———
By 1939 the whole country saw what the Whetstras had seen all along: The Germans were intent on a pattern of conquest that included Holland. In our house we scarcely thought about it. Bas was sick; the doctor called it tuberculosis. Mama and Papa moved onto a mattress in the sitting room. For months Bas lay in their tiny bedroom, coughing, coughing, his flesh shrinking until only bones and skin lay on the bed. His suffering was more dreadful than that of a normal person, because he could not tell us how he felt.
I remember one day just after my eleventh birthday creeping into the sickroom while Mama was busy in the kitchen. Entering that room was strictly forbidden, for the disease was contagious. But that was what I wanted. If Bas was going to die, then I wanted to die too. I threw myself down on top of him and kissed him again and again on the mouth. In July 1939, Bas died, while I stayed healthy as ever, and I felt that God had betrayed me twice.
Two months later, in September, our government called for a general mobilization. For once, Mama allowed her radio to be used for news. We turned the volume as high as it would go, but still Papa could not hear. So my little sister Geltje stationed herself at the set and shouted salient pieces of information to him.
“All reserve units are activated, Papa.”
“All private cars are commandeered.”
By nightfall the traffic jam had begun, the endless traffic jam that was to be the characteristic feature of the months before invasion. Every automobile in Holland was on the road. There seemed to be just as many going north as there were going south. No one knew where he was supposed to be, but he was getting there as fast as he could. Day after day, wearing my baggy trousers and loose blouse, I stood under the tree where Bas used to stand and watched. Nobody talked much.
Only Mr. Whetstra seemed to find the courage to put into words what we all knew. I could not understand why I was being drawn toward the Whetstras at this time, but frequently I found myself walking past that kitchen window.
“Good afternoon, Andrew.”
“Good afternoon, Mrs. Whetstra.”
“Out on an errand for your mother? You’d better have a cookie for energy.” She picked up a plate of cookies and brought them to the window.
Mr. Whetstra looked up from the kitchen table. “Is that little Andrew? Out to see the mobilization firsthand?”
“Yes, sir.” For some reason I put my cookie behind my back.
“Andrew, you must say prayers for your country every night. We are about to go through a very hard time.”
“Yes, sir.”
“What good can men with popguns do against planes and tanks?”
“Yes, sir.”
“They’ll be here, Andrew, with their steel helmets and their goosestep and their hate, and all we will have is our prayers.” Mr. Whetstra came over to the window and leaned across the sill. “Will you pray, Andrew? Pray for the courage to do all we can, and then having done all, to stand. Will you do that, Andrew?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Good boy.” Mr. Whetstra drew his head back into the room. “Now get along on your errand.”
But as I turned and started down the street, Mr. Whetstra called after me. “You can eat the cookie. Oh, I know, sometimes that old stove of ours smokes something awful. But it’s worked fine ever since I got my new window in.”
———
That night, lying on my bed in the loft, I got to thinking about Mr. Whetstra. So he’d known all along. But he hadn’t told my father, as every other grown-up in town would have done. I wondered why. I also wondered about his wanting me to pray. What good would that do! God never listened. If the Germans really did come, I planned to do a lot worse to them than pray. I fell asleep dreaming of the feats of daring I would work single-handed against the invader.
———
By April, Witte was crowded with refugees from the polder land to the east of us. Holland was bombing its own dikes, deliberately flooding land wrested inch by inch from the sea over the centuries, to slow down the German army. Every house except ours, which was too small, held a homeless family from the flooded land, and Mama’s soup pot simmered night and day.
But of course the Germans did not come by land. The first planes flew over Witte the night of May 10, 1940. We spent the night in the sitting room, huddled together, not sleeping. All the next day we saw planes and heard the explosions as they bombed the small military airfield four kilometers away. It was my twelfth birthday, but neither I nor anyone else remembered.
