The Netherlands, May 1940
My mother sits in her playpen chewing on a wooden teething ring while tanks roll past her home in Apeldoorn, shaking the floorboards, causing the chimes on her mobile to jingle. My mother is six months old on May 10, 1940, the day that Germany invades Holland. Two days later, the German forces enter her small town, leaving officers behind to oversee the handover of power.
Civilians, shaken and ashen-faced, pass through the town as they move in from the south, fleeing the blitzkrieg of Rotterdam, which has been flattened by the German Luftwaffe’s relentless aerial assaults. The Germans shatter every old church, every last historic brick in the inner city. Close to nine hundred dead bodies lie in the smoldering remains, and eighty-five thousand stunned inhabitants are suddenly homeless. The news is extremely grim, and the Netherlands, which had hoped to remain neutral in Germany’s war, now finds itself under a furious attack it simply cannot fight off. It takes only four days for the country to fall. All throughout Apeldoorn, people weep as the Nazis move in.
But in my mind, this never included my mother’s father. Before my research, when I imagined the invasion of the German troops, my grandfather was not weeping as he watched soldiers enter his town. This is what I once imagined: my grandfather standing on the sidewalk with his arms crossed in front of him when the tanks roll by, smug and pleased. Maybe he waves at the German soldiers or gives them the infamous stiff-armed salute, a grin on his face. I imagine the scene in the most evil way I can, because I need a villain. I need him to be a caricature to reconcile this secret fact I know about him with the narrative I have received in school, in popular culture, about what Nazi sympathizers look like. I need him to not be too much like me, his granddaughter. So I compartmentalize. It isn’t until I read his letters that I realize he actually loathed the Nazis, that he felt his country was being invaded, and that my black-and-white image of the war is extremely simplistic. So where do I put him now when I try to reconstruct this event in history? On which side does he belong? What if he’s somewhere in between?
Four days after the invasion, there is no more fighting. The Germans set up headquarters in every Dutch city hall, stringing up banners and hoisting the Nazi flag up the flagpole outside the royal palace in Apeldoorn. Young men in the Dutch resistance movement throw Molotov cocktails until they are subdued and arrested, but aside from a small civilian backlash, there is no military fighting for the first years of the war, something that surprises me when I learn this later in life. Throughout my teens and into my twenties, I imagined the war as years of continuous military fighting, Dutch and Allied soldiers against the Germans. Bullets flying, snipers on rooftops, ambushes of convoys, for years on end. The truth, I learn, is much less dramatic. Unlike my father’s experience in the Dutch East Indies, after the capitulation in the Netherlands, life goes on as usual for the majority of the Dutch public, with the exception of German soldiers and officers hanging about their towns and cities, running everything that was previously run by the Dutch and drinking beer in their pubs at night. The women still go to the shops, the men still go to their jobs, the trains run on schedule, and the kids are in school. Some Dutch Jews, afraid of rumors they’ve heard, do leave during this period, but the majority stay.
What there is instead of fighting in the streets is tension. There is hatred of the Nazis, and seething resentment of NSB members, who strike a deal with the Nazis in order to remain the sole party in operation under the German rule. It quickly becomes clear that the Nazis are calling all the shots. In his meetings with Hitler, Mussert attempts to be named the leader of a German-allied yet independent nation, but this request is denied. Instead, Mussert is given an honorary title, Leader of the Dutch People, a symbolic pat on the head for his cooperation with occupiers, and sent to his headquarters to await orders from the Nazi leaders. The Nazis appoint new mayors, all from within the NSB party, and opportunists emerge from within the Dutch population. The NSB party swells in size, acquiring over one hundred thousand new members during this period. Many of these new members support the Nazis, but just as many believe that joining the party will protect them. Some join in order to profit.
