Apeldoorn, the Netherlands, May 5, 1945
As soon as the war ends, payback begins. The country goes into a period of ferocious vigilante justice they call Bijltjesdag. Hatchet Day. In the months following the liberation of the Netherlands, the Dutch unleash their anger, grief, and resentment on neighbors whom they see as having been complicit with the Nazis who occupied their cities for years. Nazis kicking in doors in the dark of night with barking German shepherd dogs. Nazis pulling Jews out of attics and basements. Nazis strafing their cities at the beginning of the war to leave flaming debris behind in the place of families, terrorizing their sleepy villages so that no Dutch man, woman, or child knows how to sleep soundly anymore. Now that the Germans are gone, it is the collaborators’ turn to have their doors kicked in and to be pulled from their homes. On May 10, before she has even returned to the Netherlands from London, Queen Wilhelmina announces on the radio, “In the liberated Netherlands, there will be no more place for traitors.”
Anyone who has had anything at all to do with the Germans during the war is subject to the “hatchet” that will be brought down on them during this period. Nazi sympathizers are arrested as traitors. NSB members are forced to eat feces, tied up, and beaten or shot to death in the street. Female NSB members and the wives of NSB members are sometimes raped. Dutch girls who have become romantically involved with German soldiers billeting in their towns, nicknamed moffenmeiden, or “Kraut girls,” get the worst of it in cities throughout the country. They are held down, shaved bald with razors or even hedge clippers, and marched through the streets with their hands on their heads and signs hung around their necks that read “Kraut Slut” or “Traitor” while people throw garbage at them. Black tar pitch is smeared on their faces. They are jeered at, and a few people throw rocks. “Kraut lover!” they yell. “Dirty Kraut whore!” The epithet is uttered by children and adults alike. In the many photos documenting these public shaming sessions, the wide smiles of glee on the faces of the people in the crowd are a startling contrast to the vacant faces of the girls being held with guns to their heads. They have the faces of people who have left their bodies.
My mother and her family hide in their house, the children crawling under the beds, whenever they hear knocking on the door. I am struck that both my parents have hidden under beds this way within a year of each other, children terrified of raging vigilantes outside.
On April 17, 1945, the knock at the door they’ve been fearing comes, and my grandfather is pulled from the house by members of the resistance and marched away with his hands in the air and a gun at his back while my grandmother pleads and the younger children cry. The city is celebrating liberation day, and Canadian troops, floats full of dancing people, and marching bands parade through the streets. They march my grandfather, along with other NSB members, along the parade route of angry onlookers to the center of Apeldoorn, where he and the other suspected collaborators are loaded onto trucks to be sent to a detention camp. Then it is quiet, until unexpectedly, another knock comes on June 21. This one is a complete shock.
I can see my mother standing on the front stoop of her home in Apeldoorn, the house on de Jachthoornlaan: Hunt-horn Lane. It is 1945. She is holding a rag doll. Her thin legs emerge from under a cotton sundress and disappear into a pair of hand-knit socks and a pair of leather sandals. She squints into the sun. Cyclists pass on rusty bicycles with their wooden tires and crane their necks. Elsje is crying. Pedestrians gather to watch; someone shouts an insult. A car drives by slowly. Her three siblings try to comfort her. Their moes, my grandmother, is being marched out of the house by military policemen with guns.
The facts are still fuzzy for my mother, her memory malleable. She was very little. She speaks slowly, carefully, reluctantly, unlike my father. “I … I remember things being thrown out of the second-story window for us in the five minutes my mother was given to prepare. She was throwing things out the window. We didn’t know they were going to come at all because my mother wasn’t active in the NSB,” says my mother now. We sit at the table next to her sewing machine and scraps of fabric, and she drinks tea, the tea I brought back from the Netherlands, from the shop where my grandmother always bought it, extra bergamot. My mother’s hair is white silver now, shining brilliantly under the lights. Her wrinkled hands smooth over a piece of fabric, back and forth, as she talks. “We weren’t prepared for it. I just have this image of things being thrown out of the window, things falling down to us from above.” A thick wool blanket and pillows, sweaters, a bag of toothbrushes. My uncle says this part isn’t true, but he may have been on the other side of the house, and this is my mother’s memory. She says she can still see it. And whether or not it is true, it is her truth and the image that remains with her today.
