NINE

The Future
1946–1951

GERRIT’S WOODEN SHOES SANK SLIGHTLY in the moist earth of the tuin as he walked between rows of new sprouts glistening with dew. In the not-too-distant future, klompen like these would cover the walls of souvenir shops, painted with stereotypical windmills and tulips. But Gerrit’s shoes were plain wood, darkened with mud, as practical as the hat on his head and worn by every gardener around him. During the frequent Allied attacks at the end of the war, when Koos and Gert had been injured, wooden shoes had become unexpected armour, especially so close to the targeted railway tracks. Piet Rehling, the milkman who’d pushed Koos to hospital, had been working a small family plot near Gerrit’s, and had had to dive for cover when the tracks alongside his plot were bombed. Not until later, as he began to walk home, did he realize his foot was hurting. He’d wiggled out of his klomp, which was full of blood: a bomb shard had pierced his wooden shoe.

These days – May, one year into liberation – the plots along the railway tracks were mostly quiet. Working in the early morning near the reed-rimmed pond on his property, Gerrit listened to the croak of the frogs and the squawk of the black-and-white waterhens, which sound perpetually irritated. He and the birds and frogs had been up for hours, enjoying the peacefulness of the morning, and though he knew there were others who started their days as early, within the rectangular borders of the tuin he sometimes felt he was the only soul stirring. He whistled as he hung his hoe on a nail in the shed, just above the space that used to hide the pewter and the good silver. Those things had been moved back to their rightful places in Cor’s kitchen, and order on the small and large scale was being restored. Train service had resumed in December, and with the return of stolen railroad cars from Germany, schedules were improving. The community was startled, though, when the dronkaard lay down on the tracks one morning as a train approached. The train sliced off both of his legs, but he survived. Nowadays, having failed in his mission, he whiled away the hours at the café at the end of the Broekweg, where he could fill himself with gin and prove a capacity greater than that of the boozing German soldiers who’d loitered there during the occupation.

These sorts of small tragedies continued, like aftershocks, while the country at large healed. The Heineken Brewery in Amsterdam would soon reopen, and the Phillips plant, once Europe’s largest supplier of radio equipment, was operating again. Gerrit’s radio had been brought down from the attic, and held pride of place once more on the main floor. The Netherlands had resumed its export of tulips, and Gerrit, who’d begun to take night-school classes in horticulture, read with interest about several newly developed blooms: the President Truman, satin-pink; the Field Marshal Montgomery, with red and white blotches; and the Joseph Stalin, fiery red with fringed edges. Walking between his neatly planted rows of vegetables, he wondered if the other tuinders would think him crazy if he sacrificed a few rows for some experimental flowers of his own. Last night he’d dreamed that the tuin was full of flowers, and as he’d gently worked the earth around them, surrounded by their heady smell, he’d heard a droning overhead, coming closer and closer. In his dream he’d been terrified to look up and see planes – his head like a dead weight, impossible to lift – but then something had brushed his hair and a single, fat bee passed across his line of vision, moving from bloom to bloom and taking the sound with it. Gerrit laughed, now, to think of his terror, and how in his dream his hands had gone damp with sweat.

In the dunes of Scheveningen, a few kilometres away from Gerrit and his musings, the morning’s tranquility turned eerie, as if the unfound dead at Waalsdorpervlakte were watching the procession that snaked along the footpath. At this infamous Nazi execution site, still combed for bodies of resistance fighters, convicted traitor and NSB leader Anton Mussert came to a stop, his hands cuffed behind him. Though the death penalty had been abolished in the Netherlands in the last century, it was temporarily reinstated for men like Mussert. That day, May 7, 1946, marked one year since his arrest by BS members in The Hague. The court had rejected his appeal, and Queen Wilhelmina had just refused his last request for clemency. The Dutch marksmen’s rifles cracked, completing the task, the sound muffled by the hills of sand.

If Wilhelmina had given any thought to the execution of Anton Mussert, there was no evidence the next day when Winston Churchill arrived in Amsterdam, a portly figure in a top hat. Riding in a flat-bottomed canal boat that had just recently been reclaimed from Germany, he poked his head up through the roof and beamed, flashing two fingers in his signature V for victory symbol. Crowds lined the canals to watch him float by. He visited the royal family at Soestdijk, and photographers captured them together on the lawn, little Margriet’s hand tucked into his, as if he was a friendly old uncle. Cor and Gerrit, listening intently to the radio accounts of his visit, knew he was much more. When the rotund Englishman made a stop in The Hague, Cor went to hear him speak, and returned with her eyes shining.

Three weeks later, the Canadezen went home, many of them with Dutch brides and lifelong connections. The bodies of more than seven thousand soldiers and airmen remained, along with plaques and memorials that had sprung up around the country. In time, the burial places would be graced with neat rows of white stones marked with a maple leaf. In the largest war graves cemetery, at Groesbeek, words were etched in stone: PRO AMICIS MORTUI AMICIS VIVIMUS – We live in the hearts of friends for whom we died.

No such tribute would be paid to Mussert, whose body lay in an anonymous grave in The Hague. The Dutch courts would also try Police Leader Hanns Albin Rauter, executed in 1949, and Westerbork’s “gentleman” Gemmeker, sentenced to ten years for his crimes. They wanted Arthur Seyss-Inquart in the prisoner’s dock as well, but because of his crucial role in helping Germany take Austria, his fate rested with judges in Nuremberg, where the band of men accused of war crimes captured the world’s attention. In August, William Lyon Mackenzie King attended the trial at Nuremberg as part of his European tour. In the upstairs gallery overlooking the courtroom, he took a centre seat in the front row, and looked down on the prisoners as the judges filed into the room. Following the morning’s proceedings, Mackenzie King was given a tour of the prison. The door to Arthur Seyss-Inquart’s cell was unlocked, and he stepped inside to get a sense of what the rooms were like from the prisoners’ perspective. He eyed the narrow bed, a small table that held books, papers, and pictures of family – surely Gertrud and the couple’s children.

At Nuremberg, Seyss-Inquart and the other party members had undergone intelligence testing by a psychologist, and the former Reich commissioner achieved the highest point score. In spite of his genius status, he coolly testified that he felt “proud” of his record in the Netherlands, and that under another man, the country might have suffered much more than it had. He claimed he wasn’t responsible for many of the crimes he was accused of, since they’d been largely orders from above and carried out by the army and the police, who’d reported to Himmler. And while the court agreed that he had sometimes opposed extreme actions and managed to undermine Hitler’s scorched earth policy, “the fact remains that Seyss-Inquart was a knowing and voluntary participant in war crimes and crimes against humanity.” The evidence was staggering: the prosecution reported that under his rule, by the end of 1943, the Germans had already seized “600,000 hogs, 275,000 cows, and 30,000 tons of preserved meats.” Over the years, they had hauled away six hundred thousand radios and a million bicycles, not to mention thousands of human beings: Jehovah’s Witnesses and gypsies; men for forced labour. Excluding Poland, the percentage of Jews murdered was far greater than in any other European country, an uncomfortable truth that would haunt the country for decades to come. Of the 107,000 Jews deported from the Netherlands to camps like Auschwitz, which the Reich commissioner had deemed a suitable holding place, only 5,000 returned. Of course the individual details were not recounted here – that Henny’s father died in one of those camps, an old man whose only mistake had been forgetting his pyjamas. Dead, too, were the siblings of Louis and Flora and their many nieces and nephews, and the Rijssen shoemaker and his wife – Max’s parents – who’d turned down the Batelaans’ early offer of a place to live, and would never meet the granddaughters born in hiding. Not one of the native Leidschendam Jews sent to camps had survived, but all thirty onderduikers, who’d come to the town from elsewhere, made it through to the end of the war.

