The Mystery of Right and Wrong

by Wayne Johnston

  “What do any of you except Peter know about unbearable memories? What does this boyfriend of yours know, Rachel? Based on what I’ve said, could you tell what side I chose after the German tanks rolled unopposed into Amsterdam? I may have been a member of the Resistance. I may have believed in it. But the Nazis believed that they were right. And they convinced thousands of Dutch to infiltrate the Resistance. Men, women and children were shot right in front of me because the Nazis suspected them of helping Jews, or merely wanted to make an example of them. You don’t know how it feels to be always afraid, always hungry. That’s how the Nazis infiltrated the Resistance. The people who helped them weren’t Nazi sympathizers to begin with. Most of them weren’t.

  “You think you want to know the truth? Very well. The Nazis put a gun to my mother’s head and told me to co-operate or they would shoot her. If I still didn’t co-operate, they would put a gun to my brother’s head. So I agreed. What was I supposed to do, let my family die, watch them being shot one after the other, just to save the lives of some Jews? Jews I’d never met, rich, money-grubbing old men or women? There you have it. But what do you have? A story of what might have happened or the story of what did happen?

  “It may be that I hate the Jews because they brought the wrath of Germany down upon our heads. Why should I feel anything but hatred for the people so many of us died trying to protect? If not for the Jews, there would never have been a war. Is that how I really feel? Who knows? No one knew anything for certain. That’s what it was like. Resistance fighters or Nazi collaborators who gave the names and addresses of resisters to the Nazis? You were just as likely to wind up being one as the other. I chose the Resistance. My neighbours, my friends chose to be collaborators. I hated them then, but I don’t hate them now. Is that true? Here is the only truth: not even Peter knows whose side I was on.”

  I glanced at Peter, who was staring at his plate.

  “And all my youngest daughter thinks about is Anne Frank?”

  Rachel’s eyes were blurred with tears. I wanted to put an arm around her, but I was worried about inciting Hans even further.

  Gloria reached out and took her father’s hand. “Calm down, Daddy, please.” Hans pulled away. The silence stretched and stretched some more.

  Could Hans have collaborated with the Nazis? Might others, not only Jews, have died because of him? A story that might or might not be true. In the absence of any proof to the contrary, it seemed possible, given how convincing his tirade against the Jews had been. The Nazis had posed him a moral dilemma and he had put family ahead of everything else. Had he? Who knows how many girls like Anne Frank died because of men like him? None, perhaps. Why had he told such a story and then seemingly retracted it?

  “Imagine,” Hans said. “South Africa’s one friend in the world is Israel, a place crawling with Jews. They’re our friends because they treat the Arabs the way we treat the kaffirs. Did they repay the children whose fathers died to save the Jews? The wives whose husbands died? They have their own country now, and anyone who doesn’t help them defend it is an anti-Semite.”

  “Vicious stuff, Hans, vicious,” Max said. “You’re in fine form tonight.”

  “South Africa learned a lot from the defeat of the Nazis,” Hans said. “It learned even more from the failure of the Final Solution. Once it had nothing to lose by intervening, the rest of the world intervened. It wouldn’t have if Germany had won the war, which brings me to the third thing South Africa learned: don’t bite off more than you can chew. Look to your own house. Perfect your own country, the rest of the world be damned. If the Germans had simply redrawn their border to include Western Europe, that border would be the same today. There would be no Western Europe, just Germany from Ireland to Poland. If they had let the Jews live and put them to work for next to nothing, Germany would be the richest, most powerful country in the world. It could have achieved all that in six months. Over, done with. In my opinion, South Africa is the closest thing on earth to a perfect country.”

  Hans pushed back his chair abruptly, rose and strode into the front room. He reversed a reclining chair so that it faced away from us, then sat in it, the back of his neck crimson. He snatched a newspaper from the coffee table and began to read, or pretended to, seemingly unaware that that crimson neck of his was giving him away.

  “Hans gets upset whenever someone talks about the Jews,” Myra said, frowning at me.

  “I didn’t,” I said. “He did.”

  Rachel, even as tears continued to pour down her cheeks, kept her leg pressed against mine. I tried to take her hand, but she wouldn’t let me.

  Myra tilted her head as if she was about to impart bad news to me as gently as possible. “Any mention of Anne Frank gets Rachel upset,” she said. “She admires her very much.”

  “It’s true,” Clive said. “It was Hans who brought up the Jews. All Wade did was answer Bethany’s question about what he was reading.”

  “It’s a touchy subject, that’s what Myra means,” Peter said. “It is for me, too, Clive, as you well know.”

  Clive, looking chastened, nodded.

  “No harm done,” Theresa said.

  “Except to the Jews and Albert Einstein,” Fritz said.

  “Not to mention Wade,” Rachel said, wiping her eyes with the handkerchief Max passed to her.

  “And you and poor old Anne Frank,” Fritz said.

  “I’m sure there are more pleasant things than the war to talk about,” Theresa said.