Then the Germans bombed Rotterdam. The radio announcer from Hilversum, to whom we had listened since mobilization, wept as he read the release. Rotterdam was gone. In one hour a city had disappeared from the earth. This was the blitzkrieg, the new warfare. The next day Holland surrendered.
A few days later a fat little German lieutenant arrived in Witte in a squad car and set himself up in the burgomaster’s house. The handful of soldiers who accompanied him were mostly older men; Witte was not important enough to rate crack troops.
And for a while I really did act out my fantasies of resistance. Many was the night I crept barefoot down the ladder from the loft as two o’clock struck on the town clock. I knew that my mother heard me, because the regular rhythm of her breathing halted as I passed their room. But she never stopped me. Nor did she ask the next morning what had happened to our precious highly rationed sugar. Everyone in the village was amused when the lieutenant’s staff car began to give him trouble. His sparks were fouled. His engine stalled. Some said there was sugar in the lieutenant’s gas tank; others thought it was unlikely.
Food ran out in the towns before it did in farming villages like ours, and this fact too I used in my child’s war against the enemy. One hot day that first summer, I loaded a basket with cabbages and tomatoes and walked the four miles to Alkmaar. A store there still had a supply of prewar fireworks, and I knew the proprietor wanted vegetables.
I pressed my advantage as far as I could and filled my basket with the firecrackers, placing over them the flowers I had brought along for the purpose. The proprietor stood looking at me in silence. Then, with sudden resolution, he reached under the counter and brought up a large cherry bomb.
“I have no more food.”
“You’d better get home before the curfew.”
That night back in Witte the floorboards of the loft creaked again, and again Mama held her breath. I slipped out, barefoot, into the night. A patrol of four foot soldiers was moving northward up the street toward our house, playing their torches on each of the buildings as they passed. I moved out of the doorway and flattened myself against the side of the house as the marching boots drew closer. The minute the soldiers had passed I sped across the little bridge between our house and the dike road and ran south to the burgomaster’s house. It would have been a simple matter to fire the mammoth cherry bomb in the lieutenant’s doorway while the patrol was at the other end of the village. But I wanted more adventure than that. I was the fastest runner in the village, and I thought it would be fun to have these old men in their heavy boots run after me. I don’t suppose any of them was over fifty, but to my young eyes they seemed ancient.
So I waited until the patrol began its tour back down the street. Just before they got to headquarters, I lit the fuse and ran.
“Halt!” A torchbeam picked me up, and I heard a rifle bolt being drawn. I hadn’t counted on guns! I zigged and zagged as I ran up the street. Then the cherry bomb exploded, and for a fraction of a moment the soldier’s attention was diverted. I darted across the first bridge I could find, raced through a garden, and flung myself down among the cabbage heads. For nearly an hour they hunted for me, shouting gruff syllables to one another in German, until at last they gave up.
Elated by this success, I began discharging volleys in broad daylight. One day I stepped from hiding straight into the arms of a soldier. To run was to admit guilt. Yet in my hands was strong circumstantial evidence: In my left hand were firecrackers, in my right,
matches.
“Du! Komm mal her!”
My hands clenched around the firecrackers. I did not dare stuff them in my coat pocket; that would surely be the first place he would look.
“Hast du einen Fuerwerkskoerper explodiert?”
“Fuerwerks? Oh no, sir!”
I grabbed the two edges of my coat with my clenched hands and held it wide for him to search. The soldier went over me from my wide trousers to my cap. When he turned away in disgust, the firecrackers in my hand were drenched with perspiration.
———
But as the occupation dragged on, even I tired of my games. In villages near ours hostages were being lined up and shot and houses burned to the ground, as the real resistance hardened and took shape. Jokes against the Germans ceased to be funny.
All over Holland were the onderduikers (literally the under-divers), men and boys in hiding to escape deportation to the forced labor camps in Germany. Ben, sixteen when the war began, dived under a farm near Ermelo the first month, and for five years we had no news of him.