On October 1, Seyss-Inquart was summoned into the courtroom at the Palace of Justice to hear the verdict: death by hanging for him and eleven others, including Hermann Goering and Martin Bormann, although the latter had been tried in absentia, and was suspected to be dead. After learning his sentence, Seyss-Inquart shrugged resignedly and told the prison psychologist he hadn’t expected otherwise. He was fine with it, he said, but his voice sounded uneven. He asked if he’d still be entitled to tobacco, and then apologized for the question, which he admitted must have seemed petty under the circumstances.

The deed happened just over two weeks later, on a night pulled from a gothic novel: cold, with a wind howling around the prison walls, and complete with a suicide sideshow. Goering escaped the noose by swallowing potassium cyanide just hours before his scheduled execution. For the remaining men, scaffolds were erected in the brilliantly lit gymnasium of the Nuremberg jail. A crowd of thirty gathered, including journalists chosen by lottery, a priest, and a chaplain, and shortly after one o’clock in the morning, the first prisoner, Joachim von Ribbentrop, climbed the gallows stairs. With his manacles removed, he voiced a wish for an understanding between east and west, then a black hood was pulled over his face and the trap door opened beneath him. Nine more followed; as one prisoner dangled on his rope behind a dark canvas curtain, the next was brought in, and when both ropes were taut, the first corpse was removed to make way for another. Seyss-Inquart was the last to die that night. He limped his way slowly up the scaffold’s steps, helped by two white-helmeted guards. With the noose slack round his neck, he spoke in a low voice: “I hope that this execution is the last act of the tragedy of the Second World War and that the lesson taken … [is] that peace and understanding should exist between people.” After the executions, Seyss-Inquart and the others were placed in coffins, loaded into two trucks, and taken in an armed convoy to a crematorium in East Munich. Later, the ashes were scattered in secret in the nearby river Isar.

What was revealed was the last photograph of Seyss-Inquart, showing the knot of the noose still tight to his neck, his crisp double-breasted suit neatly buttoned, his arm dangling over the edge of the black box where he lay. The picture seemed of a different man than the one in the portraits in Gertrud Seyss-Inquart’s living room six years later, when Dutch historian Louis de Jong arrived to interview her. One photograph sat on the piano, and showed the SS officer looking stern in full uniform. The other peered out from the bookcase, depicting a gentler Seyss-Inquart in civilian clothes. “I’m collecting everything about him,” said his wife to de Jong during the interview. And at the end of the visit: “I have tried to tell you some things about my husband who I love – who I loved – so that your work may be truthful.”

In February 1947, soon after Koos’s ninth birthday, Princess Juliana delivered her fourth daughter, Marijke, at Soestdijk Palace. Gerrit remembered the celebrations for her sister Beatrix: church bells pealing, people toasting the birth outdoors with nips of jenever. Beatrix had been the first royal baby of her generation in a line not known for being prolific, and would someday be queen if her parents didn’t produce a son. There had been a headiness to those celebrations, but also a giddy undercurrent of fear that wasn’t there this time. Now, people paused for the fifty-one–gun salute honouring Marijke, and then got on with the business of rebuilding their lives. The day was officially declared a national holiday, but because the weather was bitterly cold and there was a coal shortage, the schools were already closed.

Koos was not interested in baby princesses, but he was pleased to miss school, since the pond near the tuin had iced over. He couldn’t skate with his prosthesis, but he zoomed over the frozen surface on a prik slee, a sled that he propelled using two sticks with nails fitted into the ends. His artificial leg laced around his thigh like a boot, pulled over a “sock” knitted by his oma. In spite of this padding, the casing frequently chafed the scars on the back of his thigh, and phantom pains still twinged in the missing lower half. But he was rarely helped or coddled, and rose to physical challenges with his adrenalin pumping. When the weather warmed, he raced to be first through the reed fencing that surrounded the playground behind the backyard, passing the places where the bombs had fallen, and never for a moment thinking that because he wore an artificial leg he might not win. He gave little consideration to the bombs either, and may not even have realized that more than one had dropped so close to him. One had landed in mud, and when it exploded, its pieces were smothered, sending out nothing but a spray of earthy splotches that covered the backs of the houses. The other had done the damage. It slammed into the brick street and down into the sand beneath, hurling metal fragments and debris everywhere. But in Koos’s house, none of that was discussed in the children’s presence, making it easier for everyone to act as though it hadn’t happened.

Only when the children were in bed did talk turn to the war and its aftermath, and even then it was the bigger stories that were told and retold, as if to mask the existence of the ones that had occurred closer to home. During visits to Overschie, or when the relatives came to Leidschendam, the men leaned forward with their forearms on their knees, and the women crossed their ankles and frowned. When one discussed a lingering resentment of the German people, another chided him and said the Nazis were to blame – that when two countries were neighbours they had to be practical and find a way to get along. They discussed the war’s toll, lost relatives and friends, but focused more pragmatically on the slow economy, the lack of jobs and opportunity, and their worries about the future.

People wanted so badly to forget this time and get on with a new era that a woman living across from Gerrit’s parents on the Broekweg was repeatedly ignored when she told authorities there was an unexploded bomb under her house. It had fallen the same day as the bombs in the Tedingerstraat – there’d been six altogether – but had plunged intact into the garden, where the ground closed over it. With the war still underway, such potential problems were regularly ignored; and afterwards, the workload was enormous. The woman’s warnings went unheeded until the 1980s, when the municipality was upgrading the sewers. “You can’t dig here,” she said when they got to her place, and finally someone listened. The little row of houses had to be demolished, and forty years after the fact, the delicate procedure of removing a 250-pound bomb began.

While the idea of abdicating was out of the question during the war years, Queen Wilhelmina began to consider this possibility over the summer of 1947. The new era was not what she’d thought it would be, with a more central political role for herself and the former resistance, and she was both frustrated and tired. After forty-nine years on the job, she felt entitled to a rest. She appointed Juliana temporary regent and moved to Het Loo in October, soon after Marijke’s christening. The Germans had used it, but she still loved this residence because it reminded her of her childhood and how she’d toured the grounds in a wicker carriage with her mother. The palace was nestled at the edge of the Veluwe parklands, the same forested area Cor and Truus had traversed on their trek to find food, and where their cousin Cornelia had lived in a shed during the hongerwinter. Wilhelmina considered it one of the most beautiful parts of the country.

Her perspective, of course, differed from Rige’s. By coincidence, Rige spent the autumn months not far from the queen, in a grand old mansion that had been transformed into a sanatorium. Like the Austrian girl who’d come to stay with Cor’s family after the First World War, Rige had been shipped off for a change of air and peaceful surroundings. She was what the Dutch then called a bleekneusje – literally a “little pale nose” – rail-thin and unhealthy. The mansion was a fattening camp of sorts, where she’d get regular exercise and good food, but as she approached the imposing building with its tall windows and double doors, she was already homesick for her cramped house and her noisy brothers. The hall where she slept had eighteen beds on each side of the room, and a double row of six in the centre, but it was terribly quiet. The girls – she knew none of them – were told to sleep on their right sides, that it was better for their hearts and their circulation, but Rige lay awake, thinking about the blood pumping through her and waiting for the tall girl with the shaved head to sleepwalk towards the door. She heard the bed creak, and turned to see her paddle out. The door was open, and the light streaming in defined the girl’s silhouette: her bald head, her long nightgown. Just as she moved through the doorway, a nurse arrived and silently steered her back to bed. Rige closed her eyes and waited for morning, and in the morning she waited for afternoon. She felt a sinking unhappiness in this place that was meant to make her strong, and when the allotted six weeks passed, she was weighed and told she hadn’t gained enough, that she needed to stay six more. She remembered Oom Jacques teasing her on their last trip to Overschie, when Tante Truus was assigning beds to the guests. “It’s convenient you’re so skinny, Graatje. You can sleep in the eavestrough.” Everyone laughed, because everyone always laughed at the things Oom Jacques said, but Rige had felt herself shrinking.

