I have biked past The Red Pan many times in my life, and my cousins still own my grandparents’ summer cottage down the road, so this is not the first time I have seen the house, but it will be the first time I have been inside.
Via a website about the village, I tracked down the current owner, and was surprised to find that the house has remained in the same family all these years and that the owner is Heidi Parqui, the granddaughter of Mrs. Parqui, whom my grandmother cared for. She is a bit older than my mother, more my aunt Hannie’s age, but my mother recalls playing with the teenage Heidi when she visited her grandmother at the cottage. So it turns out this will be a reunion not only with the house but with the people who were there with my mother seventy years earlier. Over the years, the area has transformed from the rural religious community I knew as a child to a highly desired area of weekend and summer homes for the rich. Some of the old farmers have held out, regarding the interlopers with disdain as they herd their cows past villas in their blue coveralls and wooden shoes. The Red Pan sits indifferently in the midst of this, a field of corn still on one side, and a rebuilt summer villa on the other. Two muscular, well-groomed horses graze in the sun next to the new villa. Heidi is now old and uses a walker, so she comes to the house only to show it to visitors. Nobody has lived there for years. As a result, the house is preserved in much the same state that it was in when my mother lived there as a child.
My mother shows me the corner where she slept. It’s cramped and tiny, but I can understand why she loved it. Heidi spends several hours with us drinking tea on the veranda of the house, reminiscing with my mother. I see it as an opportunity to get my mother’s story from a different perspective.
“What did people think about your grandmother giving shelter to an NSB family?” I ask. Oddly, my mother jumps in immediately before Heidi can answer, stating, “Oh, nobody in this village cared about that. They liked us. It was not an issue.” My mother loved her time in Hoog Soeren and doesn’t want anything to mar her image of it, her longing for acceptance and community still a deep need. As gently as I can, I say, “I know that was your perspective, but I actually would like to hear the answer from Heidi.” Heidi looks uncomfortable, and watching my mother’s face, says, “Oh yes, sure, they were liked by most people in the village. They always behaved themselves.” I push on, despite being aware that my mother may not want to hear unvarnished truths. “Knowing how deeply NSBers were hated, Heidi, I find it hard to believe that there was no issue at all with your grandmother putting NSB-allied tenants in her house. It’s OK. I want to know the truth about what people really said back then, behind the family’s back.”
“Really, nobody around here made an issue of that,” my mother answers for Heidi again. I stop her, and say I’d like to hear from Heidi. “Well,” says Heidi carefully, diplomatically, “it’s true, most people held their tongues. But my uncle and aunt said, ‘How can you take NSBers into your home?’ Actually, the truth is, they wouldn’t talk to my grandmother after that. It caused a bit of a rift in the family.”
“I think that’s remarkable,” I say. “Your grandmother was willing to risk her own relationships to help a woman and her children in need.” My mother listens to us in silence, then quickly changes the topic of conversation to her memories of the garden. She doesn’t want to think about the ways her father’s actions radiated outward to affect others.
* * *
War scars more than just one layer of a community. It scars both figuratively and literally. It scars people, it scars systems, and it scars landscapes. The war permanently changed this area. Even in my childhood when we visited Hoog Soeren and the nearby village of Kootwijk, where my aunt lived, it always lurked like an apparition between the trees. There has never been a time when I didn’t know this beloved, serene place as marked by the memory of violence. From the trenches dug at intervals along the roads, now scabbed over with moss and heather, to the concrete bunkers built into hillsides, World War II was a part of this landscape for me. I learned at a very young age that there were areas my siblings and I were never to play in when we rode our bicycles deep into the woods. Over seventy years later, this is still the case. There are still sections of the forest where we cannot wander freely today. Walking with my mother through the specific quiet that only the deep woods can offer, over paths worn hard by thousands of feet, I peer between branches to the shafts of sunlight filtering through to the forest floor, wondering what lies beneath. During the war, the Nazis used the dense cover of this forest to bury their explosives caches throughout the region. As a child, my mother found a German ammunition belt in these woods, and brought the unused bullets home to make jewelry out of, until her mother discovered them and told her they were dangerous. The big yellow signs with red exclamation marks still stand in certain parts of the forest, jarring people out of their communion with nature. They read: “Danger! This is a cleanup area of a former WWII German munitions depot by the Royal Bomb Squad. Stay outside of this zone and stay on the paths.” Today, picnicking parents out for a day in the country might feel the blood drain from their faces when their giggling children toddle from the thickets holding live grenades in their chubby hands. Look, Papa, I found an egg! It’s the type of scene that still occurs each year or two with alarming regularity throughout the Netherlands.
