When love conquers fear

While writing in my last about “Secret Strength” I had a strong desire to talk about wartime Holland and its sufferings under Nazi occupation. In particular I wanted to share an aria on YouTube, beautiful on its own account but even more moving for this little piece of history:

When the Netherlands were liberated in May 1945, the jubilation in the Zaan region (North Holland) reached the same unsurpassed level as everywhere else. A man hit on the idea of wheeling his old brown piano out on to the street. He sat down and began to play a patriotic song, naturally, with bystanders joining in with utmost emotion. Suddenly someone in the crowd cried: “There's a real singer living just near by. She must join us.” A few minutes later some bystanders brought a young lady, somewhat thin, smiling shyly, for she was shy by nature: Aafje Heynis. There were cries of “Sing, sing!” Standing by the old piano she began to sing George Frideric Handel’s “Dank sei dir, Herr”. It became completely still, and people began to weep. Aafje’s beautiful timbre, her own emotion, the splendid melody, the greatness of the occasion (freedom after five years of German occupation), all these cast a spell on the dozens of witnesses. “Never again have I been able to sing Handel quite like that”, the famous contralto was later to say.

Aafye Heynis died a few weeks ago. It is now known that the words and music were written by Siegfried Ochs (1858-1929) in parody of Handel, but no matter. They were apt for the occasion, as this translated excerpt shows:

Thanks be to Thee,
Thanks be to Thee, O Lord,
Thou hast led Thy people
With Thee,
Thine is now the land.

Even before these enemies menaced us,
Thy hand protected us,
In Thy grace Thou gavest us salvation.
. . .

My personal connection with this goes deep. On my birth certificate it says my father was Jan Jacobus Mulder, merchant, 38 years, from Den Helder, Holland. My mother never told me that it was otherwise, nor did she confess it to her late husband’s sister living in Arnhem. On the contrary, she left me with “Auntie Non” in 1947, while on her madcap quest for a rich new husband in Switzerland. Thus I lived with my alleged aunt and paternal grandparents, went to school and picked up a knowledge of Dutch, to the extent that I became rusty in English. It’s only in the last few days that I’ve asked myself “Why?”, now when there’s no one else left to ask.

Why did my mother take me away from the convent school in England where I’d spent one term, away from her parents’ house where we’d been living since our arrival from Australia, where I was born? I was barely five. I’d learned to read, at my grandmother’s knee. I had never been emotionally dependent on my mother like most young children. We had lived in a bungalow in Perth WA, where the landlady and other lodgers provided enough child care to let my mother gallivant as she pleased. After that I had roamed unfettered on the ship to England, overloaded with war brides; seeing my mother at mealtimes and in our cramped cabin shared with other passengers. It was unexpected to be left in Holland, suddenly and without a goodbye. Auntie Non offered tea and cake, I sat on the floor absorbed in a new toy, my mother simply slipped out while I wasn’t looking, “so as to avoid a fuss”, as she told me years later. It wasn’t a huge shock. I was used to abrupt changes and new places. The bigger shock was when she suddenly returned months later to take me back to England. I didn’t want to go, just as I hadn’t wanted to leave Australia. In Holland I had a proper life. I was Dutch, spoke the language, was learning to read and write in it.

I became part of a solid family where things made sense. It didn’t matter that my aunt was fierce, six foot tall with a hooked nose; that her husband was a solemn Calvinist schoolteacher given to Bible readings while we sat at table; that her father was a cantankerous old sea-captain, difficult to handle; that her mother was permanently bedridden, up those steep narrow Dutch stairs to the attic. This “grandma” liked to hug me but I would wriggle from her grasp and run from that stuffy room. Reflecting now, I see what I meant by “solid family”. Despite their quirks, they were close-knit and open-hearted. I was only required to take them on their terms. Beyond those, I enjoyed an extraordinary freedom. I have only two concrete memories of Auntie Non. One is of being shooed out of the back door between meals, to give space for her demanding housework and care-providing. I sometimes wandered far and wide, rendered safe by my homing instinct. As on the SS Rangitata sailing to England, hunger would bring me back on time. The other memory is of Auntie Non bathing her daughter Jannie or changing her nappies, telling me what she’d learned about baby-care, considering me old enough to have such conversations. For all I know, she may have guessed I was not her brother’s child, but it wouldn’t have mattered. After the Nazis, what else could matter? The Occupation had hardened the Dutch to tempered steel, sharpened them to survival. Sentiment was clutter and luxury.

