All Ships Follow Me

by Mieke Eerkens

  * * *

  Apeldoorn, the Netherlands, 1940

  In the dark of predawn, there is a muffled ringing. There is rustling as sleep is rubbed from eyes, and a fumbling under the pillow, where the alarm clock is. Fingers search for the button to silence it without bringing it into the open, where it might wake the man who lies slack-jawed and snoring on the other side of the bed, who insists he never be woken before 8:00 a.m. and complains that the clock’s ticking disrupts his sleep. Silently, a woman in her midthirties pulls the covers from her body and creeps through the bedroom, grabbing a woolly sweater on her way out. She is Maria Catharina de Kock, my grandmother. As the small house sleeps, my grandmother lights a fire in the potbellied stove and starts breakfast, scrambling four eggs to feed five people. She slices some hearty whole-grain bread, saving the ends of the loaf for herself. Then she climbs the stairs to wake her husband and their children.

  Hannie, the eldest, is eight. Then there are the boys: Bert, seven, and Pim, three. My mother, Elsje (pronounced Elshe) is just one year old. Hannie, already dutiful at this young age and loyal to her mother, changes Elsje’s diaper and brings the baby downstairs, putting her in the playpen. The other kids sit at the table, eating. My grandmother knocks softly at the bedroom door to wake her husband, my grandfather. Adrianus Cornelis de Kock. He stretches, yawns. “Did you make tea yet?” he asks my grandmother with a sleep-weighted voice. He groans as he gets out of bed, scratching at the white undershirt covering his belly. He steps into his trousers, runs a wet comb through his hair. In the kitchen, he shovels eggs and bread into his mouth wordlessly, washing them down with the hot tea my grandmother sets in front of him. A half hour later, he is on his bicycle, headed toward the technical college, where he teaches thermodynamics and physics to young men preparing for careers in the auto industry. Hannie and Bert also get on their bicycles and head to school together. Then my grandmother finally sits down to nurse my mother while Pim pushes a wooden block around on the floor like a car. They are living hand-to-mouth at this point, like many in the Netherlands are after the Great Depression, which manifested there later than in the rest of the world, via a slow nagging burn rather than a sudden crash followed by recovery. Adrianus is lucky to have a job at all, and there is a rented roof over their heads and food on the table. Still, he is a man who wants better, who feels he deserves more than this.

  * * *

  My grandfather is a proud man. He is also an intelligent man. He has studied cryptology for years and is able to crack advanced codes. He has a degree in astronomy, but he feels his intellect isn’t valued, at least not by this postwar, post-Depression society that sees the wealthy getting wealthier with commerce, and the rest of the working stiffs floundering. He makes a low wage teaching for the technical college in Apeldoorn, something he feels should be compensated in equal measure to other occupations requiring a degree. Has it always been this way for educators? I imagine my grandfather standing before his class of aspiring auto mechanics, trying to teach them physics. He speaks at a level beyond them and becomes frustrated when they don’t understand. His ego is wounded as he considers where all his years of study and a Ph.D. have landed him: working for pennies teaching math to aspiring auto mechanics.

  * * *

  That ego, combined with his circumstances, makes my grandfather vulnerable to the messaging of national socialism percolating at that time.

  The national socialist party in the Netherlands is the Nationaal Socialistische Beweging, or NSB. Established in 1931 by Anton Mussert to address the very issues that gnaw at my grandfather’s sense of injustice, the party appeals to an idealist contingent of the population, including some Dutch Jews. What they all have in common is the feeling that the government has abandoned them in favor of the wealthy classes who run Dutch society. In fact, civil servants are prohibited from joining the party. This is a party ostensibly for the people, antiestablishment, though it definitely does not espouse democracy. The NSB favors a strong authoritarian ruler to distribute the country’s wealth equitably, and the abolishment of voting rights—in the belief that if people are allowed to vote for politicians, competition and greed will inevitably get in the way of self-disciplined equality. In 1933, the NSB holds its first meetings, and my grandfather is a member from that year forward. In 1935, after the Great Depression has seen many people lose almost everything while others profit enormously, the NSB wins its first seats in Parliament, and begins to gain traction with its “A New Netherlands in a New Europe” nationalist message. The members focus on dismantling the wealthy ruling class, and in the first years, they espouse nonviolence and strategic positioning as tactics to gain power within the existing government.