I wonder what existing in this kind of imminent danger does to a psyche. My mother tells me about the flasher the children encountered in the woods after school when she was a child, shaking the whole community, but the munitions zones and the bomb dugouts, and even the underground bunkers where Jews hid in these woods during the war, were such a constant presence that they were experienced as part of the landscape. I wonder, how does cohabiting with the perpetually active remnants of war, as my mother did, affect one’s psychology? How does anxiety manifest in the body and carry on in the children of those who lived in a consistent state of fear? In the woods after our visit with Heidi at The Red Pan, my mother and I walk on past the warning signs we no longer read, treading carefully as a matter of habit.
* * *
Hoog Soeren, the Netherlands, September 1946
My grandfather is released in the fall of 1946, after serving his sentence of sixteen months of internment, as they call it. He has no job, no property, and no prospects. What he does have is a wife and children who are living in Hoog Soeren in The Red Pan, all arranged by my grandmother.
Her father’s return to the household doesn’t make much of an impression on the young Elsje. She already has the restoration of family and the home she wants by then in her mother and siblings. When I ask her about it now, she says she does not recall the day her father arrived at the cottage after being released from prison. Like a car merging onto a freeway, he’s suddenly just there among them again, eating at their table, drinking the tea his wife sets before him. While the return of her father specifically doesn’t make much of an impression, six-year-old Elsje finally feels content once again having her family back together and a secure sense of home, and this period in Hoog Soeren is marked by a profound sense of happiness. She builds snowmen with her siblings in the winter and goes to school on the back of her mother’s bicycle. It’s her first year of school, first grade. The next year she will ride her own bicycle beside her siblings, learning this necessary skill early like all Dutch children. In a random search of information about the two-room Hoog Soeren schoolhouse on the internet, an old sepia photo pops up, and there is Elsje at eight or nine years old, sitting at a wooden desk in the classroom with the other young children, looking cheerful in a plaid dress with a massive white bow in her hair. Everything in her life looks normal, for the first time in her young experience.
But of course, beneath the veneer of normalcy, the effects of the war still carry on. In Gelderland, where they live, all the NSBers are known. My grandfather has been banned from his job at the auto mechanics’ school, banned from the teaching profession, and he is virtually unemployable in the area. The Apeldoorn Coura
nt, the local newspaper, runs an article on June 29, 1946, naming the NSBers from the area who have come before the tribunal, including my grandfather. Not bothering to hide its contempt and dripping with sarcasm, the article reads,
A.C. de Kock, teacher in Apeldoorn, interned at Wezep, was a member of the NSB until September of 1944, a local group leader in the movement … The accused believed that the NSB could deliver better social benefits. He denied having spread political propaganda at the mechanics school where he worked. He was disappointed that the organization later developed in “a deplorable manner.” His defense witnesses paint the accused as someone who was regarded by those with opposing views during the war as a real mensch. Defense lawyer asked for consideration that the accused’s four children are living in a children’s home. His 14-year-old is forced to live with Kraut girls and similar “riffraff” that are causing the girl, who feels far removed from them, to develop an inferiority complex. Sentencing [A.C. de Kock]: Internment until September 15, 1946, and loss of voting rights. Mrs. M.C. de Kock-Barto, of Apeldoorn, was a member of the NSB, but never showed up actively in the movement. She was interned for 7 months and is now home. Sentencing: Internment in camp as time served, loss of voting rights.
