by Loet Velmans
That same night we had dinner in a charming restaurant that also floated on a deck in the river. The light of a full moon was reflected in the water. The whole scene was calm and peaceful and could not be less reminiscent of the way the banks along the river had looked half a century ago. Japan’s domination was far away and long ago.
A quiet hush hung over the restaurant. Occasionally a tourist barge with glittering lights would glide by; its thin sounds, in various tones and different languages, evaporated into the starlit night. Suddenly a commotion right next to our restaurant disturbed our tranquillity. A poorly lit vessel docked next to us and was quickly populated by a large group of Japanese. A voice started to blare through a shrill sound system, and then the music started. After about ten minutes of deafening noise, the floating disco cast off from its landing and clucked away. The sound of Japanese rock music and the harsh commands of the disc jockey drifted away. In the taxi on the way back, Lex managed to calm my anger. “This is my twelfth visit to Thailand,” he said. “I have met many young Japanese. The new generation. They want to know what happened. They don’t say it openly, but they don’t seem to trust what their elders tell them about the war.” Who was I to say what the Japanese made of their visit to the bridge? They too had lost thousands of men on the railway and tens of thousands in Burma. Were they here to honor the fallen? To communicate with the souls of their dead fathers and grandfathers? On the bridge, when they moved massively toward us, was it a rekindling of their anger and disdain for the Westerners they held responsible for a war that, they believed, had been forced upon them? For the unforgivable act of the atomic destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki?
For some reason, I found myself thinking about a bathtub I had once been in on one of my visits to Tokyo. It was in 1980: from the 1950s through the mid-1980s, I traveled to Tokyo frequently on business. On this occasion, the Dutch ambassador and his wife, Johan and Nan Kauf-mann, who were old friends, had invited me to stay with them in the Netherlands’ embassy. The building was designed in the 1920s in an orientalized Anglo-Western style, a modest but elegant villa in the heart of Japan’s capital.
The bathtub was the longest one I had ever been in. Fully stretched, I could practically paddle back and forth. My kimono lay neatly folded on a wooden stool near the door; I had tried to hang it up but hadn’t been able to reach the metal hook. The unusual size of the tub and the lofty placement of the hook seemed designed for giants. The Japanese builder who built it, years before the postwar influx of Westerners into Tokyo, must have estimated the average Dutchman to be twice as tall as the average Japanese. I had seen Japanese prints depicting the sixteenth-century Dutch explorers who set up a trading post in Nagasaki: they looked like alien Goliaths. Four hundred years later, it seemed to me, we were still about as clueless about each other as we had been then. Two other images came to me as I lay there in that bathtub: an illustration of my boyhood copy of Gulliver’s Travels, showing a giant Gulliver trussed up by dozens of scurrying ant-sized figures; and the famous 1945 photograph of victor and vanquished—a tall General MacArthur towering over a diminutive Emperor Hirohito.
Throughout my life I have lived in many countries and traveled in many environments. I quickly feel at home everywhere. But in Japan it was different. I was acutely aware of the differences. I always sensed that the Japanese businessmen and government officials I met did not feel comfortable around me either, nor around other Westerners. And it makes no difference, I thought, that they have no inkling that I was their prisoner, working in Thailand, on the Burma railway, in World War II.
On our last day in Thailand, we visited the Allied war graves in Kanchanaburi. In a large field surrounded by trees, thousands of simple crosses identified the graves of prisoners buried here. We wandered up and down the rows of graves, trying to find the names of our comrades. Most of those buried here were between the ages of twenty and twenty-three. In the Dutch section Lex discovered the name of a boy he had gone to school with almost seventy years ago. I was hoping to find my friend George’s name, for I knew that many of those interred here had been moved from the individual camp graveyards shortly after the war. But there were just too many graves, too many names. It was impossible to find anyone I knew.
