by Bart van Es
Ma did not, I expect, think of Lien’s exclusion from the funeral arrangements or of the many harsh words she had spoken to Lien over the years.
* * *
—
A DAY LATER a lilac envelope drops through Lien’s letter box at the Burghstraat in Eindhoven. The address is scratchily written “To Mrs. L. de Jong” and the stamps are pasted at awkward angles, one upside down.
Lien was reluctant at first to show me the letter. As she hands it to me, she averts her eyes.
Dordt 7.4.’88
To Lien
As you know I do not like writing letters. They are always the cause of misunderstandings. But I still want to ask you not to call me etc., for a while. That seems to me, given the situation, the best way to proceed.
With best wishes
Mrs. v Es
These are the last words Lien ever received from my grandmother, who died seven years later, the quarrel unresolved.
Twenty-six
It is so trivial, an argument over a birthday party when compared to a history that paired the two of them together against the backdrop of the Second World War. All the same, the row escalates quickly. Ma tells the rest of her children not to contact Lien, that Lien has written terrible things in a letter, that she will not ever again be in the same room as Lien. Attempts to persuade Ma to reconsider are met only by anger. Though some of Lien’s siblings do at times reach out to her, the connection between Lien and the rest of the family is broken from this point on.
In June 1995 Lien hears from my mother of Ma’s passing. Uninvited, she attends the funeral and listens to a colorless service in which Lien (and in fact the whole war and Ma’s part in it) is left as a blank. She feels entirely cut out.
But perhaps there is such a thing as creative destruction? Starting with a counselor at her work, Lien begins the task of rebuilding: long hours of therapy through which she slowly discovers a balanced sense of herself. She visits the Jewish Historical Museum and requests the dates of her parents’ deaths and the details of how they died. Lien’s “concrete story of my relations with the van Es family,” the document that I first read in my hotel room in Dordrecht, is a product of this time.
There was also another breakthrough that came a little earlier. It was a kind of reunion, the Conference for the Hidden War Child, which brought together more than five hundred surviving child hideaways in Amsterdam in 1992. For three days in August, those who had gone into hiding as children exactly fifty years earlier got to know one another through workshops, speeches, and poetry readings, through the sharing of photos on bulletin boards, through films, psychology lectures, and countless conversations one-to-one. Lien found it a moment of recognition because so many others there had, like her, been haunted for decades by the feeling that they did not belong in the world. The organization that ran the conference, the Society for Jewish Social Work, produced a daily newspaper to circulate among those attending so that they could record their experiences and respond to those of others. As children who had grown up in isolation, almost all felt that the sharing of stories was something they had always lacked and craved.
Ed van Thijn, the mayor of Amsterdam, himself a wartime child hideaway, started the conference off with this theme of the “untold story.” Though comfortable with public speaking, including public speaking about the Holocaust, he had, he told the audience in his opening address, been thrown into panic at the thought of having to tell them something personal. “Even yesterday,” he said to the hall of five hundred hideaways, “I did not know what I should, or rather, what I could say.” Only at the last minute did it occur to him that to speak of oneself as a hidden child was, almost by definition, an impossible thing:
To whom should we have spoken? Who was really able to listen to our story? The story of hiding has defined our whole existence, but we—at least most of us—have tried desperately all our lives to drive that story away.
Lien cried when she heard this, as did almost all the others around her in the room.
The Conference for the Hidden War Child was in retrospect the first stage in her move to Amsterdam, where she now feels that she has at last found her place. She has kept in touch with the Society for Jewish Social Work, which sends out a magazine and organizes nonreligious trips and small-scale get-togethers for the roughly thirty thousand Jews still living in the Netherlands, mostly in this city. Lien sits across from me in the chair that she bought with Albert all those years ago in the fashionable Amsterdam shop, looking content.
“After all that counseling and those nights of crying, it was finally over for me. I can talk about it now without emotion, though that might sound strange. In Buddhism there is this concept of waves in history and the way that people are caught up in them. You see that you cannot control everything and there is peace in sensing that bigger flow.”
She hugs her teacup, a little embarrassed by the grandness of her speech.
“Anyway,” she continues, “once I could place what had happened to me in a pattern, things changed for me. I could make choices, like the choice to live here in Amsterdam.”
The magic of the city is still with me from this morning: its spires, bridges, and the lines of step-gabled houses shining across the water in the cold January light. Quite tranquil even at its center, Amsterdam does seem like a place at peace with itself.
From her pretty white-walled house in Eindhoven, Lien moved first to a scruffy little workers’ cottage in De Pijp, a youthful district known for its street market, cafés, and rebellious, alternative vibe. Her friends were a bit worried for her, but Lien was happy. She bought a season ticket to the opera, visited art galleries, attended lectures on Buddhism, started meditation and yoga, and met many new people. Then, after fifteen years, she heard of a group of friends, many of them artists or social workers, who had a plan for living together in retirement. As a move it came a bit early, but the chance was perfect, so she asked if she could join them. It is in this block of apartments that we are speaking now.