In the afternoons, she wrote letters home, sometimes risking an honest line she never would have said to her parents out loud – I miss you, she wrote. But the letters were censored, and expected to convey pleasantries – the food is good, I’m having a nice time – and she was told to redo what she’d written. She wondered how the brothers fared without her, and who would polish their shoes on Saturday so they’d be shining for church. They all had new shoes now, and Rige knew the importance of taking care of things, that nothing should be taken for granted. It seemed she’d been away an awfully long time, and sometimes, just for a moment, she forgot what her mother looked like now, and an earlier image came instead: her mother turning, the fabric of her dress swinging, and her hair uncoiling in a fit of laughter. Rige remembered the dress vividly – it was covered in anemones, beautiful even hanging loosely in her mother’s closet – but she had not seen it in years.

Having been away twelve weeks, Rige came home by herself on the train. No one met her at the station, so she walked the familiar brick streets with her small suitcase, increasing her pace as she thought about seeing her family. She stepped in the door just before dinnertime. The pot on the stove was boiling over, and Rokus and Koos were quarrelling.

Her mother looked out from the kitchen. “Good – Rige – hurry up and get your coat off,” she said. “The table needs setting.”

Rige went to work diligently, trying to make up for the chores she had missed, and pushing the dismaying homecoming far to the back of her mind.

The tranquility of Het Loo was precisely what Wilhelmina needed to make a final decision on abdication, and apart from her personal reasons, she cited her country’s law on retirement age, recognizing that “many old people were no longer what they had been.” She made the announcement on radio the following May, waiting until late afternoon so that most working people would be home to hear her. Juliana would become their queen in September, she declared, after her own Golden Jubilee festivities came to an end. She told her listeners that it seemed just yesterday that she’d stood in Amsterdam with her father in 1889 commemorating his fortieth year on the throne, yet “I must accept reality,” she said, and explained that age had worn her down.

Cor was worn down too, though she was not yet forty. Soon after the queen’s announcement, the den Hartogs walked to Scheveningen again, with cousins, aunts, and uncles, and Cor watched the Blauwe tram pass and wished they were on it, no matter the cost. The occasion for this trip was the beginning of the herring season, a festival that would come to be called vlaggetjesdag – Flags Day – in honour of the hundreds of fishing boats clogging the harbour, their flags fluttering in the stiff wind. Jacques and Nicolaas slurped back the traditional nieuwe haring, not cooked but preserved in brine, and when all of them went out on the water in a fishing boat, even Cor found herself relaxing as the wind combed her hair. By the end of the day, their noses were pink from the sun and the wind, and the kids were tired. But there was more to come. In the dark, people had gathered along the boardwalk, and the family sat among them on the steps leading down to the beach. Cor took her shoes off and rubbed her feet. An air of expectation settled over the crowd, and then fireworks lit the night sky. With the first bang Cor saw how Rige jumped, and Gert clung to Gerrit, but then relaxed when he realized no one was running or afraid. Cor recognized his fear because she felt it too – the lights and the noise took her right back to the many nights she’d stood on the balcony with Gerrit, watching the glow of war; or the times they’d laid in bed, hearing the planes approach and whispering to each other, trying to decide whether to wake the children and rush them down to the shelter below the stairs. Cor looked around. Who else was thinking these thoughts and doing their best to hide them? The crowd whistled and clapped, and on the beach, a huge reproduction of the Dutch crown and lion emblem was set ablaze.

When it was over, she was glad of the late hour, which justified taking the tram home. A tram ride alone would have thrilled the children, because normally they walked everywhere to save money. Niek climbed over her for a window seat, but was asleep moments after the tram started rolling, his head resting in her lap. She rubbed his cheek and recalled a day, weeks back, when he’d gotten up to no good. Near the Tedingerstraat, he’d latched on to the tram’s exterior, intending to go for a harmless little scoot – no more than a few hundred metres as the tram turned itself around for the return journey. Niek had likely watched the tram do this so many times that he believed it never deviated from its routine, but that day the driver had finished his run and shot past the loop, and Niek found himself hurtling along the tracks, clinging to the tram as the neighbourhood blurred by. The tram had been moving too fast for him to risk jumping, but his friend Wim van der Panne – a slow, pudgy boy moved to action – hollered on the platform, and as if by his call alone, the tram came to a stop. An angry streetcar official escorted Niek home and told Cor the whole story. She could still picture Niek, white as a sheet, his hair in a stiff fan as if raised by terror or wind. It seemed funny now, but then she’d been aghast at Niek’s mischief and embarrassed by the appearance of the tram worker on her doorstep. She had tied Niek to a chair – harsh punishment, but the first thing that had come to mind to make him stay put. And as he’d sat there crying, she’d nearly cried too, and wondered in exasperation what she would do with all of them – the boys especially. Koos and Rokus, sharing a bed in the attic, often climbed out the narrow window onto the roof tiles and sat revelling in their small transgression, watching the world with a bird’s-eye view until Cor came up and found their bed empty. Even Rige had been involved just a few weeks back, when all five children had pressed the white moons of their bare bottoms to the upstairs windowpane, eliciting howls of laughter from the kids in the street below. Gerrit had spanked each of them, catching them as they dove under the blankets to get away, but the punishment had been nothing compared to going to bed at night hungry as they’d done in that last year of the war, knowing there’d be little food or warmth with morning.

Throughout the summer, the country prepared feverishly for celebrations to mark Wilhelmina’s sixty-eighth birthday and her fiftieth year as queen of the Dutch people. At the Leidschendam town hall, new stained-glass windows were installed to commemorate the queen’s reign, and a booklet was printed listing those who’d helped pay for them, including Rige’s Bible group, Gerrit’s tuinders’ co-operative, and the association that had erected the playground behind the den Hartog house. Koos and Rokus missed much of the activity. In June, Rokus went to a Scouts camp in Drenthe, where he got to wear his green uniform, and earned badges for his sleeve. Cor and Gerrit hadn’t approved of the Padvinders before the war: the organization had English military roots and allowed heathens to join. But this was a different world, and scouting was enjoying a new popularity in part because of its “Englishness,” and the fact the Nazis had outlawed it. So with other boys his age, Rokus hiked through fields of heather, learned to stand at attention, and at night slept in a room much like the one Rige had stayed in, with twin beds lined up in neat rows. Koos too joined Padvinders, and would have been with Rokus in Drenthe, but was spending the summer instead in the small village of Kleinditwil, Switzerland. The train trip was costly for Cor and Gerrit, but they managed, since the doctor had prescribed mountain air for Koos’s asthma. Cor felt a small stab of jealousy as she read Koos’s postcards referring to “Mama and Papa” Geissbühler, and describing his room with its view of pastures and hills and snowcapped mountains in the distance. Mama was kind and cooked delicious meals, Koos wrote, and Papa, who owned a hardware store, let Koos try out all the tools. Some days, Koos and Mama walked a hillside path to a farm where they earned a bit of money plucking fat June beetles from the plants and collecting them in pails. Cor pasted on a smile and wrote back: Niek picked this card for you, mooi heh? … Tante Maria’s new baby Hansje is a real treasure.… The boys have been to Overschie, fishing and more fishing! She wrote to the Geissbühlers too, dutifully thanking them for caring for “mijn zoon,” and suppressing a shiver when their replies came in German.