Meanwhile Edith had walked to the far side of the cemetery, where a group of workmen were digging up a row of beautiful trees. She was curious to know why. One of the men, dressed like the others, lifted his conical hat and explained, in unvarnished Australian, that the trees were dying and needed to be replaced. They started to chat, and Edith mentioned that those two men at the other side of the graveyard were her husband and his friend, and that they had both been in the area as POWs.
The man was Rod Beattie, supervisor of Allied war graves in Thailand. Beattie had lived and worked in the area for twelve years and was among the original builders of the memorial at Hellfire Pass. Like Terry Beaton, he was a railroad engineer, and he was equally passionate about the history of “his” railway. He had walked the entire three-hundred-mile trail several times and talked like an archaeologist: on frequent expeditions alongside and on the overgrown railway bed, he would still dig up spikes, tools, and the occasional human bone. He too was excited to meet two Dutch ex-POWs, and he took us back to his office to inspect his collection of artifacts and examine old World War II aerial reconnaissance photographs of the area. When we pointed to the location of Spring Camp on our map, Beattie assured us that we had been in the right place: “I’ve been there several times,” he told us. “That’s where I found some human bones.”
George, I thought. Now we can go home.
1
Boyhood
I WAS TEN YEARS OLD IN 1933, the year Hitler came to power. During my teens, as Hitler’s grand plan to expand the Third Reich began to be realized, my parents and their friends were confident that, whatever else might happen in Europe, the Germans would leave the Netherlands alone, as they had done in World War I.
My parents, like their parents before them, had been born and bred in Amsterdam’s Jewish community. Amsterdam had been home to a significant and often influential Jewish population since the sixteenth century. Jews fleeing the Spanish Inquisition, although not necessarily welcomed with open arms, were allowed to practice their religion by the Dutch, who have always had an innate tolerance for people of different religious and political persuasions.
By the time Iwas born, families like ours—descendants of a second wave of Jewish immigrants who had arrived from Germany and Eastern Europe in the late eighteenth century—had been totally assimilated into Dutch society. For us, Yom Kippur was the only day of the Jewish calendar on which we acknowledged our faith and stayed home from work or school. Even then my parents and I did not attend services, and we fasted only until we felt hungry. We were linked to our Jewish forefathers primarily through the four great rituals of life: circumcision, bar mitzvah, marriage, and burial. On our birth certificates, however, we were identified as Jews, and thereby inexorably classified as members unto death of the Nederlandsch Israelitische Gemeenschap (the Dutch Jewish Religious Community). In the Netherlands the religious affiliation of all citizens was officially listed. Each head of a Dutch household who belonged to a church or synagogue found on his annual income tax form an obligatory small assessment for the government-imposed “church” tax, the proceeds of which supported one’s assigned denomination. Holland is a neat country, and the Dutch are a precise people who file each subject in its proper place. In a precomputer era, all pertinent personal information about each and every citizen and resident—name, address, sex, age, and religion—was recorded on endless lists and efficiently stored in file cabinets and boxes. The Nazis got the lot.
Both of my parents had left school at age twelve or thirteen. My mother (a woman ahead of her time) was a buyer and department head at the Bijenkorf (the beehive), Holland’s largest department store. Her job frequently took her to Europe’s fashion capitals, leaving me in the care of our live-in housekeeper.
I was used to the fact that Mother came home late and left early, but comparing myself to my friends whose mothers were there for them all the time made me feel a little distant and apart. On her return from abroad, Mother overcompensated for her absences by smothering me with love and concern—and the latest fashions for boys. I tried to get out of wearing the Parisian sailor suits and the cashmere vests she brought back for me. I did not want to be the best-dressed kid on the block. I couldn’t stand being decked out in my Sunday best and would change my clothes as soon as my parents were out of the house. My father was in the fur trade. I was always excited when he took me to his office which was located in the “House of the Seven Heads,” a historic building on one of Amsterdam’s canals.
