Six months ago, the sight of Amsterdam would have exhilarated and confounded me: the bewildering network of canals spanned by innumerable bridges, the slick, polished-by-time cobblestones, the criss-crossing streams of old-fashioned bicycles with baskets on their handlebars—bicycles as likely to be ridden by nuns and men in three-piece suits as by students. However, aside from the fact that I felt more at home in the chilly early summer of Western Europe than I had in the heat of South Africa, my main impression of Amsterdam was that it was not Cape Town. Gone were the “Blanke” and “Nie-Blanke” signs and all the other racist trappings of Cape Town, the ever-lowered eyes of the coloureds and the blacks who moved about among the whites as unobtrusively as if they were invisible.
Gone, too, of course, were the blacks and the coloureds, for the city was full of whites paler than those of Newfoundland.
After finding our flat and dropping our bags, Rachel and I walked two and a half miles to Merwedeplein, the apartment building in Amsterdam South, where, after fleeing Germany, the Franks had lived on the second floor from 1933 to 1942. I tried to imagine Amsterdam after its occupation by the Germans in May of 1940, those who had been identified as Jews walking about the cobblestone streets, the conspicuous yellow Star of David enclosing the word Jood stitched onto the front of their clothing, the Jews still seemingly free but soon not to be.
Rachel pointed at the window of the Franks’ flat. “The only film that exists of Anne Frank is of her leaning out that window to watch the wedding of some family friends. It lasts about three seconds. She laughs and smiles. She was happy here. They all were, for a while.”
By 1942, Jews were not allowed to use the trams, so, the day they went into hiding, the Franks had carried all their movable possessions with them for two and a half miles through the rain to Prinsengracht. “People sometimes forget that the Franks were Germans,” Rachel said. “Anne’s father fought on the side of the Germans in World War I. It’s said that he was proud to have served his country with such honour. Anti-Semites try to make Otto Frank out to be a bit of a shady character. The business he co-owned with his non-Jewish friend made food preservatives. When he and his family went into hiding, he signed the company over to the friend and it operated throughout the war. People say that he made money from helping to keep the Germans in rations, the very Germans who killed his wife and daughters. But that’s not true. He was so poor by the end of the war that he had to live with friends for the next seven years.
“Fritz once said to me, ‘Have you ever wondered how he survived Auschwitz? He did it by informing on the other prisoners, that’s my guess. He was once a German soldier. That would have impressed the Nazis.’ But none of the others who survived Auschwitz accused him of being an informer. None of them accused him of anything.”
On the way back, we walked by the house in which Hans grew up, one of a row of high, attached houses that opened onto a canal-facing street, all of it unchanged since the war, just as the Achterhuis and the buildings around it remained unchanged.
“He was a child once, in that house,” Rachel said, her eyes welling with tears. I put my arm around her waist and pulled her to me. “I wonder what happened in there. Nothing, maybe. Or did he do what he did to Bethany, and maybe to me and my other sisters, because someone in that house did the same to him? Or did something even worse happen to him? It’s just a house. But it was just a house in the 1930s and ’40s, too. Our houses were never just houses. Each of them seemed like the entire world. Maybe this house was never just a house to him.”
“Things will get better,” I said, hugging her hard. “They will when we’re back home.”
I looked again at Hans’s childhood home. In Amsterdam, many collaborated in the hope of saving their lives or improving their lot. From what I now knew about Hans, I suspected he wanted to be accepted by the Nazis because he had never been accepted by any group before. In his adult life, he was excluded by every group in which he sought membership because he repeatedly curried favour with his superiors by informing on those he believed to have been unfairly promoted at his expense. He was certain that he had been held back by favouritism, nepotism or inexplicably bad judgment. He may even have believed that what the Nazis sought to create was a pure meritocracy in which the strong would advance and the weak be left behind, a society, a world, in which there would be no advantage in being high-born, and in which those who accrued wealth by usury, dishonesty and greed would be relieved of it and thereafter relieved of life itself. I imagined Hans having been made a kind of honorary Nazi by the men whom he amused by his presumptuous eagerness to be one of them. If I was right, it was a wonder one of them hadn’t shot him dead on a whim.
It struck me that Rachel had been right when she said that history happened not in some nebulous, exceptional elsewhere, but in ordinary concrete places, to commonplace people. My world shrank to this pair of unexceptional streets, to Hans and his family, to Anne Frank and hers. History, the war, the fate of the Franks, were personal, local, terrifyingly actual and immediate. I imagined Hans as a teenager looking out of one of the windows of the house, his hands pressed to the glass as the Nazis marched past, their boots clumping on the cobblestones, row after row of bluff and bravado and menace without purpose, a lethal behemoth composed of men just like the ones who ran South Africa and those who supported them, greater only in number, driven to savagery by a group of men whose madness they need not have fallen for but did for reasons that flattered none of humankind.
More than forty years ago, when my father was less than half his present age, these things had happened here. One street away, the two teenage daughters of a man who, ostensibly, was not unlike Hans van Hout were dragged from their hiding place along with six other people and, for no reason but that they were Jews, were sent to concentration camps. Westerbork, Auschwitz-Birkenau, Bergen-Belsen—in chronological order, the series of camps to which Anne Frank and her family were sent and where they stayed until they died, places that, before the war, were no more sinister-sounding than St. John’s or Halifax.