This was a very moving part of my trip here. My grandfather’s story is inextricably linked to the war because although he left Holland in 1938 to study music in Munich,
his English tutoring activities in Germany speak very quietly to the facts of the times: a rising power was beginning to classify and judge entire peoples whole cloth: first Jews and behavioral “deviants”, then entire countries and cultures. When Germany invaded The Netherlands in May of 1940, it took them just days to take it all. Then incredible cruelty was enacted here, as in other places. Of the 140,000 Jews who lived in Amsterdam before the invasion, fully 107,000 did not survive the war. Jews were prohibited from working, then offered wartime work in Germany. Those who opted to move ended up going directly to concentration camps.
A visit to the Anne Frank House in the Jordaan district of the city really brings these things home in simple pictures and a tour through the tight quarters of the family’s hiding place over a small warehouse. So moving for me was a piece of preserved wallpaper, where pencil marks measured the kids’ growth while they lived in silence, unable to even walk around while the workers in the warehouse below were present. Then to know their fate – death for all but the father in concentration camps – and to know their story was by no means unique.
As per Otto Frank’s wishes, the rooms are bare now, not at all reconstructed or dramatized. There were a very few pictures of the interior of the rooms during their hiding, including one in particular, Peter’s Room, in which you can see very clearly the ladder to the attic that exists right in front of you. But you can also see how the furniture was positioned around it, and it’s obvious that a young boy lived there. Now, stripped of the bed, the decks, and the paper clippings and photos pinned on the walls, the empty room with its aging walls and the silence spoke in volumes about the eternal absence of the little boy who lived there.
Also around the city you’ll find large plaques featuring a black and white photo taken from that spot during the war. They would show something like a German army fortification in Rembrantsplein, for example, or a Nazi rally in the mueseumsplein. After looking down at the photo and then looking up, you can see clearly the same buildings before you that existed in the picture. The spookiest ones for me were in the Museumsplein - depicting the rally “celebrating” Germany’s opening the Russian Front – with the long red banners and ranks of German soldiers and uniformed “dignitaries” on a large stage. Another showed Heinrich Himmler himself, reviewing a new, Nazi-controlled police force, with his arm out in the Nazi salute. There in the background is the perfectly clear image of the Concertgebouw, where I had just spent that magical evening listening to the Netherlands Philharmonic. It just made the hairs on my arms stand up. Here, truly evil people existed, did their dirty work, walked right where I was standing.
One of my favorite lines from any movie is in the third Indiana Jones film, when Indy mutters to himself, “Nazis. I hate these guys.” A visit to Holland reminds you that “these guys” were not invented by Steven Spielberg to move a plotline forward. The U.S. did indeed make great sacrifices to rid the planet of the Nazis, but the war was not fought in the U.S. We were spared the horror of what happens when people like them live among you, control you, send you to concentration camps in another country just because you hid a radio, spilt the blood of your neighbors to send you a message: behave, or else.
The Dutch Resistance Museum
Just in front of the main entrance to the Amsterdam Zoo (USD$27 to get in, all you St. Louisans spoiled by having a world class zoo that we can get into for free), is a non-descript building that houses the Dutch Resistance Museum, which categorizes the ways in which the citizens of The Netherlands survived the Nazi occupation from May of 1940 to the war’s end in May of 1945, a full five years of oppression that began with a five day blitzkrieg and the complete leveling of center of Rotterdam by the Luftwaffe. Certainly, Rotterdam’s status as Europe’s largest industrial port gave it strategic importance, but the flattening of the city itself also helped to serve as a message to the newly vanquished Dutch: more of this can come.
The museum offers an interesting look at life in Holland during the world wide great depression of the Thirties, which was of great interest to me as that was when my grandfather was here. An older Dutch person I met at church said my grandfather was lucky to leave when he did, as he was here for bad times, but they would have been much worse for him in Europe doing the war. I suppose that goes without saying, except that his leaving Europe meant that his life would not last five years more.
The Resistance Museum also helped us put in context some amazing details from a letter written in 1946 to my grandmother by a friend of my grandfather’s in Utrecht. This must have been so trying a personal time for this man, a father whose family had felt the brunt of the occupation, yet somehow survived. He mentioned hiding his radio in the floorboards of the house, and when Germans discovered it, they put him in prison, then sent him to a labor camp in Germany. For hiding a radio! The museum put that in context by explaining that the mass confiscation of radios occurred after something called the Milk Strike, when Dutch farmers and market people succeeded in freezing the distribution of food products. The Germans, fearing the Dutch were coordinating these actions through secret codes in their radio broadcasts, decided to simply take all the radios. So anyone who hid a radio was considered a member of the underground and arrested.
One thing you get from the museum is that the Dutch Resistance was not really all that organized. There were different factions that grew from pre-war social factions: Protestant, Catholic, those faithful to the crown, and Communists who were already trying to gain a political foothold after the economic turmoil of the depression. Still, they created some clever chaos by blowing up the records offices, for example, so that they could use their forged identity papers to move about the city more easily. But there were so many examples of Dutch who resisted for years, with Hollywood blockbuster-like close calls, only to be caught in the later years of the war and be sent to their deaths in concentration camps.
Interestingly, this friend of my grandfather escaped Germany and walked back to Holland after the city he was in, Kissell, was devastated by Allied bombers. 40,000 dead in one and a half hours. He mentions “800 bombers,” so this surely sounds like one of the infamous “millennial raids,” so called because it meant over 1,000 Allied aircraft were used to execute the mission with escorts and other support aircraft included.
His letter also described black market food price and women having to walk all the way out to the farms to get the food because it was too dangerous for men to be caught on the streets. He spoke of enduring the winter with no heat of wood, giving their only scraps of bread to their children and going without themselves.
I wonder how, in just half a century, these experiences translated into the Dutch being some of the friendliest, most open people I’ve ever met in my travels. One would think there would be bitterness and suspicion built up to last a thousand lifetimes. But perhaps the opposite occurred. Maybe the lesson is that life is too short to get overly concerned with simple differences or minor disagreements when much, much worse is a proven possibility. And just as survivors of tragedies create lifelong bonds between them, the Dutch have decided to greet each other with the hand of friendship and a triple kiss on the cheeks.