Soon after Rokus returned from Drenthe, the sky over Leidschendam turned copper green. All afternoon the air had been heavy and thick, and Rokus watched the storm roll slowly in. He pictured his oma closing the windows of her house on the Broekweg and fretting over God’s wrath. His father was still at the tuin by early evening when the fat raindrops began to fall, and Rokus, peering out the window, hoped he’d taken shelter in the shed. Yesterday, his father had brought home one of the melons that had been ripening in the warm August sun for the last while, and they’d sliced it open on the kitchen table and shared the juicy hunks with listless Wim van der Panne and the milkman’s son Jan. Rokus wondered if he’d bring another today, but then the sky opened and egg-sized hail pelted the ground. Rokus stared through the window as the falling balls of ice flattened flower beds and dented the metal roof of the toolshed in the Bloms’ backyard, and snapped branches from the shrubs near the kinderpark. He thought of the window he’d smashed with a ball at the Scouts camp. He’d been hauled down to the leader’s office and had stood with his hat crumpled in his hands, awaiting punishment. But instead, he’d been made to say I’m sorry – a simple penance he hadn’t expected – and that had been the end of the incident, unlike the time another ball had smashed Mevrouw van Kampen’s window, just after the war. No one had owned up to the deed, so no one had been made to apologize then either, but Koos, still travelling in his green cart, had wheeled from door to door down the Tedingerstraat and the Broekweg, collecting enough money to repair the window.

When the storm ended, Gerrit came home from the tuin and flopped into his armchair, closing his eyes. Most of the seven hundred windows he used as covers for his hotbeds, stacked for storage by the shed, had been shattered, and much of his crop destroyed.

His voice, as he told Cor the news, was leaden. She took off her apron and walked to the tuin, her shoes crunching over the hail that lay melting on the sidewalk. At the gate, she stood staring at the mess of glass, the mangled vines, and the flesh of the hacked melons, thinking what Gerrit hadn’t said – that nothing was insured. The sense of defeat winded her, and she sagged against the gate, the wood wet beneath her palms. There was no future here, not now. But at the same time, starting over somewhere else would be equally difficult with such a setback. Cor bowed her head, thinking.

When she returned home, she stood in front of Gerrit’s chair and said that tomorrow all of them would get to work in the tuin; they’d have a sale on melon, direct to the consumer, sold by the piece. There was nothing to do but inch forward in baby steps, which was just what had been happening all around them every day since the end of the war.

Gerrit’s disaster didn’t stop the nation’s celebrations. They bid Wilhelmina farewell with parties and parades awash with orange lights, streamers, and flowers. Barrel organs churned out music and banners fluttered from rooftops, and in Amsterdam, where the queen would say her final farewells, the population swelled to twice its number, so that people slept in the parks and on boats and in hotel bathtubs. From the balcony overlooking the Dam Square she accepted a choral serenade by nineteen thousand children and adults, and, caught up in the fun of it, waved her arms as if conducting them. Later, at the Olympic Stadium, Wilhelmina took in the festivities standing in a box festooned with gladioli and greens. Wearing a coat covered in stars and a hat with a flopping feather, she laughed and clapped her appreciation.

Four days later, in a solemn, late-morning ceremony that took place in the Moses Room of the Koninklijk Palace, Wilhelmina signed the abdication paper and was queen no more. The palace belfry pealed out a tune, dying away as the clock chimed noon, and on the twelfth stroke, Wilhelmina grasped Juliana’s hand and stepped through the balcony doors, followed by Bernhard. “One could have heard a pin drop in the Dam at that moment,” Wilhelmina later wrote. The crowd in the square below – the scene of tragedy when people had hidden behind lampposts to avoid the spray of bullets – waited expectantly. They seemed unsure of the protocol of losing, but gaining, a queen. Wilhelmina felt no such uncertainty, and announced her abdication in a clear, forceful voice, thanking the Dutch people for their confidence, affection, and sympathy over the years. “Long live the queen!” she shouted, flinging her arm in the air as if brandishing a sword, then turning and hugging her daughter while the crowd echoed the cry.

Wilhelmina’s reign ended in a sea of orange, the mounds of marigolds and zinnias a floral tribute to her golden jubilee and the House of Orange she had represented for fifty years. But Juliana, with Bernhard beside her, began hers by sending a subtle message of change via the pink begonias that adorned the church for her formal inauguration. Reserved and compassionate, and having her own ideas about colonialism, she would be a different queen than her bold, unyielding mother. At the inauguration, she surprised Wilhelmina by bestowing on her the Military Order of Willem, the country’s oldest honour, awarded for exceptional courage. Touched by the gesture, Wilhelmina accepted it as “a tribute to all my brave fellow-fighters during the war.”

It seemed there were more and more of these heroes all the time. With the danger over, people liked to stress that they had been on the right side, often underplaying collaboration with the Germans and exaggerating acts of resistance. But an ugly reality has emerged with the passing years, and hundreds of thousands have been counted as active collaborators. No other Western European country had proportionally as many volunteers for the Waffen SS as did the Netherlands. Wilhelmina’s own decisions continue to be questioned as the country examines its past. Some ask how different the occupation would have been if she had remained among them throughout it. Of course each resister and each collaborator has his own story, with its myriad reasons, as do those who straddled the middle.

Gerrit may or may not have been courageous during the occupation years, but either way, he would not have included himself in Wilhelmina’s tribute. There were no medals or high honours to say he did anything out of the ordinary, and he never spoke to his children about his brave deeds or his cowardice. The armband he must have worn in those weeks after liberation has long since disappeared.

Now and again, Gerrit stole a few hours from the tuin and took the boys fishing for snoek. In the sunshine, legs dangling over the canal wall, the den Hartog men sat in a tidy line, jigging their garden stakes with the floats tied on. Koos fished the way he did everything, with enthusiasm for the task and a determination to make the first catch, or at least the biggest. Gert’s head swivelled towards his bigger brother frequently, and he mimicked Koos’s swaggering banter, deftly handling the rod with one hand and his knees. Rokus seemed less concerned about fishing, but liked the competition, while Niek often used his rod to snare bits of weed or flotsam from the water, and then inspected them close up. Finally, Gerrit thought in these moments, his children were enjoying a childhood.

Cor took them often to Overschie, and if Gerrit wasn’t too busy he joined them. There, Jacques also fished with the boys, but right off the back stoop, which was as much a treat for them as Jacques’s boisterous personality. Rige loved going to Overschie too, but Gerrit suspected she found her larger-than-life uncle overwhelming, since he filled the room with more than his size. Maria’s husband Nicolaas, less ostentatious, had to work harder for the children’s attention, but child and adult alike were surprised when the little man flipped himself over one day and stood on his head – all the blood rushed down to his face, and change tumbled out of his pockets.