Every evening would find me sprawled full length on the living room floor, the pages of the newspaper spread out in front of me, brooding over the state of the world. I was obsessed with the political turbulence in Europe. Another victory for Hitler: the Saarland, the Rhineland, Austria, Czechoslovakia. Meanwhile Italy was overrunning Abyssinia, and Franco was winning the Spanish Civil War. On the other side of the world, the Japanese were carving off ever larger chunks of China; banner headlines reported on the Rape of Nanking. But Asia was too far for me to worry about. It was what was going on in Germany, our country’s next-door neighbor, that really mattered. Reading about the imprisonment of those who opposed the Nazis in concentration camps and the persecution of the German Jews made my blood boil.
I went to the cinema at least once a week. There, before the main feature, Fox MovieTone would show footage of Hitler and his awesome hordes of brown-shirted SS men. The sight of Hitler’s followers roaring in unison and raising their right arms sent a chill down my spine. How can they let him get away with it? I’d think—“they” being an amorphous entity composed of France, Britain, and the United States. In other words, our friends, the good guys, who in my youthful fantasy were certainly already on their way to kidnap Hitler and lock him up and out of harm’s way for the remainder of his life.
I was not consciously patriotic. My schoolmates and I sang the national anthem on appropriate occasions. We cheered loudly when the Dutch national soccer team scored a goal against Belgium, its archrival; we rejoiced in our queen’s birthday because it meant a school holiday and a festive parade downtown. But I did not wholeheartedly share in the nation’s joy at the wedding of Crown Princess Juliana and Bernhard, a German prince. Being German, he did not get my blessing.
At school, our geography lessons consisted of memorizing the names of the towns, rivers, and lakes of the Netherlands as well as of the islands, cities, and volcanoes of the Dutch colonies in the East and West Indies. In history class, we learned how the Dutch had pluckily fought off the invaders from mighty Spain, England, and France, and how the colonies had been won. Yet none of these events—neither the beginnings, the progress, nor the endings of our wars—was presented in a particularly stirring way. We were not aroused to feel any great passion for our homeland. We simply took for granted the cozy, nest-like atmosphere in which we lived.
Nor did I feel particularly Jewish. We were “Yom Kippur” Jews. My vague awareness of being a Jew came about through a special ritual, which had nothing to do with religion, to which I was treated on the first Sunday of each month. While other Jewish preteen boys attended Hebrew school, Father would take me on a tram ride to the Jewish quarter. On these Sunday mornings with Father, I was exempted from dressing up to please Mother. Wearing old plus fours, we would first stop at a bakery in the Jodenbreestraat, the main thoroughfare of Amsterdam’s traditional Jewish neighborhood, for challah and ginger bolus, a traditional, strongly spiced Jewish cake. Then we would walk to visit Opoe and Omoe, Father’s parents, who lived in a walk-up cold-water flat on the Rechtboomsloot, a canal in the old Jewish quarter. Besides the bread and ginger bolus, we also dropped off half a dozen oranges, a large piece of crumbling aged Gouda, and a bag of freshly roasted peanuts in the shell.
I liked to climb into Omoe’s built-in bedstead on the far wall of my grandparents’ living room, close its shutters, and peek through its wooden slats at Father seated between his parents. Opoe was a shy and taciturn man who became eloquent when Father was his sole audience. At birthday celebrations, surrounded by his daughters with their husbands and children—and Father, Mother, and me—he would hardly utter a word.
Opoe was a diamond polisher by profession and a devoted member of his union. On our Sunday-morning visits he would report on the latest labor meeting or the May Day parade in which he had taken part: these were momentous occasions in his life. May Day was the most important day of the year, and he would repeat to us the rousing speeches he had heard, word by word. His union, he believed, would remedy the many grievances he and his coworkers held against the owners of the diamond factories.
Opoe never kissed me like Mother’s dad, my other grandfather. But he always shook my hand when we parted. It made me feel grown-up, especially since I had been listening attentively from behind the shutters. It also made me proud, as if through his handshake I had been drawn into his circle.