What is not in dispute: the children’s mother, my grandmother, being loaded into a car, a black car from the POD, the Politieke Opsporingsdienst, the Political Investigation Service. Then the POD agents place wire seals on the doors and windows of my mother’s house. They post a notice on the front door stating that the home has been seized. Boots stride past the children without stopping. Car doors slam. The engine is started. My grandmother turns to look at her children through the window of the police car, her face stunned. And moments later, the car is gone, headed toward Wezep, the same camp they brought my grandfather to two weeks earlier, the special jail for NSB members. My five-year-old mother is crying harder now, inconsolable. Hannie, fourteen, takes her hand. Their two brothers, ages thirteen and seven, flank them. The officers do not come back. Nobody comes for them. The children stand for many minutes on the curb as the elder sister thinks. The pedestrians move on. Fingers hook to pull curtains furtively aside in the houses of the neighbors. They watch the children standing in the street, but they do not come outside. When Hannie turns toward them and catches their eyes in the sliver of space between curtain and window, the fingers hastily retract and the curtains fall closed. She turns away.
William Maxwell writes about a boy losing his home in the novel So Long, See You Tomorrow: “Whether they are part of home or home is part of them is not a question children are prepared to answer. Having taken away the dog, take away the kitchen—the smell of something good in the oven for dinner. Also the smell of washday, of wool drying on the wooden rack. Of ashes. Of soup simmering on the stove. Take away the patient old horse waiting by the pasture fence. Take away the chores that kept him busy from the time he got home from school until they sat down to supper.… Take all this away and what have you done to him? In the face of a deprivation so great, what is the use of asking him to go on being the boy he was. He might as well start life over again as some other boy instead.”
There is the image of my five-year-old mother again, left standing in front of her home, which has just been locked and sealed off. Too late, she remembers the Steiff bear the Canadian soldier gave her, now entombed in the locked house. In my mother’s mind, her mother has been taken away into a black hole, never to return. She and her siblings begin to move down the road, away from the home that is, in an instant, no longer theirs. They walk to the only house where the door might open for them. “Go to the Van den Dools’,” their mother had called hastily as she was led away by the police. So the children walk through a city in the throes of Bijltjesdag, past the shops with signs in their windows that read “No wigs sold here to women with shaved heads,” and keep their eyes on the cracks in the sidewalk, hoping nobody recognizes them, heading for the home of the Van den Dools, unsure if anyone will still be there. Perhaps they have been vanished too, put in handcuffs and taken away.
After what feels like a long time walking but is likely around thirty minutes, they arrive at the home, and Hannie knocks on the door. Elsje cowers behind her older sister’s skirt, holding on to her leg. They hear footsteps. A curtain is pulled aside and falls shut. Then the footsteps come to the door and the door of the house opens. Mrs. Van den Dool regards the children, whom she knows quite well. Her face indicates that she already understands the situation. Hannie’s voice shakes as she speaks. “They’ve taken Mummy away. She told us to come here.” Mrs. Van den Dool brings the children inside and pours hot tea for them. The house is very quiet. The wooden grandfather clock swings its pendulum. Tick. Tock. Tick. Tock. Elsje looks around her for the Van den Dool daughters, her teenage babysitters, but they are not there. “We sent the girls to Germany, where they’ll be safe,” says Mrs. Van den Dool. “Mr. Van den Dool was arrested yesterday.”
Mrs. Van den Dool cannot keep them. She has too many worries about her own family and no money. The next day, Aunt Ket arrives by train and takes them south to her home with Uncle Jan and their kids in Dordrecht. Aunt Ket is a solid woman, a pragmatic workhorse not prone to sentiment. She herds the children onto the train and sits tensely, hands folded in her lap, staring out the window at the empty fields that slide past into the train’s wake. When they arrive in Dordrecht, a city adjacent to Rotterdam that is tattered by bombing from the Germans during the war, my mother and her siblings walk from the train station with Aunt Ket and crowd into her tiny house on the dike. It is very small for the four children and their two cousins. They sleep squeezed together like pencils in a box. As Elsje is falling asleep, she hears arguing downstairs. Aunt Ket’s husband shouts, and the words float up through the floorboards. A bunch of NSB children … be able to show my face … not our problem … Then Aunt Ket’s voice rises. My sister’s children … can’t just leave them … this is family … what are we supposed to do? So the exchange goes until Elsje falls asleep and dreams of angry neighbors with hatchets calling for their heads.