If it was sunny, the adults would loll on the neighbours’ barge that floated in the Schie, a pastime they jokingly called “going to sea.” Occasionally someone got a dunking, and it occurred to Gerrit that a passerby might think that the lot of them were carefree. And now and then he supposed they were. After the children had been sent to bed, someone would pass the advocaat, recalling Neeltje as they sipped the sweet, strong liqueur, and how she’d made her batches on the back stoop – tastier than anyone’s, they agreed, and Jacques suggested Schie water had been her secret ingredient. Maria’s husband Nicolaas liked something a little stronger, a neat shot of jenever that he downed with one twist of his wrist. Once, he made the mistake of leaving his just-filled glass unattended while he stepped out of the room, and Jacques, grinning, holding one long finger to his lips to signal the others to go along with his prank, replaced the glass of liquor with one filled with water. Nicolaas returned, tossed back the shot, and spewed the water across the room to the delighted howls of the rest. Incidents like this kept the children creeping back to spy from the top of the stairs, and Gerrit noticed them crouching there, where cigarette smoke rose in a blue curl. The young were so resilient, he thought to himself, glad that adult concerns were mysterious to them now that there were no German soldiers in the streets.

These days there were syrupy treats, pet rabbits in a cage at home, and, that Saint Nicolaas Eve, a black puppy named Molly, and he wondered if they’d forgotten the nasty German shepherd that had guarded the tuin for a while during the occupation – nearly three years had passed since the war’s end, a long time in the lives of children. Molly arrived in a cardboard box, and Rige and the boys shrieked happily as she scrambled out of it and raced through the house, tail wagging. Cor wasn’t thrilled, Gerrit saw, especially when Molly peed on the carpet, but Cor’s own sister had made the offering, so how could she say no? Molly outdid all the other presents: the elaborate dollhouse Rige had wished for years earlier, and for which she was likely now too old; the miniature village for the boys that spread through two rooms, complete with tiny roadsigns, green-painted bridges, and strips of black paper for roads. But the warplane books for Rokus and Koos were a hit, as Gerrit had expected. “What if they trigger bad memories?” Cor had asked him, but Gerrit doubted that – he understood his boys’ fascination for planes, and for collecting, whether it be pictures of Spitfires, cigar bands, stamps, or the Padvinder badges Cor sewed on their sleeves. He knew that Koos’s great mission was to acquire more badges than Rokus, who seemed to come by them easily though he was a year and a half younger and should have been – at least in Koos’s opinion – a year and a half less adept. The emblem on their Padvinders hats said Je Maintiendrai, but neither of them pondered it. Dressed in their identical uniforms, they attended the meetings, vowing to outdo each other. Life was good to them in the post-war era, and that made Gerrit vicariously happy.

He and Cor, though, were ever aware of the underlying struggles, of financial difficulties both personal and national as the months and years wore on, and they each feared the future held no reprieve, since potential buyers for the tuin were few and far between. The American Marshall Plan was in effect now, giving millions of dollars in aid to countries devastated by the war, but the rebuilding was a massive endeavour, and both he and Cor agreed Europe’s convalescence was and would continue to be painfully slow. They worked and survived, and made enough to ensure that Koos went to Switzerland in the summers for his asthma, that the children were decently clothed, that Moeder and Vader’s rent was paid. But there was no feeling of progression; worse than that, they shared a sinking sense that their children, Koos and Gert especially, wouldn’t flourish here, where there were so many needy people and not enough resources to go around. Gerrit thought of the garden, and how blight crept from plant to plant, spreading past the boundaries, even, to the meadows where only wild things grew. Often, he remembered the storm, which had revived their old wish to emigrate. At times during the occupation and immediately afterwards, leaving the Netherlands had seemed a silly fantasy, but now, little by little, it seemed sensible, and therefore possible. When a poster went up advertising Esperanto lessons given in the Tedingerstraat, Cor suggested they go, and once a week, the couple studied the “international language” once outlawed in Nazi Germany. Gerrit glanced at Cor during the classes, and loved to see how she paid such close attention, lips mouthing the words as if everything depended on this strange new language. Also in attendance were Mevrouw and Meneer Blom, as well as their daughter Corrie and the girl Jeanne van Kampen from across the way. Sometimes Gerrit looked around at the others, and it unsettled him to think that if he and his family left, the people of his past would not be part of his future.

As they lay in bed each night, Cor and Gerrit recited kie, tie, ie, ĉie, nenie, the Esperanto words for where, there, somewhere, everywhere, nowhere, and had halting conversations that usually declined into laughter – Esperanto meant “hope,” but they were both hopeless when it came to learning it. Still, when the chuckling subsided, they talked about leaving: where they would go, how they would get there, what it would mean for their families. And each time, Cor offered the surety that God would provide, just as he always had, and would give them a sign as to when and how. So when an official notice came from the public works department, Cor said it was actually a message from above. A large portion of the tuin land was needed for a major highway, the notice said, and the municipality would purchase the property from him. Gerrit could easily sell the leftover parcels for family plots, and these amounts combined would be just enough to fund a move overseas. Gerrit knew, too, that the auction building would move to Delft within five years, increasing the cost of moving his produce beyond profitability. He knew the time was right. His scalp prickled with nervousness at the thought that their plan was now fully in motion, and that he was running along after it, trying to catch up. Cor, once the deed of sale was in hand, looked as happy as she had the day she’d held the deed of purchase. Gerrit remembered how much it had meant to her that they were landowners – how proud she’d been.

In that last season, his cucumbers were selected to be shipped to England for an exhibition, and Jacques jokingly called him the Komkommer Koning, but his reign of that domain was short – with winter, he’d have to find work in a lumberyard, or take anything that came until the myriad details of emigration had been sorted. As he walked the rows of the tuin, he thought of his favourite days there, when Cor as his new wife had brought him lunch and coffee, and then a little later when Rige was small and he’d held her to his chest, taking her up and down the length of the property as he sang the old lullaby “Slaap, Kindje, Slaap” in her ear. Somewhere there was a picture of them, father and daughter with the tuin behind them, snapped by his old friend Henny Cahn.

He’d own no small parcel of land in his new country. He’d start right at the bottom and work his way up, though he was middle-aged now and had a brood of children. The old choices of South Africa or Australia had been set aside for Canada, revered in the Netherlands since the days of liberation. Gerrit knew by now that it was a huge country, ripe with possibility, where many Dutch families had already settled and started Gereformeerde churches, and urged more families to come. The paperwork to get there arrived in thick packets from Ottawa, painstakingly translated by Rige, who’d learned her piecemeal English in school. “We will have representation to meet you in Halifax,” she read. Gerrit and Cor looked over her shoulder at the mystifying words and letters, more foreign to them than Esperanto. “We will give you labels whereon is your name, destination station where you have to get out, and the number of the wagon wherein you shall travel. Wear these labels inside and attach them at once in the buttonhole of your coat.… We wish you a pleasant journey and every success in your new country.”

All of a sudden, it was upon them. Their belongings had been crated and taken to Rotterdam, and Molly the dog had been given away, though the boys cried and didn’t see why she couldn’t come on the ship with them. Cor’s brother-in-law Nicolaas arrived in his car to pick them up and take them to Overschie, where they’d spend their last night. On the Broekweg, Gerrit held Moeder, then Vader, and stood back as Cor and each of his children embraced them. He knew he would never see his parents again, and that the youngest of his children would barely remember them: an old man with a groove in his lip and a missing ear, and an old woman, arthritic and nearly blind. “Don’t go too far into the bush in Canada,” joked Vader to the boys. “Otherwise the rabbits will eat you.” Moeder smiled and let the tears pour down. She gripped Vader’s arm as they drove away, and Gerrit, watching in the mirror until the car turned the corner, wondered if she could even see them as she frantically waved goodbye.