  “Here, here,” Myra said. The table fell silent. As bewildered as I was, it occurred to me to wonder who would not have felt bewildered in such circumstances, and among such people as I had fallen in with. These were not the people of the greater world into which I had belatedly made my way. These were people of a micro-world of their own exclusive and, thus far, inscrutable design. Fritz’s eyes said as much to me every time we exchanged a look. In this way, if in no other, we were kindred souls—that had been the message of that grin of his since the moment we met.

  “Let’s start clearing up,” Rachel said to her sisters.

  “I don’t know why I have to pitch in,” Bethany said, from the doorway. “All I did was drink a glass of water.”

  I headed for the kitchen as the other men, along with Myra and Theresa, filed into the front room. “What was that all about?” I whispered to Rachel as she moved back and forth between the table and the kitchen counter. “There would have been no war if not for the Jews? That’s a strange thing for a war hero to say. Why did he make up a story about being a collaborator?”

  “Please drop it for now,” Rachel whispered.

  “I didn’t say a word about the Jews,” I said.

  “We’ll talk about it later. Unless you want to march into the front room and, in front of everyone, ask Dad to explain himself.”

  “We’re an acquired taste, Wade,” Bethany said. “That’s why I gave up eating. Dad was joking. In poor taste, I’ll admit. But there is nothing he likes more than getting someone’s goat, and he certainly seems to have got yours.”

  “And Rachel’s,” I said. “And yours, Bethany. I seem to remember that, when the going got rough, you went upstairs.”

  “Only because I know his speech by heart and I can’t stand to be bored.”

  * * *

  —

  “He insulted you, Rachel,” I said that night as we were driving home. “He knows how you feel about Anne Frank and her book.”

  “Really? Do you know how I feel about Anne Frank and her book? Here’s how I feel about them: I wish I could put both her and that book out of my mind forever. I wish I could work up the nerve to burn every last volume of my diary and every last copy of hers that exists on earth.”

  “So you keep saying.”

  “It was when we came back here in 1975 that Dad first started in about the Jews. It was just a few words at first, only in fr
ont of the family. ‘Another goddamn Jew.’ ‘Filthy Jew.’ My mother told us it was just Dad’s way of mocking those who meant it when they said such things, his way of dealing with one of the horrors of the war.”

  “That’s absurd.”

  “Yes, well, he’s gotten worse, but her explanation has stayed the same.”

  “That makes it more absurd. It makes me wonder if your fixation with that book is…” I stopped.

  “Is what?” she said, sounding more fearful than annoyed.

  “I don’t know,” I said. I had been going to say I wondered if it was her way of countering his bewildering anti-Semitism. For a minute, neither of us spoke.

  “When I was sick, really sick, Mom used to say, ‘Your father must have walked past the Secret Annex one hundred times without knowing it. Imagine that.’ I did. I imagined him walking past the Secret Annex that many times, not knowing it was there, not knowing that two families of Jews were hiding out there from the Nazis just a few feet away, not knowing that one of those Jews, a mere girl, was keeping a diary that, like her, would go on to be world-famous. Mom said that some of the members of the Dutch Resistance were decorated by the Allies, but most of them remained anonymous because a lot of people in Holland sided with the Nazis, and Dad didn’t want to put himself and the people he worked with in danger. Medals didn’t matter to him. By 1955, that danger had passed, and that was the reason he was able to say on his resumé that he had been a member of the Dutch Resistance. I have a copy of that resumé. I brought it with me from St. John’s. I’ll show it to you when we get home. I’d meant to show it to you under different circumstances. For ages, the original was a cherished family souvenir. The closest thing Dad had to a Resistance membership card. Mom gave us all copies and got us to swear not to tell him we had one.”

  As I sat at the kitchen table, nursing a beer, Rachel rummaged in the bedroom closet and emerged with a single faded mimeographed sheet, which she placed on the table in front of me. “He sent it to Peter DeVries and told him to include it with his letter of application to South African Airways.”

  The address on the resumé was: “Oegstgeest-Holland/38 Sumatrastraat.” Rachel read the first entry aloud: “1942–1945—went into hiding to evade the German compulsory work in factories. Worked for the Dutch during that time under a feigned name as a farmhand and manservant and succeeded in eluding the German suppressors.” She looked at me, eyebrows raised. “All the resumé says is that he escaped the Germans by working on a farm outside the city, in which case, by the way, how did he walk past the Secret Annex a hundred times during the war? I don’t know, Wade, I don’t know. I sometimes wonder if I should believe a word he has ever said about anything.”

  “Maybe the notion of him being a war hero was just some sort of family myth that caught on over the years.”

  “Maybe. Maybe she made it up. She’s always painted him as a hero who is content to keep his heroism a secret, a man so modest, but also so traumatized by the war, that, thirty-five years later, he doesn’t want his own daughters to know of his bravery, a man who exacted from his wife a vow that she would never tell them whatever in God’s name it was that he told her. Until I became obsessed with the diary, we never brought books about the war into the house. When we came back here in ’75, I read Het Achterhuis everywhere except at home. I grew terrified that one of my sisters or I would bring everything down around us with one slip of the tongue, one moment of forgetfulness. Then I became terrified that we would provoke him into ranting against the Jews. I still don’t know if he was a member of the Resistance or a collaborator with the Nazis.”