In June 1940, the Dutch royal family flees to London, fearing for their lives. Mussert uses this to strengthen the NSB’s position, taking advantage of people’s feelings that they’ve been abandoned by their queen, whose privilege has allowed her to flee while they remain in the motherland, though most certainly the royal family would have been murdered by the Nazis if they had remained. In fact, rather than abandoning her people, Queen Wilhelmina broadcasts a weekly radio address to the country from her refuge in London, insisting that she is still very much with them. In response to this, the Nazis accuse her of provoking people to stage nationwide strikes and rebel, and so they make the owning of a radio illegal. In the Dutch archives, an anonymous poem, “Goodbye to My Radio,” appears in an article on the seizure of radios:
My radio, my dearest friend
We soon will have to part
As that German thief has stolen you
To chastise me, your owner
For I pin my only hopes
On the messages from Britannia …
While the rest of the country has to turn in their radios, NSBers are allowed to keep theirs, and in fact are offered the very radios that have been confiscated from their neighbors. They are passed out to NSB members, but my grandfather refuses his, saying he doesn’t need a radio. He does help his brother-in-law Jan, the husband of my grandmother’s sister Ket, with fixing and hiding an illegal radio. Jan is both a police officer and an active member in the resistance, so my grandfather knows that helping him with the radio is highly illegal. But according to his and Jan’s written statements, my grandfather doesn’t believe that some people should have things that others don’t, and he’s critical of the Germans and their radio double standard, so he flouts the rules to help Jan and the resistance.
This is the kind of mixed information that muddles my perception of my grandfather’s activity in the NSB. I bump up against these conflicting behaviors continuously, causing my feelings about my grandfather to sway wildly from one end of the spectrum to the other. When he and my grandmother go to visit her sister, he and Jan have heated arguments about politics while they work on the radio and drink jenever in the shed. The more they drink, the more the disagreement escalates. Jan scolds my grandfather and calls the Nazis animals, asks him how he can support a party that supports the Nazis. My grandfather yells back that he doesn’t support the Nazis, he supports the NSB. Jan says it’s the same thing.
Meanwhile, even as he argues in defense of his membership in the NSB, my grandfather helps Jan with his illegal activities for the resistance, and he knows that Jan uses a typing course held in his living room to pass secret messages to other members of the movement.
In the first few months of the occupation, the Nazis don’t take any overt action against the Jewish population of the Netherlands, which numbers at that point around 140,000 people, mostly concentrated in Amsterdam. Perhaps this lulls people into a false sense of security. According to several historical accounts, the Dutch public is naive in the beginning, believing the Nazis won’t actually do anything to their Jewish citizens, who are well integrated into Dutch society. In Amsterdam, one in ten citizens is Jewish, including some of the most prominent families in the city. In fact, to this day the Dutch nickname for Amsterdam is Mokum, the Yiddish word for safe haven. Prior to World War II, the quarter near the Nieuwmarkt is a bustling area of Jewish businesses where many non-Jews also shop. However, in November 1940, Jews are suddenly removed by the Nazis from public positions, in particular those in the education sector, such as university faculty. All the other faculty members at universities receive a letter, which they are instructed to sign:
The undersigned declares that to the best of his/her knowledge, neither he nor she, nor his/her spouse, nor his/her parents or grandparents, have ever belonged to the Jewish belief or community … The undersigned understands that providing false information will result in immediate termination.
This leads to student protests, but the demonstrations are ineffective. Faculty members who protest the firing of their colleagues and refuse to sign the declaration are immediately arrested by the Nazis and sent to prison, where they remain until the end of the war. The Dutch population, while agitated, either still don’t fully understand the danger their Jewish neighbors are in or are complacent and complicit, or a combination of both, depending on whose historical narrative is believed. It’s impossible to know one singular truth in this, as with any perspective of history. What is known is that not enough direct action was taken in response to the early arrests of professors and firings of Jewish public employees. The next uprising doesn’t happen until February 1941, when a small group of Dutch Jews is arrested and deported. Anger against the Nazis rises among Jews and non-Jews, and a fight breaks out between NSB members and members of the resistance on the Waterlooplein in the Jewish neighborhood. An NSB member is killed, and this is all the provocation the Nazis need. The day after the fight, they put barbed wire around the Nieuwmarkt neighborhood, raise the bridges, place guards at the entrances, and create an island-ghetto, prohibiting movement into or out of the neighborhood. It is forbidden for non-Jews to enter unless on official business.
