Twenty-two
Sunshine pours in through the windows of the Portuguese Synagogue in Amsterdam and under my feet I feel the grains of the sand strewn on the floorboards to dampen sound. Above my head, golden chandeliers float against the dark timber of the vaulted ceiling while stone walls and columns rise all around me, massive and honey white. It is all so simple and restrained. At the time of its completion in 1675 it was the world’s largest synagogue, and aside from its temporary closure in the 1940s, it is still the oldest in continuous use. Even now, there is no electricity or heating. It is lit for the great services by nearly a thousand candles, which shine from holders on the plain wooden benches as well as from high up in the three-tiered chandeliers.
Lien smiles proudly as she stands beside me. We are on a walk a round Amsterdam’s old Jewish Quarter and will head on to the Jewish Historical Museum after this. As we wander across the courtyards and peek into prim little rooms and offices, she tells me about her wedding, which took place here on December 20, 1959.
By that time her connection with the Van Es family had been reestablished. She stayed away for a year, living rather miserably in institutional accommodation, but then Pa came to see her. They met on neutral ground in the bar of a hotel in Arnhem, not far from where she worked. He told her that nothing had happened and that she had better come home.
That was not how Lien saw it, but because she missed Ma and her brothers and sisters, she accepted the offer, resuming the old pattern of weekend visits. The incident and her year of absence were never discussed.
There was, though, a new sense of distance between Lien and her foster parents, and perhaps it was partly this that made her choose to join the Jewish Student Society rather than the Socialist Union when she began to study in Amsterdam for an additional qualification in social work. It was in Amsterdam that she met her future husband, Albert Gomes de Mesquita, a scientist completing his PhD. Physically frail and soft spoken, he nevertheless had a confidence about him.
“He was someone,” as Lien puts it. “I remember that he told me it was easy to be happy. He knew how to live.”
Happiness, for Albert, flowed from the rules and the rhythms of Judaism, the age-old patterns that brought with them a sense of peace. He was himself a descendant of those who had built the Great Synagogue. His maternal grandfather, a prosperous banker, had been chairman of the board of the Portuguese Jewish Council and his great-grandfather had been the author of celebrated Ashkenazi books of prayer. Although, in contrast, his father’s family were poor diamond cutters, they too were observant believers, their lives shaped by the Sabbath, the marking of feast days, and the keeping of dietary laws.
Albert, of course, had his own story of survival. In August 1942, aged twelve, he had gone with his parents and sister to hide in a set of purpose-built safe rooms. Holed up in the hidden ground floor of an Amsterdam town house, they had a large store of provisions, a secret escape route, a set of reliable friends to supply them, and a routine of exercise and mental occupation to keep their spirits up. They played Monopoly, whist, chess, and bridge. Each week Albert completed the logic puzzles in a magazine supplied by their outside helper, who also brought in fresh food. Every Sabbath they performed the usual rituals and sang the usual prayers.
Yet, in spite of all their preparations, before the year was over, they had been discovered. Very early in the morning there was banging on the blacked-out windows, and then a burly figure charged in through their escape route, shouting for them to move to the back room. One by one he interrogated the family members, including Albert and his little sister, all of whom fully expected that outside there must be a police van waiting, which would take them to a concentration camp. Weirdly, however, at the end of a morning of questioning, they were left alone and unguarded, free to leave. The raider, it turned out, was a robber and not a policeman. The family had lost their possessions and their safe house, but though friendless on the streets of Amsterdam in late December, they were still alive.
After this narrow escape, they went through a dozen different hiding places across the Netherlands, crouching behind panels in attics and escaping several raids. At times they were starved and flea bitten, beyond hopelessness, but somehow they stayed together as a unit. They had stories to share and, come May 1945, their collective survival as mother, father, and two children to celebrate. So for Albert, the saddest moment came only after the liberation, when he discovered that of his large extended family of aunts, uncles, and grandparents, just three people were left alive.
After the war, Albert’s family resumed its old patterns of living, which they had tried to keep going even during the occupation. They rejoined their community, kept kosher, observed the Sabbath, and celebrated the festival days. On May 9, the same day as the overall German surrender, a service of thanksgiving was held in the Portuguese Synagogue. Across the whole of the Netherlands, however, Albert’s family were now numbered among just eight hundred remaining Sephardic Jews.
THE PHOTOGRAPHS OF LIEN’S wedding at the synagogue have a golden quality to them. She and Albert stand arm in arm in a doorway, her head tipped down shyly in a Lady Di pose.
In another shot they are seated in the back of a gleaming motorcar, Lien looking as perfect as a 1950s film star with her Colgate smile framed by her veil and white dress.
Then there are the pictures of the reception: my grandfather in a pin-striped suit with a spray of flowers in his buttonhole and Ma, in a hat, both caught midconversation as they stand in a line to accept the congratulations of well-wishers, beside a resplendent Lien. My father sits smiling at a table with his brother and sisters. Aged fourteen at the time, he remembers it vividly: the brilliantly funny speech from Jan Heroma (Took’s husband); the stage that collapsed as the rabbi was speaking; and his little brother, caught short, having to pee against a wall in the street. Everyone was joyous and united. Even Ben, Lien’s cousin (the baby who had sat beside her in those photos in the Pletterijstraat), was present. He had survived, also as a child in hiding, and Lien had found him only very recently by searching through the records of war orphans kept by Le-Ezrath Ha-Jeled.
For Lien as well as for my father, the speech that Jan Heroma made toward the end of the evening was a highlight. The words that he spoke about her are the only element of her story that she has repeated to me more than once. Having given a brief and witty outline of her character, he turned to the subject of Albert and asked the audience, rhetorically, “Now, is this scrawny, ginger-haired gentleman really good enough for our Lien?” “Good enough for our Lien”—it was a revelation to her: that she should be presented as something special, and that she should be thought of as theirs. Happiness shot through her. She felt completely united with the friends and family who had gathered to send them on their way. She felt at one with the Van Esses and now a part of the Jewish community as well.
If one were looking for a simple, happy conclusion to the cut out girl’s story then this would be the place to end it. Albert is proud of her, protective, and gentle, and he knows so many things. Ma also loves him: he is so interested, hardworking, and polite. In the morning, in the back of the shiny, black wedding car, the honeymooners drive to the airport, where a gleaming Dakota awaits them for Lien’s first-ever journey by plane. As the flat, regular fields of the Netherlands recede below them, Good Lientje rises toward the sunlight on silver wings.