  “Judging by that resumé, I’d say he was neither,” I said. “Maybe he was just making things up to impress South African Airways. He mentioned that the Nazis threatened his brother. You never told me he had one.”

  “He doesn’t, not anymore. He died during the war. I don’t know how. Another forbidden topic.”

  “Maybe that explains—”

  “Don’t bother. Really. There’s no point. Maybe, maybe, a million maybes. What you hinted at on the way home? Pretty far-fetched. Driving yourself crazy is a very extreme way of protesting your father’s choice of words.”

  “If that’s all it is.”

  “When you know nothing for certain, you have to assume that’s all it is. You know, I used to think it would be fun to hide out in an attic with your family, fun for everyone to always be together and safe, unknown to the outside world, which was a dangerous place where no one could be trusted.” She looked at me as if she had confessed to something she knew I didn’t understand.

  “I’ll show you something else: the first copy of Het Achterhuis I ever owned.” She got up, and once again I heard her rummaging through the closet in the bedroom. She came back to the kitchen and gingerly handed me the “book” with both hands. It didn’t look like a book, but like a tangled mass of various kinds of tape—masking tape, duct tape, black electrical tape. Inside it, she said, was a stationery box, and inside that, a paperback edition of the diary. “We can’t open it,” she said. “It would fall apart. The glue in the binding along the spine dried up years ago. There’s just a bunch of loose pages. But I’d freak if you saw it anyway. I wrote notes on every square inch of it, even the inside of the covers, in the margins, in between the lines. I doubt that even I would be able to make out the notes now. Promise you won’t ever open it?”

  “I promise,” I said.

  “I’ll know if you did,” she said. “It’s not something you can take a sneak peek at. You’d have to cut it open with a knife and you’d never be able to put it back the way it was.”

  “I won’t touch it, Rachel.”

  “Okay. I’m sorry. It’s just that it’s pretty precious to me.” She went back to the bedroom and replaced the book in the closet, then came out and sat on my lap. She ran her fingers through my hair and whispered, “It’s okay. Whatever happens, it’s okay.”

  “I love you,” I said. “Nothing’s going to happen.”

  From The Ballad of the Clan van Hout

  THE MAN WHO ALMOST SAVED ANNE FRANK (1966)

  The tanks rolled into Amsterdam,

  though many died opposing them.

  The Nazis played their Nazi games:

  they registered the Jewish names,

  they made the Jews wear yellow stars,

  they drove about in fancy cars

  and rounded up the richest Jews—

  they told them that they had to choose

  between starvation and a ruse

  (they didn’t call it that, of course).

  They staged the famous “Jewish race”:

  they made them run on cobblestones

  while wearing clogs, the wooden shoes

  that no one wore by ’forty-two.

  (Remember, now, the four of you,

  that every word I say is true.

  The naughty get much naughtier

  when they have nothing else to do.

  They do, it’s true, I’m telling you,

  the nicest of nice children, too.)

  The young, the old, the meek, the bold

  (this story is not often told),

  the funny-looking naked Jews,

  while wearing only wooden shoes,

  were chased by dogs across the square

  (but for those shoes the Jews were bare:

  I want to make that crystal clear).

  They slipped, they slid, the poor Jews did.

  (The bodies that their clothing hid

  were not the kind you often see

  at Muizenberg, believe you me.)

  They skated on the cobblestones—

  you never heard such moans and groans.

  There was never such a sorry sight

  nor such a pair of sorry sounds:

>   the clacking of the clacking clogs,

  the barking of the barking dogs

  were heard that day for miles around.

  The Germans, drinking beer and wine,

  stood just behind the finish line

  where the prizes were displayed,

  the wheels of cheese and loaves of bread—

  for those who crossed still on their feet

  could take home what they didn’t eat

  to feed their starving families.

  Some crossed the line but most did not;

  regardless of how far they got,

  when they were done, the Jews were shot.

  Do not forget about the Dutch—

  five hundred of us, forced to watch,

  stood silent, frozen to the spot.

  The colonel looked from face to face:

  “And so it ends, the Jewish race.

  How swiftly won the war would be

  could it be done so easily.”

  Among the Dutch, a certain man

  whom you all know, your father, Hans,

  was sickened by the blood that ran

  throughout the streets of Amsterdam.

  The Germans laughed, but Hans did not.

  “Laugh,” they said, “or you’ll be shot.”

  He couldn’t but pretended to.

  So did the rest—what could they do

  but mock the dead and dying Jews?

  Not much older than you children,

  and much younger than most men,

  Hans joined the secret underground

  and left the life he knew behind.

  You will not find his name in books—

  young Hans was not the kind who looks