by Bart van Es
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THEN, AFTER A MONTH, she is back in school and it is her ninth birthday: September 7, 1942. She gets to choose her own dinner and she chooses sprouts. After breakfast, Auntie brings her some letters and packages from home. When Lien arrived in early August there were three dates ahead of her: her birthday (which was the most important), her mother’s (a long way ahead on October 28, when she would surely be home), and then far away in the distance there was Pappa’s in December, further off even than St. Nicholas. Now the first of these dates is upon her and she is nine. Before anything else, she opens the packages: two big bags of sweets, including one of licorice, of which she takes one piece and then two. There is also a knitted thing and a book that she puts to one side.
Four letters. It is strange to sit here in silence looking at them in the mooie kamer, where she has hardly been since she arrived. The first she reads is Pappa’s, which has “7 SEPTEMBER” written in bold capitals in the top right-hand corner to make sure it is read on the proper day. She recognizes Pappa’s faultlessly joined sloping writing, which is also there on the first page of her poesie album. It is four sides long:
Dear Lientje,
I am writing this letter on the occasion of your birthday. I congratulate you on your ninth birthday and hope that you will have many happy returns in future years to remember this day. Then, of course, we will be together again and will celebrate this one an extra time. As Mamma is sending you a present (I don’t know what it will be?) I will do the same and so enclose one guilder, with which you can buy something that you like, or you can use it to give others a treat if you have a ration card for sweets.
I have heard you are having a nice time there and that you are learning to swim. Can you swim well already?
We are always happy to hear news from you and if you ever have not so much to do, write to us with some news. It doesn’t have to be a long letter and it will help you to practice your handwriting. You are probably back in school now? That must be nice, because then you won’t be behind the others when you come back.
Hey Lien, I saw the menu for your birthday meal; it looks delicious. I think we will eat exactly the same things on the day itself, because it is kind of also a celebration for us (is “celebration” with an “e” or an “a”?).
If you sit there with the six of you I would really like to see your pudding. Draw it for me if you like, because that must be a big pudding. I don’t know who had the last bite of it, but I think it was you. We will have to remember because when you come back we will start from where you left off.
Are you always the first or the last to be dressed in the morning? And with food? You can win that race I think. You will have to write to me about all this and about how you celebrated your birthday.
Don’t forget Mamma’s birthday!! [Pappa squeezes in “28 October” in little letters, deciding afterward that she might have forgotten the date.]
Lientje, I hope that you have a very, very, very, very happy time of it and we here will have a nice glass of lemonade and let’s hope that we will soon be together, the three of us, maybe even before Mamma’s birthday. That would be the best present. Hey Lien, the paper is nearly full and I had wanted to write so much more.
Thank your foster parents on our behalf, also for their kind letter to us, and look after yourself, then the time will go quickly, till we collect each other from the train.
I also have to pass on the congratulations of the family. Both grannies and grandpas, Auntie Fie, Uncle Jo, Rini, Daaf, Auntie Bep, Uncle Manie, Auntie Riek with the three children, Uncle Bram, and Auntie Ro. Have I forgotten anybody? Because they have all told me that I must congratulate you on their behalf. I had nearly forgotten to send a greeting from Pretty.
Lien, many more years after this one.
Hip, hip, hip HOORAY.
from Pappa
The second letter is a short one from Mrs. Andriessen:
Dear Lientje,
Many congratulations on your birthday. I hope that you are healthy and are having a nice time. Also, best wishes to your housemates. You should have a pleasant day and let us hope that everything will be normal again soon, like it was. I am well. You’ll see a small present for you. Now Lientje, take my warm greeting, in thought
many kisses
from Mrs. R. A.
The next letter is from Aunt Ellie, who wrote a poem in Lien’s album, decorated with a beautiful fan. She leaves a lot of space at the top of her big sheet of lined paper, below the date, “The Hague, 2 September ’42”:
Dear Lientje,
Many congratulations on your birthday and I hope that you will become a big girl to make Mamma and Pappa even prouder of you than they are now!