When my mother tells me this, her sense of hurt and rejection is palpable. Where my father learned to detach and become wholly self-contained, my mother’s entire adult life has been defined by a raw desire to belong somewhere, with others, to be wanted, to be home. “I heard them fighting,” she says of her aunt and uncle. “He was a member of the resistance and he had a reputation to protect. He couldn’t have NSB children in his home. They told us they didn’t have room for us, but it wasn’t just because of the lack of space. They also didn’t want us because we were fout, wrong.”
Documents in my grandfather’s trial dossier that I read in the National Archives seem to support my mother’s memory. There are letters to the Ministry of Justice from Jan complaining about his brother-in-law’s political mistakes and being saddled with a bunch of unwanted NSB children. Pressured by his wife to take care of my mother and her siblings but wanting to be rid of them and angry about the position it puts him in, he requests that his brother-in-law be released immediately in these letters, “in the hopes that you, in recognition of my own family which played no part nor participated in the stupidity of my brother-in-law, yet is now the dupe, will offer your cooperation in my request and hopefully can offer me an expedient and positive response.”
When the request is denied, Uncle Jan wins the battle in the little house on the dike. The NSB children, Aunt Ket’s nieces and nephews, must go. The next day, Aunt Ket is very quiet as she places a piece of bread on the plate before each child. She doesn’t look at them, and they eat in silence. Finally, she says, “I’m afraid this house is too small for all of us. We will have to find another solution.” In the afternoon, she is gone for several hours. When she returns, she is holding a paper from the Renate Home for Child Welfare. It is the third time Elsje has been ejected from a home in a few months. Shortly thereafter, Aunt Ket brings Elsje and her siblings to the Renate Home, a large building with two wings to house NSB children whose parents have gone to jail, boys and girls left in the wake of the mistakes of their parents and the swift retribution of their country. All across the Netherlands there are institutions like this, filled with the thousands of offspring of the fout.
“I’ll come to visit,” Aunt Ket says. “I promise.” The woman from the home smiles at the children. She takes Elsje’s hand. “You’ll be in the little children’s wing.” Elsje looks to her older sister with big eyes. Aunt Ket crouches down. “Be a good girl, Elsje,” she says. “Don’t make any trouble.” And Elsje doesn’t make any trouble. She makes it her duty never to make any trouble again. She is absolutely silent as the lady from the children’s home leads her down the hallway, away from her siblings and Aunt Ket, who is waving bye-bye.
NSB members like my grandparents are sent to jails and the same Nazi camps in the Netherlands where the Jews had been interned during the war, the most famous of which was Westerbork. Because there were so many of them, an estimated 120,000 to 180,000 accused collaborators, some of them spend years awaiting trial. A handful of them don’t make it that long, as Hatchet Day didn’t end outside the camps, and a number of the NSBers being held for trial are killed inside the camps. In 2012, the remains of nine people were dug up in the woods outside of Westerbork, and these bodies belonged not to Jews but to the NSBers held there after the war. More bodies are believed to be buried there, though it is not known how many. In an article in the Dutch newspaper Trouw reporting on the 2012 discovery, Helen Grevers, a researcher at the Netherlands Institute for War Documentation, wrote, “It was always known that there must have been bodies buried somewhere, the Ministry of Justice has never made a secret of that. There probably also is some documentation of it. Only it has long been unknown where exactly the graves are.”
