The Heart Has Reasons (22 page)

If Jesus was alive today, do you think he’d be a capitalist, preaching that every man should enrich himself to the best of his ability? Socialism raises those same issues of justice that Jesus and the other prophets talked about, but you can be socialist without being religious.

There may be a God, but I have trouble believing in the God that is proclaimed by Christianity. Still, I think that our society here in Holland tends to be a Christian society in the best sense of the word, and perhaps there was some Christian influence in the way I acted.

Did you see those Christian principles being practiced by your parents when you were
growing up?

I must say yes. During the Depression, my father would often help people, though we were rather poor ourselves. My mother was the same way. There was a divorced woman in our neighborhood, and in those days being divorced carried a real stigma. Nobody wanted to have anything to do with her. But my mother befriended her and came to her aid when she got sick.

How do you look back now at the role you played during the war?

It was just the human thing to do. I feel that I did my share—but not enough. But I never believed that all those people being taken away were going to be killed, something I might have realized if I’d thought about those 400 boys who were sent to Mauthausen.

But even late in the war, someone said to me, “Do you know, they’re killing people with compressed gas pellets, with prussic acid?” And I said, “That’s ridiculous, that can’t be—it’s just a lurid story made up to scare people.” You couldn’t believe such things were really happening. When someone in hiding was caught, I thought, well, they’ll be sent to a work camp, and it will be hard, no doubt, but they’ll make it.

I recall one beautiful Jewish girl with dark shining eyes and skin like porcelain: her name was Louisa van Praag. We put her up in Loosdrecht with a baker and his family, and figured she’d be safe there for it was out of the way. However, she had to stay in her room all day long, and it was like solitary confinement. At night she could go outside and sit by herself in the garden, but she started to go loopy. We learned of it from the baker, and tried to convince him to let her boyfriend come join her, but being a strict old Calvinist, he wouldn’t hear of it. And in the end, she ran out into the bracken shouting, “I am a Jew! I am a Jew!” A neighbor called the police, and she was taken away and never seen again. I’ve known about sixty Jewish people like that, including a girlfriend of mine who was put to death by the so-called medical experiments. And that’s what I still feel very sad about.

Although I’m not Jewish, I feel connected with the Jewish people; my whole life has been bound up with them. I have quite a few Jewish friends, but we hardly ever speak about the war—that’s a subject it’s best to avoid. For instance, the brother of that girlfriend of mine
survived Auschwitz. I knew him through the nature group; he was fourteen and she was sixteen. Their whole family had planned to dive under—we had found them a perfect place—but they were caught the day before. The mother survived quite well; she was a good seamstress and spent the whole war sewing parachutes for the Germans—in Auschwitz of all places! The father was killed immediately; why, I don’t know. As I told you, the girl was used for medical experiments—purposely careless mutilations to test out methods of sterilization—and died three months later.

Kees as an elder at the bow of his sailboat.

Over the years, I’ve seen the brother. During the war, we were friendly with each other, but afterwards there was little left of the old camaraderie. About two years ago, though, he surprised me. We met for coffee, and he said, “Did you know that my sister kept a diary?” I said, “No, how could I?” He said, “She wrote very affectionately about you.” He offered to show it to me, but, knowing how it would affect me, I wasn’t very keen on seeing it. But then, I kept on thinking about it, and several months later I wrote him a letter saying that I was ready to see it. He wrote back that he never said he would show it to me. He made that quite clear, and we never talked about it again.

How do you feel about Germans nowadays?

Now when I meet a German, he’s a fellow human being. I can even shake hands with him. But the nation as a whole I despise. I’m sorry, but it cannot be helped. Not after what they did.

You know, there was a concentration camp outside Hamburg where twenty-five Jewish children were taken after being plucked from hiding places all over Holland. When they arrived there, one of the German officers went to the camp commander and asked, “What shall I do with the children?” He said, “Kill them. Kill them all.” “Shall I shoot them?” the officer asked. “No.” he said, “Hang them.” There was a deserted school nearby, and inside was a gymnasium with metal stirrups used for gymnastics. So he hanged them from those stirrups, one by one, like rabbits.

After the war, some Dutch people said, “This man must be punished, he must be brought to justice.” But no court would take the case because the man had been ordered to do it. And then they said, “Well, then the commander must be brought to trial,” and he, indeed, went to trial. They deliberated for less than an hour, and concluded, “Well, he didn’t have an order to do that, but he acted according to the guidelines given to him by his superiors.” And so that man wasn’t punished either. And of that type there were not 10,000, but 100,000!

I’m wondering if things are ever going to get worked out. Will we ever forgive and forget?

No. No. No. I mean, that girlfriend of mine who was murdered by the “medical experiments”—many of the doctors who did those things were never sentenced. If we had war criminals like that living in Holland, we would punish them. But in Germany, all those despicable ex-Nazis have lived out their lives, some in prominent positions. No, I cannot forgive. Especially as so many of them have never even admitted their guilt—let alone expressed remorse and asked for forgiveness.

So you hate all Germans?

Well, look here, if a German comes into my bookshop, he is treated just like anybody else—unless he makes a wrong remark. If he makes a wrong remark, there’s a switch, and the old resentment flows through my veins.