Aunt Ellie had wanted very much to come and see you but it is better not to. Your present, you knew what it was anyway, you will get from somebody else now. Babs has knitted it beautifully, hasn’t she?
I have heard that you are having a nice time and that everything will be fun.
If you want to see Aunt Ellie very much, just for a moment, you should ask your aunt and uncle if they can think of a way to do it.
But over there you have lots of new aunties and uncles and playmates, so perhaps you have forgotten us already long ago!
Dear little thing, I’m stopping with this. A nice happy day, I hope that you can have one, and enjoy your lovely birthday meal.
Very many kisses from
Aunt Ellie
E. Monkernuis,
Kanaalbrugweg 87,
The Hague
The licorice is from Granny and Auntie Bep!
Finally there is Mamma’s letter, the one she wanted to save till last. Crosswise at the top is written “meant for 7 September”:
Dear Lieneke,
Heartfelt congratulations on your ninth birthday. Although I cannot congratulate you myself now, because of this I still think of you the whole day and I hope that you will have just as much fun as you would with us at home. I will send you a book and some nice things to eat and you will have to make do with that this year. I have not been able to buy a watch for you. I hope that Aunt Ellie will come to you herself, that would be very nice for you and for me. If she doesn’t go then the package will go in the post and you will still get everything. I hope that you are now going to school and that you will be happy and that you will appreciate what Aunt and Uncle are doing for you, because that is a lot. I don’t know if Pappa can write to you, because he is out of town. But please believe that he will also think of you the whole day and that he thinks it is a shame that we cannot be together. But maybe everything will come good again. Think of that, love. Write Mamma a little letter back, but don’t put it in the mail, because we don’t live at the Pletterijstraat anymore. So just give the little letter to Auntie and Uncle, they will make sure I get it. Or you can give it to Auntie Ellie, if she comes.
Good-bye angel, a really lovely day for the rest and thousands of kisses from your loving
Mammie
The book that Mamma sends her is called About a Happy Holiday. Its cover shows three children, drawn in pastel colors, who are standing on a quayside with a lady in a green hat looking protectively on. Behind them is an enormous ocean liner at which the children are waving excitedly as it comes in to dock. The whole thing is cheerful colors: the bow of the ship is a solid triangle rising above the quay and above this there is a long white line marked with regular black circles that are portholes. Right at the top, above the waving figure of what must be the captain, an orange funnel puts a little puff of smoke into a bright yellow block of sky. In a picture like this, going away seems like a simple and beautiful thing.
Lien takes the book and places it high on a shelf in the mooie kamer, where it remains untouched.
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THERE IS AN ALIEN, grown-up sadness in these letters, like t
he sadness she felt when Mamma and Pappa quarreled and she had to go away to stay with Daafje and Rini. Suddenly Lien wants more than anything in the world to be home. Real home, in her own bedroom in the Pletterijstraat. But now she thinks that maybe her bedroom has a different girl living in it, just when she wants so much to be lying in her little bed with Mamma stroking her hair.
Lien feels a tightness in every part of her and sees that she is weeping and once she knows it she cannot stop. The tears just keep coming. Her breathing gets all muddled and she begins to sob in hard, sharp bursts. Then grief overwhelms her like sickness, rolling over her as a great, dark wave.
Now she finds herself crying constantly, for days, for hours on end. There is no comfort possible, she just wants her Mamma and Pappa with an all-consuming hollowness. Desperate, not knowing what to do with her, Auntie takes Lien for a walk in the park, where she just carries on crying, so unhappy that it hurts like a raw wound. Then both of them are weeping, hand in hand with the gray autumn sky above them, the leaves still dark green and brown on the trees. They just walk round and round the same paths, seeing the same faces, not speaking at all. As they cry together, Lien holds herself close to this warm, strong woman, and the feeling of loss is joined by a new feeling, of love.
