by Bart van Es
Jan Willem cites these facts from memory. In postwar Holland, however, they were never mentioned and not a single soldier ever faced trial. For the country to recover from such actions, which saw the deaths of at least four thousand civilians, would require an act of collective amnesia, which left many stories like that of Jo Kleijne untold.
* * *
—
A LITTLE OVER AN HOUR LATER, having borrowed Jan Willem’s car again, I am back in Amsterdam with Lien. I tell her about my discoveries in Bennekom, especially about the village’s wider resistance network and the fact that there were people in hiding right next door and also across the street from where she lived. To my surprise, what excites Lien most is not the unexpected news about the neighbors, but rather the confirmation of her own memories when it comes to her time with the Van Laars.
“It makes a big difference that she confirms that I had it hard there. I have always worried that the problems came only from me or that I was being unjust.”
While we clear the table I fret a little about the kind of book that might grow out of our work together. There are so many books already out there about the war. Lien smiles and tells me that repetition is no bad thing. “There are also so many songs about love.”
Nineteen
In other places Lien recalls front rooms, but of the house in Ede, where she hid from October 1944, she only remembers a flight of stairs. They are steep and carpeted and there is a glass door at the foot of them, which shuts you off from the rest of the house. It is possible to stand there undetected while listening and looking out. If need be, she can race up to a bedroom, her footfall deadened, leaving no one aware of her presence.
The atmosphere in this house is nicer than it was in Bennekom, even though there is little food and she is stuck inside all day. There is almost a holiday atmosphere. The family is camping, sort of, and making do with less cleaning and fewer rules. Father van Laar’s brother, Uncle Evert, who is the man of the house here, helps with that feeling. He keeps everyone jolly even when things are hard. Mother smiles and blushes when she hears his jokes.
“What’s the difference between the Germans and a bucket of shit?” he asks loudly, his red face beaming.
“I don’t know and I don’t want to know,” she answers but still stays to listen.
“The bucket! The only difference is the bucket!” comes his thundering reply.
He is fearless. You feel his presence in a room. Father van Laar is almost like a boy when he is with him. They have games, like playing catch with a teacup or flicking each other with the wet ends of towels. Jaap, who is less annoying here than he was in Algemeer, is included in their battles. He giggles when he is bundled struggling to the floor.
“We have ways of making you talk!” says Uncle Evert as he tickles his ribs.
She is Uncle Evert’s favorite. When they are all huddled around the stove, which is lit for just an hour every evening, he takes her on his lap and calls her his little friend. They play dominoes together. Uncle Evert gets furious if he loses, but this is only a joke.
“You have painted extra spots onto yours,” he tells her, bringing the suspect piece right up to his nose.
He even starts to lick the domino to see if the paint will come off. It is all a bit childish, but still quite fun.
* * *
—
HE HAS A WARM WAY of touching people. For her it is squeezes and tickles. She laughs so much that she loses her breath.
In the evenings there is talk among the adults and dominoes for the children, but for most of the day nothing much happens. She gets up, changes into her day clothes (snatching a moment alone in the bedroom), then she heads down to breakfast, which is usually two slices of dry bread. After this she simply drifts around the house.
Upstairs, a little away from the window, is a good spot for reading, with a pillow wedged between the wall and the bed. There are not many books, but the ones that she loves she can read over and over without getting bored. Their words become a rhythm and Lien enters completely into the adventure: the companionship and beauty of a world. Days drift by from gray dawn to the darkness that comes by midafternoon.
When everyone is away, the house has its own sound to it, unheard until you listen. There is the tick of the alarm clock on the washstand, the murmur of pipes, and the light scrabbling of birds’ feet above her head on the tiles of the roof. In the stillness she sometimes picks up the sounds of her own body and is embarrassed even though there is no one to hear.
Today she is not alone in the house because Uncle Evert is moving things about in the kitchen. There is the scrape of furniture, the stacking of metal on metal, and the creak of his weight on the floorboards. Once she is absorbed in her book these sounds vanish completely. She only hears them again when they change.
