One gray, late-February morning, with a light mist in the air, I altered my weekly bicycle routine from my house in Amsterdam’s Oud Zuid. Instead of taking my son, Anthony, to day care and then cycling to Frieda Menco’s apartment to interview her about her experiences in the city before and after World War II, I brought him with me to see Frieda. She had called me the day before saying she had found a letter we had been talking about: a long letter her mother had written to a brother in New York in September 1945 summarizing all the suffering the family had been through, from the first appearance of Nazi uniforms on the streets of their neighborhood through the horror of Auschwitz. Since Frieda had been asking me lately about my little son, I told her I could come by her apartment on the way to day care and that way she could meet Anthony too. I had said we would be there between nine and nine thirty. She said, “So late for day care!” which seemed an odd comment. As it turned out, there had been a miscommunication. She thought I was coming after nine o’clock at night, after day care. She blamed the mistake on her age; I blamed it on my Dutch. At any rate, when I arrived at nine in the morning, Frieda was still in bed. I said I would come back another time, but she insisted we come in. We then had a little encounter in the hallway of her apartment that began with her apologizing for her appearance. Normally she was impeccably dressed and made up; now she wore a nightgown; without makeup, and having just roused herself from bed, her skin looked gray.
More to the point, there was a cloudy grayness in her eyes, a torment, almost. She said she had been thinking, since our last meeting, about one particular question I had brought up, something that truly bewildered me: how was it possible that, in choosing an apartment for herself in the early 1990s, she had settled on this one, which was located on the very block where her family had been brought after their hiding place had been discovered and where her Auschwitz nightmare began. How, I had asked Frieda the day before, could she have chosen to live in the very locus of her family suffering?
Then, she had answered me by saying she had simply liked this apartment, liked the light, felt happy here. “But since you brought it up I’ve been thinking about all of these things,” she said now. “That building down the street, this letter, my mother … I just shake my head. How could I do that? I never saw my father again …”
And then this happened. I was holding Anthony in one arm. Frieda had clutched my other arm with both her hands as she recounted her recent tumble of emotions. She reached out and cupped the baby’s cheek. “Wat een schat!” she said: such a sweetheart. He was a big, bright-faced toddler, and he stared at her with the seriousness he could sometimes summon. “He’s thinking deeply,” she said. “He’s never seen someone so old.” And for a moment she stared back at him. This woman who for me personified the history of Amsterdam—both its legacy of personal freedom and the betrayal of that legacy—locked her gaze onto my son, who was born here and so was the physical embodiment of my own involvement with the city. And she said, “You know what I’ve often said, ever since Auschwitz. Life is absurd. It has no meaning. But it has beauty, and wonder, and we have to enjoy that.” Her hand was still on his cheek, her arm stretched out, revealing, beneath the almost silver surface of the skin, the watery blue numbers of the tattoo a Nazi clerk had pricked into it when it was still young and fresh. Then she looked from the boy to me and said, “I was wondering. Your book is about so many things: the whole history of the city. What are you going to end it with?”
“This,” I said. “I’ll end with this.”