Today, the Nieuwmarkt neighborhood is one of the liveliest in Amsterdam, and I spend much of my time there when I’m in the city. Looking at a photo of the same square surrounded by a barbed-wire fence, Jews on one side, non-Jews chatting with them on the other, I am shocked by how casual they appear. I think of how easily the unacceptable can begin to look acceptable when people are inside an experience. There are Jews who have already gone into hiding by this point, recognizing the danger, but I wonder about the rest of the community. This photo of the ghetto was taken a full year and a half before the Frank family went into hiding. I wonder if people believed that this was as bad as it could get.
The Dutch practice of meticulous record-keeping works against the Netherlands’ own citizens, as the addresses and names of all Jews have been neatly noted in the city halls and synagogues, giving the Nazis all they need to efficiently round up the Jewish population. These people are called to the Nieuwmarkt square to register at tables with the Nazis or face punishment, and each of them receives a Star of David armband they must wear in public. Frightened by the beatings and detainment they have seen happen to others who resist, they comply, standing politely in line and volunteering their names, birthdays, and home addresses, many sealing their fates. They have no idea what awaits them in the camps or the capacity for depravity in human beings. This Dutch efficiency and tendency toward bureaucracy is one of the main factors in the Netherlands’ having the highest percentage of its Jewish population killed among all Nazi-occupied countries in Western Europe.
After the creation of the Jewish ghetto in Amsterdam, more fights and protests erupt throughout the city, causing Nazi officers to be injured. In revenge, the Nazis conduct their first large-scale pogrom on the afternoon of February 22, 1941, a Saturday. Driving their trucks into the Nieuwmarkt neighborhood, 600 Nazi soldiers flood the streets, rounding up 425 young Jewish men between the ages of twenty and thirty-five. The young men are held in a school and later sent to concentration camps, where all but two will die. In response to the pogrom and the detention of the young men, who are at that point still in the country, many workers in the city of Amsterdam go on collective strike, led by the non-Jewish dockworkers in the shipyards and the communist party of the Netherlands, which distributes a flyer:
STRIKE! STRIKE! STRIKE! Organize a strike in all businesses! Fight the terror! Demand the immediate release of the arrested Jews! Show solidarity with the heavily stricken Jewish members of our working population! Halt the entire Amsterdam commerce for one full day!
The flyers work. All commerce and public transportation come to a grinding halt that day. Other strikes in cities throughout Holland follow.
Sadly, they do little to stop the assault on the Jews, and the leaders of the first protest strike are executed.
After the February strikes, Jews are mercilessly rooted out of the city. The sound of boots echoes against the tall brick houses in the narrow streets of the city. Fists pound on doors, and if no one answers, doors give way with a violent splintering as Dutch Jews are taken from their homes and put onto trams to the Amsterdam Central Train station. From there, they are taken to Camp Westerbork for processing, and then are sent on to Auschwitz, Dachau, or Bergen-Belsen.
The fact that most of the Dutch Jews are processed through Westerbork, 180 kilometers northeast of Amsterdam, is a bitter irony. In perhaps the cruelest twist of the occupation, in 1942 the Germans seize the Westerbork refugee camp, which had been established in 1939 by the Dutch government and wealthy Dutch Jews to take in Jews and Romani people fleeing the Nazi-occupied areas of other countries. It is filled with Jewish refugees who are like sitting ducks when the Nazis invade the Netherlands. The Nazis put them on trains to the concentration camps almost immediately and turn Westerbork refugee center into a transit camp where over one hundred thousand Dutch Jews, including Anne Frank, as well as one thousand Romani and members of the resistance, are held before being sent to their deaths in extermination camps.
To this day, the trauma still runs deep in Amsterdam. My cousin told me about an old man he knows who grew up in a Jewish neighborhood of Amsterdam near the Amstel station. He was the only gentile living in the neighborhood, and all of his friends were Jewish. One day they came to his house with their parents to say goodbye, bearing gifts. “We’ll be back,” they said. “Don’t worry.” But not a single one ever returned. He lost all of his childhood friends and his entire community in one week. This man left the Netherlands and moved to France, unable to bear ever returning to his city.