Six
The ceiling of The Hague’s Central Station is like an Escher print of squares within squares. I stand looking up at it for a moment and then resume scanning the crowd. I am here to carry out research at the National Archives, just across from this building. There are papers there on the police service in Dordrecht, which was active in the war years hunting out hidden Jews. Steven, the cousin with whom I will stay, is due to meet me and after ten minutes I spot him. His lean frame and handsome cheekbones stand out; he is tall, even by Dutch standards. He is wearing a sort of baseball jacket with black jeans and black skateboarding trainers and a peaked cap. A little medal with faded ribbons sits askew on his chest. I feel the medal as he bends down to give me a hug.
We have not seen each other for at least a year, but when I e-mailed he was quick to answer that it was no problem for me to stay at his place, which is close to the station. I should arrive, he suggested, fairly late in the evening. He would pick me up, take me on a tour of his workplace, and then we could head home in the early hours. Steven has a mix of professions: visual artist, festival emcee, local politician; he also manages an arts center-cum-nightclub that he set up himself, which is where we are heading now.
I hear the club before I see it. A dull regular thud. After twenty minutes’ walk, we have reached a light industrial zone, with warehouses and 1930s office blocks looming up in the darkness behind high steel gates. This is an area of deprivation and the building in which the club is located is part of a project to try to revive it, attracting small businesses, but there is still a lot of empty space. The huge block stands out against the night sky in outline and makes me think of an oil tanker, weighed down, engines running, trying to get up to speed.
Once we are inside, the club, though half empty, envelops us. At the entrance, Steven trades air punches with a muscled bouncer and bear-hugs the girl at the desk. Beyond this there is dry ice and music, a series of large rooms with young men standing at turntables, each lit in different pulsing colors. The style of the place has an edge of irony to it. Room one is themed as a 1970s beach club, with a retro glitter ball and pinkish slides of a desert island projected onto the walls. Most punters at this stage, I am told, will be tuned in via Internet radio, checking Facebook and Instagram, deciding whether to come.
By 2:00 A.M. the news is positive: the club is filling up. Parties of friends make their way past the bouncer and onto the dance floor, checking for familiar faces, ordering drinks. They compliment one another’s clothing and check their phones. Soon there is live Japanese painting in time to the music and I watch as a great bird emerges from spots of color on a white wall. The steel tanks on the ceiling, Steven proudly tells me, contain two thousand liters of beer that is piped to the bars. There are people now of all races, mainly young, who move with an aura of pleasure, raising their hands. A man who might be in his sixties—with a shaved head and gray stubble, dressed completely in black—stands beside me on the sidelines as he nods his head rhythmically with the sound. Later, in a courtyard surrounded by smokers, we hold a brief conversation. He is a patent lawyer and travels Europe catching events such as this whenever he can. Berlin, he tells me, is especially great.
Berlin. That word’s meaning has changed so completely. Today it means a weekend break or a conference. And Tokyo, from where the young men at the turntables come, is now a riot of neon advertising, Hello Kitty kitsch, and minimalist design. The old Axis capitals have been conquered for the rainbow flag of youthful globalization, which is all around me in the club. This is the other side of the immigration that I saw in Dordrecht this morning: instead of marginalized and tribal, the young here are united by music and by a set of witty, ironic Internet memes. But then this was there too, in another form, in the 1930s. Those pictures of Lien’s father (first with the dapper young men in the motorcar and then posing with his fedora hat and polished shoes) make me think that he would have fitted quite easily into this happy cosmopolitan crowd. And yet all that unity, at least in Berlin, was wiped away by the Great Depression, a catastrophe not entirely different from the crisis that laid waste to the industrial estates that lie all around us in darkness, locked up behind gates.
