What have you survived lately? A weekend without Wi-Fi? An evening on public transportation? An obligatory visit to a surly senior who never saw the silver lining even when it was screaming rainbows? Some of us have survived plane crashes, walked away from car wrecks or have struggled with major diseases and have lived to share the tales of woe. And with these epic life-changing and sometimes bodily and mentally disfiguring events, few of us have survived an actual war – on our soil.
Yes, the AIDS crisis deep in the decades of death of the Reagan-Bush years seemed like we were in a war and one can only hope this new administration doesn’t provoke a civil war, let alone trigger a global one. My mother Willy was born during the Depression in Amsterdam, the Netherlands in 1936, just four years before the Nazi invasion in May 1940. During walks with her Opa to the market, German soldiers would be randomly line up young Dutch men and force everyone to be active onlookers – or risk being hurled on the pile of machine gunned youth bleeding and dying on the sidewalk. Her Opa would grab her by the hair on the scruff of her neck and point her face toward the firing squad.
In 2012, I took my mom to NL with me to say goodbye to those memories as I could tell her Alzheimer’s was progressing and I wanted to go with her while she could still enjoy walking and eating and carousing. Near Leidseplein, we got off of the tram to walk down the Korte Leidsedwarsstraat to her Oma’s house on Easter Sunday. I got the idea to ring the bell and see if anyone answered. When we walked down the street I could see my mother was deep in remembering. The street had become somewhat of a casino back alley with headshops and coffee shops (the cannabis kind) all up and down the street punctuated by assorted shwarma shops for the munched out masses. There were young guys dressed as Hare Krishnas in front of her grandmothers townhouse (see posting).
© Frank H. Jump
One was very stout and it was obvious by the videographer documenting this scene that it was a spoof. We rang the bell. A German woman by the name of Monika Thé answered the door. I explained who we were and she invited us in, but first we posed for a picture with the carnivalesque street performers. I could hear she was German from her accent and I whispered to my mother that she had to behave. Along with PTSD from the war – Willy was left with an irrational antipathy for Germans. So I said we were guests in her home so we must act accordingly. We were offered tea and while Monika was in the kitchen my mother started to relax and look around. My uncle who died three years before had done the same thing for as we explained our connection to the house, Monika said a man that looked very much like me had visited her some years earlier and sat with her and cried. I vaguely remember him telling me this on one of our drunken rampages through town a decade earlier and it was how I got the idea to ring the bell. One thing lead to another and Monika started to recount what a tragic childhood she had after the war and how she was treated so badly by Dutch neighbors. Willy jumped right in and said but what the Germans did was unforgivable. Monika took my mothers hand and said, But I was just a child. She explained her parents were Bohemians, non-conformists and hung out with a Brechtian crowd on the fringes of German society, often shunned by neighbors during a turbulent and dark time. After the war she moved to Amsterdam and her parents settled there, and she had lived in my great-grandmothers house for almost 50 years.
It was a breakthrough moment for Willy. They hugged and cried and I drank a vanilla black pepper camomile that soothed my tension and transported me back in time.
© Frank H. Jump
To this day, my mother will recognize a picture of her Oma’s flower shop storefront residence but she doesn’t remember this unforgettable day. And although she has very little memory left, I am thankful she has finally no more recollections of the war. The families that disappeared in the middle of the night never to be seen again. Or the neighbors that were forcibly removed from their homes only to return after the camps were liberated, walking barefoot from Bergen-Belsen, the soles of their feet almost worn to the bone. Or the refugees from hunger that were secretly snuck out of the country in cattle cars bound for Denmark, then by boat to Sweden where they would survive the ravages of starvation. My grandparents tried to get my mother and her brother out but there was a snafu and they couldn’t meet their connections in the middle of the night on a canal in the Bos en Lommer that connected to a main water artery to Centraal Station. Weeks later they had heard that the train my mother would have been on was blown up. (To be cont’d…)