  For a man like my grandfather who feels himself slighted and that his talents are overlooked in a hierarchal class system that values only commerce and not intellect, a proud man who thinks the existing system is run by idiots, the NSB’s message is irresistible. The movement preaches the country’s interests over group interests, and group interests over individual interests. The national socialists advocate for a strong leader who will make decisions that ostensibly benefit the whole country rather than the few, and for an economy focused on equal distribution of labor and wealth. In order to achieve this, they claim it is necessary to revoke the voting rights of the country’s citizens. I suppose that to my grandfather, it must have seemed more important to be granted the promise of a fair and equal system that would punish the corrupt and knock the wealthy off their gilded pedestals than to have his voting rights guaranteed. But those who support fascism usually fail to recognize that they are supporting fascism until it is too late and they realize that they’ve been waiting for their promised reward from snake oil salesmen. At what point does naiveté become negligence?

  While there has been a great deal of literature written about the false image of tolerance in the Netherlands before the Second World War, and though anti-Semitism was more common in the general public than the postwar Dutch were willing to admit, generally speaking, there is an institutional policy of tolerance for Jews within the NSB prior to 1935, with an estimated 150 of the 30,000 members being Jewish. In 1933, in a retort to anti-Semitic party members, Anton Mussert specifically addresses the NSB’s Jewish members, stating, “You have your place in our ranks with full conviction. You remain worthy of this standing, and you may have the satisfaction of having done your duty to all our people despite suspicion and scorn.” He further states that the “Israelites are just as welcome as other people” in the party, and insists that “National Socialism in the Netherlands does not have to be or become anti-Semitic, because here in the Netherlands there are Jews who are wholeheartedly committed to the well-being of the Dutch nation, because they help form one inseparable whole and wish to continue doing so.”

  But all of Mussert’s grand words about unity and Jewish inclusion ultimately prove to be empty. In 1936, with Germany gaining power in Europe, some party leaders float the idea that they should ally themselves with Adolf Hitler, and criticize party leader Mussert for allowing Jews into the party. The internal fighting causes the party to lose strength, as cooperation dissolves. More radical leaders and the five NSB Parliament members begin pushing the pro-Nazi agenda further in the government and openly flout parliamentary procedure with disruptive outbursts and verbal abuse. They eject the Jewish party members during this period. Later, when the Nazis begin to deport Dutch Jews, the more prominent NSB Jews, who belong to the group of sixty-four so-called Mussert Jews, are sheltered by Mussert and sent to live at Villa Bouchina, a rectory in Doetinchem. Mussert is eventually overpowered, and the nine remaining Jews taking refuge at Villa Bouchina are arrested by the Nazis and sent to concentration camps, where three of them die.

  * * *

  I don’t know why my grandfather didn’t leave the party between 1936 and 1939, as it became clear that the NSB was descending into fascism with increasingly anti-Semitic and pro-Nazi rhetoric. However, there are clues that my grandfat
her was unhappy with the party and made attempts to distance himself and perhaps even leave the party when the NSB became more aggressive and the general population turned against members. In my research of his dossier at the National Archives, I find a letter addressed to him, dated January 1939, from Mussert himself:

  Comrade, Thank you for your letter on the 9th of this month. Of course, your number remains permanently assigned to you. Those who are being terrorized shall soon be able to continue to bear their share of responsibility to the cause within a new system. Thank you for everything you have done for the movement. It is my assertion that you will never be able to renounce your National Socialist membership. The leader, Anton Mussert

  My grandfather’s original letter to the party is not included, so I can’t know to what extent he attempted to extricate himself from the party and what the reasons were for his communication, but the letter makes clear that he was under thinly veiled pressure by the leaders, being told that he could never renounce his membership. I imagine that my grandfather was intimidated and perhaps more than a little afraid as he realized the position he was suddenly in with the NSB’s turn toward the Nazi party and war threatening the Netherlands: leave the protection of the party and become their target even as the anti-NSB community shunned him, thereby becoming persona non grata to both sides, or stay with the party that could shield him as it gained power in a political climate that was escalating toward war? He had four children. He argued with his brother-in-law Jan, a police officer, who disagreed with the NSB. I have heard from multiple older people in the family that during these arguments, he said, “If you’ve said A, you have no choice but to say B. It’s too late for me to back out now.”