The glass pane in the door at the foot of the stairs gives a faint rattle. The latchbolt clicks back into its slot. Then, beneath the carpet, the wood sighs a little with each step. A moment later, the door to the bedroom, which was already half open, swings wider, and the face of Uncle Evert appears.
“Still reading, my little friend the bookworm?” he smiles.
Walking in, he seats himself on the bed and gestures to his lap. This, she knows immediately, is not quite normal, but she moves without thinking. As she settles, his body arches toward hers. He says something about her liking this and how this makes her a naughty girl.
She is flustered and confused.
Lien has no words for what Uncle Evert is doing. No ideas even. She is shivering in a cold sweat. It is tickling but different. His hands do not stop. She is not sure, even, if she has said no to him. Her body is rigid but he unlocks her legs. Then his fingers are inside her, inside her underwear, and it hurts and there is blood.
Afterward he says that she wanted it herself.
Now the fear grows within her each time that the house empties. Once the last has left, she must go with him to the space beyond the door at the foot of the stairs. There, after the glass clicks shut behind them, she must stand, her dress up, half naked, while he unbuckles his belt. It hurts so much as he pushes his penis inside her. Sometimes there is blood on her legs.
“You wanted this yourself,” he always tells her, and eventually she almost believes him. The rapes are a secret, hard and poisonous, that she swaddles within.
Evert van Laar has an unseen power. It is a mystery how it works. How is it that the house is empty so often? Why is her place now always on his lap? He is a jovial bully, expert at bending others to his will. With the women of the house he is flirtatious, full of cheeky suggestions, while with his nephew and brother there is a charming, cajoling menace. He deals out thumps that are friendly but just a little too hard. Lien is right in the middle, between the boys and the women, courted as a princess, and then tumbled like a pet.
* * *
—
GRAY DAYS, WEEKS, and months blur into one another. Lien sees almost nothing and grows familiar only with the space beyond the door at the foot of the stairs. Meanwhile, twenty miles away in Nijmegen an army of half a million men stands waiting. When the spring comes, one thousand heavy guns will fire into enemy territory around the clock. Smoke will clothe the rivers in preparation. Already now, thousands of bombers swarm and darken the land beneath them. They will rain down half a million tons of ordnance in these last few months of the war.
* * *
—
AMID ALL THIS there is still the edge of carnival in the evenings at the house in Ede: a restless, random celebration that Uncle Evert drives. He insists that they all have pancakes (even though there are no eggs, milk, or butter), and somehow they get them: gritty and paper thin. At the table he sits triumphant. Lien, as his little friend, must have some, so he slides a sharp-edged wafer onto her plate.
Cold, hungry days pass, but then one day, unannounced, it is over: April 17. First there
is gunfire, then silence, and then, in the distance, the crazy rumble of cheering and what sounds like a marching band. From the top-floor window, through which she has never looked till now, Lien gazes down on small groups of men and women who are emerging, full of caution, from their doors. Right below her, down on the pavement, a woman starts shouting—a drawn-out, high-pitched, uncontrolled squeal. The woman stands and bellows up at the buildings, an orange flag held up with both hands.
Now everyone rushes out, Lien with them, and crowds jostle her as she steps onto the pavement for the first time in half a year. It is dizzying to feel the sun and the sky again. In the cloudy brightness everything is overwhelming: the letters of a shop sign, the flecks of gravel on a pathway, the dark leaves of a hedge. Her ears ring with the sound of a moving, shouting, crying multitude, and in her mouth she can taste the fresh air.
Lien runs with a group of children, leaping over rubble, finding her balance on crumbling walls. In an alley they come across the body of a German soldier. It lies facedown on the cobbles, one arm pointing upward, the helmet still attached with a strap. For a while they just stare down at it in wonder—frightened, not sure if it might suddenly move—but then a girl steps forward and softly kicks the side of the head. With shrieks they back off in horror, but then they edge back. Now a boy and then others dare to give the body a kick. When she has a go, Lien is surprised by how heavy the dead soldier feels against her foot.