With articles like this in the local newspaper of a small city, my grandfather and the family are marked in the community. He will not be hired anywhere near Hoog Soeren. Even those who would consider it would be ostracized for hiring an NSBer. With five mouths to feed, my grandfather has to find a way to earn money. Eventually, he manages to do this, getting a job at the National Aerospace Laboratory in Amsterdam, where he works on aerodynamics projects. The job requires him to be in the city, so for several years, he returns home only on the weekends to see the family. Together they bike through the woods to the train station in Apeldoorn on Saturday afternoon to pick him up, and they drop him off on Sunday evening when he takes the train back to Amsterdam. Elsje sees her father very little. He plays a very minor role in her day-to-day life in Hoog Soeren.
On one of his weekends home, he gets my grandmother pregnant for the fifth time, and nine months later, in May 1948, little Rob is born, something that brings joy and hope back into their lives. Eight-year-old Elsje is no longer the baby in the family, something she is thrilled about. In photos, she carries her baby brother around like a doll. She dresses him and feeds him his bottle and coos at him through the bars of the playpen set up in the tiny living room of The Red Pan. Uncle Rob now writes of his birth, “I believe, or like to believe if you want, that I represented an allusive sort of restart for this pair of parents. They couldn’t undo history, but they could give themselves another go. Unfortunately, that was never going to be quite realistic. Babies and toddlers are very good at soaking up in considerable detail the state of mind of those around them, even if they don’t have the grown-up words. All that denial. All that frigging silent denial.” Rob pushes back against the narrative that my mother seems to want to adhere to: fresh start, no enemies. I understand his resentment now at having been used as the savior figure in a family unwilling or unable to reckon with the past. Certainly as he grew up, he would have known that something had happened to the family unit that was not to be spoken of, and that he was excluded from. It seems a heavy burden for a child to carry.
The family gets a dog, a German shepherd they call Bandit. They play in the garden and go to the lake in the summers. Elsje learns to swim and makes a best friend, a girl named Eva who lives a few houses away in the village, a friend she will keep for the rest of her life. In the summers, Mrs. Parqui comes to stay. My grandmother does her washing and cooks her meals, and the children play with her grandchildren, including Heidi.
But despite the relief from the immediate terror of war, the country has not healed, perhaps will never heal. Buildings haven’t been rebuilt. Lives have been lost. The anti-German and NSB sentiment is everywhere. There are businesses that won’t even serve people with a German accent in the decades after the war. My grandparents would have been, of course, hyperaware of this as blacklisted adults. But by and large, young Elsje is insulated from it, growing up in the forest and on the heath in rural Hoog Soeren with the occasional exciting visit to the village from the teenage Princess Beatrix, stopping by in her horse-drawn coach on weekend outings from the royal palace in Apeldoorn. Elsje becomes Else as she turns eight, nine, ten, eleven, twelve, all in the tiny cottage in the village.
Her older sister, Hannie, graduates high school in this time and moves into a small apartment in a nearby city where she works as a lab technician. Through that job, she meets a research student, Hans, and before too long, young people’s impulses being what they are, she is pregnant. Little Rob, her toddler brother, is beside himself. He runs through the village of Hoog Soeren, yelling, “I’m an uncle! I’m an uncle!” Else, now thirteen years old, is excited by the prospect of being an auntie to her big sister’s baby. She adores babies. She beams when she is told the news by her mother. “This is going to be so great!” she says. Her mother frowns. “No, Else. This is not so nice at all. This is not good news.” Hannie will have to marry Hans. There is no other option in the 1950s for a pregnant girl. Word of Hannie’s fate spreads through the village, where two other young ladies have also become pregnant. The baker, bringing loaves to the houses on his bakfiets cargo bicycle, raises his eyebrows when my grandmother tells him the news during their customary chitchat on the front stoop of The Red Pan. “Goh, that stork sure be flying hard round here,” he says in his heavy regional accent. “Here’s your whole-grain loaf and twelve biscuits, Mrs. De Kock. Congratulations on the blessed news.”