While Amsterdam was emptied of its Jews, my grandfather was ninety kilometers away in Apeldoorn, which had seen one Jewish teacher fired from the local high school. In the letters he wrote after the war, my mother’s uncle Jan maintained that my grandfather was not anti-Semitic. Other witnesses at his trial also insisted he was not anti-Semitic. He himself said he was not anti-Semitic. All of his children insist he wasn’t anti-Semitic. As members of the resistance, Jan and his wife had onderduikers in their house, people in hiding from the Nazis. My grandfather said nothing when he visited them on weekends. The neighbors had a Jew hiding in their home whom my grandfather knew about. My grandfather said nothing to anyone throughout the war about these onderduikers. My relatives all tell me that he had several Jewish friends and colleagues before, during, and after the war, friends whom he defended.
In his dossier in the archives, I find a defense witness statement from his brother-in-law Jan:
13 June 1945
[De Kock] knew all kinds of information that in the last years of the war could not be brought into the light of day. For some time I had the family Fontijne in hiding in my home. De Kock knew about the entire situation and kept it secret. During the time that radios were confiscated, he even helped me to hide my own radio. In a shed behind my house I was hiding four horses that should have been confiscated and two contraband bicycles hidden for the farmer Schenk. De Kock came to my house, saw everything, was greatly amused by it all, and always kept it secret.
Jan Enzerink, Police Agent, Dordrecht
So how do I reconcile this portrait of my grandfather with the article I discover on microfiche in the National Library of the Netherlands in The Hague titled “Crisis of the Sciences”? Written by A. C. de Kock in 1942 for the NSB journal New Netherlands, it reads, in part,
The Jews, one could say, have shown that they are capable of practicing science and even can be fairly successful. One could rattle off a whole list of names: Einstein, Lipschitz, Spinoza, Minkowski, etc.… But hard science, as degenerated as it is today, is no longer characteristic of our race … When the Jew from time to time succeeds in the current science, which has become disorderly partly because of him (as well as Humanism), that does not necessarily prove that he has anything to offer us in this area … On the contrary, it would certainly appear that the Jew has nothing to offer that would be of any interest to us, no more than the Papua, the Chinese, the Eskimoes, or the African Negroes …
These are the words of my grandfather, someone supposedly “not anti-Semitic,” someone who supposedly had Jewish colleagues and friends whom he spoke highly of, writing clearly anti-Semitic, racist nonsense for a racist NSB publication. Was he pressured to write it? My cousins, much older than I, tell me that my grandfather was an intelligent man with Jewish academic colleagues whom he respected, and there is no way he actually believed what he was writing in the article. So why did he write it? They have theories. He was paid to write it and sold out to feed his family. He was threatened. He was afraid of being seen as disloyal. Ego; it made him feel important to be asked to write an article. Perhaps he was secretly more racist than his friends and family knew and felt superior to his Jewish friends. Sadly, nobody alive today knew he wrote this article until after his death—he never spoke of it. He refused to discuss any aspect of his involvement with the NSB later in life. I don’t know what the truth is about this article, or about his continued involvement with the NSB. He has taken his explanation and any possible defense he might have had to his grave.
Further, there is a giant question mark for me regarding the arson of the Jewish synagogue in Apeldoorn. The Jewish population of Apeldoorn isn’t as large as that in Amsterdam, but they have a synagogue, a stately brick building with stained glass windows. One night in August 1941, it is set on fire. Three NSB members are caught in the act at 3:00 a.m., shaking gasoline from cans around the perimeter and onto the front door, striking matches. Their names aren’t printed in any of the newspapers, but as an NSB member, my grandfather must have known something via the local rumor mill, even if he wasn’t directly involved. The synagogue is only a ten-minute bike ride from his home, after all. If my grandfather had been alive in my lifetime, I would have liked to ask him about this, about the article and what he knew and when he knew it, what he really believed, whether he was pressured, and why he continued on in the party. But the documents—ink on paper—and the words of people who knew him who are still alive are all the evidence I have, and they are at odds with each other.