Afterward, Father would take me by the hand, his other hand now holding the bag, which was now only half full. We would stroll through streets and alleys where Amsterdam’s Jewish inhabitants clustered around their cavernous synagogues and scraped together a living as small shopkeepers, tailors, manufacturers of textiles and linens, clock makers, diamond polishers, and craftsmen in half a dozen other trades. Many were poor, and peddlers out of need. It was the only trade open to them.
Amsterdam had always prided itself on being an open and tolerant society—more so than any other European city. The niche that the Jews had carved out for themselves in Amsterdam was replenished by a continuous stream of new arrivals from Eastern Europe, replacing those who migrated to new middle-class neighborhoods, just a short tram ride away.
When Father married, he left the Jewish quarter for good. Mother’s parents had moved out earlier; my maternal grandfather had prospered modestly from trading as a wholesaler of household goods.
My parents’ generation was the first to fan out to new neighborhoods in significant numbers. They settled mainly to the south of Amsterdam’s center. In the 1920s and 1930s the Jewish population of Amsterdam had swelled to 80,000, constituting well over half of all the Jews in Holland. It was one of the oldest and largest Jewish population centers in Western Europe. After World War II, about 5,000 Jews were left.
Where Father and I walked, Jews had lived since the sixteenth century. Rembrandt had lived and worked in this neighborhood, finding models among the archetypal patriarchs on his block.
As we strolled along the clothing and junk stalls at the nearby Waterlooplein, Father firmly held my hand and told me not to touch. I needed Father’s reassuring grip, as I was a little scared to be in a crowd of so many tall strangers wearing dark large-brimmed hats. On one special Sunday, a few days before Mother’s birthday, Father selected a glittering brooch at a jewelry stall. It made Mother very happy.
By one o’clock we were home for our Sunday lunch. I would devour the open-face sandwiches—thick slices of heavily buttered challah with chunks of the sharp cheese on top. I would have ended up with a serious case of indigestion had Mother not called a halt to my gluttony. Even so, she let me crack a few peanuts—another special Sunday treat.
The rest of the peanuts were shared with my friends on our free Wednesday afternoons. We used to get together in a tent pitched on a sandy building site at the end of my street. First, we played Cowboys and Indians, ending our games with the peanut ritual. This consisted of our counting how many nuts were enclosed in each shell, and sorting the singles, doubles, and triples into separate heaps. The champion was entitled to eat as many of his winnings as he could stomach; the losers shared the rest.
In 1933, the year Hitler came to power, we moved to Scheveningen, a fishing village bordering The Hague. We lived in a cozy semidetached home in a prosperous middle-class neighborhood,
opposite some tennis courts and close to a well-laid-out woodland park and one of Holland’s widest, longest, and most endlessly overcrowded beaches.
I was fifteen in the autumn of 1938, and remember having a strong sense of foreboding that mushroomed into fury and disgust when I watched my family react with relief and joy to the news coming out of the conference in Munich between Britain’s Neville Chamberlain and Chancellor Hitler, at which the fate of Czechoslovakia was sealed.
We were all seated around the radio in the living room of my favorite aunt, Tante Aal, listening to the thunderous applause with which Chamberlain was welcomed back to London. Tante Aal, who was childless and lived on the same street as two of her sisters, was always well prepared for our family gatherings. Her table was invariably laden with chocolate-glazed cream puffs, chocolate cakes, truffles, nougat, and liqueur-filled bonbons.
Was the whole world ready to approve this sellout? Here was my own family cheering on old stuffed shirt Neville so that they, in their simplemindedness, could continue to put their trust in an ever-lasting peace! Only Father caught my eye and nodded thoughtfully at me. I shared his fear, and he shared my anger. In that one moment I felt very close to him: we both were appalled. The others, unaware of our outrage, earnestly redirected their attention to the rich assortment of light and dark brown confections displayed on the table in front of them.
