I didn’t mean to write The Hypnotist. I wanted to tell a different story all together. The story I had in mind traced my own family history, beginning way back in Persia in the 1700s when our first known ancestor, Jacob Sjoesjan, led his bedraggled family across the deserts and mountains to Europe . . . just like so many poor refugees today.
Jacob and his family were Jews in a society that had turned against them. It has always been my worst nightmare to find myself in a world in which the very authorities that are meant to protect you – the police, the government, the army, the law, the educators – are on the side of the mob that is baying for your blood. You are powerless. There is nowhere to turn.
That dystopian scenario often begins with bizarre rules designed to intimidate and humiliate: you must go here, but you cannot go there! So Persian Jews were banned from all but the most menial jobs; theatres and public baths were closed to them; they were not allowed out in the rain or snow in case impurities leached from their skins and infected others. And here’s a familiar one – Jews were forced to sew yellow stars onto their clothing, so that people could be sure they were discriminating against the right minority.
Next comes the violence – the smashing of glass in the night, the splintering of doors as uniformed bullies demand documents, which you never seem to have. Unsurprisingly my ancestors decided to flee and I bet it was a terrible journey. I wouldn’t be surprised if some of them died on the roadside – the young ones, the old ones; that’s what usually happens. After many months, the Sjoesjan tribe rolled up at the Dutch-German border. They were dirty and hairy and kind of foreign-looking, as many refugees are. In my imagination it was a snowy night and the official who demanded their names couldn’t understand a single word they were saying. What old Jacob was trying to convey was that Jews didn’t have surnames where they came from; they were named after their town of origin – Sjoesjan was just a funny way of spelling Shushan, their hometown in Persia. All the guard could think about was his warm bed and his warm wife. He stamped their papers and, to save further confusion, replaced their funny name with the sensible name of the border town where they were standing. That town was called Anholt, which suggests to me something like ‘Stop and hand over your papers!’
Jacob’s family took their shiny new surname and settled into the horizontal and tolerant Netherlands. They were a creative lot and over the generations, they became art dealers and artisans, including a wonderful painter named Jozef Israels, who was much admired by van Gogh. I wanted to write about Jacob and Jozef, and the many powerful women of the family. I wanted to mention my great-grandfather, Martin van Straaten, who went down with the Lusitania in 1915, so that when his remains drifted onto a beach in Ireland, only the jet-black ring on his bloated finger identified him. My sister wears it to this day – the ring, I mean, not the finger.
But the person I wanted to write about most of all was an olive-skinned, black-haired boy named Simon ‘Gerry’ Anholt, who became my father, although I never felt I knew him well. When Gerry was 16, that thing happened again – the nightmare I’ve been trying to describe . . . the one in which you are a powerless scapegoat, and the authorities that should be there to protect you are siding with the thugs. (There must be a name for that kind of dystopia, but I don’t know what it is.)
Hitler’s armies had invaded Holland and the cancer of prejudice, which never really goes away, oozed through the beautiful canals of Amsterdam like a foul oil slick. Up went the cry in the Jewish neighborhoods – ‘Here we go again!’ Along came the bizarre rules: you are allowed here on Tuesdays, but not there on Fridays. You had to sew on the old yellow star for easy identification. And when they heard the snarling of Alsatians and the smashing of shop windows, many of my father’s family went into hiding in cellars and attics, exactly like Anne Frank’s family. Those who stayed were herded into cattle wagons and freighted to concentration camps. Among the 6 million Jews, homosexuals, disabled people and Roma who were murdered by the Nazis, more than sixty members of the Anholt family also perished.
My dad was lucky . . . at least, he thought he was lucky. His parents had contacts in London and they got out before things turned nasty. My father thought he would be safe, but . . . you know how these stories go; the nightmare had just begun.
