by Bart van Es
* * *
—
WOUT RETURNS, having found the red folder, and as we look through it he tells me about his father and mother and the work that they did during the war. Right underneath me, he explains, below the sofa where I am sitting, there is a wooden panel that is lined up with the grooves of the floorboards and therefore difficult to spot. To get to it you would need to move the furniture and then lift the carpet. And then, once opened, this trapdoor leads to a dug-out space beneath the house. It looks empty and innocuous. To a searching policeman it is supposed to look like space for ventilation, preventing damp. But if you crawl flat in the darkness on your stomach, this shallow passage will take you to a wall of sand and behind that to a room with furniture and electric light, where a Jewish family lived in hiding during the war.
To me, seated on Wout’s sofa with the TV still on in the background, the world suddenly seems different. To think that this secret life existed, unmentioned, right below Lien’s feet. I look again at the book and see that, alongside Lien’s entry for 33 Algemeer, there is mention of another woman, Bets Engers, who also hid with the Van Laars. Who was Bets Engers? Lien remembers nothing of her. Was this before her arrival? If so, how long did she stay? On my phone I look back at the photograph of the Van Laar family, remembering now that there was another figure standing with the group. There she is, a curly-haired young woman, to one side, directly behind Lien. Is this Bets? Wout does not know. Memory is selective and not always reliable. So many facts are irretrievably lost.
Wout and I talk for a while about his parents, looking over old photographs as we speak. He writes down a series of e-mail addresses, listing people in the local history society who might be able to help me with my research. Then, with the light outside already fading, I ask what he meant when he said that he was born because of Lien. This part of the story is still unclear.
“Oh,” he smiles, “it’s best to hear about that from my sister. She lives in Ede now.”
Together we look at a picture of a teenage girl with a Peter Pan collar who holds out a doll-like baby in a christening gown. Printed with ruffled edges, it looks staged and formal. The girl’s smile, though, is real enough.
“That’s Corrie with me just after the war,” Wout tells me.
In neat printed letters he writes down her full name, telephone number, and address and attaches his card, which bears the head of an Alsatian.
“Keep in touch,” he says.
* * *
—
BACK ON THE BIKE, I head through the woods to my aunt and uncle’s house, riding alongside the big trunk road that was, during the war, still just a forest track. It was somewhere along here that the Schoorls hid the group of Jewish children in a forester’s shed.
This morning I was running through the landing fields of the Allied Airborne and then, straight after, past burial mounds that date from more than four thousand years back. These woods are no longer simply a childhood playground. Even the trees are not quite what I thought.
During the war there was one small pine very close to here on the edge of the village in the grounds of the Keltenwoud hotel. It looked no different from the others, but all the same, on a regular schedule, it was uprooted by its owner and replaced. Below the ground, that tree fitted into a wooden, boxlike structure, which formed the entrance to a secret room.
It took until 1995 for Leo Durlacher, by then in his seventies, to write its description. He and his family spent time hidden in a shed at the back of the hotel. A warning system, which was driven by a sewing machine motor, told them when police were on their way. If the alarm was raised, the four would then run to the tree that was really a secret entrance, then seal themselves into the darkness belowground. Breathing by means of a hand pump connected to the surface, they would listen in silence as heavy boots moved around above their heads.
* * *
—
WHEN I GET IN, I call Wout’s sister, Corrie. She would be happy to talk, she says, and adds, only half joking, that I had better hurry: she is well into her eighties, after all.
They all feel rushed, these meetings—Marianne at number 33, Wout at number 31, and now this with his sister, whose home, it turns out, is right behind the office where my uncle works.
I suggest ten the next morning.
“That,” says Corrie, “should be quick enough.”
Eighteen
The next morning, having got a lift into Ede from my uncle, I walk up to a substantial complex made up of new, well-built retirement flats with balconies and large wheelchair-accessible lifts. After crossing the car park I come to a courtyard of patterned brick paving and huge flowerpots, from which pansies shine in the January sun. Several groups of residents are sitting outside at metal tables in their hats and coats, chatting. Signs show me the way to the gardens, to the medical center, and to a stylish communal eatery called the Grand Café. This place is a snapshot of well-being in the Netherlands, which comes near the top of global league tables when it comes to quality of life in old age.
Corrie’s flat itself is warm and crowded with an assortment of objects. She is tall, like her father was, and despite her warning that I had better come quickly, she looks in good health. It is not difficult to match her with the young woman who held her baby brother in the photo from nearly seventy years ago that Wout had shown me. There are pictures of children and grandchildren around the apartment, and right behind her as she sits is a large photograph of her late husband, who worked at the cement factory for most of his life. As she pours out condensed, sweetish coffee milk I realize that Corrie reminds me of someone. It is my grandmother, Ma van Es.
I show Corrie a current picture of Lien, as well as some other photographs.
“She became a beautiful woman,” she says with a kind of pride.
“Lientje had it hard there,” Corrie continues. “They only had her for the cleaning. It was no kind of life.”
