All Ships Follow Me
Page 17
Anyone who has had anything at all to do with the Germans during the war is subject to the “hatchet” that will be brought down on them during this period. Nazi sympathizers are arrested as traitors. NSB members are forced to eat feces, tied up, and beaten or shot to death in the street. Female NSB members and the wives of NSB members are sometimes raped. Dutch girls who have become romantically involved with German soldiers billeting in their towns, nicknamed moffenmeiden, or “Kraut girls,” get the worst of it in cities throughout the country. They are held down, shaved bald with razors or even hedge clippers, and marched through the streets with their hands on their heads and signs hung around their necks that read “Kraut Slut” or “Traitor” while people throw garbage at them. Black tar pitch is smeared on their faces. They are jeered at, and a few people throw rocks. “Kraut lover!” they yell. “Dirty Kraut whore!” The epithet is uttered by children and adults alike. In the many photos documenting these public shaming sessions, the wide smiles of glee on the faces of the people in the crowd are a startling contrast to the vacant faces of the girls being held with guns to their heads. They have the faces of people who have left their bodies.
My mother and her family hide in their house, the children crawling under the beds, whenever they hear knocking on the door. I am struck that both my parents have hidden under beds this way within a year of each other, children terrified of raging vigilantes outside.
On April 17, 1945, the knock at the door they’ve been fearing comes, and my grandfather is pulled from the house by members of the resistance and marched away with his hands in the air and a gun at his back while my grandmother pleads and the younger children cry. The city is celebrating liberation day, and Canadian troops, floats full of dancing people, and marching bands parade through the streets. They march my grandfather, along with other NSB members, along the parade route of angry onlookers to the center of Apeldoorn, where he and the other suspected collaborators are loaded onto trucks to be sent to a detention camp. Then it is quiet, until unexpectedly, another knock comes on June 21. This one is a complete shock.
I can see my mother standing on the front stoop of her home in Apeldoorn, the house on de Jachthoornlaan: Hunt-horn Lane. It is 1945. She is holding a rag doll. Her thin legs emerge from under a cotton sundress and disappear into a pair of hand-knit socks and a pair of leather sandals. She squints into the sun. Cyclists pass on rusty bicycles with their wooden tires and crane their necks. Elsje is crying. Pedestrians gather to watch; someone shouts an insult. A car drives by slowly. Her three siblings try to comfort her. Their moes, my grandmother, is being marched out of the house by military policemen with guns.
The facts are still fuzzy for my mother, her memory malleable. She was very little. She speaks slowly, carefully, reluctantly, unlike my father. “I … I remember things being thrown out of the second-story window for us in the five minutes my mother was given to prepare. She was throwing things out the window. We didn’t know they were going to come at all because my mother wasn’t active in the NSB,” says my mother now. We sit at the table next to her sewing machine and scraps of fabric, and she drinks tea, the tea I brought back from the Netherlands, from the shop where my grandmother always bought it, extra bergamot. My mother’s hair is white silver now, shining brilliantly under the lights. Her wrinkled hands smooth over a piece of fabric, back and forth, as she talks. “We weren’t prepared for it. I just have this image of things being thrown out of the window, things falling down to us from above.” A thick wool blanket and pillows, sweaters, a bag of toothbrushes. My uncle says this part isn’t true, but he may have been on the other side of the house, and this is my mother’s memory. She says she can still see it. And whether or not it is true, it is her truth and the image that remains with her today.
What is not in dispute: the children’s mother, my grandmother, being loaded into a car, a black car from the POD, the Politieke Opsporingsdienst, the Political Investigation Service. Then the POD agents place wire seals on the doors and windows of my mother’s house. They post a notice on the front door stating that the home has been seized. Boots stride past the children without stopping. Car doors slam. The engine is started. My grandmother turns to look at her children through the window of the police car, her face stunned. And moments later, the car is gone, headed toward Wezep, the same camp they brought my grandfather to two weeks earlier, the special jail for NSB members. My five-year-old mother is crying harder now, inconsolable. Hannie, fourteen, takes her hand. Their two brothers, ages thirteen and seven, flank them. The officers do not come back. Nobody comes for them. The children stand for many minutes on the curb as the elder sister thinks. The pedestrians move on. Fingers hook to pull curtains furtively aside in the houses of the neighbors. They watch the children standing in the street, but they do not come outside. When Hannie turns toward them and catches their eyes in the sliver of space between curtain and window, the fingers hastily retract and the curtains fall closed. She turns away.