Gerry was drafted into the British Intelligence Corp and took part in dangerous missions in occupied France, Holland and later, Germany; for which he was ‘Mentioned in Dispatches’. Like many Dutchmen he spoke several languages, so part of his job was to translate the often-brutal interrogations of captured SS officers. My father didn’t often talk about these events, and it wasn’t until the last years of his life that I learned about the worst horror of all – in 1945, that olive-skinned, black-haired boy was amongst the Allied troops who liberated the death camp of Bergen-Belsen. He said that although the stench hung over the nearby town like smog, the residents denied any knowledge. I think my father lost a lot of things in there – his youth, his optimism and even a sense of joy. What I know for sure is that the skeleton-people wandering naked amidst the heaps of bodies haunted his dreams for ever. These were his own people.
When it was all over, Staff Sergeant Anholt tried to forget what he had seen. He married an English girl. He became a Christian. They started a family. But of course my father was not ready to raise children of his own. What he actually needed was someone to look after him. We spent some years back in Holland and then at nine years old, I was packed off to an English boarding school, which I detested with a passion.
That was the story I planned to write. I wanted to mention that although he was not a great dad, my father was a deeply tolerant humanitarian who despised prejudice of every kind. Touchingly, he held a special fondness for Germany, which he visited many times.
But, in 2011 my father died. Suddenly the whole thing seemed too painful, and too complicated, and generally too close to home. Maybe I’ll return to that story one day, but for the time being, I decided to write something completely different . . .
The problem was that some of those themes just would not go away; the stuff about powerlessness and prejudice – what it feels like to be defined by a yellow star, your gender, your sexual orientation, or the colour of your skin . . . what it’s like to live in that hellish world for which I have no name; the place where there is nowhere to turn. I began searching the history books for other less personal examples. And it didn’t take too long.
It starts with the bizarre and humiliating rules, like the Jim Crow laws, for instance: You must step off the sidewalk when a White person walks by. You may not share a drinking fountain in case you pollute the water. You must sit at the back of the bus. No Coloured barber shall touch the hair of White women or girls . . .
Then comes the fear. The rumbling vehicles in the night, the lynch mob waiting at the corner. There’s nowhere to go for help because the very people who are meant to protect you are pulling on their jackboots or their scary pointy hoods.
Like my father, I despise prejudice of all kinds, but surely there has never been a more ignorant form of prejudice than colour prejudice. The idea that the pigmentation of half a millimetre of skin might somehow define the person within seems as laughable as old man Zachery choosing a goat or a horse by the colour of its coat. Colour prejudice would indeed be comical if it were not subjugating, dividing and murdering to this very day. (And let’s not forget that colour prejudice can work both ways.)
The point I am making is that although The Hypnotist is set in the Southern States of America in 1963, it could be anywhere; anytime. For the record, I love the United States and have many friends and relatives in that great country; indeed my own daughter worked for several years at the United Nations in New York City. There is not one country on this planet that does not carry the bloody stain of prejudice and oppression. It’s what we tribal humans do, and always will do until we wake up and look in the mirror.
It is not just the victims themselves who suffer – the ripples spread through the generations. The horror that my father witnessed was passed on through his inability to nurture. When I write about Pip in the orphanage, I only need to close my eyes and remember the iron bed in the cold dormitory of my boarding school. I was not an orphan, but sometimes I felt like one. And perhaps the culture of bullying and the regular canings were my personal glimmer of that nightmare in which the men with the power are your enemies.
That’s all a bit miserable, isn’t it! But I’m one of the lucky ones – I have a wonderful life, free of war and prejudice. Those small hardships were nothing more than the grit in the oyster shell, which every creative person needs. My father did pass on many positive things. Chief amongst them is a dream of tolerance, equality and mutual respect.
When they stayed at the Kozy Kabins Motel, Jack lay awake watching a historic moment on TV. If you know nothing about the March on Washington of 28th August 1963, I urge you to check it out! Don’t let another day go by without hearing the ‘I have a dream’ speech, which brought Jack Morrow to tears.
Martin Luther King’s dream was that one day, Black and White; Jew, Muslim and Christian; Gay and Straight; Woman and Man, will join hands and sing together, ‘Free at last! Free at last! Thank God Almighty, we are free at last!’ I hope it’s your dream too.
Laurence Anholt, Devon, England 2016