Shame breeds silence. Many of the NSB members refused to speak about their experiences after the war, and my grandparents were no different, stating that it was a closed chapter they never wanted to talk about again. I search the internet for any information about what my grandparents might have experienced during this postwar period and their subsequent detention. I find a very old film online of the liberation of Apeldoorn, which includes the rounding up of the NSBers. I pause the film to study the grainy faces of the figures who walk with their hands up, at gunpoint, through a gauntlet of celebrating Dutch citizens. As a sound track to these images of arrests and public shaming, cheerful marching band music plays, which, out of context of the era, seems perverse. I realize that I am searching through the faces of those being marched through the streets for my grandfather, whose image I have never actually seen, in person or on film. Perhaps he is among them. It’s a distinct possibility. But I don’t know my grandfather well enough. In the film, men, women, and teenage children walk with their hands in the air, the crowd jeering. One woman’s face in particular strikes me, and I pause the video, squinting. This woman could be my grandmother. It isn’t, as she was arrested later, but she would have been treated much the same. The woman in the video wears a white sign around her neck, and as she walks with her hands up, guns at her back, she looks down at the sign, trying to read what they’ve written across her chest. In other films, I watch NSBers held in town squares and made to bend over on platforms while members of the public beat them with chairs and rods. Little children look on with their parents at these beatings, their faces lit up with openmouthed laughter. Amazingly, shortly before finishing this book, I find a photo in a county archive of unnamed NSB men being arrested after the war. A man at the center of a crowd walks with his hands in the air, marched through the streets to the courthouse past jeering citizens like so many others I’ve seen in other photos. The caption reads: (b/w) photo. People suspected of being Nazi sympathizers are brought in, 17-04-1945 … (In the period shortly after the second world war many innocent people were also arrested.) I have an eerie feeling creeping through my body that this man is my grandfather, though I never met him and the photo isn’t clear. I email the photo to my mother. She responds, “Yes, my love. That’s him. I have never seen this photo. Shit.” She spends several days crying over the emotional confrontation of the image. When I share the photo with family members, they too express shock. My brother writes, “That is a shocking photo of Opa de Kock being arrested! Wow. I had to stare at that for a while.” My cousin Hanke reflects my own reaction, writing, “I’ve never seen that photo of our grandfather being arrested, and it hit me hard. For me it’s suddenly visual evidence of our family history, to which shame, guilt, and question marks are attached.”
With the abrupt end to the war, it is difficult for people to reestablish a harmonious and orderly society with collaborators of the enemy living next door. People cannot simply go back to life as normal while anger and pain about their neighbors’ actions pervades, and with the vacuum of a clear, operational government left in the wake of the German retreat from positions of authority, it’s absolute mayhem. The government realizes that they need to bring in collaborators sooner rather than later, before they are murdered in the streets and in their own homes. Because of the haste, they don’t have time to vet every case. They round up everybody who is suspected of having had any connection at all to the Nazis or the NSB, no matter how vague the link. This includes instances of mistaken identity. In a letter he sent to my father’s family in Indonesia after the war, my father’s uncle in the Netherlands wrote, “Delightful to see how the NSBers were rounded up and the Krauts interned.” This reflects the predominant sentiment in the population.
These people will be sent to the former Nazi camps in the Netherlands, and because there are so many, they will be forced to build their own camps. Other videos I find show NSBers erecting the barbed-wire fences for their own imprisonment, as the government hasn’t even had time to prepare for this massive influx of prisoners. They’ll stay interned in these camps, some for half a year or more, until their cases can be heard at a tribunal. The conditions in many of the camps are horrendous. Prisoners in these camps aren’t able to wash, sleep on straw in unheated horse stables, and are underfed. Toilets are holes in the ground. In one camp, Harskamp, 150 prisoners die of starvation, and Harskamp is the only camp where the government conducted any official inquiry—four years after the fact, in 1949–50, after a former prisoner published a pamphlet about his experience there. At the time, the abuses in the camps were largely ignored, and the research of journalist Koos Groen, as presented in his book on NSB families, Wrong and No Good, suggests that a minimum of 1,000 NSB members died in this period after the war in the detention camps, with their deaths left largely uninvestigated. His research includes a study of 178 accounts of interned NSBers in the National Archives that indicate that the conditions in all of the camps were equally miserable and included “systematic abuse, systematic starvation, and a high incidence of sexual harassment.” Why did these abuses go overlooked for years by the public and the Dutch government? According to an article by Netherlands Institute for War Documentation employee Johannes Houwink ten Cate in the Dutch online “History Newspaper,” “Prisoners are tortured and beaten bloody. Guards empty the contents of the latrines on their heads. But the Dutch public doesn’t want to hear about the abuses in camps for ‘foute’ Dutch. Collaborators had broken the national solidarity during the war, and for that they needed to be punished … [From a] political-social perspective the trials and punishment of ‘wrong’ Dutch citizens was effective in the extreme. [From a] humanitarian perspective, the arrests and internment of ‘wrong’ Dutch citizens was a catastrophe.”
