My mother and father, Greta and Jan, had two small children – one and four years old respectively – when the German army invaded the country on May 10, 1940. Under German occupation, Dutch society needed to continue functioning as must my father, who was chief of police in a provincial town in the East of the Netherlands. They lived in a town close to that of Greta\u2019s mother, who ran a farm. Jan was a policeman. His top brass instructed all police to continue on the job. While life seemed unchanged with the occupation – at least for a while – it drastically fell apart.<\/p>\n
About two decades earlier, Greta\u2019s mother, Johanna, and her Dutch husband, Hendrik, had immigrated from Germany to Holland. Greta and her twin brother, Hans, were nine. The family had saved enough money in Germany to buy some land in the Netherlands after working for years on the railroad. They purchased a piece of farm land, and a duplex farmhouse in town.<\/p>\n
Hendrik had migrated to Germany in the thirties when jobs were scarce in the Netherlands. He got a job laying railroad tracks and worked his way up to become an overseer. This was when Hendrik met my German grandmother. They got married and Johanna followed Hendrik with a wagon along the rail tracks, selling food and goods to the railroad workers. Their five children – two sets of identical twins and one other child- all born within four years, traveled with Johanna in the covered wagon. While this must have been a hard life for the parents, it was probably interesting for the children. You could say my mother and her siblings were born travelers. They were also German-born. Photos in the family album show Greta as a young woman together with her siblings, including twin brother, Hans, and her father, busy harvesting the hay. A horse was waiting patiently in its harness before a half-loaded cart in the field. These sepia-toned tiny photos show an idyllic and happy family, hardworking. Greta and Jan didn\u2019t have children yet in the photos.<\/p>\n
After Hendrik died in his sixties, Hans, who still lived at home and was a bachelor, helped Johanna with the farm. He also had a job as a mechanic. When he got married, he move with his wife into the other side of Johanna\u2019s duplex-farmhouse. In winter, the pigs and a cow lived in the back of the farmhouse within the dark confines of a stable. This was next to a small room that contained a non-flushable toilet. A clean stable and never too smelly, it was just a bit scary for a small child having to use the toilet after dark because the whole area was lit by only one bare bulb. Johanna kept chicken in a henhouse beside the orchard at the back of the farmhouse. <\/p>\n
Greta became a nurse in a psychiatric institution after high school and worked there until she married Jan. I saw photos of him as an attractive and athletic young man, who was into boxing and target shooting. He was a bit of a jock. He enrolled in the military mounted police force. Jan and Greta had two boys – aged one and four – when war broke out. My eldest sister, Maggie, was born during the war. Before the war, my parents were visiting back and forth with all of the extended family, but things changed after the war. My father was transferred to another town, where my sister was born, a few months after the German capitulation. A few years later Dad was promoted to another town – his last position before retiring – where I was born as the last and fifth child. Growing up, I occasionally visited Johanna\u2019s house with my mom. I had never met Opa Hendrik; he died before my time. I didn\u2019t get to know Uncle Hans and Aunt Liz. My mom told me Hans had always been a follower, while she was the bossy one of the two. Nevertheless, he must have been smart, as he went to a pre-academic program and got an HBS diploma.<\/p>\n
Hans and Liz had a child, little Hans, who was a couple of years younger than me. When my mother and I visited Johanna, I secretly got to play with little Hans out in the backyard; his home was forbidden territory. My mom forbade me to play with him, but kids being kids, we found a way. My mother assumed an atypical attitude in dealing with Johanna\u2019s next door neighbours, my uncle and aunt. Usually, a kind and very friendly woman with all, Greta became a different person and turned mean in the presence of little Hans\u2019 parents. When we happened to run into Hans or his wife in the yard, Greta gave them the cold shoulder. She froze them out from any contacts with me and blocked me from the possibility of me building any real memories about them. They were as uninteresting and untouchable as mud. Once in a while I heard snippets of conversation between Johanna and Greta in accusatory tones from another room. They stopped talking as soon as I entered the space. Only after diving into the family history- 60 years later-did it become clear to me what alienated Hans from the family. To me as a four-year-old, these adults were incomprehensible.<\/p>\n
My eldest brother is thirteen years older and he has some memories of war times. I got to hear about those memories, much later at a family reunion. My parents did not talk about the war. I have no memory of it, although the war ruled my childhood, and my parents wore its effects underneath their everyday lives like ill-fitting and scratchy wool underwear. In grade school, my teachers taught beyond the three Rs and held forth on the perils of discrimination and intolerance. At a young age I saw photos and movies of living skeletons. There were people who had survived concentration camps – people who were either Jewish, or different in some way. I later understood that to mean they were homosexual, developmentally delayed or otherwise disabled – attributes that were punishable by death in the eyes of the Nazis.