In a video I watch, a man close to my mother’s age stands at the grave of his father, who was in the NSB. “The first time I came here, I was so angry,” he says, “because of what he did. I think, Jesus, what is going on inside you that you would make a choice like that? I just can’t understand … The problem is that as a child, you can’t ask them what actually happened. [They] didn’t want to talk about it.” Grappling with the actions and the beliefs of your ancestors is a one-sided conversation. I will never have all the answers I want about my grandfather, and without a diary or letters in which he wrote freely, I will never have the chance to hear his side of the story. Recently, my cousin and I traveled to visit my grandfather’s grave site, which we had never seen. The family had received word that the body might have been disinterred. The site had never been paid for or maintained. I don’t know why we wanted to go. In the car on the way to the cemetery, we talk about our frustration that we will never get to ask him “Why?” The cemetery where he is buried is grim and gray, abutting a mobile home park. Almost too perfectly, a pair of black ravens sit on a gravestone in the drizzle, calling out. Our grandmother was not buried next to him. All expense was saved burying him, and he was buried in a public grave in the county where he died. At his grave site, we discover that he’s not alone. He’s sharing his grave with a stranger named Izaak. Izaak is buried on top of him in the same grave, something that we learn was done in public graves during the 1960s. My grandfather’s gravestone is plain and worn away, covered in lichen. We stand in front of it, looking down, getting no answers to our “Why?”
In 1941, my mother is two years old, toddling about the house, walking through the woods nearby, sitting on the banks of the Hill and Dale nature park with her brother Pim, now five. When school lets out, her face lights up as she sees her brother Bert, now eight, and sister Hannie, now nine, come in through the back door into the mudroom and set their book bags on the ground. Across town, thirteen Jews are removed from their homes in Apeldoorn and sent to concentration camps. My grandfather, like all Apeldoorn community members, will be told of their deportation, though he doesn’t know what their ultimate fate will be in the “detention” camps.
At the end of 1942, my mother is three, and scooting around on her tricycle. Pim is practicing writing his letters: P-i-m. Meanwhile, all Jewish bank accounts are frozen, and in Apeldoorn, another two hundred Jews are removed from their homes during Nazi razzias, their doors kicked in, and men, women, and children dragged out into waiting trucks.
In early 1943, my mother is four. My grandfather is still working at the auto mechanics’ school, cycling there and back every day. His Jewish students and colleagues are missing, and for most of the remaining faculty and student body, maybe it’s easy to forget they were ever there. He comes home, grabbing the newspaper off the stoop, and pours himself a cup of tea. Across town, thirteen hundred people in a Jewish mental hospital in Apeldoorn who had been allowed to stay up to that point are led out of the facility, loaded onto trucks, and deported to concentration camps, thereby emptying the city of all its Jewish citizens, with the exception of the onderduikers in hiding.
By all accounts, both by witnesses in his postwar trial and by people who knew him, my grandfather condemned these acts to those who challenged him on his NSB membership. He agreed in their political debates at the time that the Nazis had gone too far, and that the NSB should never have allied themselves with the Nazi party to begin with.
But did he rethink his NSB membership? Is knowing about one onderduiker in hiding and saying nothing an excuse for knowing about thousands of others being pulled from their homes and put on trains and taking no action to stop it? We could ask the non-NSB citizens the same thing. Here is where I always get caught up: If my grandfather was afraid of the repercussions of turning his back on the party, does it make any of it OK? What about the others, the hundreds of thousands of residents who cursed the Nazis, who weren’t in the NSB, but who bought their Jewish neighbors’ silverware at the market stalls and moved into their homes for a bargain?
My mother was a toddler during the worst of war, during the razzias and the increasing anger. She recalls very little of that period, and her parents did their best to shelter their children. But her older siblings who were in school remembered a lot. They had very few friends during the war. Hannie was so ashamed, she often sat with her head down in the corner. As an adult, she told me she was thankful that the teachers didn’t throw her out of their classes and that the other children tolerated her presence. Still, while she and her siblings were tolerated, most of their classmates were forbidden to play with them, as they were “dirty NSBers.” At school, they ate lunch alone. They weren’t invited to birthday parties, except for those of the other children of NSB members. The neighbors cursed under their breath when they passed. All across the country, taunting songs were sung to and about NSB members in the streets. As she was under the age of five, my mother doesn’t remember the songs being sung to them, but her family would not have been an exception.
I learn about these anti-NSB songs not from my mother’s family but from an eighty-three-year-old woman whom I am introduced to in 2014 while on a writing retreat in Gelderland, in a village that saw a lot of fighting at the end of the war. The woman recalls being a child during the war in the village, where she spent her whole life, and having an NSB member as a neighbor. We sit in her garden and drink tea as I ask her about her memories of the war. When I mention writing about the NSB and my grandfather, she misinterprets this to mean that he fought the NSB, and she says, “Oh, we kids used to tease the NSBer on our street. We ridiculed him and his son!” and begins singing enthusiastically, apologizing for her shaky voice.