Possession of a radio was made a crime against the new regime. We hid Mama’s instrument in a crawl space under the sloping roof, and one by one we would crouch there to listen for the Dutch language broadcasts from England. Later, when the Dutch railroad struck, we would even squeeze railroad workers into that tiny hole, and of course there were always Jews to be hidden for a night on their way to the coast.
As the Germans grew desperate for manpower, Witte’s tiny occupation force was withdrawn. Then came the dreaded razzia. Trucks would suddenly speed into the villages, at any hour of the day or night, sealing the dike roads at both ends, while squads of soldiers searched every house for able-bodied men. Before I was fourteen I was joining the flight of men and boys into the polders at the first sign of a German uniform. We would run across the fields, crouching low, leaping the canals, making for the swamp beyond the railroad. The railway dike was too high to climb—we would surely be seen—so we would dive into the broad canal that flowed beneath the railroad bridge, to crawl out soaked—panting and shivering. By the end of the war even little Cornelius and Papa, deaf as he was, were joining the race to the swamp.
Between the razzias, life was a somber struggle for mere existence. All electricity was reserved for the Germans. With nothing to power the pumps, the rainwater lay deep and stagnant over the polders. In our homes we used oil lamps, making the oil ourselves from cabbage seeds. There was no coal, so Witte cut down its elms. The tree under which Bas had stood was cut the second winter.
But the chief enemy, worse even than the cold and the soldiers, was hunger. We were constantly, naggingly, endlessly hungry. All crops were commandeered for the front as soon as they were picked. My father tended his garden as carefully as ever, but it was the Germans who reaped most of the harvest. For years our family of six lived on rations for two.
At first we were able to add to this allowance by digging the tulip bulbs from our garden and eating them like potatoes. Then even the tulips ran out. Mama would pretend to eat, but many nights I saw her divide her tiny portion among the other plates. Her only consolation was that Bas had not lived to see this time. He never could have understood the ache in his stomach, the dark fireplace, the treeless street.
At last the day came when Mama could not get out of bed. If liberation did not come soon, we knew she would die.
And then in the spring of 1945 the Germans left and the Canadians took their place. People stood in the street weeping for joy. But I was not with them. I was running every step of the five miles to the Canadian encampment, where I was able to beg a small sackful of breadcrusts.
Bread! Quite literally the bread of life!
I brought it home to my family with shouts of “Food! Food! Food!” As Mama gnawed the dry crusts, tears of gratefulness to God rolled down the deep lines in her cheeks.
The war was over.
2
The Yellow Straw Hat
One afternoon in the summer of 1945, several months after liberation, I came into the house and was met by my little sister, Geltje, with the news that my father wanted to see me.
“He’s in the garden,” she said.
I walked through the dark kitchen and out into the cabbage patch, blinking my eyes against the bright sunlight. Papa, hoe in hand, klompen on his feet, was bent over his cabbages working the little weeds out with patient tenderness. I circled so as to stand in front of him and shouted, “You wanted to see me, Papa?”
Papa straightened up slowly. “You’re seventeen years old, Andrew.” I knew instantly what direction the conversation was going to take.
“Yes, sir.”
“What do you plan to do with your life?”
I wished his voice didn’t have to be so loud. And mine in answering him. “I don’t know, Papa.”
Now Papa was going to ask me why I didn’t like smithing. He did. Then he was going to ask why I had not stuck with machine fitting—a trade I had tried to learn during the occupation. He did that, too. I knew that all Witte could hear both his questions and the vague and evasive answers with which I tried to satisfy him.
“It is time for you to choose a trade, Andrew. By fall I want your decision.”
My father leaned back over his hoe, and I knew the conversation was over. I had then perhaps two months to decide on my life’s work. Oh, I knew what I wanted all right: to find somehow a life that broke out of the mold. To find adventure. To get away from Witte, from the mental set that was constantly looking backward.
But I also knew that my prospects were not very good. The Germans had come when I was in the sixth grade and taken over the school building, and that was the end of my formal education.