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These survivors from Germany and the occupied territories had been shipped by railcars and worked and brutalized to near-extinction in German industrial extermination camps. We saw photos and videos of piles of collected items from those gas chambers – for example, millions of bones of the exterminated as high as a house. We saw piles of suitcases, and boots, and human hair to be used for pillow fills; as well as large dug-outs with emaciated dead bodies, ready to be set on fire. We heard all of the atrocious facts of that particular war. It was a scary mystery to us children how this could have happened? We were shown these unimaginable images with the moral intention that we never allow this kind of catastrophe even happen again when we became adults and rule the world in the place of our parents. We were educated – no – indoctrinated to become tolerant and to appreciate differences in others and learn to recognize, and disapprove of, the slightest signs of discrimination. We children embodied the hope of our parents for a better future for the nation and the world. No wonder we were the “flower-power” and “love” generation and despised war as adults: “make love; not war!”<\/p>\n
Recently my eldest cousin who is eighty years old gave me the result of his research into my family’s history. It included a piece written by my dad, Jan, about the arrests of Dutch collaborators as well as of the enemy on the heels of the war, on liberation day. Seventy years later, it was the first written account of his that I would ever read. Jan\u2019s matter-of-fact report started set me wondering and imagining the scenario around, and condition under, which he wrote. As a policeman, he must have had a hell of a time cajoling German army officials, while trying to protect the town’s residents from depraved Nazi policies. The occupiers frequently arrested non-compliant citizens and sometimes shot them for the slightest of infringements against War-time German regulations. Sometimes they were even held for no offence at all but as hostages. It was not uncommon for a person to be shot in the street execution-style just as a deterrent. This was an example of the terror-rule by the Nazis. It is possible that the occupying force showed Jan some measure of difference because he was married to a German woman. In any case, he remained the town’s police chief until liberation from occupation by the allied forces.<\/p>\n
While Jan’s appearance of being sympathetic to the occupiers was a ruse to help him protect the town’s citizens up to a reasonable extent, Johanna was a staunch supporter of Hitler and openly adored him. She thought that Hitler gave pride back to the defeated and orphaned German nation after the First World War. To her, Hitler was someone who finally dared say the things many Germans were already thinking in a depressed and devastated country after a First World War, which had ended only 20 years earlier. It is all those foreigners\u2019 fault, those Jews – never mind that ‘those Jews’ had been born German and had been Germans for generations. Johanna was friendly to the German soldiers; she was a true collaborator opposed to Jan. Johanna gave her treasures to the ‘war-effort’; this included antique copper wares, my mom told me in an unguarded moment. Jan was pissed, but what could he do? His wife was Johanna\u2019s daughter. He didn\u2019t want to alienate his mother-in-law or his wife. But such open support for the Nazis seemed to be more widespread. It appeared that majority of Europeans had been covertly anti-Semitic. This was why there had not been any serious and systematic effort to stop Hitler in his fury to kill Jews until it was too late. Ich habe es nicht gewusst – I didn’t know – was a popular phrase, unfortunately after the fact.<\/p>\n
In my research, I learned that Jan was arrested three days after the liberation and brought before the purging committee to justify his actions. Some community members had accused him of collaborating with the enemy. Plenty of witnesses stepped forward to testify, some for and some against Jan. The testimony of members of the local underground resistance group finally set him free. A writer for an underground paper, De Vonk<\/em>, testified on his behalf. He had made a sketch of Jan at work in the field while assisting with illegal drops of British weapons for the resistance. The local and the regional commanders of that illegal group testified in my dad’s defence. That testimony exonerated him during the hearings that followed liberation. He was quickly released but had to be transferred to another town since locals remained too hostile. Two months after the war, that resistance group published a bundle of their stories that I hunted down and now have a copy of.<\/p>\n Each and every report of suspected collaboration or criminal actions filed against a civil servant was referred to an Exceptional Court. It determine the extent of wrong and appropriate punishment. There was no law for the offence of collaboration with an enemy. This was virgin territory for the courts. The new government reinstated a previously abolished, centuries-old death penalty to cater to the unusual post-war situation. The post-war adjudicators, who had survived the war years without blemish either in prison or underground, started with investigating the worst offenders first. Jan\u2019s highest superior within the police force, Tenkink, had been the deputy minister of Justice. He got the death penalty and was executed within the year. His successor, Schrieke, was also sentenced to death. But the frenzy for revenge had passed by the time his appointment with the hangman came. Queen Wilhelmina stepped in and directed clemency. His sentence was commuted to life in prison in 1948.<\/p>\n From extensive investigations and in trying top war criminals, it became clear to the government that the police top brass had been criminally involved with the Nazis to an advanced level of collaboration. The police leadership had instructed police rank and file to comply with that same level of collaboration as well. The Exceptional Court, in its judgements, never took the top-level police collaboration order into consideration as far as individual civil servants were concerned. The argument was that such civil servants should have known, by virtue of their profession, <\/em>what correct conduct required. Policemen were sentenced for overstepping the bounds of decency, and for breaking the law, even while instructed by their superiors to do so. About half of the police force had been investigated.<\/p>\n I dove into the history of my dad and researched his seventy-year-old files, which were hidden away in some national archive. I found out about his own self-conduct in the dangerous and uncertain situation of war occupation. On instructions from the local resistance group’s commander and acting with calculated duplicity, Jan pretended as police chief to like the German occupiers in town as well as the commander of the German prison camp, with whom he formed collegial relationships. He played his role of informant for the resistance very well, while appearing to be a collaborator and fooling everybody in town, including his subsequent detractors.