Ohhhhhh Jan de Bree, you’re a traitor to the country
Ohhhhhh NSB, we’re going to break your neck
You in your lil’ black uniform, you’re actually in mourning,
When Queen Wilhelmina comes back, we’ll beat you black and bluuuue.
When there is no more meat to eat, we will butcher yooooou.
She laughs. “That’s what we kids always sang about that nasty NSBer, Jan de Bree, and his son, who lived on this street. NSBers, you could see it in their eyes. Just mean.” There is an awkward pause as I try to formulate an elegant way to correct the misunderstanding that has transpired between us, but there is no tactful way to say it.
“Um, actually, I meant I am researching the NSB because my mother’s father was a member.”
She blanches and stammers, “Ohhh. Oh, I thought—It was just kid songs. We didn’t know any better. I didn’t know.”
“It’s OK,” I say. “Actually, this is good. I’m glad you shared this with me. Nobody ever wants to tell me how people really felt about the NSB members once they know about my grandfather. They’re afraid of being impolite. But I want to know how it really was. I can’t understand if I don’t know how it really was at the time.”
Later, I research anti-NSB songs and discover many others. One I find especially interesting:
On the corner of the street is an NSBer,
It’s not human, it’s not an animal, it’s a Pharisee-er.
With a newspaper in his hand, peddling his rag,
Selling out his Fatherland, for a coupla cents.
I am struck by the lines about NSBers not being human. I wonder how the children of NSB members internalized that messaging about their parents during the war. I wonder how that message influenced their relationships with the people they relied on for all of their needs, emotional and physical, at a young age. The Dutch, filled with rage and grief as they watched their neighbors being arrested and taken away, had little recourse left beyond verbal protest. So they did not hide their feelings about the collaborators during the war, and the children watch, extensions of their parents. “Fout!” my three-year-old mother hears yelled at them as she walks through the farmers’ market holding her mother’s hand. “Fout!” my mom’s big sister, Hannie, hears yelled at her as she bikes to school. “Dirty, filthy Nazi-lovers! Fout! Fout! Fout!” Fout. Wrong. Fout means not just incidentally wrong, but inherently defective and flawed, a deeper, unchangeable, all-encompassing kind of wrongness. How does a child like my mother metabolize that label on her and her family as she grows up?
Apeldoorn, the Netherlands, 1943
In early 1943, Hannie is enrolled by my grandfather in the Jeugdstorm, the NSB youth group for kids aged ten to seventeen, based on the Nazis’ Hitlerjugend. On weekends, Hannie is expected to put on a uniform that looks much like a Girl Scout’s uniform. She bikes across town to attend the meetings, where they do calisthenics and track-and-field exercises to keep their bodies fit. Healthy body, healthy mind! The blond, blue-eyed girls memorize songs and march back and forth on the frost-covered field at the local high school while singing in unison, their breath puffing from their faces in little clouds:
Our drumbeats sound throughout the land, marching with the Youth Storm!
The flags are waving in our hand, the flags of our Fatherland!
Stormer’s youth! Stormer’s youth! Stormer’s youth is marching!
Hannie, now eleven years old, shuffles along in formation in the cold, gray afternoons. She’s thoroughly embarrassed and doesn’t feel moved by the flag or the fatherland or these women standing in front of her shouting with their megaphones in their woolen skirts, ties, and silly hats. She’s a sweet, sensitive girl who likes everyone. She doesn’t understand why she’s supposed to mistrust Jews or feel proud to be a Germanic girl. To the contrary, her face flushes with shame when her non-NSB classmates bike by the field, and she tries not to catch their eyes. She would much rather be reading a book, walking in the woods, or even doing her homework. When it rains, the Youth Storm leaders force the children to sit inside and watch Hitler’s speeches projected onto a white screen, or they force the kids to write stories about being proud Dutch children for the Jeugdstorm newspaper, The Storm Seagull. Hannie daydreams and fails to apply herself to the cause with gusto. She is talked to sternly by the Jeugdstorm girls’ leader about her importance in the movement. “Young lady, your country is counting on you. Is that bird you’re staring at perhaps more important than your country?”