The only thing I could do well was run. That afternoon I took off across the polders, barefoot, running mile after mile along the little footpaths used by the farmers. After five miles I was just getting warmed up. I ran through the town where I had bought the firecrackers. My mind was clear now and functioning well.
I scrambled up the dike that led back to Witte with a mounting sense that I was close to my answer. The solution was clear. There was constant talk in the paper about armed rebellion in the colonies. The Dutch East Indies, so recently liberated from Japan, were now presuming to claim independence from Holland as well. Daily we were reminded that these colonies were Dutch soil—had been for 350 years. Why were our armies not reclaiming them for the Crown?
Why indeed? That night I announced to the household that I knew already what I was going to do.
“What’s that, Andy?” said Maartje.
“Join the army.”
Mother’s instinct was to draw in her breath. “Oh, Andrew!” She had seen too much of armies. “Must we always think of killing?”
But my father and brothers were of a different mind. The very next week I borrowed Papa’s bicycle and pedaled to the recruiting office in Amsterdam. By nightfall I was home again, much diminished in my own sight. The army took seventeen-year-olds only in the calendar year in which they turned eighteen. I wouldn’t be eighteen until May of 1946!
In January I was back, and this time I was accepted. Before long I was strutting through Witte in my new uniform, oblivious to the fact that the pants were too small, the jacket too big, the whole effect quite top-heavy. But I was going off to take back our colonies for the Queen, and perhaps get a few of those dirty revolutionaries who everyone said were Communists and bastards. The two words automatically went together.
The only people who did not respond with applause were the Whetstras. I walked, top-heavy, past their house.
“Hello there, Andy.”
“Good morning, Mr. Whetstra.”
“How are your mother and father?”
Was it possible he did not see the uniform? I turned so that the sun glinted from my shiny brass belt buckle. At last I blurted, “I’ve joined up, you know. I’m going to the East Indies.”
Mr. Whetstra leaned back as if to see me better. “Yes
, I see. So you’re off for adventure. I will pray for you, Andrew. I will pray that the adventure you find will satisfy.”
I stared at him, puzzled. Whatever did he mean, adventure that would satisfy? Any kind of adventure, I thought as I looked out over the flat fields stretching away from Witte in every direction, any adventure would satisfy me more than the long sleep of this village.
———
So I left home. I left home emotionally as well as physically. I worked hard during basic training and felt for the first time in my life that I was doing something I wanted to do.
Oh, how I liked being treated as an adult. Part of my training took place in the town of Gorkum. Each Sunday I would go to church—not because I was interested in the service but because afterward I could count on being invited to dinner. I always enjoyed telling my hosts that I had been picked for special commando training in Indonesia.
“Within a few weeks,” I would say, dramatically pushing my chair back and taking a long draw from my after-Sunday-dinner cigar, “I shall be in hand-to-hand combat with the enemy.” And then, striking a somewhat distant look, I would ask if my hosts would consider writing me while I was overseas. They always agreed, and before I left Holland I had seventy names on my correspondence list.
One of them was a girl. I met her in the usual way, after church—a Reformed service that particular Sunday. She was the most beautiful girl I had ever seen. About my age I guessed, extremely slender, with hair so black it had a tinge of blue in it. But what impressed me most was her skin. I had read about skin as white as snow; this was the first time I had seen it. After a pleasant snooze during the sermon, I went invitation-fishing. Sure enough, I timed my exit just right. Snow White was at the door. She introduced herself.
“I’m Thile,” she said.
“I’m Andrew.”
“My mother wonders if you would like to have dinner with us.”
“Very much indeed,” I said, and moments later I left the church with the princess on my arm.
Thile’s father was a fishmonger. His home was over his shop, down by the waterfront in Gorkum, and throughout our dinner the pleasant smells of the dockside mingled with the odors of boiled cabbage and ham. Afterward we sat in the family drawing room.
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