<\/p>\n Jan collected and passed on information about German troop movements from the local Wehrmacht commander and from the boss of the man-hunting commandos of the prison camp, Erika, which was under the German Nazi police (Ordnungspolizei). In his role as Dutch police chief, he was able to lead some arrested Dutch people to freedom, intervene on their behalf. He also assisted with the illegal weapon drops by the British for benefit of the area’s resistance groups. Jan\u2019s brother-in-law was a Dutch Nazi, while another brother-in-law was the regional commander of the resistance. Jan\u2019s life must have been a balancing act, with a potential traitor in his extended family and a wife he was not sure he could trust because her mother was a collaborator as well. This must have put his immediate family at great risk. The police commander in his region was pro-Nazi. The regional officer of Justice was also a potential traitor. Anybody within the justice system in those days could easily be a spy for the other side. Civil servants had been replaced with Dutch Nazi members. By the end of the war, one third of them were Dutch Nazis. It really couldn’t have been called paranoia when there really were people out to get you.<\/p>\n War had a great impact on my parents. It might have contributed to my dad becoming such an intolerable straight shooter, after regaining the freedom of liberation. He had spoken and acted according to his true beliefs after the war, shedding the duplicity and appearance of sucking up to the Nazis. I have never given my parents enough credit for surviving without blemish and staying on the right side during those years. I just had no idea. As a nation, the Dutch were collectively traumatized by the brutal events of war and the daily struggles of living through it, or even by the events after liberation. Many were unable to talk about it afterwards, as most had dirty hands, in some way. The nation was disgusted by the whitewashing of so many who had been morally stained by their conduct during the war years. Politicians who had been collaborators were elected again and resumed their jobs in positions of trust. The police force and the justice system was judged and found lacking, and was tainted for the following twenty years. Many Dutch people, including the police, had actively caused the deportation of Jewish Dutch. Those that had been registered members of the Dutch Nazi parties were severely punished, targeted, scapegoated and were often the subject of severe abuse in prisons, even when they had committed no real criminal act beyond signing up for that dreadful party.<\/p>\n There was no honor in survival. My parents, like so many others, never wanted to tell us children what happened in their lives during the war. Bury it, move on, don’t think about it. That was the thought of the day. Yet, Remembrance is big in the Netherlands. On May 4 the Dutch remember the fallen. This is called Remembering the Dead. On May 5 they celebrate the liberation of World War II. I am unable to push back tears when I see on TV expressions of gratitude on the faces of Dutch citizens and their children even after 70 years. Canadian and American soldiers, members of the liberating allies, have become mythical heroes in my homeland.<\/p>\n I am an immigrant. I remember my Dutch trauma on Remembrance Day, the eleventh day of the eleventh month. I cry for the wonderment on the faces of the very few allied veterans left, who probably do not understand the heavy Dutch tribute. These veteran think they had simply done their job and had an adventure. But at what great sacrifices! Unfortunately, war did not stop after the Second World War. Atrocities continues and the promise of “Never Again” has been severally broken. We see refugees by the millions seeking a place of peace. Discrimination continues for people that are different, look different, believe something different and live differently.<\/p>\n We are all guilty when we do not stop others in their hate propaganda; when we do not protest loudly enough, and when we think it is not up to us to shelter the displaced or help relocate refugees. We didn’t keep our parents’ promise of “never again”, however well intended. I cry for that fact, and for the imperfect world we are living in; for our environment that is so damaged, and filled with so many damaged people. The world has become one country with many survivors of all kinds of wars. On the eleventh day of the eleventh month, and maybe at the eleventh hour, let’s not forget!<\/p>\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" The Eleventh of the Eleventh<\/strong>
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\nMy mother, Greta, and my father, Jan, had two small children, one and four years old respectively, when the German army invaded the country on May 10, 1940. Under German occupation, Dutch society needed to continue functioning. So also my father, chief of police in a provincial town in the East of the Netherlands. They lived close to the town of Greta\u2019s mother, who ran a farm but lived in town. Jan\u2019s top brass instructed all police to continue on the job. Life seemed unchanged with the occupation, at least for a while, but then drastically fell apart.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":2155,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[11],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1662","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-creative-non-fiction"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.mtls.ca\/issue22\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1662","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.mtls.ca\/issue22\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.mtls.ca\/issue22\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mtls.ca\/issue22\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mtls.ca\/issue22\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1662"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.mtls.ca\/issue22\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1662\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2156,"href":"https:\/\/www.mtls.ca\/issue22\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1662\/revisions\/2156"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mtls.ca\/issue22\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2155"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.mtls.ca\/issue22\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1662"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mtls.ca\/issue22\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1662"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mtls.ca\/issue22\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1662"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}