by Loet Velmans
It started as a sort of open debate. Then the argument got ugly. Although we had little room to move about, someone shoved somebody else. Cries of “Look out!” and “Be careful!” rang out. A line was drawn between some of the older generation (though not the members of my family) who wanted to return, and the young, who insisted on going on. There was also contempt for the Jonkheer, whose very name, title, and accent aroused feelings of class antagonism. When I realized that what we were talking about involved the risk of our being arrested by the Gestapo, I began to shake. This was serious business—our very survival was at stake. My flight had been launched head-over-heels in a spirit of adventure; I had had no time to consider the consequences. Now that we were stuck dead in the water, reality set in. I must say something, I thought. I have to find an irrefutable argument that will clinch it once and for all and convince all aboard that there is no choice but to go on. But once again my throat was dry, and I clammed up, just as I used to in Mr. Brouwer’s natural history class. In order to speak up, I had to overcome the respect for my elders that had been drummed into me since childhood. I just couldn’t do it.
The debate was now really getting out of hand. People were shrieking and yelling and interrupting each other. And then suddenly the discussion came to an abrupt stop. An eerie silence followed. It was as if it had suddenly hit every passenger aboard that here we were, drifting helplessly at sea. What had we done? What was next? Everyone in that lifeboat seemed to have been struck dumb. Perhaps we were waiting for one person to come forward and be decisive, to show some leadership. Then a lone voice, timid and hesitant, suggested a vote. That hardly made sense to me either: democracy at work in an open vessel on the high seas? Before the polling could start, however, one of the students finally took charge. All those who were having second thoughts, he yelled, should simply swim back to shore. The mutiny subsided as quickly as it had begun.
Meanwhile, two of the other student engineers had been tinkering with the motor below deck. After what seemed like hours but must have been less than fifteen minutes, they succeeded in getting it started again. Our voyage was resumed, and we chugged along at the same steady pace as before. The four students were still firmly in command. Families sat huddled together on the benches along both sides of the Zeemans Hoop. Everyone was quiet, looking back at Holland’s disappearing coastline. Only the children slept.
At daybreak a formation of bombers flew over us. We assumed they were German, though they were too high for us to gauge whether they were friend or foe. An elderly couple told the sergeant he had better hide his rifle under his coat; if he didn’t, we might be mistaken for a military target. The unidentified aircraft ignored us. They were undoubtedly after bigger game.
The sun rose in a breathtaking pink dawn. “Another beautiful day,” we said to one another. Except for the children, no one complained of hunger or thirst; we were too scared, too excited, or both. After mistakenly identifying a large piece of driftwood as a mine, I finally spotted a barrel-like object that looked as if it might be the real thing. We gave it a wide berth.
It was midafternoon when two large shadows suddenly loomed up on the horizon. In the bright sunlight we could not make out what they were—only that they were rapidly closing in on us. Few of us had ever lived through so many hair-raising events in such a short space of time—first the motor dying within sight of land, then the bombers overhead, then the mine. As for me, it was all only part of a great adventure.
Whatever it was that was heading toward us was moving with great speed. The quick succession of so many panicky moods, so many ups and downs, was my initiation into the sort of spontaneous mass hysteria which I found myself part of several times in my life. After the passage of so many years, I cannot recall how, as a teenager, I coped with a number of crises that so quickly succeeded one another. I must have been uplifted when one euphoric moment followed the other and depressed when such glimpses of hope and relief were quickly overtaken by new calamities.
As the lead ship came closer, a cheer went up. She was flying the Union Jack! She was a destroyer: the HMS Venomous— a name meant to strike fear into the enemy, but one that, to us, meant we were safe at last. Soon we were alongside. A rope ladder was lowered, and British sailors helped us climb aboard—women and children first. The women squealed as the sailors lifted them up onto the deck. Everybody was laughing, though there were also copious tears of relief. We were formally welcomed onto English soil and invited to partake in high tea.
An announcement came over the public address system: the captain was inviting the crew of the Zeemans Hoop to join him on the bridge. Dick and I tagged along with the four students, who were the true heroes of the day. Up on the bridge, the captain showed us charts of the sea we had just crossed, pointing out several minefields strung just below the surface of the water. We had passed right over them, oblivious to the danger. It was only thanks to our unusually shallow draft that our boat had not been blown to pieces.
He also told us that our navigation skills left something to be desired. The North Sea currents had driven us south toward the British Channel. Had we continued on our course, we would have missed the English coast altogether and been swept into the Atlantic Ocean, headed for the American continent. We stared at the captain with a mixture of relief and utter disbelief.
It wasn’t until half a century later that I learned the full extent of our luck that day. In the German naval archives there is a report by the captain of a German U-boat, who writes that on May 15, 1940, he had the HMS Venomous in sight through his periscope just as a group of civilians were being taken on board. We owed our survival to the fact that both his submarine and a second U-boat that was also in the area had used up their supply of torpedoes on an earlier mission.