Out on the main road it is almost a frenzy. Men sing loudly into the warm, gray afternoon air. Then the line of troops comes through. They are from Canada, the Allied soldiers, it seems. Lien sees them in snatches through the limbs of the thronging crowd. She watches as girls climb to sit on the tanks, their skirts flying up. The air is thick with smoke and diesel. Finally, as Lien walks back from the high street, she locks eyes with a woman who stands on the pavement, her head newly shaven with spots of bright red.
And all through this, though she is part of the madness of the celebration, though she runs and joins in with everything, Lien has not understood it. The liberation has no meaning. It is a party, people are cheering, and that is all.
* * *
—
IT WAS MAY 5, 1945, when the Canadian general Charles Foulkes and the German commander in chief Johannes Blaskowitz reached agreement on the capitulation of German forces in the Netherlands. The surrender was signed in Wageningen, just three miles from Bennekom. Adolf Hitler had already shot himself at the end of April, and on May 8 the war in Europe was officially over when Allied victory was declared. After a few days of celebration, however, the mood in the Netherlands was at best one of grim resignation about the work of rebuilding that lay ahead. Nineteen thousand civilians had been killed during the combat, eight thousand non-Jews had died in prison camps, and a further twenty-five thousand had starved to death. Calorie consumption per person had more than halved in the last year of the conflict; 8 percent of the landmass lay under water, having been flooded by the German army in the course of its retreat; and systematic looting meant that economic destruction was greater in the Netherlands than in any other occupied country in the West.
This national devastation does go some way toward explaining the poor treatment of the nation’s surviving Jews. Sixteen thousand of them emerged from hiding, and in the east a further five thousand were left alive in the camps. Other countries, such as France and Belgium, already liberated for the most part in 1944, were much quicker to send aid and transport to help the return of survivors. The Dutch, with a repatriation force that consisted of two hired motorbikes and four small lorries, could do almost nothing. Most of their citizens had to struggle home by themselves.
With nearly half a million Dutch men stuck beyond the borders (most in German labor camps) and another third of a million internal refugees, the government that returned from exile in London would always, even with the best intentions, have struggled to provide sufficient help for the surviving Jews.
There were, however, no signs of best intentions. Not even a statement, let alone any special arrangement, was made. When the issue came up, Dutch ministers insisted that Jews should expect to be treated the same as others. They saw no contradiction between this and the substantial orders that they placed for hymnals, prayer books, Bibles, and even Communion chalices, which would be waiting to give spiritual comfort to the refugees.
The vast majority of Jewish survivors who made it back to the Netherlands found arrival a traumatic experience. When they reached the borders they were met by a large though disorganized defense force, made up of men wearing clogs and unmatched uniforms, because the government was frightened of an influx of foreigners, above all communists, who might destabilize the state.
Dirk de Loos described afterward how he arrived on a bus with other Jews from Dachau that was stopped at the border, where, in spite of the Jews’ authentic Dutch accents, the authorities were unimpressed by their lack of papers and placed them under arrest. They were dusted with DDT powder and then sent to an internment camp in Nijmegen, a place from which, after ten days, Dirk managed to escape. When he reached his home in Leiden, however, he was rearrested and sent back by the Dutch police, who were, as ever, all too quick to follow orders from above.
Dirk’s experience was not unusual. In Westerbork, the transit camp from which more than one hundred thousand had been transported to Auschwitz, over five hundred remaining Jews who had been destined for extermination were kept imprisoned for months after the war had ended. They were held there alongside ten thousand newly arrested Dutch fascists, the very people who had wanted to send them to their deaths. When they were eventually released, the situation barely improved. Jewish property had been robbed, there were new people living in their old houses, and in some cases there were even tax demands to cover the years they had spent in the camps.