It is disappointing to me as I try to piece together my family’s story that my grandparents were so affected by their internment that they absolutely refused to ever speak of their experience after the war. Specifically, when I consider the things I have read about these camps, I think my grandmother must have been deeply traumatized, especially given her complete lack of involvement in the politics that put her there. To be identified as a verrader, a traitor, someone fout, wrong, when her worst offense was being married to a man who may have been these things, must have felt like a betrayal. And because she doesn’t exist as an individual in the record of this history due to her silence on the issue, I project onto her the other narratives that I read, filling in the vacuum of information that her shame left in the family history. This is hardly unique, as I read over and over in the words of NSB children that their parents refused to speak of what happened to them as well. The stories we are left with, the only ones that make it into the history books, become the mismatched pieces we jam into the gaps of our family puzzles. They don’t complete the picture, but they’re better than empty spaces.
In a video, a woman who was the young adult daughter of an NSB member, arrested along with her parents, speaks about being put into a group of prisoners who are the daughters of NSB-appointed town mayors. She was forced to walk with these women in a circle as they were hit with sticks and hoses. “Are you sorry?!” the guards yelled as they hit the young women. “‘No,’ we said, because there wasn’t anything we could have done about it. They hit us everywhere. [They felt] we had deserved it,” says the woman. In her book From Traitors to Good Patriots, Helen Grevers quotes a camp guard in an NSB internment camp in Velp: “Why we hit [the internees] I don’t actually know. The early days of the liberation were an abnormal time and a chaos. Such behavior toward the political delinquents found its roots mainly in the effects of the liberation excitement which we were experiencing, through which we couldn’t fully understand the consequences. Practically all the guards were in that state of mind that they hit the political delinquents.”
It is complete confusion as the NSB members come flooding into camps and prisons throughout the country, thousands upon thousands, among them my grandfather. They cram into the barracks, stack themselves into the bunk beds if they are lucky. The rest of them sleep on straw on the ground.
For the NSBers sent to Westerbork, in the barracks right next to them lie dozens of Jewish people who were saved in the nick of time before their transport to Auschwitz and Dachau but haven’t yet been repatriated. Many of these survivors have nowhere to go. So they stay in the camps, where they get a bed and food and time to make plans. Once again, as after the false alarm of Mad Tuesday, Jewish internees and NSBers mingle inside the camps. But this time, their statuses are switched, the Jews finally free and the NSBers prisoners. One Jewish survivor wrote to family members,
Every day now, large transports of NSB members arrive here. They don’t have it easy … We Jews no longer have to work, except we now are the supervisors. There are boys here from the Free Netherlands [magazine] and military police for security. They are extremely harsh towards all that is NSB.
There are not enough guards, and a handful of the Jews who had been liberated only days earlier are now offered jobs as guards.
The violence of revenge outside the camps that the NSBers were presumably saved from with their internment is in actuality just as bad inside the camps, if not worse. There do not seem to be any rules against flagrant abuse of the prisoners, and the Dutch authorities look the other way with regard to human rights violations. The most bizarre humiliations are invented for the accused collaborators. They have to “mow the lawn,” forced to get down on their hands and knees and bite grass and weeds off with their teeth. In the worst camps, they are made to walk on glass shards. At night, the guards get drunk and pull the prisoners naked out of bed and lead them around by a rope while they are beaten with sticks and bottles. According to one historian, “Abuse was more often the rule than the exception.”
Elderly people, many of whom had done nothing more than vote for the NSB party prior to the war, succumb first. Meanwhile, six months or more go by before those accused get a hearing before a judge. Some of them are innocent, including women who, like my grandmother, had never been active in the NSB but happened to be married to a member. The human rights abuses they suffered are waved away as irrelevant by the Dutch authorities because “if they had been released, they would have been murdered.”
Aside from the conditions in the camp, I imagine that for my grandparents, and especially my grandmother, not being able to see their children is the greatest difficulty of their internment. My grandmother gets a letter in the camp from her sister telling her that the children have been taken to the children’s home. There is nothing she can do about it, and she feels helpless. She spends her days knotting fish nets or weaving place mats or making handbags or sewing jackets, or whatever her daily labor is, but her mind is on her children in that facility in Dordrecht. She is a mother who cannot go to her children in the night when they have bad dreams. She cannot check her children’s foreheads for fever when they are ill. She is trapped behind barbed-wire fences, unable to soothe her children’s worries.