Hannie bikes home and bursts into tears as she walks in the front door. “I don’t want to be in the Jeugdstorm anymore,” she says to her father. “Please, please, Paps, can I quit?” My grandfather nods.
“OK. If you really don’t want to do it, I will see what I can do.” He goes to his desk and pulls out a sheet of letter paper. A week later, a response comes back to him from the regional girls’ director of the Jeugdstorm.
April 4, 1943
Comrade,
In regard to your letter of April 2, the following: You write that when your daughter is required to go to the Youth Storm, she has no free time left over due to all her studies, and this seems to you to be unhealthy for a child of eleven years old. Would it then not be a better solution to not have a child of eleven years old study so much? The Youth Storm is not stressful but in fact anti-stress, and is a moral obligation, Mr. De Kock! I would have expected more understanding from you as a national-socialist about the forthcoming new times and some sense of duty to your other comrades, whose own children are committed for the full 100% to realize their ideals, and are willing to sacrifice insignificant personal past-times. This is not a game anymore, but deadly serious. It is sink or swim now, and children cannot learn this early enough, comrade! I therefore see no good reason to excuse Hannie. However, you can consider her expelled from the Youth Storm as of the 1st of grass month. I would have liked to have seen her contribute something to this point. She is seven weeks behind, something which you should not have allowed to happen. If Hannie had been told at home what her duty was as a Youth Stormer, this would not have happened.
Her uniform pieces are owned by the Youth Storm and remain our property with her departure. Please have her drop them off as soon as possible. They are: a blouse, cap, tie, tie clip, and badge.
Stay the course!
The Regional Girls’ Youth Storm Director,
C. Wedekind
Some NSBers profit financially from their membership in the party, being appointed to important positions and getting salary increases, but my grandfather, sticking to his socialist ideals, rejects such opportunities. He is offered a better position at a better school but keeps his teaching job at the auto mechanics’ school, despite his low pay and lack of prestige having been a major point of frustration for him. He is offered a radio, illegal for all Dutch people not in the NSB, which he refuses. He is offered more food coupons during the rationing that takes effect throughout the Netherlands during the war, but he declines, and my grandmother stands in the same lines as everybody else.
Throughout the Netherlands, Jewish homes are looted during the war after their residents are sent to the camps. Priceless artwork, furniture, clocks, silverware—everything is stolen, leaving the buildings abandoned and bare. Later, the homes will be bought for pennies on the guilder by non-NSB Dutch investors. My grandparents never received any property from Jewish homes, even though both NSB and non-NSB Dutch participated in this practice. While this fact doesn’t absolve my grandfather of his sins, it begs the question of how clear the divisions are between the righteous and the collaborators they condemn.
When my uncle and I walk through the former Jewish neighborhood in Arnhem, it occurs to me that these homes sat empty after their inhabitants were deported and murdered. It’s a lovely neighborhood, with typical brick town homes near the historic city center.
“What happened to these houses when the Jews were sent to the camps?” I ask him.
“Dutch people bought them for next to nothing. Dutch people bought anything that wasn’t already looted,” he says.
This is something I never considered before. NSB members were not legally permitted to buy these properties after the war, so I realize now that any property not looted by the Nazis at the time of the razzias was bought or looted by those on the other side, the “right” side, something that seems perverse.
“You mean the people who were protesting the German occupation then turned around and got a bargain house or furnishings?”
“Basically,” says my uncle.
At the same time, I understand that with the exception of the Nazi officers and NSB members willing to profit from advantages, everybody suffered during the war, particularly at the end, as the Allied troops fought to take back territory from the Germans and bullets and bombs hit civilian homes as the air raid sirens screamed. With the Germans controlling the railways and waterways, there was a food shortage. The Dutch population suffered, regardless of which side they supported.
My mother’s family is no exception in 1944. They eat stinging nettle soup when there are no vegetables, knit underwear out of yarn from old sweaters. “Things will be better soon, kids,” my grandmother tells her children. “The war will be over soon.” How mistaken she is, as she halves, and halves, and halves again the number of potatoes included in each meal to make her rations stretch a few more days.