Corrie’s verdict on Mrs. van Laar is not favorable: “She was one only for outside appearances and she did nothing if it could be done by somebody else.”
Lien, in her memory, was very thin, warmhearted, and put upon—always working, always criticized, and hardly ever allowed out.
“What she really wanted was to live with us. I remember her saying so very often as we lay in bed at night when she stayed with us, and we all wanted the same thing, but we had to keep on good terms with the Van Laars, so it was too dangerous and could not be done.”
Corrie tells me of the time when Lien came to lodge with them for over a week while the Van Laars went off on holiday.
“Two chatty girls in one bedroom, you can imagine how that was,” she laughs.
And yet Lien remembers nothing of this.
Corrie’s was a happy youth in 1930s Bennekom, with a lot of strong uncles who would carry her about on their shoulders and play with her.
“I was like a ball to them—so thrown about!”
We look at a photograph of Corrie’s parents with her as a baby. The three of them sit together in a vegetable garden with bean stalks growing tall behind them on neat, interlocking canes. Her father’s long legs stretch right up to the camera. He wears suspenders and a somewhat scruffy open-necked shirt. Her mother, in a flowery dress, is holding her daughter’s hand, squinting a little in the bright sun.
Toon de Bond worked as a housepainter. His wife, Jansje, was frail in contrast, having contracted tuberculosis in her youth. After the birth of their daughter, the two of them were told by the doctors that they should have no more children, that Jansje was not well enough to cope with pregnancy a second time. This was a great loss for the couple and also, as she grew up, for Corrie, for whom a little brother or sister was always a dream.
Then the war came. In 1939, Toon enlisted in the army and his wife and child moved to Rotterdam for a spell. Corrie still recalls the bombing of that city. She remembers b
eing huddled in a barge on the great river, with sheets of flaming bitumen hissing into the water around her, as they escaped the docks.
She and her mother came back to Bennekom straight after the national surrender. A few weeks later, Toon returned unannounced, appearing one afternoon in the garden, in uniform, his head shaved bare. He had walked from Germany following his release as a prisoner of war. The first thing they did as a family was to go to town to buy him a hat.
It was over two years later that the first hideaways came to Algemeer. Nothing was said to Corrie, but she remembers people in the house. She thought they stood too close to the windows, and one time she saw them running downstairs from the bedroom, through the kitchen, and into the woods. It was some time after this that her father began digging and laying cables underneath the house.
And then Maartje was there. A girl of three. She was rescued, they heard, by the maid in a big household, who snatched her to safety when the rest of the family was already lined up, under arrest. In Maartje’s photo, she still has the round cherub face of a baby, framed by a triangle of black curls. The checked bow in her hair sits right up above her in the style of Minnie Mouse. Her puffed-sleeve dress is also like Minnie’s, and she has dark, rather sad-looking eyes.
The De Bonds loved her from the first instant. Toon carried her around on his shoulders and Jansje sang the little girl to sleep at night. This was the sister Corrie had always wanted. The family recorded her as Maartje de Bond at the register office, so it was safe for her to run around outside.
During the evacuation they all lived together in a chicken hutch in Ede, cold and hungry. They made sure, though, that Maartje had enough to eat. Then, after the liberation, the family returned to a smashed-up house in Bennekom, but it did not really matter. They had a summer of rebuilding and playing.
And then, all of a sudden, a woman came. It was Maartje’s mother, who had survived the war.
Of course, they should have been happy. They gave Maartje, whose real name was Sari Simons, a little silver bracelet when she left.
The De Bonds went to see her once, in Leiden. There were still no trams running, so the journey took a very long time. Corrie hardly recognized her. The curls of Maartje’s hair were done in pigtails that Corrie thought went too tight against the girl’s head.
And then, for her birthday, they bought a bicycle, which Toon brought all the way to Leiden, even though there were no trams or trains.
But when he got there, Maartje and her mother were no longer living at the same address. They had gone to Israel, the neighbors said.
From her chair in the apartment, Corrie looks at me. “Without a word of good-bye. I can’t understand that, can you?” she says, her voice constricted.
I am silent. Looking around the apartment, I can see now why she reminds me of my grandmother. There is the same mixture of ornaments and practical furniture, kept nicely clean, that I remember from Dordt. They even look similar: robust and maternal, with strong voices and ruddy cheeks. Their histories—rural upbringings followed by life as working-class mothers to large families—are much the same. And there is also, at this moment, a familiar edge of sadness when it comes to the past.
Can I understand it? A woman, whose husband and parents have been murdered in the gas chambers, returning to find her child hidden in a strange little country village, wanting to leave the Netherlands as soon as possible, without a trace. Yes, I can.
But then I have been listening for a long time now to Lien.
After Maartje’s sudden departure, Toon and Jansje wrote letters and made inquiries to find out what happened to her, but no answer came back. The red folder that Wout showed me at the house on Algemeer is a record of those efforts and the years of silence that followed in their wake.