On the morning of their departure, as they stood outside Cor’s family’s bookstore, Niek – almost nine now – ran off down the street to the corner store, clutching the bag of marbles his friend Wim had given him when they left the Tedingerstraat. He used his last thirty-seven cents to buy a Donald Duck figure for his Tante Truus, and ran back swinging the marbles and cradling the duck in his palm. Truus bent to take it and embraced her gangly nephew. Jacques towered above them, grinning, and asked Niek, “Why are you going to Canada? Why would you go so far away?”

Niek looked up with a serious expression. “Because there’s no future here,” he said, repeating words he’d heard at home.

Everyone laughed, but an uncomfortable moment hung between those who were leaving and those who were not. Behind them, the row of crooked houses on the Zestienhovensekade still stood after everything, looking as unchanged as the greenish canal waters that had carried Cor’s belongings to Leidschendam. Cor could smell the Schie with every breath, which was strange because she couldn’t recall having noticed it before – an organic, funky scent that brought on a well of nostalgia. A memory flashed, of herself as a girl, laughing while brother Gerry held her by the armpits and dunked her in the water again and again.

There would be no dips in the Schie this morning. It was a bright, sunny day in March, but chilly too. Cor was wearing a new chartreuse-green coat that had been sewn by Paulien Quartel in the popular swagger style. Cor had picked the fabric herself, and the pattern, but suddenly it felt wrong, and didn’t seem to suit her. It was more a coat that Truus would wear, or Bep, and she wished for her old blue one that had worn through at the elbows. She wished she’d been able to say goodbye to Bep, properly and in person, but the rift between them now seemed unmendable. Visits over the last while had become more strained, and eventually Cor decided she was unable to continue a friendship with Bep if her friend wouldn’t let God help her. Maybe she’d gone too far – certainly it seemed Bep thought so. She’d written a letter, but Bep had not responded. Ignoring the guilty feeling that pulled in her stomach whenever she thought of her old friend – whenever she pictured her leaning over Koos and Gert as they lay in the yard – Cor resolved to leave things in God’s good hands.

With relatives in tow, and Rige’s girlfriends Ineke and Willy, they took the train to the pier, and the crocuses that had just begun to bloom showed themselves in a vibrant blur. At the crowded dock in Rotterdam, the Volendam stood waiting, still rigged as a troop carrier used to take soldiers back home. Cor’s brother Gerry may have known the old ship’s war stories – how it had attempted to escort English children to Canada but had been torpedoed by U-boats. But today, most thoughts were of times ahead. He gave Gert his gold watch – clunky on the boy’s wrist – and someone took a picture of the seven travellers looking into the camera with their arms around one another, lifejackets visible in the rafters above them. Each had new warm clothes, carefully chosen for weather they hadn’t experienced. The boys were wearing matching bomber jackets in the style of the day, and Rige’s was similar, but fashioned for a girl. Gerrit wore a dark beret, and Cor a scarf tied turban-style. Husband and wife look almost sophisticated in this shot, and confident of their decision to start over, with their life’s possessions crammed into a single wooden crate.

Below on the pier, friends and relatives stayed from morning until late afternoon. Jacques kidded Truus, “Do we need to watch them cross too?” and Truus smacked him. But all playfulness disappeared when the heavy ropes were cast off, and Truus began to cry. “I’ll never see her again,” she said, and Jacques put his arm around her, pulling her close. He looked up to the Volendam and saluted Gerrit, the boerenjongen, as the ship eased slowly away.

On board, Gerrit stood behind Koos, who waved like mad as Truus, Jacques, and the rest diminished into dots of colour. He knew that for Koos, the waving and shouting was less a goodbye than an outlet for the boy’s excitement as they floated through the long waterway that opened into the North Sea, and he envied that uncomplicated enthusiasm. Koos would miss summers in Switzerland, but Canada was better, he’d told Gerrit, “because it’s farther away” – whereas that, for Gerrit, was the worst thing of all.

Rige, on the other hand, understood the implications as well as Gerrit did, but had none of her parents’ vision of a better future: they would likely never be back, and she would never see Ineke and Willy again, and this might be her last glimpse of her family and the flat, green country behind them. He felt sorry for pulling her away from everything she knew and loved, and sorrier still when she got queasy on the first day of a long crossing. But her brothers were aching for the adventure, and for the sight of the broad sea with no land visible for days. They gaped over the rail at the sea foaming against the ship’s sides, and wove between the other passengers as they explored the decks. Koos, thirteen by now, was hardly held back by his artificial leg, and eleven-year-old Gert had proven more than resilient – the kind of boy who’d easily learned to shoot a bow using his foot, and found it gave him greater range. Once, while playing at the tuin, he’d pierced Wim van der Panne’s lip with a homemade reed arrow, and Gerrit had seen how his son had marvelled at the accuracy of his shot when the bubble of blood appeared against Wim’s pale flesh.

The passage was rough, and soon Rokus was so violently ill that the ship’s doctor suspected something contagious, and confined him to the hospital at the boat’s stern. Niek loved the vanilla wafers said to ward off seasickness – though they didn’t always work for him, he spent his time hunting out empty bottles and cashing them in so he could buy great stacks of the thin, delicious cookies. Koos liked them too, and swiped them when Niek wasn’t looking. As he munched away in the salty air, streams of yellow vomit fell from the decks above, interrupted here and there by a hat or a set of false teeth twirling down. “He has a pirate’s leg,” Gerrit said to Cor, “and a sailor’s stomach.” He leaned back in his deck chair and waited for her to laugh, but she stayed silent, and when he turned and looked at her, he saw that she, too, had gone waxy and pale beneath her dark turban. Over the entire trip, only he and Koos managed to dodge seasickness. One day – at breakfast, lunch, and dinner – Koos and Gerrit sat at the table assigned to them in a vast, otherwise empty dining hall. Almost everyone on board was seasick, and by dinnertime, when Koos and Gerrit strode into the quiet room to fill their bellies, they and the superfluous white-clad waiters shared a fit of laughter at the telling scene. The two of them clinked their glasses and pompously dabbed the corners of their mouths with the thick linen serviettes. Koos hummed through the rich, unfamiliar food – “Cream Martha” soup, steamed cod fillets, carrots in butter, and English cakes. Koos didn’t know it, and Gerrit wouldn’t tell him, but the “den Hartog table,” clothed in white like the waiters and laid with gleaming, heavy utensils, was a point of pride for Cor and Gerrit. They found themselves seated in these wide, comfortable chairs only because they had paid their own passage: three thousand six hundred and thirty guilders and seventy-four cents by ship and train. Had the family’s fare been subsidized by the Dutch government, they would have been eating down below at long tables, elbow to elbow with other passengers.

But the accommodations were not otherwise grand. Rige and Cor shared an overcrowded cabin, and the boys slept in the hold with Gerrit, lying in tiered bunks as strangers snorted and mumbled. He thought back to his time in the barracks at the farmhouse in Strijen, and he wondered if Cor, too, thought of that period of separation, for it had been one of the few times they’d slept without each other in the years of their marriage. “I missed your snore,” she said to him one morning when they’d come midway across the ocean. “It reminds me that all is right with the world.”