  * * *

  According to all sources, my grandmother has no time for politics. My grandfather drags her to one meeting at the urging of party leaders who want families to be dedicated to their cause, and she signs the form they push under her nose. In the archives, I find political posters for this campaign to involve women and wives of members: “The woman who thinks also votes NSB.” But my grandmother is not interested in politics or the nationalistic nonsense, and she never returns to a party meeting, nor does she vote in any elections. She has floors to mop and meals to cook, scarves and gloves to knit, hems to sew, tablecloths to scrub clean, fights between children to referee.

  * * *

  In October 1939, my mother is born into this household. Whereas the images of my father’s family in Indonesia have a formal Protestant stiffness to them, coupled with the formality of upper-crust white colonial privilege, the black-and-white photos of my mother’s family depict the casual familiarity of the lower middle class. They lounge lakeside on a picnic, their bikes lying in the grass next to them. My two-year-old mother stands at the water’s edge in a hand-knitted bathing suit, her belly round, her dark brown eyes serious even at that age. There is an easiness in how they interact with their environment in these photos. When I am growing up, there is a photo of my grandmother that hangs in the hallway in our home in Los Angeles. She is in the woods, searching for wild blueberries. Foraging for blueberries and other wild edibles is a family activity that is carried on into my generation, a tradition passed down from my mother’s family, a clan deeply involved with nature and place. The older kids join the padvinderij, “trail-seekers,” the Dutch version of the Boy and Girl Scouts. As teenagers, they all join the NJN, the Netherlands Youth League for Nature Studies. The family often takes walks together, and my grandfather lectures the children about plants and rocks and animals along the way, his hands on his back as he walks, pausing to pick up this or that object and quiz the kids about it. I can see him clearly in my mind, though I never met him, because my uncles are also this way. “Boletus edulis,” he says, holding up a specimen. “Now, how do we know this is a King Bolete and not Tylopilus felleus? Whoever can answer first gets butter on their bread tonight.”

  Unlike my father’s family, my mother’s family is not religious. My mother’s father is an astronomer, eyes pointed skyward into the ether. Not looking for God but looking at the miraculous, logical machine of nature as the planet spins around the sun. Nature is sacred in my mother’s family, and continues to be so, with almost all of the children of my mother and her siblings going into the natural sciences, and all of us camping, foraging, gardening, and bird-watching. I read the NSB literature and notice a display of pride in old agrarian Holland, like when the party abandoned the Roman calendar names of the months in favor of names related to farming and nature. Starting with January, the new names are: hide-tanning month, wood-gathering month, spring month, grass month, bloom month, summer month, hay month, harvest month, fall month, sowing month, slaughter month, and winter month. I sometimes wonder if my grandfather was attracted to the NSB because of this strange echo of paganism in the movement that honors agricultural traditions and man’s relationship with the land. For my grandfather, nature can be trusted; it is an ordered, reliable, and predictable system. The party he pledged his allegiance to, however, was far less trustworthy.

  7

  THE OCCUPATION

  The Netherlands, May 1940

  My mother sits in her playpen chewing on a wooden teething ring while tanks roll past her home in Apeldoorn, shaking the floorboards, causing the chimes on her mobile to jingle. My mother is six months old on May 10, 1940, the day that Germany invades Holland. Two days later, the German forces enter her small town, leaving officers behind to oversee the handover of power.