The baby comes, a little girl named Maaike, and she is beloved by the family. Hannie, who has received the most rigorous high school education among the children and is extremely smart, abandons her pursuit of a career. She marries Hans and they live with baby Maaike in the university city of Leiden, where Hannie becomes a stay-at-home mother. Later, she follows her geologist husband to Libya and Texas before settling right back into a farmhouse in the Veluwe, with three more children. This is the house where I will later live for a year and where our family will spend our summers.
When Else is fifteen and her elder siblings have already left home, she and her mother and Rob move to Amsterdam to join her father, who has finally reached the top of a waiting list and has been issued government housing, an apartment on the outskirts of the city. It marks the end of the happiest time in her life, and a move into one of the most difficult ones. Before they leave, her father uses the money he has saved up to buy a parcel of land in Kootwijk, very close to Hoog Soeren. The parcel has only an old barn and the burned remains of a house on it, and my grandfather plans to build the family a house on the site of the former house. But when he submits the application for a building permit to the county office, he is inexplicably denied the permit, despite the parcel’s clear zoning for a residence. There is no explanation for the denial. Shortly thereafter, the mayor’s office changes the zoning of the parcel to preclude building any new structures on it. Later, rumors filter back to the family. No NSBer is going to build a home in that county. So the family leaves for Amsterdam owning an overpriced parcel of land on which they can only camp on the weekends, sleeping on cots in the barn. They will never live in the Veluwe as a family again.
11
FOUT IN THE CITY
Amsterdam, the Netherlands, 1955
My mother hates Amsterdam, with its horizon-marring buildings and its pressing inhabitants, the thousands of unfamiliar eyes watching, scrutinizing her in the thick crowds of the Kalverstraat where they shop. The family doesn’t live in one of the stately brick homes lining the canals, but rather deep in West Amsterdam, in the blocks of government housing. Else is fifteen when they move, an awkward age to transfer to a new school in this unfamiliar city. Bert is at university studying chemistry, Pim has also just started his university studies, and Hannie is living with her husband, Hans, and pregnant with her second child at twenty-three. O
nly little Rob and Else live in the Amsterdam apartment with their parents. Else learns to navigate on her bicycle the streets from West Amsterdam to her school in the Jordaan, one block from the house where Anne Frank hid during the war, and possibly the school Frank would have attended at my mother’s age had the war not intervened.
Else is a shy, nature-loving girl who has spent very little time in any big city. The teens in her class have heavy Amsterdam accents. They are more mature in the ways that city kids are usually more mature, discussing films and music and current fashions about which Else has no clue. She is also one of only two girls in her class, as Dutch high schools are separated into different levels and emphases, and this is the HBS B (Beta), the high school for kids studying math and science. In the 1950s, hardly any girls study math and science. Else becomes something of a ghost, silently floating in and out of her classes. She spends her free time reading and getting out of the city entirely, going on nature walks with the NJN, the Netherlands Youth League for Nature Studies. But as one of two girls in the class, she can’t avoid the inevitable attention from teenage boys. The following year, when she is sixteen, she’ll get a boyfriend, Dick, who will be her only friend at school. Despite this, depression is the main thing she will remember about Amsterdam.
* * *
Amsterdam, the Netherlands, 2014
When we are in Holland, my mother always stays with her brother Pim’s wife, Bouk, at her farm in the north, and I stay in an apartment in Amsterdam. I ask her multiple times to schedule time for us to visit her former neighborhood in Amsterdam, but she resists. “Let me think about it,” she says. “I’ve already seen it,” she says. And finally, “I don’t want to see it.” In the end, I visit the site of her old apartment alone, which is perhaps more fitting. The place symbolizes a time of extreme isolation for my mother, and perhaps it is in isolation that I should view it.
All Ships Follow Me Page 19