In The Hague, my parents had had the foresight to pack a small suitcase for each of us, containing some clothes, a toothbrush, and other essentials. Father’s also contained most of our savings, in the form of bearer bonds that he had retrieved from his bank’s safe deposit box. Once aboard the destroyer, Father discovered that, in the haste and confusion of departure, he had picked up the wrong suitcase. The one Mother had been watching like a hawk throughout our voyage turned out to be filled not with bonds but with clothes hangers! Fortunately, Father had stuffed some valuables in his pockets, and Mother had some large banknotes in various currencies and gold coins in her handbag. We were not entirely destitute.
We also had our passports. In Dover, where we disembarked, the British authorities processed us quickly. We were served tea, first by the immigration people and again on the platform of the rail station, by a group of kind ladies who belonged to a volunteer organization. A couple of hours later we boarded a train for London.
3
Refuge
AS SOON AS WE ARRIVED IN ENGLAND, it became clear that my ambition to join up had been unrealistic. There was as yet no organized Dutch army. When I walked into a British recruiting office, I was told in no uncertain terms that I was too young to enlist in any military force.
We lived four months in London, our home a small hotel off Russell Square. Dutch refugees occupied most of the rooms in our hotel. When I wasn’t called to accompany my parents, I hung around the lobby, playing bridge or chess and flirting with the pretty switchboard operator. I also explored the neighborhood and visited some of London’s tourist attractions, but for the most part I was bored. The only exciting distractions consisted of the occasional dash to the air raid shelter and my attempts to impress the receptionist, who paid not the slightest attention. I was itching for new adventure.
A week or two after arriving, my parents visited Mother’s London business contacts. Some of these were Jewish refugees from Germany, who had lost no time reestablishing themselves in a new country. I went along, serving as translator, because Father knew no English, while Mother managed to make herself understood by mixing a few vaguely English-sounding words into her heavily Dutch-accented German and accompanying this mélange wi
th energetic gestures. Although she did usually manage to get across her message—that we had left home and worldly possessions behind—she came away from her conversations with only the faintest notion of what the other person had said in reply.
Mother’s friends had built up their new businesses in England in the trade they had left behind, which was ladies’ millinery. We must have visited one contact a day over a three-week period. Each milliner referred us to the next one. I dreaded those visits; they were a terror for me. I was always complimented on my English and sometimes patted on the head. But I was deeply embarrassed when these silver-haired, elegantly dressed, and heavily accented gentlemen would press a small bundle of pound notes into Mother’s hands. As Mother dabbed at her eyes, I would look away, furious, ashamed, and humiliated. At those moments I resented my mother even more than I had when she forced me to wear a sailor suit or fancy plus fours.
My own English was rather good. At school, English had been my favorite subject. From the age of twelve I had listened to the BBC, marveling at the wit of Noel Coward and the deadpan presentation of the six o’clock news. In 1938 I spent a long summer holiday in Dorset. A voracious reader, I had devoured more books in English than in Dutch. Charles Dickens, Sir Walter Scott, Oscar Wilde, and J. B. Priestley were among my literary heroes. I loved the New Statesman, Agatha Christie, and the London Illustrated News. In London I continued to tune in to the BBC breathlessly, following the course of the war. (After the war I learned that our Zeemans Hoop had been put to good use by the British: it had made several trips to evacuate British troops from Dunkirk.)
While Mother made her rounds, Father had absolutely nothing to do. Yet he looked more preoccupied and worried than I had ever seen him before. He put a damper on my optimism by sharing his concern with me over the rapid victory the German armies had scored in France, which, he was certain, would be followed by an invasion and the inevitable German conquest of England. Although I could not imagine such a disaster, I felt helplessly small trying to argue with my own father.
One day a fellow refugee in our hotel asked whether I would like to learn the diamond trade. I was curious about the offer but loath to accept it. Father urged me to give it a try, and Mother was determined to get me out of our hotel’s lobby, where I was wasting my time making eyes at the receptionist. After thinking about how bored I was, I reconsidered. A day later I was an apprentice in the diamond trade. All the action took place in just one street—Hatton Garden—where transactions were conducted in the open air. I followed my tutor around for a few days, watching as small envelopes containing half a dozen or a dozen stones were passed from hand to hand, the gems studied through a loupe and appraised for value. Bids were made, rejected, increased, and finally accepted. Each trader made a modest profit on every transaction, but at the end of the day I wondered what the point was. It seemed to me that the merchandise had merely been recycled. Within a week, I told my parents that this kind of apprenticeship was a waste of time as far as I was concerned. I found the entire business useless and embarrassing. Both Father and Mother told me how disappointed they were, but they weren’t able to change my mind.
It struck me how separate the circles were in which I now moved. There were the relatives and the members of my new extended family from the Zeemans Hoop. They were the protective core around me; a very familiar environment, no matter how displaced we all were. Compared with this Dutch coterie, Mother’s milliner benefactors were aliens: they spoke German among themselves, and their English was heavily accented. The English receptionists and other hotel staff members eyed us warily, sometimes making us feel like intruders, while the diamond traders in Hatton Garden seemed to come from a different planet. The last group I was dealing with, the Dutch government bureaucrats-in-exile, also seemed to operate on a unique island of their own. They maintained a stiff and formal attitude toward us, the humble subjects of Her Royal Highness. I started to wonder how everyone could be so preoccupied with his or her own little world; was there anything that tied us all together? I knew that there were Belgian and French refugees close by. I never met a single one. There was a war going on out there, but we had secured a little niche; I moved about quite comfortably and contentedly in the small cocoon that our family had built for itself.