For Rige, almost fifteen, things couldn’t have been more wrong. Every wave took her farther from home, farther from friends like Ineke and Willy, to a place she didn’t want to go. Against her parents’ rules, she’d sat in darkened cinemas a handful of times with her friends, admiring Rita Hayworth’s lips and eyebrows and the backdrop of New York City – but glamorous as that had seemed, she still didn’t want to move to North America. The only thing that made the trip bearable was a tall, blond Frisian boy she met and sneaked off with between bouts of seasickness, but the boy would go to Alberta when they reached Canada, and she’d never see him again. She was with him when they drew close to Newfoundland, distracted by her first try at romance; her brothers were equally distracted by a game of cowboys and Indians, the kind of fun they expected to have in their new country. None of them paid attention when the Volendam sounded its horn, or when the great ship in its path answered. The two drifted so close that a person could jump from one deck to the other. On either side, crowds of passengers gathered, holding their breath as the crews strove to keep the ships from colliding. Cor slipped her hand into the crook of Gerrit’s arm as they watched, and kept it there as the ship passed and the Volendam headed for shore. The sun shone on the coastline, revealing blackish-green conifers, bare maples, grey rock. Patches of earth smudged the snow brown.

On a Saturday morning, they moored in damp, chilly Halifax, after nine days at sea. Still on board, Cor and Gerrit joined the horde holding immigration papers and sorting out crates and destinations, and confirming the next part of their journey. They’d requested a change from their assigned posting of Cochrane in northern Ontario, hoping for something closer to Toronto so they could more easily address Koos and Gert’s growing needs for new prostheses. The plans took time to arrange, but the children kept busy watching the goings-on, and looking out at Canada. Koos gawked at the dockworkers in their peculiar red and black wool jackets, and Rige started when a crate – not theirs – plunged into the water as the cargo was unloaded. It was here, when Rige’s head was turned, that Niek wandered off for a snoop around the harbour. Still holding his bag of marbles – Wim van der Panne’s entire collection, now his – he headed down the ramp and onto land without anyone seeing him go. Once they discovered his absence, Cor and Gerrit panicked, and the family spread out to look for him. Cor thought of the size of the country, and the dark forest Vader had joked about, and worried they’d never find him. Rige feared he’d dropped into the water, like the crate, and bubbled under. But Niek didn’t think he was lost. He wandered into a building and down a hall where two official-looking men sat at a desk. Strangely, one of them offered a cigarette, and Niek accepted, feeling eighteen rather than eight in spite of his marbles. He inhaled the potent smoke and his head swooned, but he puffed again as he stepped outdoors, and the sky spun above him. The clouds swirled like the patterns on his marbles, and he felt himself turning green as he drifted back on to the boat, searching for the washroom. Over an all-too familiar basin, he threw up again, though the boat trip was over.

Cor gripped his arms when she found him, and flashed back to the time she’d tied him to the chair. She held her face close to his and tried to think of something to say, but instead just hugged him, hard and fast. She gripped his hand that evening, squishing the bones, as they all walked to town to pass the time. The shops had closed for the day but offered a picture reflected in their windows: the seven people trudging past looked like immigrants here, despite the attention paid selecting new clothes. The boys’ knickerbockers and long socks shouted out their foreignness. Even in March, the coats were insubstantial, and the hats didn’t cover their ears, and the thin-soled boots slipped on snow and mud. “Where are the horses?” Gert asked Cor, and she remembered the pictures of prairies in his books at home. There was no sign of cowboys and Indians in Halifax, but after their last night on the docked Volendam, Gert still woke up hopeful, and told her he’d watch for them on the train to Ontario.

The train had none of the comforts of Dutch trains. Together they sat on slatted wooden benches for the journey through a drab landscape in which trees had not begun to bud. They slept in their seats, leaning up against one another, and waking to the long, melancholy sound of the train’s whistle in the middle of the night. The journey took three days, brightened by a short stop that gave Gerrit time to step out of the train and come back with sweet, delicious bananas. Soon, they were underway again, passing nothing but trees and more trees. To Cor, it seemed unfathomable that this was all part of one country. She sat with Rige and looked out, tapping on the glass and pointing to the plain white clapboard houses. “Those,” she told her daughter, “must be where the immigrants live.”

It was night when they were deposited in Aylmer, Ontario, two hours past Toronto. Their wooden crate was stored at the railway station, and they stood at the roadside, waiting for their contact as the snow fell in slow, bright flakes. Gerrit’s new sponsor was a dairy farmer – the job was one he’d never done, but he and Cor had agreed he should take what was offered to get them farther south than Cochrane, which looked on the map to be in the middle of nowhere. Now that they were here, Aylmer, too, looked like nowhere. Cor thought of the flower vendor bicycling by, and his cry of “flowers in all colours!” and how out of place it would seem here. They waited a long while in the quiet night until a Dutchman pulled up in his pickup truck, and said he’d take them to their lodgings on the farm. Gerrit rode in the back, crouched down with the boys and their luggage, and Cor and Rige climbed into the cab with their driver, a friendly man who belonged to the Gereformeerde church started there. Hesitantly, he told Cor that the farmer who would be Gerrit’s boss had already gone through several helpers, and Cor understood his tone of warning.

It hardly prepared her, though, for the accommodations assigned them when they arrived: two rooms filthy from their recent use as chicken coops. There were two double beds for all seven of them, and the pots and pans were rusted through with holes. The fatigue that had been with her for nearly a decade swelled, but there was nowhere clean to lie down, and there were the children to think of. She divided the duties, as they’d done at the tuin after the hailstorm, and everyone got to work to make the place bearable.

Dinner that first night was a piece of meat, stalks of celery, mashed potatoes, and something called Jell-O, courtesy of their hosts, a skinny old man with missing teeth, his wife, and their thirty-ish son, a sluggish fellow with cruel eyes. They ate in silence. The elder man inhaled his food and finished before the rest, then scraped his chair back and retired to his rocker, belching. Cor looked away in distaste. They were expected to stay for a year, to fulfill the contract Gerrit had signed, and once more Cor found herself surveying her new home and thinking it wouldn’t be possible. Nor did she see how they’d acquire another, but she reminded herself that God always provided. All that they needed would present itself in due time.

The kids started school in a one-room schoolhouse that served eight grades, but all five of them read Dick and Jane, puzzling their way through a foreign language and a culture much less formal than their own. Cor, too, had trouble adjusting, and couldn’t run her household the way she always had. Money for food was subtracted from Gerrit’s wages rather than given as cash, which meant the old farmer took Cor to the grocery store and told her, “Choose what you need,” but when she placed the items on the counter in front of the cashier, the farmer picked through her selections, removing things randomly until he found the cost satisfactory. Cor stood at the farmer’s elbow, seething and humiliated, but with her head held high. She’d been through worse during five years under the Nazis, so she knew she could withstand this boor.