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IT IS NEARLY MORNING when we get to Steven’s apartment, which, like the club, is in a derelict building. Although marked for demolition, it can be used in the interim on a short-term lease. The huge rooms, more than sixty-five feet long, have high ceilings and rows of uncurtained windows that look out onto a skyline of silent, lit-up roads. This was originally the testing laboratory of the Dutch Trading Standards Institute and the glass doors still bear their original labels. They read DESTRUCTION EXPERIMENTS, RADIOLOGY, and ENDURANCE REPETITIONS. It feels like a film set, especially because Steven and his housemates have placed various art objects on the floor in pools of light. There is a full-sized plywood paper sailboat that greets you on first entry and opposite, at the far end of the room, a smashed chandelier that sits on top of a plinth. In the midst of all this is a kitchen island with a glass-fronted fridge and a stove.
Steven heads straight for the stove, puts the kettle on, and begins chopping a piece of ginger to make tea.
“No light in the toilet—you have to use your phone,” he warns me after I ask the way.
And soon we are talking with the city spread out below us. I hear about Steven’s various projects: local Hague politics, an art residency in Japan, the club, and his girlfriend’s work for an urban redevelopment corporation in Amsterdam. He asks me about my family: my wife’s new job at the hospital and especially about my eldest daughter, Josie, with whom he has a special bond. He sits roughly between her and me in age. She has had some tough years lately, but her life has turned a corner, and he listens with enthusiasm about her move to London, where she now works. In all the flood of information my search into Lien’s life barely gets a mention, which is partly because I am sheepish about it, wrapping it up in my description with various other bits of university work. The fact is that Lien’s story is not a comfortable one for the Van Esses: asking questions about it threatens the reopening of old wounds.
Half an hour later I am drifting toward sleep on a mattress in the music room, surrounded by piles of records, a keyboard, and a drum kit, with the night sky already turning gray.
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THE NEXT MORNING I sit at a large table in the modern, brightly lit reading room of the National Archives. In front of me there are three plain cardboard boxes. Others are reserved and waiting behind the desk. Beyond the glass doors at the back of the librarians’ office you can see the archivists shifting material on trolleys that look as though they belong in a mo
rtuary. With uniformed officers moving about in search of hidden cameras, warning readers not to lean over their papers, the place feels military and clinical at the same time.
Between 1945 and 1950 the Dutch authorities investigated around 230 police officers for their role in the Holocaust, a process that produced a vast amount of documentation, which now sits on shelves that stretch for over two and a half miles. Most of the prosecutions relate to Amsterdam. But Dordrecht, whose 300 Jews were almost all murdered, has a fair section of shelving reserved for itself.
The Jewish wartime death rate in the Netherlands, at 80 percent, was more than double that of any other Western country, far higher than that of France, Belgium, Italy, or even Germany and Austria themselves. For me, vaguely brought up on a myth of Dutch resistance, this comes as a shock.
There are various factors that help to explain the exceptionally low chance of survival. The population was urban, persecution began early, escape across the borders was almost impossible, and the registration process (which was aided by a blindly cooperative Jewish Council) was efficient. But the active participation of Dutch citizens—who did the work of informing on neighbors, arrest, imprisonment, and transportation—also played a significant part. Unlike Belgium, where the SS were the Jew hunters, or France, with its complicated mix of Vichy and direct military occupation, in Holland it was the native administration that brought death to the Jews.
Here, unlike anywhere else, a scheme of financial bounty was established. A price of seven guilders and fifty cents was placed on the head of every Jew. This was personal money that the responsible policemen, informers, or civilian operators received in cash. On top of this, the authorities established a system of competition, with two independent agencies being given the power of arrest. One of these was the ordinary police force, which set up various specialist units with names such as the Central Control, the Bureau for Jewish Affairs, or the Political Police. The other was a semicommercial company, the Hausraterfassung, a Dutch-staffed body whose technical job was the seizure of Jewish property, but which expanded its business to seize people as well. In spite of having just fifty agents, the Hausraterfassung tracked down around 9,000 Jews. Through such measures, the Dutch authorities quickly exceeded the targets that were set by their German masters and, in the end, delivered 107,000 “full Jews” to the death camps in the east.