Finally, long after Jansje had passed away, a letter arrived one Christmas. It was sent from Jerusalem and dated December 18, 1983:
Dear Mr. De-Bond,
I am very sorry it took me so long to answer your letter. I simply didn’t know where to begin, at first I tried to write in Dutch, but now I feel that goes better in English. I hope your friend can read it, although it is in handwriting. . . .
Maartje tells Mr. de Bond that she works in a pharmaceuticals laboratory, has a religious life with her husband, and has five children—four boys, aged between twelve and seventeen, and a girl of eight.
I have a photograph. I think it is from you, your late wife, and daughter. I remember almost nothing of those years, but I remember I had always a good time. I don’t remember that I ever had been hungry, or afraid, and that is thanks to you. I remember I had many beautiful toys, like dolls, and I still have with me the bracelet of “dubbletjes” you gave me when my mother took me home. . . .
There is an account of her mother’s remarriage, of new brothers and sisters, and of the Yad Vashem memorial ceremony, which, it is hoped, Mr. de Bond might attend. They would be honored to have him as their guest. This is the least that they could offer, after all he has done. Then the letter closes:
Strange we came to Israel very lonely, but thank to god we are now a large family. Maybe that is some of a reaction of what happened.
I hope that you understand something of my English and receive this in good health. I hope to hear your news from you as soon as possible.
Best regards from Haim, and with hope we meet soon. With a lot of affection.
Yours
Maartje
Corrie feels awkward about this letter. Though the invitation is warmly given, it came too late for her father to visit and she herself is barely mentioned. There is just a brief question that recalls her existence:
Have you one daughter or more?
The question is kindly meant, but Maartje cannot know how hard it is to answer or the sadness that it brings.
We sit in silence for a moment and then I ask what Wout meant when he told me that he was born because of Lien. Corrie smiles a little weakly. Well, perhaps it was more because of Maartje than because of Lien, but in their absence, the two girls grew together in the minds of the De Bonds. The life that these hideaways had brought to them was missing. Each girl had been imagined as a daughter or a sister, only to vanish without so much as a farewell. They could not have known it, but these cut out girls left holes behind. It was because of this that, though the doctors told them it was dangerous, Toon and Jansje took the risk of trying for another child.
I look again at the photo of Corrie holding her baby brother. She looks elated.
“My mother spent nine months in bed, pretty much, she was that sick,” Corrie tells me, “but then we had Wout.”
* * *
—
AFTER LEAVING CORRIE’S PLACE I stop off at my uncle’s office, a solo legal practice that stands around the corner from the end of her street. The plan is to have lunch with him before heading off to Amsterdam to see Lien. The building—a low-rise 1970s construction with long strip windows and interior divisions of curved glass—was once a small public library. Inside there is antique furniture, a grandfather clock, and a heavy oak table, which contrasts with the bright simplicity of the walls. The place is not big, but it is spacious, and as I take the tour with Jan Willem, I am struck by the Dutchness of its layout. Natural light slants down across textured plaster to mark out a desk, a painting, or a chair. It makes me think of Vermeer. Engraved on the glass divisions there are texts excerpted from the country’s Constitution, which tell me that “all those who find themselves in the Netherlands will be treated equally in equal circumstances” and that “discrimination on the grounds of religion, belief, political opinion, race or sex or on any other grounds whatsoever shall not be permitted.” In style and substance, the office is a quiet expression of the country’s ideals.
That is a selective vision, though, and as we sit having lunch together, Jan Willem and I discuss the curious split personality of the Dutch state. On the one hand,
at least from the early nineteenth century, when the Constitution was written, the Dutch were able to picture themselves as an ideal community: classless, peaceful, prosperous, and governed by equal rights. In 1864, the romantic poet W. J. Hofdijk vaunted the nation’s mission to become “the most virtuous people on the earth.” Yet while equality reigned at home, abroad the country remained a ruthless colonial power, deriving more than half of its tax income from the exploitation of Indonesia, the Dutch Antilles, and Surinam.
The sense of entitlement to those colonial possessions was still evident in the years immediately after the Second World War, when the Dutch government’s primary focus was not on internal matters but on Indonesia, which had been lost to the Japanese. Though Holland had been reduced to rubble at home, it raised an army for the reconquest of its oil wells, mines, and plantations, using surplus military hardware bought from the Canadians. The Dutch Marines were sent into action. Jo Kleijne, the young man who carried Lien to the resistance hideout in IJsselmonde and who afterward wrote to her from Singapore, was a part of this force.
Tanks that had once faced the Germans now rolled into Java, and this strange mirror image of Holland’s recent history extended farther still when on the island of Celebes suspects were taken out of prison cells, lined up in town squares, and killed by firing squads. The young Dutch commander Raymond Westerling warned his soldiers that their mission would require them to “walk up to their ankles in blood.” On February 1, 1947, Dutch troops began what was called the cleansing of villages by selecting 364 unarmed men more or less at random, shooting them, removing their watches and jewelry, and dumping their bodies into a mass grave. Their villages were then burned to the ground.