My parents were not the only ones concerned about my future: no less a personage than the Dutch minister of waterworks, Mr. Alberda, who had been a neighbor of ours in Scheveningen, took an interest in me. His ministry had overseen the building and maintenance of water projects—Holland’s extensive network of drainage canals and protective dikes, a very important matter in a country that lies largely below sea level. Exiled in London with the rest of the cabinet, he now seemed to have all the time in the world to take a young neighbor’s case to heart.
His suggestion was that I should finish my schooling in the Dutch East Indies. That archipelago (today the Republic of Indonesia) beckoned as an attractive destination. Mother had a cosmopolitan outlook, the result of years of buying trips to Paris, London, and Vienna, and she immediately saw the move as an opportunity. Father, who generally let Mother call the shots, agreed that the prospect of a new life in the Orient, far from the war in Europe, looked good. He had just one reservation: it was supposed to be uncomfortably hot out there, and he feared Mother might suffer from the heat. However, convinced that the war would not be over soon, he saw no point in hanging around London waiting for the day when we could return home.
Meanwhile, Mr. Alberda had arranged a meeting with one of his colleagues, the now similarly underemployed minister of justice. Professor Gerbrandy, who sported a thick walrus mustache, agreed with the plan and authorized a government loan for our passage. He even promised me that, upon finishing high school on Java, I could return to Europe to fight the Germans—although, he added, he could not guarantee that the war would last that long. There was every reason to believe that the Germans would be defeated long before I graduated in 1941. (Gerbrandy, who was subsequently promoted to Prime Minister in exile, maintained his staunchly optimistic outlook throughout the war.)
Our family was offered passage on a Cunard ocean liner. Our final destination was Batavia (now Jakarta), capital of Holland’s crown colony, at the farthest remove—or so we thought—from the war.
Our last meal in London with the whole family was a tearful occasion. Tante Aal and her husband Max had decided to stay behind in England. Max had found a job as a diamond polisher in Llandudno, Wales. But Aunt Ro, Uncle John, and Cousin Dick threw their lot in with us. Mother and her sisters were very close. All through dinner, the tears flowed freely. “We’ll be safe over there,” said Uncle John. “The Japanese will never enter a war they cannot win.” It surprised me that Father did not say a word, but I was so preoccupied with my own feelings that I did not ask him what he was thinking.
On a dreary day in early September, we boarded a train to Liverpool, where our ship was docked. The Viceroy of India, bound for Singapore, was one of four large ocean liners that had been converted into troop carriers and that would be traveling in convoy.
That first night at sea, my thoughts went back to our earlier voyage, on the Zeemans Hoop. This time I felt much more secure. Snug in my cabin, seeing the ships signaling to each other in the dark—a series of single, blinding lights transmitting mysterious coded messages—I felt safe. But by the following day the other three ships were gone—on their way to America, we were told. The fact that we were now unescorted and alone made Mother and many others aboard anxious.
Because the Mediterranean was a war zone, the Suez Canal was closed to us. Instead, we had to go around the Horn of Africa. Our voyage lasted seven mostly uneventful weeks under an often burning equatorial sun. Dick and I struck up a friendship with the two Royal Air Force sergeants who shared our cabin. They kept us apprised of how far they had gone—or had been allowed to go—in their nightly trysts with two British army nurses also en route to the Far East. The morning-after instruction about the correct use of
the condom (which they called a French letter) and other clinical details fascinated me. Our roommates were only three years older than we, but their experience was light-years ahead of ours. In any event, their reports of sexual prowess kept me awake at night, feverishly wondering how much longer I was doomed to remain a virgin.
I also formed a friendship with two Dutch Jesuit priests, who provided me with a different kind of instruction. Every morning at ten I would accompany them on a brisk walk along the deck. They had been attending a meeting of their order in England at the time of the German invasion of Holland and, like us, were now refugees on their way to the Indies to assume new teaching assignments. I have only a dim memory of the younger one, a hearty, rotund figure. By contrast, I have a vivid recollection of the older priest’s long nose and strong jaw, and of our struggle to keep our daily conversation audible—walking around the deck against the wind or with a gale at our backs. The priest was punctilious in his use of language. His lecturing left little room for dialogue, although I usually managed to get a few questions in. His subject was the Dutch war of liberation from Spain in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. He seldom talked about his religious beliefs, and rarely related them to that early war when the Protestant Dutch fought Catholic Spain. My friend extolled the virtues of the Dutchman’s national self-determination and glossed over any reference to the dogmas of his own church, which had been largely responsible for the Dutch insurrection against Spanish rule and had turned the Dutch into fervent iconoclasts. He did, however, draw analogies between the past and our country’s current plight, reinforcing my own conviction that the Germans were going to lose, even if they seemed invincible now. His encyclopedic knowledge excited me: he spouted facts, anecdotes, and insights. These conversations stimulated a passion for history that has never left me.