Little by little, spring arrived and the slush disappeared. Gerrit worked long hours and earned a paltry amount, but they managed to give Niek, growing quickly, new jeans for his birthday. Cor noticed his swagger and the way he hooked his thumbs into the belt loops, while the bag of marbles from pale Wim lay forgotten in a corner, an old game from an old world he was no longer part of. But Rige’s letters flew back to Ineke and Willy, pages long, each one dutifully answered. With equal frequency, notes came from Moeder and Vader den Hartog in Leidschendam, always short, starting with a few lines from Gerrit’s mother: “I would like to knit a sock for Koos, but I can’t even see well enough to write,” she confessed, and passed the pen to her husband. The letters had the tone of finality – “We hope you may live in that new land for many years, and that your life goes well” – but also brought everyday news from home: auction prices, hellos from the Batelaans and the Quartels, and a message to Cor that, no, they still had not heard from Tante Bep. Moeder told of a wild rainstorm that caused her to step into her wooden shoes and put up her umbrella in the house, and Vader said the sight made “quite a movie.” But the overall message of every letter was melancholy: they missed their family and wished they would come home. “Say, Cor and Gerrit, the Volendam has left again with 1,200 passengers, that is the third time already since you! But you are having some bad times. We hope you will soon find something better. If that doesn’t happen then you’ll just come back. You can move in with us so long as we are healthy, and by the Koop factory they are going to build thirty-two houses. This will provide work. Say, Cor and Gerrit, you shouldn’t think it bad to come home. So many are coming back. Paulien Quartel told us that a family with ten children returned. Anyway. It is cold here, but things are growing well. The auction prices are uneven. Lettuce three cents. Wagonloads go to the cows.”

Cor folded each letter and tucked it away like a keepsake. As bad as things were at the farm, she wouldn’t consider moving home. Rige would have gone in a minute, she knew, but the boys were happy enough, especially Niek and Gert, who came home after school chanting new English words: “chalkboard,” “strawberry,” “sandwich.” Some, like “chipmunk,” they repeated endlessly, snorting with laughter. Gert had a head start with the English he’d learned in England, and though the vocabulary hadn’t stayed with him, he picked it up easily now. He started calling himself Gerry, an easy enough change. Niek became Nick, thumbs tucked in the belt loops of his treasured blue jeans. But Koos went further upon discovering how ridiculous his Dutch name sounded to him in this new environment. The kids pronounced it Koos, like loose, with their lips puckered. So he leafed through the English Bible to find the right translation for Jacobus – likely the last time, he says now, that he used the Bible as a fount of knowledge. He was surprised to come upon James rather than Jacob, and soon shortened the moniker further to Jim. And it was this “Jim,” eagerly shedding a skin, who merged the cumbersome den and Hartog to Denhartog, amazed by how different it looked on the page. He felt lighter and suddenly more confident once he’d made the change.

One day in May, as he walked home with his brothers and sister, he lagged behind enough to be out of earshot, and practised saying his name with a hard r and g. But as they approached the barn, he rushed to catch up – it had become their habit to stop and see their father before going home. They watched him scraping straw-caked manure off the barn floor or filling the cows’ feed troughs, the big beasts lowing softly as he elbowed his way between them. Seeing their father acting like a farmhand was strange after so many years of seeing him in the tuin, but it didn’t occur to any of them that he, too, was reinventing himself. Koos liked being near the big cows with their long eyelashes and swishing tails. He even liked the smell of the cow dung that lay in flat discs called “patties,” and he loved to torment Gert, who still had the picture of his so-called girlfriend Patty from England. “Watch out!” Koos shouted. “Don’t step on Patty!” But Koos stayed quiet inside the barn, as did the others, since the farmer and his son were so unfriendly.

Today, the older man sat milking a cow, and the milk squirted rhythmically into the bucket. His stout son carried another pail of milk to a calf in a stall, who had to learn to drink from the bucket rather than from his mother. The man leaned into the stall and offered the milk, and the calf lapped noisily but shook its head when the droplets tickled, and the pail fell to the ground. The milk seeped into the carpet of straw on the barn floor, and before anyone had time to speak, the farmer’s son grabbed a plank of wood and swung, bringing it down on the calf’s head. One blow knocked the animal to the ground, where it lay dead and bleeding. Koos felt sick to his stomach. He saw his father drop his broom and look at the son and then the farmer – the older man stopped milking but then started again. Koos stood rigid. He saw that Rige and Niek were crying, and sensed that, behind him, Rokus and Gert hovered in the doorway. Suddenly his father stood and moved in front of the children. He said to the men in his awkward English, “I will not work tomorrow.” His voice was clear and even, and Koos stared at his ears, red beneath his cap. “I will look for another job,” he said, and his hands at his sides opened and closed nervously.

The younger man scoffed, but it was the farmer who answered, hardly glancing up from his chore. “In that case you can go look for one right now,” he said flatly. “And don’t come back.”

Koos’s father turned and looked at each of them. “Go and tell your mother to pack the suitcases,” he said to Rige.

Rokus was sent to fetch a church friend who had a car. Within the hour, they were gone.

The friend didn’t have room for them for long. Cor and Rige stayed in the house, sharing a narrow bed, and Gerrit slept with his boys in the barn. But the late Canadian spring had finally begun, so the nights weren’t overly cold. He remembered Cor’s foraging trip with Truus, and how they had slept in a hayloft in February – that it should have been him and Jacques. Jacques had been livid when Truus recounted how the farmer kissed her. After the war, he had said, he’d find the man himself and wring his neck. But it had been too long a journey. Now the distance seemed short by comparison. He listened to his sons breathing, trying to gauge whether they were asleep or not. He could hear Koos sucking his thumb, and smiled. The habit had almost disappeared but sometimes came back in his sleep when the boy was nervous or scared, even now that he was “Jim,” barrelling into adolescence. Gerrit sighed. The hooting owls and flapping bats were comforting sounds, and while he had just thrown away his only income, his family’s lodgings, and the sponsorship that made his status in Canada legal, he felt good. The night smelled of hay and freshly turned earth, like the tuin.

The next morning, Gerrit’s friend took him to McConnell’s nursery to apply for a job, but Gerrit’s hopes weren’t high. He knew the busy season, early spring, was over, and that now was the time people were let go rather than hired on. As the car travelled along the gravel driveway towards the nursery, Gerrit saw the greenhouses spread out before him, and off to the left, a beautiful two-storey home where the owners lived. He met with the foreman first, and was taken through the packaging room, where the plants were bundled for mail-order. The smell of cut greens and flowers hung in the air as the man in charge of the flower department introduced himself and showed Gerrit the time clock and how it punched each employee’s card. Gerrit’s English was still poor, but he understood that, against the odds, he had gotten the job.

Each day, he tended long rows of flowers in the humid greenhouses. He made chrysanthemum cuttings with a sharp knife and dipped the stems in rooting powder, and he unpacked roses that arrived from the Netherlands, surrounded by mulch. His horticulture studies and his experience as a tuinder carried him, and he learned the workings of the nursery quickly. Before long he found himself offering tips that helped the fussy plants bloom, and throwing horseshoes with the head of the department at lunch hour. In the afternoons, the owner began stopping by the greenhouses to see his work, and calling him “Garrett,” as if they were friends. The informality seemed strange to him, but he liked it.

With Gerrit’s job secured, he and Cor quickly found a house, and the nursery’s truck picked up the crate from the railway station and brought it home. Gerrit pried open the wooden slats. Inside was the oak table that had travelled by barge to Leidschendam when Cor and Gerrit were married. The crate also contained small items, carefully wrapped and boxed: the pewter pitcher and fluted cups Rokus had spotted in the shed; a packet of photographs and the Swiss postcard from “José”; the old queen and the new queen’s portrait; the mill in which Rige and Cor had ground peas and beans; the small metal lockbox with its old, soldered coins and spent bullets; Gerrit’s sharpshooting certificate, and the ID cards they had carried during the occupation. As he and Cor drew out the items and unwrapped them, it occurred to Gerrit that these things represented what already felt like a past life, and that now, a new one would begin.