* * *
William Maxwell writes about a boy losing his home in the novel So Long, See You Tomorrow: “Whether they are part of home or home is part of them is not a question children are prepared to answer. Having taken away the dog, take away the kitchen—the smell of something good in the oven for dinner. Also the smell of washday, of wool drying on the wooden rack. Of ashes. Of soup simmering on the stove. Take away the patient old horse waiting by the pasture fence. Take away the chores that kept him busy from the time he got home from school until they sat down to supper.… Take all this away and what have you done to him? In the face of a deprivation so great, what is the use of asking him to go on being the boy he was. He might as well start life over again as some other boy instead.”
There is the image of my five-year-old mother again, left standing in front of her home, which has just been locked and sealed off. Too late, she remembers the Steiff bear the Canadian soldier gave her, now entombed in the locked house. In my mother’s mind, her mother has been taken away into a black hole, never to return. She and her siblings begin to move down the road, away from the home that is, in an instant, no longer theirs. They walk to the only house where the door might open for them. “Go to the Van den Dools’,” their mother had called hastily as she was led away by the police. So the children walk through a city in the throes of Bijltjesdag, past the shops with signs in their windows that read “No wigs sold here to women with shaved heads,” and keep their eyes on the cracks in the sidewalk, hoping nobody recognizes them, heading for the home of the Van den Dools, unsure if anyone will still be there. Perhaps they have been vanished too, put in handcuffs and taken away.
After what feels like a long time walking but is likely around thirty minutes, they arrive at the home, and Hannie knocks on the door. Elsje cowers behind her older sister’s skirt, holding on to her leg. They hear footsteps. A curtain is pulled aside and falls shut. Then the footsteps come to the door and the door of the house opens. Mrs. Van den Dool regards the children, whom she knows quite well. Her face indicates that she already understands the situation. Hannie’s voice shakes as she speaks. “They’ve taken Mummy away. She told us to come here.” Mrs. Van den Dool brings the children inside and pours hot tea for them. The house is very quiet. The wooden grandfather clock swings its pendulum. Tick. Tock. Tick. Tock. Elsje looks around her for the Van den Dool daughters, her teenage babysitters, but they are not there. “We sent the girls to Germany, where they’ll be safe,” says Mrs. Van den Dool. “Mr. Van den Dool was arrested yesterday.”
Mrs. Van den Dool cannot keep them. She has too many worries about her own family and no money. The next day, Aunt Ket arrives by train and takes them south to her home with Uncle Jan and their kids in Dordrecht. Aunt Ket is a solid woman, a pragmatic workhorse not prone to sentiment. She herds the children onto the train and sits tensely, hands folded in her lap, staring out the window at the empty fields that slide past into the train’s wake. When they arrive in Dordrecht, a city adjacent to Rotterdam that is
tattered by bombing from the Germans during the war, my mother and her siblings walk from the train station with Aunt Ket and crowd into her tiny house on the dike. It is very small for the four children and their two cousins. They sleep squeezed together like pencils in a box. As Elsje is falling asleep, she hears arguing downstairs. Aunt Ket’s husband shouts, and the words float up through the floorboards. A bunch of NSB children … be able to show my face … not our problem … Then Aunt Ket’s voice rises. My sister’s children … can’t just leave them … this is family … what are we supposed to do? So the exchange goes until Elsje falls asleep and dreams of angry neighbors with hatchets calling for their heads.
When my mother tells me this, her sense of hurt and rejection is palpable. Where my father learned to detach and become wholly self-contained, my mother’s entire adult life has been defined by a raw desire to belong somewhere, with others, to be wanted, to be home. “I heard them fighting,” she says of her aunt and uncle. “He was a member of the resistance and he had a reputation to protect. He couldn’t have NSB children in his home. They told us they didn’t have room for us, but it wasn’t just because of the lack of space. They also didn’t want us because we were fout, wrong.”