Lien puts her cup on the table and pours some more peppermint tea.
“It was only then—I’m not good with dates, but it must have been 2003 or something like that—that I felt ready to face Auschwitz. I’d been so frightened of it till then. I thought: I can’t do that. If I went with non-Jewish people I feared that something might be said that would hurt me. And then, if it was with other Jews it would be this trail of collective trauma and I did not want that either, so I just never dared. But I heard about a Buddhist teacher who took people to Auschwitz for a week’s vigil, where it was possible to say something personal, and that felt like the right thing to do. They made a video of it. Shall we watch it together?”
And so, moments later, we are again seated at her desk looking at her computer. It is just what we did for her testimony to the Shoah Foundation. Now, though, the Lien on the recording is much closer in age to the one beside me. What is also different from last time is that Lien is happy with the images that play out before us on the screen.
“I found it such a positive experience. I was given all the time I needed. People were crying. It was done with respect,” she says as the film begins.
There, through the hell mouth gateway, amid broken walls and lines of rusted barbed wire, stands Lien, her skin blue-white with cold. On the video there is sharp, chilling, discordant music that is somehow human and a voice-over that tells us the facts of what happened in this factory of death. The Buddhist group spent many long days together conducting their vigils. They stayed for a week, sleeping in a kind of hostel, sitting and standing for hours on railway lines, in the barracks, and in the gas chambers themselves.
On the DVD, the scene changes and the camera pans to show windowless concrete rooms that are lit only by a few candles. Within them, people crouch and stare into the middle distance or whisper prayers with tightly shut eyes. Midway through, there comes the point where Lien is given her m
oment to address the vigil. She stands in the half-light of the former women’s barracks, a wide circle of people around her, and speaks in English with a series of long pauses, her voice breaking now and again. Including the slight imperfections in grammar, these are the exact words that Lien speaks:
When I was eight years old, I went hiding and I said good-bye to my father and mother and I thought it was just for a few weeks.
And it went on and on and it did not end and I didn’t see them anymore.
My father was Charles de Jong and he died in Auschwitz and he was thirty-seven.
My mother was Catharine Spiero and she died together with her mother, Sara Verveer. My mother died when she was twenty-nine, and my . . . my grandmother was fifty-six.
The parents of my father were David de Jong, he became fifty-eight and died with his wife, Hesseline Lion, and she became fifty-seven.
My father had one sister, she became thirty-nine and she died at the same day as her children: Serina Mozes and David Mozes. Serina was my favorite cousin and she became fifteen and David was only three months older than I was. I always played with him and he became nine.
And they all died in Auschwitz.
Their father died in Sobibor. He became forty-four.
The brother of my mother became forty-four and died in Auschwitz.
Another brother was thirty-two and he died in the middle of Europe and his wife was thirty-six and died in Auschwitz.
And their children . . . and their children, Nico and Robbie, died when they were four and three years, and the eldest became . . . lived . . . after the war, but he hanged himself after the war.
And then there was one sister of my mother and she became twenty-seven and died in Auschwitz.
And I want to tell you. And I missed them the rest of my life.
After this there is silence and soft crying as Lien’s long list of names is enfolded by waves of many others:
Frieda Singer, Mordecai Singer, Golda Singer, Moshe Singer . . .
And on.
We sit for a while in silence. “It is beautiful,” I say eventually, “the way you name them.”
Lien nods.
“I was very happy with it,” she says.
* * *
—
THAT NIGHT, I stay with friends in Leiden. The first stage of research for my book about Lien is now over. In the morning I check a few last references in the university library and make plans for a return later in the year. When we planned this trip in December Lien told me that she would not be free on the final day of my visit. Even as late as yesterday morning she did not actually say what she would be doing, feeling a little embarrassed, perhaps, at describing something as intimate and intense as the Buddhist discussion group that she will be hosting in her flat. Yesterday evening, though, she did tell me about it and about how important these sessions now are in her life. Lien suggested we could have lunch together beforehand. The Buddhist meeting does not start until 2:30 P.M. Before the members of the group start arriving, I could move to the front section of the apartment, which can be shut off from the sitting area with a set of glass doors. I could sit and work there before heading off, at about 4:00, to catch my flight.
So over lunch, with sunshine cutting through the stained glass artworks on the windows, we sit as friends together one last time for a while to come. Then, as the group will soon be arriving, Lien pulls the division across the room. This way, once the session has started, I can slip away through the side door without disturbing the people on the other side of the glass. We say good-bye to each other. I hug her. Till Easter, when I’ll be back for another research trip, and sooner via a Skype call, we say.
Then Lien sets off to get the room ready and I take a seat at her desk. It seems a good idea to make copies of all the interviews, photographs, and documents I have gathered. I will store these on her desktop, just to be safe. So I sit there, quietly porting the files across. After a bit, members of the group begin to drift past the window, ringing the doorbell and heading straight to the front room via the corridor as Lien welcomes them in.