Dordrecht, the Netherlands, 2014
On a drizzly late-spring day, my aunt, my mother, and I drive into the city of Dordrecht in the southern part of the Netherlands. We follow the GPS to locate the former home of my mother’s aunt Ket and uncle Jan, using an address I have copied down from my research in the archives, but the GPS leads us to a dead-end parking lot next to a factory abutting the freeway. We get out of the car and walk down the road, which is, as expected, a dike with some charming old cottages at the opposite end, but none of those is the right house. Eventually, we learn from a woman walking her dog that this dike used to continue but the freeway now bisects it, cutting one half off from the other. We get in the car and drive through a tunnel to the other side of the freeway and locate the other side of the dike, which now has a different name. New homes line this neighborhood, but a horse stable at the end appears to be old, and we stop there. My mother recognizes the stable as part of a farm that the dike house looked out on, but all around it, time has progressed, filling in pasture with cement. We never locate the dike house, though one small cottage is a contender. My mother isn’t sure. I realize that asking a woman in her seventies to remember a house she was removed from as a five-year-old may be unrealistic. I snap some photos, and we move on to locate the children’s home where my mother stayed when her parents were interned. This address pops up on GPS as being in the center of the city, so we drive downtown and park. Dordrecht is an old city, with cobblestone streets and church spires rising up from the center. It’s also a modern city, with the same kind of nondescript apartment buildings we’ve encountered everywhere. In the drizzle, we locate the address and find a huge concrete block. Inside is a retirement home. We use the restroom in the lobby, and I watch the residents, all appearing old enough to have lived through the war themselves, spoon yogurt into their mouths in the dining room. The trip to find my mother’s past here is a failure. I am left feeling a sense of emptiness about the ways that history is literally paved over. I will never be able to know my mother’s experience, and will only be able to fill in images based on my research, just as a reader will only be able to create their own vision of the truth based on the information I present. The true narrative is buried somewhere beneath Dordrecht’s rebar and concrete.
Dordrecht, the Netherlands, 1945
Elsje is in the little children’s wing of the Renate Home, separated from her brothers and sister. Hannie is in the older children’s wing, and her brothers are on yet another floor. The children sleep in bunk beds in tiled rooms. Elsje misses her mother intensely in the dark of the room. Every now and then she hears footsteps in the hall echo off the walls and waits for the door to open. But it rarely does. Hannie comes to visit her once, but she and Pim contract diphtheria almost immediately and are put in quarantine, and thereafter they don’t visit for weeks. Elsje gets lice, which make her head itch. All of the kids get scabies. The meals are adequate, but thin. Elsje watches the staff of the home slather butter on their bread in front of the children, who aren’t afforded these luxuries, and she is envious. She loves butter. It has been a long time since she tasted it.
Elsje is ill almost constantly in the home, probably due to anxiety. Her stomach is in knots, and she has intestinal issues that put her in the sick ward more often than she is in her assigned room. Her sleep is restless, punctuated by nightmares, and one night as she tosses in her top bunk, she rolls completely off the mattress and drops to the concrete floor below. She lands on her side and her face smacks the floor, causing it to swell and turn shades of black and purple. After that, one of the women who works in the home takes pity on the bruised six-year-old and begins to take her home with her to her house outside the city on the weekends. At Anneke’s house, Elsje gets to play outside with the dog and watch the chickens catch beetles in the dirt outside their coop. There, she gets a soft-boiled egg at breakfast with a tiny spoon just for her, and a bedtime story and a kiss on the forehead before sleeping on soft cotton sheets. She wishes she could stay there forever and be part of this family, this perfect family that is not hated by strangers, and maybe at some point she even expresses to them this desire to stay. It’s something that will plague her forever as an act of betrayal toward her own family. All week long at the children’s home, she waits for Friday to come so she can go home with Anneke. And after some time, maybe Elsje sort of forgets that she ever had another mother and father. Anneke’s family is a tiny sliver of normalcy in the fear-laced loneliness of being six years old and separated from your parents and siblings, rejected by your aunt and uncle, resented by your community as the child of people who were fout, like maybe there is something inherently fout with being born to that family.