Documents in my grandfather’s trial dossier that I read in the National Archives seem to support my mother’s memory. There are letters to the Ministry of Justice from Jan complaining about his brother-in-law’s political mistakes and being saddled with a bunch of unwanted NSB children. Pressured by his wife to take care of my mother and her siblings but wanting to be rid of them and angry about the position it puts him in, he requests that his brother-in-law be released immediately in these letters, “in the hopes that you, in recognition of my own family which played no part nor participated in the stupidity of my brother-in-law, yet is now the dupe, will offer your cooperation in my request and hopefully can offer me an expedient and positive response.”
When the request is denied, Uncle Jan wins the battle in the little house on the dike. The NSB children, Aunt Ket’s nieces and nephews, must go. The next day, Aunt Ket is very quiet as she places a piece of bread on the plate before each child. She doesn’t look at them, and they eat in silence. Finally, she says, “I’m afraid this house is too small for all of us. We will have to find another solution.” In the afternoon, she is gone for several hours. When she returns, she is holding a paper from the Renate Home for Child Welfare. It is the third time Elsje has been ejected from a home in a few months. Shortly thereafter, Aunt Ket brings Elsje and her siblings to the Renate Home, a large building with two wings to house NSB children whose parents have gone to jail, boys and girls left in the wake of the mistakes of their parents and the swift retribution of their country. All across the Netherlands there are institutions like this, filled with the thousands of offspring of the fout.
“I’ll come to visit,” Aunt Ket says. “I promise.” The woman from the home smiles at the children. She takes Elsje’s hand. “You’ll be in the little children’s wing.” Elsje looks to her older sister with big eyes. Aunt Ket crouches down. “Be a good girl, Elsje,” she says. “Don’t make any trouble.” And Elsje doesn’t make any trouble. She makes it her duty never to make any trouble again. She is absolutely silent as the lady from the children’s home leads her down the hallway, away from her siblings and Aunt Ket, who is waving bye-bye.
NSB members like my grandparents are sent to jails and the same Nazi camps in the Netherlands where the Jews had been interned during the war, the most famous of which was Westerbork. Because there were so many of them, an estimated 120,000 to 180,000 accused collaborators, some of them spend years awaiting trial. A handful of them don’t make it that long, as Hatchet Day didn’t end outside the camps, and a number of the NSBers being held for trial are killed inside the camps. In 2012, the remains of nine people were dug up in the woods outside of Westerbork, and these bodies belonged not to Jews but to the NSBers held there after the war. More bodies are believed to be buried there, though it is not known how many. In an article in the Dutch newspaper Trouw reporting on the 2012 discovery, Helen Grevers, a researcher at the Netherlands Institute for War Documentation, wrote, “It was always known that there must have been bodies buried somewhere, the Ministry of Justice has never made a secret of that. There probably also is some documentation of it. Only it has long been unknown where exactly the graves are.”