  Civilians, shaken and ashen-faced, pass through the town as they move in from the south, fleeing the blitzkrieg of Rotterdam, which has been flattened by the German Luftwaffe’s relentless aerial assaults. The Germans shatter every old church, every last historic brick in the inner city. Close to nine hundred dead bodies lie in the smoldering remains, and eighty-five thousand stunned inhabitants are suddenly homeless. The news is extremely grim, and the Netherlands, which had hoped to remain neutral in Germany’s war, now finds itself under a furious attack it simply cannot fight off. It takes only four days for the country to fall. All throughout Apeldoorn, people weep as the Nazis move in.

  But in my mind, this never included my mother’s father. Before my research, when I imagined the invasion of the German troops, my grandfather was not weeping as he watched soldiers enter his town. This is what I once imagined: my grandfather standing on the sidewalk with his arms crossed in front of him when the tanks roll by, smug and pleased. Maybe he waves at the German soldiers or gives them the infamous stiff-armed salute, a grin on his face. I imagine the scene in the most evil way I can, because I need a villain. I need him to be a caricature to reconcile this secret fact I know about him with the narrative I have received in school, in popular culture, about what Nazi sympathizers look like. I need him to not be too much like me, his granddaughter. So I compartmentalize. It isn’t until I read his letters that I realize he actually loathed the Nazis, that he felt his country was being invaded, and that my black-and-white image of the war is extremely simplistic. So where do I put him now when I try to reconstruct this event in history? On which side does he belong? What if he’s somewhere in between?

  Four days after the invasion, there is no more fighting. The Germans set up headquarters in every Dutch city hall, stringing up banners and hoisting the Nazi flag up the flagpole outside the royal palace in Apeldoorn. Young men in the Dutch resistance movement throw Molotov cocktails until they are subdued and arrested, but aside from a small civilian backlash, there is no military fighting for the first years of the war, something that surprises me when I learn this later in life. Throughout my teens and into my twenties, I imagined the war as years of continuous military fighting, Dutch and Allied soldiers against the Germans. Bullets flying, snipers on rooftops, ambushes of convoys, for years on end. The truth, I learn, is much less dramatic. Unlike my father’s experience in the Dutch East Indies, after the capitulation in the Netherlands, life goes on as usual for the majority of the Dutch public, with the excep
tion of German soldiers and officers hanging about their towns and cities, running everything that was previously run by the Dutch and drinking beer in their pubs at night. The women still go to the shops, the men still go to their jobs, the trains run on schedule, and the kids are in school. Some Dutch Jews, afraid of rumors they’ve heard, do leave during this period, but the majority stay.

  * * *

  What there is instead of fighting in the streets is tension. There is hatred of the Nazis, and seething resentment of NSB members, who strike a deal with the Nazis in order to remain the sole party in operation under the German rule. It quickly becomes clear that the Nazis are calling all the shots. In his meetings with Hitler, Mussert attempts to be named the leader of a German-allied yet independent nation, but this request is denied. Instead, Mussert is given an honorary title, Leader of the Dutch People, a symbolic pat on the head for his cooperation with occupiers, and sent to his headquarters to await orders from the Nazi leaders. The Nazis appoint new mayors, all from within the NSB party, and opportunists emerge from within the Dutch population. The NSB party swells in size, acquiring over one hundred thousand new members during this period. Many of these new members support the Nazis, but just as many believe that joining the party will protect them. Some join in order to profit.

  In June 1940, the Dutch royal family flees to London, fearing for their lives. Mussert uses this to strengthen the NSB’s position, taking advantage of people’s feelings that they’ve been abandoned by their queen, whose privilege has allowed her to flee while they remain in the motherland, though most certainly the royal family would have been murdered by the Nazis if they had remained. In fact, rather than abandoning her people, Queen Wilhelmina broadcasts a weekly radio address to the country from her refuge in London, insisting that she is still very much with them. In response to this, the Nazis accuse her of provoking people to stage nationwide strikes and rebel, and so they make the owning of a radio illegal. In the Dutch archives, an anonymous poem, “Goodbye to My Radio,” appears in an article on the seizure of radios: