Local police officers search the house twice. They are looking for comrade Gooijer and his brother-in-law, both loyal Nazis, and on the second attempt they find Gooijer and take him. They turn the entire house and the adjacent barn upside down, but don’t look in the rear of the garden, where the great Dutch Nazi leader is counting worms in a ditch.
When Gooijer is released that night and looks for Mussert at home, he is alarmed not to find him. Gooijer creeps around his own garden, along the hedge, hissing at Mussert as if looking for a lost cat. He softly whistles the Dutch Nazi song ‘Soldiers in Black’, the words echoing in his mind:
The fight has flared up
Discord must go away
From our beautiful land
Oppressed to this day
New spirit breaks ground
We are all ready
Let the united front fight
On the streets we are steady
Come, my comrade, come take a stand
For us, people, for our Netherland
Soldiers in Black is who we are
Supporting Mussert in this war.
After a while, Mussert’s sandy face pops up and comrade Gooijers breathes a sigh of relief. While the Netherlands are on the eve of five years of death and destruction, Mussert sits down to a meal of baked potato wedges, lettuce and fried egg.
The next day is Anton Mussert’s forty-sixth birthday. He considers it safe enough to stay in the room upstairs, where Mrs Gooijer kindly brings him a bunch of flowers and food. The Dutch hold out a day longer than he had predicted, but on Tuesday, 14 May, the capitulation is announced on the radio.
Mussert puts on his best suit, leaves the farmhouse and hoists the Dutch Nazi flag at the Party headquarters in Utrecht. The grim black-and-red stripes, a triangle with the golden lion in the middle, triumphantly flutter in the breeze.
The story of Mussert hiding at the decisive moment is soon picked up and ridiculed in anti-Fascist circles. All sorts of hiding places buzz around – from gypsy caravans to haystacks – and in the following years it will remain a popular topic among cartoonists.
Comrade Gooijer’s farmhouse becomes a pilgrimage site for Dutch Nazis, hundreds of them flocking to see where their leader was kept in safety for them. They proudly sign their name in Mrs Gooijer’s guestbook with the words ‘faithful to our leader’ written elegantly on its cover. She puts the clothes Mussert wore on display in the attic; an altar on the place where the leader of the Dutch people was saved.
When the Brilleslijper family seek shelter in Naarden, Mussert is staying close by again – not in hiding this time. Although officially stationed in Utrecht, he will spend most of the war at his mistress’ place, around the corner from The High Nest.
Mussert has a special fondness for women he is related to. He has married his aunt – one of his mother’s sisters – eighteen years his senior and well into her sixties. Royal dispensation was required for their marriage in 1917, being relatives in the third degree. In addition to his supposed hiding place, the resistance mocks Mussert’s relationship: ‘for anyone who wants to keep the race pure, marrying their auntie is the perfect cure’ is an often-heard joke.
Early in the war, Mussert meets his second cousin Maria ‘Marietje’ Mijnlieff – her mother, Helena, is a niece to both his mother and his wife. He falls madly in love with the young girl. In symbolic exchange for a diamond necklace, he lends Helena the purchase price of a beautiful villa in Naarden, where, in November 1942, she and Marietje move. Villa Eik en Linde, Oak and Lime, becomes Mussert’s wartime love nest. He often visits and when in 1943 his own house in Utrecht is cleared for defensive measures, Eik en Linde, much to his wife’s dismay, becomes his permanent residence.
One day, Japie goes out to check his traps in the forest and returns to The Nest not with pheasants for his mother to cook, but with the limp body of a well-fed cat. Fietje is horrified and quickly tells him to bury the beast at the back of the garden, hoping no one will come and look for it.
The day after the cat murder, Janny returns from her resistance work. It is early in the evening and she has had a long day. From the station she takes the tram, gets off at Nieuwe Bussumerweg, walks the familiar route along Ericaweg to the path towards the villa. After a few minutes she suddenly hears a woman’s voice ahead of her. She quickly leaves the path and vanishes in the thick bushes along the verge. Cautiously crouching, she carries on as the voice sounds louder and louder.