Shame breeds silence. Many of the NSB members refused to speak about their experiences after the war, and my grandparents were no different, stating that it was a closed chapter they never wanted to talk about again. I search the internet for any information about what my grandparents might have experienced during this postwar period and their subsequent detention. I find a very old film online of the liberation of Apeldoorn, which includes the rounding up of the NSBers. I pause the film to study the grainy faces of the figures who walk with their hands up, at gunpoint, through a gauntlet of celebrating Dutch citizens. As a sound track to these images of arrests and public shaming, cheerful marching band music plays, which, out of context of the era, seems perverse. I realize that I am searching through the faces of those being marched through the streets for my grandfather, whose image I have never actually seen, in person or on film. Perhaps he is among them. It’s a distinct possibility. But I don’t know my grandfather well enough. In the film, men, women, and teenage children walk with their hands in the air, the crowd jeering. One woman’s face in particular strikes me, and I pause the video, squinting. This woman could be my grandmother. It isn’t, as she was arrested later, but she would have been treated much the same. The woman in the video wears a white sign around her neck, and as she walks with her hands up, guns at her back, she looks down at the sign, trying to read what they’ve written across her chest. In other films, I watch NSBers held in town squares and made to bend over on platforms while members of the public beat them with chairs and rods. Little children look on with their parents at these beatings, their faces lit up with openmouthed laughter. Amazingly, shortly before finishing this book, I find a photo in a county archive of unnamed NSB men being arrested after the war. A man at the center of a crowd walks with his hands in the air, marched through the streets to the courthouse past jeering citizens like so many others I’ve seen in other photos. The caption reads: (b/w) photo. People suspected of being Nazi sympathizers are brought in, 17-04-1945 … (In the period shortly after the second world war many innocent people were also arrested.) I have an eerie feeling creeping through my body that this man is my grandfather, though I never met him and the photo isn’t clear. I email the photo to my mother. She responds, “Yes, my love. That’s him. I have never seen this photo. Shit.” She spends several days crying over the emotional confrontation of the image. When I share the photo with family members, they too express shock. My brother writes, “That is a shocking photo of Opa de Kock being arrested! Wow. I had to stare at that for a while.” My cousin Hanke reflects my own reaction, writing, “I’ve never seen that photo of our grandfather being arrested, and it hit me hard. For me it’s suddenly visual evidence of our family history, to which shame, guilt, and question marks are attached.”
With the abrupt end to the war, it is difficult for people to reestablish a harmonious and orderly society with collaborators of the enemy living next door. People cannot simply go back to life as normal while anger and pain about their neighbors’ actions pervades, and with the vacuum of a clear, operational government left in the wake of the German retreat from positions of authority, it’s absolute mayhem. The government realizes that they need to bring in collaborators sooner rather than later, before they are murdered in the streets and in their own homes. Because of the haste, they don’t have time to vet every case. They round up everybody who is suspected of having had any connection at all to the Nazis or the NSB, no matter how vague the link. This includes instances of mistaken identity. In a letter he sent to my father’s family in Indonesia after the war, my father’s uncle in the Netherlands wrote, “Delightful
to see how the NSBers were rounded up and the Krauts interned.” This reflects the predominant sentiment in the population.
These people will be sent to the former Nazi camps in the Netherlands, and because there are so many, they will be forced to build their own camps. Other videos I find show NSBers erecting the barbed-wire fences for their own imprisonment, as the government hasn’t even had time to prepare for this massive influx of prisoners. They’ll stay interned in these camps, some for half a year or more, until their cases can be heard at a tribunal. The conditions in many of the camps are horrendous. Prisoners in these camps aren’t able to wash, sleep on straw in unheated horse stables, and are underfed. Toilets are holes in the ground. In one camp, Harskamp, 150 prisoners die of starvation, and Harskamp is the only camp where the government conducted any official inquiry—four years after the fact, in 1949–50, after a former prisoner published a pamphlet about his experience there. At the time, the abuses in the camps were largely ignored, and the research of journalist Koos Groen, as presented in his book on NSB families, Wrong and No Good, suggests that a minimum of 1,000 NSB members died in this period after the war in the detention camps, with their deaths left largely uninvestigated. His research includes a study of 178 accounts of interned NSBers in the National Archives that indicate that the conditions in all of the camps were equally miserable and included “systematic abuse, systematic starvation, and a high incidence of sexual harassment.” Why did these abuses go overlooked for years by the public and the Dutch government? According to an article by Netherlands Institute for War Documentation employee Johannes Houwink ten Cate in the Dutch online “History Newspaper,” “Prisoners are tortured and beaten bloody. Guards empty the contents of the latrines on their heads. But the Dutch public doesn’t want to hear about the abuses in camps for ‘foute’ Dutch. Collaborators had broken the national solidarity during the war, and for that they needed to be punished … [From a] political-social perspective the trials and punishment of ‘wrong’ Dutch citizens was effective in the extreme. [From a] humanitarian perspective, the arrests and internment of ‘wrong’ Dutch citizens was a catastrophe.”