To an extent, such experiences could be blamed on the chaos of the immediate postwar situation, but in those first months after the liberation there were also signs that anti-Semitism in the Dutch population played a part. At one time Holland had stood out as a haven of toleration. Yosef Kaplan, the historian of Jewish life in the Netherlands, could find no significant incident of anti-Semitic persecution during the entire history of the Dutch Republic, stretching from 1581 to 1795. During the nineteenth century, however, a new stereotype of the grubby, heavily accented, Jewish swindler did emerge in the national culture, an image fueled by immigration from the east. Partly also thanks to the rise of international Zionism, the notion surfaced that Jews were not entirely Dutch. Then, in the wake of the Nazi takeover in Germany, thirty-five thousand foreign Jews escaped to the Netherlands, to which the government responded by restricting immigration and putting people in camps. There was widespread talk of Jewish communists, of Jewish moneymen, and of how Jews might bring down the tone of a good restaurant or a good club.
Though the fascist vote in the Netherlands never got beyond 4 percent, there had been something there for the wartime Nazi propagandists to work on, and this was evident in 1945. The nationalism of some resistance newssheets was far from tolerant. Het Parool, for example, warned Jews not to draw attention to themselves after the liberation, and it also criticized Dutch Jews for leaving their posts in the face of the German threat. Another sheet, The Patriot, wrote of the need for Jews to be grateful given that the Dutch resistance had saved them when “quite possibly better people had died.” There were Jew jokes in popular magazines. On the letters pages of various newspapers readers complained that now that the war was finished, the Jews were again on the rise. One government office even decided not to reemploy Jewish workers on the grounds that the feeling against them in business was so negative that such people could not possibly be effective in their jobs. Meanwhile, the minister of justice wrote to the Jewish religious union (which had just been excluded from the National Church Council on grounds of their diminished numbers) asking if they could please make an effort to help reintegrate the more t
han 120,000 detained Dutch collaborators, who were rapidly being released. In the media the fact of the Holocaust was briefly acknowledged, but it was then passed over as too horrible to contemplate at length. Unsurprisingly, Jewish emigration from the Netherlands in the postwar decade ran at far higher levels than it did in Belgium and France.
* * *
—
IN EDE IN APRIL 1945, Lien has no great sense of the war having ended. She simply awaits the decisions of others. It is an enormous relief, though, to escape from Uncle Evert once the family sets off for Bennekom after a few days. The old road is now full of dirty green trucks, which roll toward them full of soldiers who signal V for victory with their fingers. When they get to number 33 they find it undamaged. While the De Bonds’ house next door has been ransacked, the floorboards torn open, in theirs the jars of pickles are still lined up, just as before, on the cellar shelves. Mother van Laar is soon directing the cleaning and Lien is put to work again with cloths and dusters, and as she shines the wood of the front-room cupboard, life reasserts its familiar grain.
Nowhere are questions asked or answered: not at home, not in church, and not at school. Not a word is spoken of what happened to her parents, neither now nor in the months ahead, but somewhere, somehow, the permanence of their absence is lodged in her consciousness. The whole world of Mamma and Pappa and grandmothers and grandfathers and aunts and uncles and cousins and friends in The Hague has vanished and there is no turning back, not even in her mind.
Lien is reestablished in her little bedroom, with its pane of glass above the door. On Sundays there is preaching and Bible study, and each evening after dinner she reads aloud once more about the acts of the Apostles and the struggles of the Old Testament kings. She returns to school, where the teachers notice she is behind with her studies. She gets extra math and history, which she works through in the late afternoon, half under the covers, sitting up in bed. Outside she hears Maartje in next door’s garden. Lien goes to the De Bonds now more often, is somewhat freer, and has Corrie as a kind of friend. A month passes and down the street toward the village a few planks of wood are laid out as men begin to repair the damaged houses. Their cement mixer stands there unused in readiness, its mouth caked with a rim of brittle rock.