‘Puss, puss, puss!’
Twenty footsteps away from Janny is woman, face turned towards the forest, shaking a bowl of food, calling for her cat.
‘Puss, puss, puss!’
She sounds as if her child is missing and looks around in despair.
Janny presses her back into the prickly plants and holds her breath. She curses her younger brother. They have murdered this lady’s cat and now of course she’s trying to find it. She quickly retreats deeper into the forest, making her way through shrubs and thorns until she’s safely home.
When she tells the story, Jaap bursts out laughing, but Joseph immediately cuts him off and forbids his son ever to use the traps again. Jaap has to stand guard at the grave in the garden – the cat has been dug up by a dog once before – and someone else is stationed as lookout on the first floor. All residents are told not to leave the house, play music or make any noise in the following days until they are certain the danger has passed.
Later, Janny will discover that the cat lady is one of the most fanatical Nazis in the area – a kind of aunt to Mussert. Even when she doesn’t turn up on their doorstep, asking for her pet, they find it hard to laugh about what happened.
4
Masks
Eberhard has more time for his music than ever. In their life before the war they had to earn money, but now, hiding in what feels like a sanctuary in no-man’s-land, he and Lien have the freedom to practise and play for days on end. He has joined the Amsterdam Music Library under his false name to get piano arrangements based on operas. He borrows as many as he can and spends hours behind the piano. He studies until his knuckles crack and drives the other residents crazy. This has nothing to do with his music – most of the people arriving at The Nest suffer from overstrained nerves because of their flight, the years of not trusting others, the fear of being found. Once they realize their only witnesses are often just deer, foxes and badgers, they surrender to the music.
First, Eberhard and Lien cherish the fortress walls of The High Nest – a beautiful sound barrier, too – but soon their ambition grows. The new regime has condemned the entire country to a spartan existence, but from The High Nest an underground web of artists will arise, livening up the area, and restoring the dazzling pre-war life of Amsterdam and The Hague to some of its former glory.
One morning, when Eberhard is walking in the forest with Kathinka, he notices a figure between the distant trees. Narrow and straight as a bare pine, its head bright white. Eberhard pushes the girl behind his back and they hide behind a shrub as the man comes closer.
‘Karel?’
Eberhard steps out of the cover and calls through the forest. A startled bird flaps away.
‘Karel Poons?’
The man holds still. His skin seems transparent, his hair bleached. Sharp eyes staring in their direction.
‘Yes?’
Eberhard briskly walks towards him, happily surprised. Karel was the star in the Yvonne Georgi ballet; they have often watched him dance in the theatre. Lien came home from shopping one day adamant she had seen Karel walking around Huizen – but Eberhard had not paid any attention. Excited to have met at this strange place, they tell each other about their wanderings.
In 1941, Karel Poons, Jewish ballet dancer, was forced by the Nazis to leave his ensemble and move to a Jewish neighbourhood in Amsterdam. He felt suspicious and decided to vanish from the face of the earth. He bleached his hair with a bottle of hydrogen peroxide and with his steel-blue eyes looked like a Frisian farmer’s son. At least, he th
ought he did, but when Janny sees him, she bursts out laughing. Karel, as she’ll tell Lien later, still looks very Jewish to her.
When he and Eberhard run into each other, Karel has already been hiding in a modern villa in Huizen for some time, where the owner, Cecile Hanedoes, had enough space for him to create a dance room. Karel trains every day to keep up his technique and choreographs dances to perform for Cecile.
Eberhard brings Karel to Lien and their meeting results in a plan. In Laren, a village down the road, they can rent a proper dance studio with mirrors and a barre on the wall. Twice a week, Lien and Karel come to the studio to train and devise performances they intend to put on after the war.
Eberhard and Karel become close friends too. The first thing they do is get new forged documents – his fake identity card makes Eberhard laugh when he sees it – and coupons to get through the war.
Their artistic circle widens through Karel. During one of their dancing sessions in the studio, Lien tells him what performances she used to make. They are Yiddish dances, accompanied by Eberhard on piano, and she would love to include them in her repertoire. She is thinking of using masks but wonders how to save herself from looking ridiculous and unprofessional with papier mâché masks straight from a hobby room.
Karel has an idea: his landlady, Cecile, once introduced him to an artist in Blaricum – she is somewhat strange but very talented. She paints and makes sculptures, puppets, marionettes, and when they met, she told Karel she was thinking of experimenting with masks too. Her name is Grietje Kots and, most importantly, she can be trusted.
Lien visits the lady in the forest studio where she lives and works. Grietje prefers not to leave her garden, which she tends with great devotion and where she can often be found discussing life with her invisible forest friends, a bird on one hand, a slice of stale bread in the other. The beautiful little farm with thatched roof, consistently referred to as ‘hut’ by Grietje, has no kitchen or other bourgeois comforts, but she is very content living there with her trees, animals and art.
When Lien shares her ideas about the Yiddish dances and the masks she pictures, Grietje is instantly inspired. As she studies Lien, from her elegant ballet feet to her striking face, framed by black curls, ideas begin to take shape in her mind. She invites Lien to come back with Eberhard and play for her, so she can get to work.
And so, in the early spring of 1943, Eberhard and Lien find themselves back onstage, performing to Grietje in her ‘hut’. She starts sketching and drawing immediately: with fine, black strokes on heavy paper, she portrays Lien as Pierrot. Large eyes with a melancholic look, a straight nose, high cheekbones, her black hair pulled back tightly. On the same page, beside Lien’s face, she draws the masks she has in mind for her, each of them inspired by the subject of the song.
She draws a golem mask, for the song based on the Jewish legend of the rabbi who turns a shapeless lump of clay into a living human being. The mask is gloomy and unrefined, close-set eyes sunken deep into the skull, a protruding lower jaw and thick, pouty lips – and yet it’s elegantly shaped, both abstract and realistic. Grietje draws Lien in profile as well, with a sharp nose and tormented look, a beautiful death mask in the foreground. It has the characteristic shape of a skull, but the eye sockets are not empty; they have eyelids, round and closed – as if death might change its mind at any moment.
Lien is over the moon with the masks. First, Grietje makes them out of newspapers and baking paper, simple and light with a peachy structure and a wooden stalk for Lien to hold them in front of her face. She later makes some out of plaster too. Eberhard and Lien work on their repertoire of Jewish songs and quickly begin to organize underground concerts. Grietje knows plenty of local artists and enthusiasts, and many resistance friends are interested too.
And so in 1943, when the Nazis have dropped their masks and one train after the other leaves Westerbork filled with Jews, headed for the extermination camps in the east, Yiddish culture and other arts flourish at The High Nest. There is dance, music, song and recitation. Simon drums, Puck plays the violin and Jaap builds Kathinka a little piano. Lien uses the death mask for a Yiddish story and the unrefined mask in a performance on golems. At Grietje’s place, the hut in Blaricum, Eberhard and Lien give a series of house concerts too. The proceeds of those soirées always go to The Free Artist. Mik tells them others around the country are doing the same: raising money by performing illegal concerts for the magazine to enlarge the print run and to expand the resistance.
Lien and Eberhard are cautious; they never let people arrive or leave at the same time and always have others acting as lookouts. While they freely play music inside and the audience can briefly relax, their watchmen form a cordon around the house, alert to each sound or sudden light flashing in the dark. Afterwards, the guests quietly dissolve into the night – without a single Nazi, German soldier or overzealous neighbour even noticing they were there.
5
Associates
The days are growing longer and the cold leaves the ground. The heath and the trees around the house begin to blossom and Janny loves seeing the seasons change, literally right under her nose, for the first time. She had only seen The High Nest in cold winter months – the house too large to heat, a permanent smell of fire and damp nestled in their clothes. Now, the surroundings are going through a metamorphosis and Janny is amazed to see the villa changing right before her eyes. The IJsselmeer water begins to melt, monotonous charcoal grey giving way to steel blue. Branches, first clawing at the sky around the house, unwind, reach for each other, their buds sprouting. The reeds on the roof begin to brighten, cast off the sombre shadow of the forest, moss green slowly changing into yellow ochre, and the shutters, matte and heavy in dark winter months, seem covered with new gloss, their claret gleaming dramatically in the morning sun.
Before the first sunbeams reach the large windows and brighten the attic, Janny has usually been woken up by birds bursting into song in the early hours of the morning. The sound comes from all sides; the exuberant tweeting and twittering of males attracting mates delights her and she often lies quietly in bed, listening to their concert, the soothing breathing of Bob and the children by her side.
At breakfast they discuss what strange noises they heard in the night. Paranoia has led them to suspect Germans encircle them at night-time, using animal sounds to communicate. Thankfully, there is always someone who knows what kept them awake: that scream was a fox, the low cooing sound an owl desperate to mate, that sharp response his female, not in the mood quite yet.
The Brilleslijper family has established a sort of routine in their underground household, including house rules, places to sleep, shifts for the dishes, schedules for cooking. Jaap has fabricated a radio, which they gather around in the evening, listening to news from London. How much longer will it take? When will the Allies come to bring Hitler to his knees? Jaap is always allowed to sit at the front with Father Joseph when they turn the radio on. Everyone adores the shy boy, his inventions, his dexterous fingers. He has built a beautiful doll’s house for Kathinka and Liselotte, with floors and rooms, beds and curtains, and even proper lamps made of bicycle lights. Jaap will fix anything that has broken and can always be found in the shed, stooped over the workbench, his glasses on the tip of his nose.
Because of the disturbing reports Janny brings home from Amsterdam – the fanatical search for people in hiding, the ongoing willingness of citizens to report Jews – Jaap starts to build hiding places all around the house. Beneath and above the built-in cupboards that can be found in most rooms, he makes hiding spaces for one or two people to squeeze in. Some of the floors have cavities, which Jaap turns into storage spaces, and on the top floor, he creates hiding places between the walls of the rooms and the roof. In each room he builds either a crawl space or a cupboard, with a hatch hidden underneath a rug or behind a piece of furniture.
Next, he installs an ingenious alarm system. He mounts little lights in all the rooms and connects them wit
h electrical wire to a small emergency button next to the front door at eye level. If anyone presses the button, all the little lights switch on. This alerts the residents to the imminent danger; they must rush to their designated hiding places. Jaap has taught them how to hide, which foot to use when entering the narrow space, how to shut the hatch. They have rehearsed several times, like a fire drill. Within thirty seconds every trace of their existence can be erased.
On the first floor, in front of the window on the right, just above the name of the house, they put a Chinese vase. The coast is clear as long as this vase is there, in front of the window. If it is gone, this is a sign for resistance couriers or guests of The High Nest that something is amiss.
The constant threat has a different effect on each of them and sometimes subdued tensions lead to conflict. The two young girls, Jetty and Puck, share the maid’s room on the first floor and, more than once, boys hiding at The High Nest develop a crush on one of the girls, despite the fact that Jetty is engaged to be married to Simon.
One morning the front-door milkman arrives – they have two, both unaware of the other, so they can buy a lot without it becoming suspicious: the front-door milkman and the back-door milkman. Just as the man is about to put his bottles at the front door at the back of the house, hell breaks loose on the terrace. Two boys, both in love with the same girl, are fighting, a third one is trying to separate them; all three of them are in hiding at The High Nest. The milkman watches the spectacle with his mouth wide open while the third boy tries to save them all by keeping the hotheads away from each other, his arms and legs wide apart. ‘Never mind them. Just their morning exercises.’ He gives one of them an extra shove.
The milkman, shocked, never returns again.
When they discuss the incident at dinner that night, most of them laugh out loud. But Janny doesn’t flinch and gives the boys a serious talking-to. The High Nest might create the illusion of freedom, but, if they are found out, the consequences will be devastating.
The Sisters of Auschwitz Page 13