When all this is finished I put a memory stick on Lien’s desk, another in my pocket, and a third in my suitcase. The memories that I have collected feel now like my most valued possessions. I recheck my ticket and confirm that I have my passport. It is time to go. Before heading out, I move just quickly toward the glass doors that now divide the apartment, catching Lien’s eye and giving her a little wave. Seated with the others, she smiles as she sees me. Then, taken up in the moment, she stands up and moves forward to open the doors. The glass folds away and she invites me in.
Lien addresses the people around her. “This is my nephew, Bart,” she says. “He is going to write my book.”
EPILOGUE
July 2017
Without families you don’t get stories.”
When I first heard these words just under three years ago I knew very little about my family’s wartime history and I knew almost nothing about Lien. I also understood much less about my relationship with my own children, especially Josie, about whose troubles I had struggled to think or speak. Getting to know Lien has changed me. It has made me more reflective and less absolute. For the first time I feel I have seen someone else from the inside from the earliest stages of her life. I have also seen myself in another person, my grandmother. Not, of course, in her courage, but in some of her mistakes.
The way that Lien introduced me to her Buddhist group as a “nephew” in January 2015 confirmed something special, the healing of a breach. I can claim no special credit for this. Lien has done the healing herself. Still, our meeting has proved to be the start of a series of fresh connections. I have since met up with her children and she has got to know mine. Last summer Lien came to visit us in Oxford, where she stayed at my parents’ house, meeting my father for the first time in many years.
Lien and I meet often now as friends and keep up with each other’s news. It was during her visit to Oxford that Lien first mentioned to my wife, with whom she developed an instant connection, that she was meeting up with someone, a man, who seemed nice. He was not exactly a new acquaintance. I had, in fact, seen his face on a photo on the very first day, back in December 2014, when I first met Lien.
At that point it was just a photograph among many others: the school scene taken in The Hague in 1939 in which Lien, wearing a pinafore, sits with another little girl on a school bench, with two little boys to their right, wearing ties.
The picture, I later learned, was given to her when she was twenty, and performing in a Christmas show at Middeloo College. After the performance, a lady who had been part of the audience came up to the stage.
“I think I recognize you. Are you, by any chance, Lientje de Jong?” she asked.
Lien, puzzled, said that she was.
The woman remembered her from The Hague. Lien and the woman’s son, Jaap, had been at primary school together.
“I still have a photo of you,” she said, “you and Jaap, both aged five.”
Jaap van der Ham, it turned out, was now also at Middeloo, in the same course as Lien. They knew each other, but neither remembered that they had once been classmates and even friends. A few days later Jaap’s mother sent Lien a copy of the photograph, pointing out that her son was the boy with the neat side parting, shorts, and long, stripy socks on the far left.
Lien was not a great one for asking questions at this point in her life: the past was something on which she feared to dwell. Still, she and Jaap, although they moved in different circles, did talk on a few occasions about their shared childhood in The Hague. It turned out that they had been classmates for another two years after the photo was taken. Then, in 1941, Lien had to leave to attend the Jewish school. Jaap avoided the same move only by a fraction: his father was Jewish but his mother was not. For this reason, in March 1943, by which time Lien had already been in hiding
in Dordrecht for over half a year, Jaap remained at home with his mother when his father was deported to Poland, never to return.
Lien kept the photo that Mrs. van der Ham had given her, adding it to the small collection that she had from her parents. Beyond this, though, the connection with Jaap was only a distant one. He had a steady girlfriend who soon became a fiancée, and though he was kind and charming, once the course at Middeloo was over, he and Lien lost touch.
* * *
—
WHEN LIEN AND I MET in December 2014, the photo of her as a little girl on the school bench with Jaap to one side was still a memento no different from the others. In October of the following year, however, a letter was sent out by some of her former fellow students at Middeloo in which a reunion of its old members was proposed. Jaap was one of those doing the organizing. Though Lien decided against attending, she did reply, asking how he was. There was, after all, the oddity that they had known each other as children in primary school. Her inquiry sparked an exchange of e-mails and then two meetings, the first in Amsterdam and the second in the village of Velp near Arnhem, where Jaap now lived.
On a bright May morning in 2016 Lien arrives on a train from Amsterdam at The Hague’s Central Station. She is meeting Jaap again for the third time now. When they last met, in Velp, the two of them discussed their early years together and conversation moved to the Jewish school, which Lien said she would like to visit. Jaap, who remained living in this city until he was eighteen years old, still remembers where it stood. There is a new memorial now.
He stands there waiting in the high-ceilinged hall of the station. Although a little thickset and in need of a cane, there is still something of the schoolboy in him. He wears a flat cap and has clashing stripes on his shirt and jacket, which make Lien smile. There is a gentleness to him, an easy warmth as he moves forward to give her a hug.