In June 1946, my grandmother finally has her trial and is found not guilty of active treason, though she is found guilty of being an NSB member and loses her right to vote. She is released from the camp, as are nearly one hundred thousand other people for whom there is insufficient evidence to warrant a conviction for treason. She may not be guilty of more than signing her name on a form once years before the war, but the mark is already on her as an NSBer, and the punishment has already been delivered. All of the family’s possessions are gone. My grandfather’s assets have been frozen, and his bank account is now controlled by the state, which pays his bills via a state-appointed accountant. His salary, pension, and benefits have been revoked. Still, the bills roll in and go to collection when the accountant doesn’t pay them on time. Telephone service bills for a house they cannot enter, outstanding balances, all accrue late fees upon late fees. The children’s home in Dordrecht has also been charging astronomical fees that the family is expected to pay upon release—adding up to a bill of 1,913 guilders (the equivalent of approximately 10,000 dollars in current-day value, when adjusted for inflation). The government’s payment for the accidental bombing and deaths of my grandmother’s parents in Zutphen doesn’t cover all the bills. Because my grandfather is unable to organize mandatory repairs from inside prison on a house in Gorssel he owned that has been damaged by bombing, the government fines him.
Into this state of bankruptcy, bureaucracy, and accruing debts and fines that have compounded while my grandparents have been incarcerated, my recently freed grandmother emerges, walking out of the detention center with only the clothes on her back. She has no home and no money. Like a homing pigeon, she has one destination in mind, and she heads there immediately.
Elsje wakes in the children’s home one morning, ill with the flu and confined to the sick ward as she so often is. In the doorway of her room are two staff members and a woman. “Elsje, look who’s here!” Elsje sits up in her bed blinking her feverish eyes, cheeks flushed, looking at the thin woman in the shabby coat who is beaming at her. The women look at her expectantly. She smiles. “Is it … Aunt Nini?” Elsje asks, a tentative smile tugging at the corners of her mouth. Aunt Nini, her mother’s sister, lives in South Africa, and Elsje has never met her before. The woman’s face falls, and the staff members look at each other uncomfortably. “No, no, Elsje. Look again. It’s your mother!” Elsje isn’t sure what to think. Her mother was sent away. She was gone. In her child’s mind, this meant she was gone, no longer existed. Yet here she suddenly is, this person they insist is her mother, standing in her room. Her mother comes to her, reaches out her arms, her eyes full. Elsje reaches back.
Despite this reunion, my grandmother has to leave her children behind in this home because she has not a guilder in her pocket nor a home for them to go to. Answering advertisement after advertisement, she gets a job near the children’s home in Dordrecht, as a live-in maid for a wealthy man, and works for months to save enough to get them out, visiting the children daily. It’s a slow process, as the fees for the children’s home accrue simultaneously. Three, four, then six months pass, but she hasn’t saved enough, and nobody will rent a house to her. When she visits the children in the home, the eyes of the staff members turn to stone. She’s an NSB traitor. Her disloyalty has caused her children to suffer, and the staff to have to take over her parental duties and tie shoelaces, wipe noses, and pick lice out of these NSB children’s hair. What kind of a mother does this to her children? The judgments move across their faces like clouds. They don’t try to hide their disdain. But my grandmother’s only choice is to keep the smile plastered on her face every time she visits, the smile of attrition that has become second nature. “Thank you so much for keeping them longer,” she says. “I’m earning money now. I’ll have enough soon to take them with me and off your hands.” Anneke, the woman who brings Elsje home on the weekends, turns to my grandmother with daggers on her tongue. “I’ve discussed it with my family, and we’ve decided that we’d be willing to keep Elsje. She’s a very sweet little girl. Helpful and obedient. She deserves … a good home.”
My grandmother snaps, her smile disappearing. “Keep her? Is that a joke? She’s my daughter, and she isn’t available to keep. I love my children.” Shaking, she wipes her eyes. “I know what you think, but I am not a bad person, and I wish to take my children out of here.”
So it is that a few days later, Hannie, Pim, Bert, and Elsje are retrieved from their respective wings, and their mother walks out of the Renate Home for Child Welfare in Dordrecht with her four children and an overwhelming sense of complete uncertainty about what to do now.