen, his eyes wide.
“Wow.” He whistles softly.
“What?” I walk over to the table, try to commandeer the laptop, but he pulls it closer.
“This was huge! Front-page news!”
“Where?”
“Everywhere. ‘The Sinterklaas Murders,’ ‘Bloody Gift Night.’ This is a James Bond film!”
“Lemme see.”
He turns his laptop toward me. The browser shows a website of online newspaper archives with eleven full pages of links to articles about the bombing. Why didn’t this ever occur to me? I look at D, too flabbergasted to say anything. He grins and mouths the word am-a-teur.
I take the laptop upstairs and sit down at my desk. In five hours I’ve read all 132 articles about the bombing that appeared between December 1946 and June 1948. Then I reread them. And reread them again. It’s as though a snowbank is melting before my very eyes, revealing the glistening contours of a bigger story than I’d ever imagined. Bigger—far bigger—than the compact myth it has become.
On December 5, 1946, an army vehicle tears southward down the Rijksweg in The Hague, heading for Brussels. At the wheel is the thirty-seven-year-old Captain Frans van Heemstra. Most of the newspapers presume he had an explosive with him intended for a Belgian target. One or two journalists cast doubt on this theory, because no bomb went off in Brussels and there is no indication that an attack had been planned in the Belgian capital. Frans has the road to himself. Gasoline is still rationed and cars are scarce, but as the head of the motor vehicle facility at the army base in The Hague he has access to the fleet of military vehicles. The weather: partly cloudy, some sun, then wet snow. Temperature: just above freezing. Evening is approaching. Across the country, fathers are sneaking out of the house to change into their St. Nicholas disguises.
A few hours earlier, Frans handed a list of addresses to two of his subordinates, Corporal Peterse and Sergeant Haastrecht. It is a hit list, the names of the four men who are to be liquidated that evening.
The bombs to be used had been assembled by one Corporal De Boer. “Hellish machines,” writes the Utrechts Nieuwsblad. They’re small wooden boxes about the size of a pound cake, each containing a hand grenade and a wine bottle filled with gasoline. When the box is opened, the bottle shifts, pressing against the grenade’s detonating mechanism. Four seconds later there is an explosion, igniting the fuel-filled wine bottle. The explosives are wrapped up to look like Sinterklaas presents. Peterse has scribbled “From St. Nick” on them. They’re tied with ribbons.
While Frans is heading for Brussels, Sergeant Haastrecht is riding his motorcycle toward Amsterdam with one of the explosives in his saddlebag. He has a passenger behind him, a fellow sergeant who had nothing further to do with the story. His involvement is purely coincidental: he was hitchhiking, a shivering soldier at the side of the road hoping to get a lift home. Everything would have gone differently if Haastrecht hadn’t picked him up, but he is a friendly sort, or a loyal one (you don’t leave a fellow soldier stranded at the side of the road), or a reckless one, or a stupid one, or perhaps simply a terrified sergeant who has been trembling with panic all those kilometers on his motorbike with that deadly payload in his bag. Four seconds till detonation isn’t much time—one pothole and you’re a goner.
But that first second goes by without Haastrecht noticing. The wobbling weight of the hitchhiker shifts the bag, which in turn makes the wine bottle slide, and for those next three seconds Haastrecht makes no moves to escape, because he still has no idea until—four, three, two, one—they are catapulted into the air, the motorbike flips, and shrapnel, flames, and limbs skitter across the asphalt.
Haastrecht lands some distance from the motorbike, and he miraculously escapes the flames and chunks of metal. He scrambles to his feet, only slightly injured, and makes a run for it. An hour later a passerby finds his passenger at the side of the road, wounded and unconscious. When he comes to, he provides the police with a description of the driver. Haastrecht is the first to be arrested the following day.
Around the time Haastrecht’s bomb explodes, the twenty-eight-year-old Corporal Peterse, Frans’s second subordinate, stops two passersby on the Prinsengracht in The Hague. He asks if they would deliver a Sinterklaas surprise to number 266. They take the parcel and ring the bell at the address. When the door opens, they set it on the steps and shout up the stairs, “From St. Nick! From St. Nick!”
They amble briefly on, until they hear a boom and the sound of breaking glass. When they look back, they see a cloud of dust and smoke rising from the house they had just called at. A burning curtain flaps “like a large red torch” out of the window.
Corporal Peterse likewise sees the torch. He has parked his motorbike at the end of the street to make sure the bomb has reached its target. But the thundering explosion gives him second thoughts about the whole operation. When he gets to Delft, the home of the next two targets, he stops at a canal and—splosh, splosh—drops both parcels into the water, one at a time. Then Peterse gets back on his motorbike and rides home, to bed, to the arms of his wife, who a few days later is quoted in the newspaper as saying that his hair smelled of gunpowder that night, and that, for the first time since she’d known him, he cried in his sleep.
Haastrecht and Peterse and bomb-maker De Boer are all puppets of Frans, who is fingered as “the brain behind the bombings.” They knew each other from the Resistance and had been stationed at the same army garrison in The Hague. According to the newspapers, for months Frans had fed them reports of Dutch collaborators who had evaded justice, and insisted they needed to take matters into their own hands, because otherwise it would all have been for naught, the years of Resistance and risking their lives in the belief that the postwar Netherlands would become a different, better place. He spoke (according to one weekly magazine) of a “shadow army” and that they yearned to “carry on with the resistance” once peace came. Van Heemstra knew the men would go all out for him and would not shy away from using extreme violence. De Boer, for instance, is said to have single-handedly killed six German soldiers at Apeldoorn station during the war. He shot some of them point-blank, the others he strangled with his bare hands. He then dragged the bodies to an empty locomotive, which he then set on fire.
The soldiers were quick to embrace their captain’s plans. They had enough weapons to
unleash a new war. In De Boer’s shed, police discovered machine guns, loaded pistols, crates full of ammunition, hand grenades, and rifles.
No one knows where Van Heemstra delivered his deadly cargo, if there even was one, or what he did afterward in Brussels.
There was speculation that others were involved with the bombings, but no proof for this was found.
The bomb on the Prinsengracht destroyed the upper floor. Three people died.
21 WEEKS LEFT
THREE FATALITIES. NOT just one “bomblet” but four, maybe even five hefty explosives. Not a solitary act, but a larger scheme that dominated the front pages for weeks. Now that the story covers a larger terrain than I had imagined, I need a new scale, new surveying instruments. D says we’re bound to find somebody who wants to make it into a film. I counter that I need to know everything first. And besides, I don’t want a film, I want a name. I wrestle with the new words that have been appended to the story. “Hit list.” “Hellish machines.” “Strangle.”
While I try to think through my strategy for the coming weeks, I’m being devoured by everything that needs to be done. I read and write, visit friends’ babies, go into town with my parents to buy a stroller. They’re surprised by the newspaper articles, but not as much as I had expected. “These things are always a lot messier than you think,” says my father. War, he means. Violence.
I ask him how it’s possible that I’ve never heard this version before. Didn’t anyone read the newspapers back then? How could this story have been magically transformed into our tidy, straightforward family legend?
In Search of a Name Page 3