And have you met any good Germans?

Why yes; I must say yes. My wife and I went to Peloponnese, that’s a peninsula in the southern part of Greece. We were touring around and came upon a certain memorial in the town of Kalávrita for 840 Greek men and boys who had been shot by the Germans. It’s a very thinly populated area—there’s almost nobody living there—so I was amazed that 840 people had been shot. All the names were listed, and I said to my wife, “Look at this—a twelve-year-old, a thirteen-year-old.” Later when we checked into a hotel, there was an old woman behind the counter, and I asked her about it. She told us that some partisans had shot four German soldiers and the German commander had given the order: “Shoot 1,000 Greek men.” But they couldn’t find 1,000 Greek men, so they started taking boys, but even then there were not enough. In the end, the only ones left in the town were women.

The next day, we met a German clergyman and his wife who had settled in Kalávrita because they had learned of the massacre and wanted to do something to make amends. They were trying to establish a homeless shelter there for women. We invited them to our hotel for dinner, and when they walked into the lobby, you should have seen that old woman behind the counter. She heard them speaking German, and she started crying and yelling, she was pouring out words: “And my sons have been killed, and my nephews have been killed.” That German minister was shaking like a leaf. Nevertheless, we had dinner with them, and I talked with him about my war experiences. We were going to meet them again for breakfast the next morning, but his wife came by and said that he was so stricken by what he had seen and heard that he had not slept at all and didn’t feel well enough to join us. Yah, so he was a good one. Of course there are good Germans.

Why did the Holocaust originate in Germany?

The Germans are too good at taking orders, that’s why. You know, in Bussum, where I live now, there was a couple who had taken in a four-year-old Jewish girl. One day, two German soldiers arrived, and they said, “You must give the girl to us.” Well, they couldn’t deny they had the child because the soldiers had seen her playing on the garden swing, but the woman begged, “Can’t you just say that you came here, but didn’t find her?” “No,” they said,
“Befehl ist Befehl”
—an order is an order. Well, the couple offered them money, and tried everything they could to
save her little life. But no, they had to take the girl.

You could say that all soldiers are trained to follow orders, but I was in the Dutch army, and I can tell you: we weren’t very good at taking orders. And it’s the same in civilian life. If the government tells us to do something we say, “Why must I do that?” “Well, I don’t like doing that.” But in Germany, they would do it. I daresay Hitler wouldn’t have made it in Holland. We would have said, “Look at that hysterical little man shooting off his big mouth!” But in Germany they followed him.

One way to prevent this kind of fatal obedience to authority would be to educate the younger ones to be somewhat critical of the leaders; not to be so quick to believe everything the government tells them. You know, towards the beginning of the war, I went over to the house of a Communist family I knew, and there was a young man sitting there with a black shirt and a skull and crossbones insignia—I thought, good God, he’s an SS! So I said to the daughter, “What the hell is he doing here?” She said, “We’re connected. Hitler has signed a pact with Stalin.” Of course, Hitler later broke that pact and attacked Russia, which led to his downfall. But, anyway, I got into a conversation with this fellow.

He was my age, but his mind was so filled with propaganda that it had completely warped him. He started going on about his Führer, and I wanted to say that there have always been tyrants like that, and they always fail—but that would’ve gotten me arrested. He continued: “We’ll win the war, no doubt about it, and the German language will be spoken throughout the world.” I had to say something. “Do you think they’ll learn German in the United States?” His blue eyes turned icy. “They’ll have to. English will be prohibited.”

He really thought that the Third Reich was unconquerable and that it would last a millennium. He believed in an absolute order, and the unquestionable right of Hitler as a superman to remake the world however he wished. And that’s the way those people were—you couldn’t possibly talk with them, because their minds were fixed. They were like robots—no spontaneity, no thinking for oneself, only the party line. That’s what we need to prevent. Once people latch onto some twisted ideology and become completely convinced that they are right, it’s very dangerous.

The war was a terrible time—horrible things happened then. And yet, and yet . . . often I think the war was the best part of my life. You could be useful, you could save people, you could do things. And
people were glad with anything they got: food, shelter. And now we are well fed and well housed, and not content. Everybody takes everything they have for granted—even my own children. And I know that life isn’t always that way. It can be quite different. Of course, it’s ridiculous to say that the war was a great time—I wept during that time—but still . . . something happened. It was quite clear what was good and it was quite clear what was bad. You had to do the good things.

In this chapter, kees recalled the deportation of more than 400 young men to Mauthausen concentration camp, and his initial reluctance to believe the worst about what might happen to them. However, even if he had been prepared to believe that the men would be intentionally killed by the Nazis, he could not have imagined how gruesomely the murders would be carried out.

Mauthausen, the only concentration camp in Austria, was built in 1938 on land that contained several stone quarries. It was intended to become the source of the large granite blocks that would be used to construct the monumental buildings of the “Führer-Cities” following Germany’s victory, starting with nearby Linz, where Hitler had grown up. For the newly arrested young men, however—and for tens of thousands of others—it became the site of a Sisyphean nightmare as they were forced to haul granite slabs up the nearly 200 stone steps that the SS aptly named “Death’s Stairway.”