When I started school, she must have taken me there on the first day but I don’t remember it, only that I went on my own with a tin of jam sandwiches each day for lunch, forcing myself to remember the route—at least half a mile—and trying not to be frightened of big dogs running free. I can’t imagine a parent or guardian treating their children this way today without intervention from the authorities, but this was Holland, less than two years after Liberation. It must have felt safe everywhere, with the whole country united in thanksgiving, bound together as firmly as the Hop-Mulder family of Beekhuizenseweg in Velp.

I was 49 before I discovered my true paternity, which makes me Australian rather than Dutch. It doesn’t change my feeling about Holland. There’s no language I love to hear more than Dutch, though I can’t speak it any more. Perhaps everyone craves an identity, inventing one if necessary; and perhaps the strongest patriotism burns in the soul of exiles, especially those who can’t decide where they’re exiled from. I know from Fernando Pessoa, another lifelong exile, that the greatest nostalgia is for events we missed, or which only occurred in fancy.

I wanted to speak of these things: what I remember, what I don’t, what I missed, what I’ve invented and imagined, straws to clutch through the torrent of life. Especially when talking of empathy in my last. Slender threads of personal sentiment, like unrequited love. Moving as Victor Frankl’s story is, it feels somehow distant, like hearsay; whereas Holland is mine, I lay claim to the land and its past. But I didn’t know how to connect it to my theme of “Secret Strength”.

Then serendipity lent a hand. Going aimlessly around the town, as mentioned in my last, I visited the Oxfam shop, where they keep shelves of second-hand books. I was drawn to a fat paperback of 700 pages, The Assassin’s Cloak. I wavered, then resisted the idea of adding another volume to my collection of Tsundoku, and left empty-handed. But next day I still hankered for it, hoped it would be still there, and it was. It’s arranged in day order, an anthology based on the diaries of 167 people.

I bought it on February 25th, so started to read from the entries for that day:

February 25th, 1942 [Holland]:
It is now half past seven in the morning. I have clipped my toenails, drunk a mug of genuine Van Houten’s cocoa, and had some bread and honey, all with what you might call abandon. I opened the Bible at random, but it gave me no answers this morning. Just as well, because there were no questions, just enormous faith and gratitude that life should be so beautiful, and that makes this a historic moment, that and not the fact that we are on the way to the Gestapo this morning.

This was from the diary of Etty Hillesum. I wondered anxiously about that visit to the Gestapo, but then discovered this, shortened from her entry of February 27th:

How rash to assume that man shapes his own destiny. All he can do is determine his inner responses. . . . Very early on Wednesday morning a large group of us was crowded into the Gestapo hall, and at that moment the circumstances of all our lives was the same. All of us occupied the same space, the men behind the desk no less than those about to be questioned. I noticed a young man with a sullen expression, who paced up and down looking driven and harassed and making no attempt to hide his irritation. He kept looking for pretexts to shout at the helpless Jews: ‘Take your hands out of your pockets’ and so on. I thought him more pitiable than those he shouted at, and those he shouted at I thought pitiable for being afraid of him. . . . I am not easily frightened. Not because I am brave, but because I know I am dealing with human beings and that I must try as hard as I can to understand everything that anyone does. . . . All the appalling things that happen are no mysterious threats from afar, but arise from fellow human beings very close to us. That makes these happenings more familiar, then, and not so frightening. The terrifying thing is that systems grow too big for men and hold them in a satanic grip, the builders no less than the victims of the system, much as large edifices and spires, created by men’s hands, tower high above us, yet may collapse over our heads and bury us.

Wikipedia tells us she died in Auschwitz a year later. World of Books Ltd has mailed me a copy of her diary. I want to know how her strength held out as things got darker. Meanwhile, I leave you with this:

...I am also thinking of Etty Hillesum, a young Dutch girl of Jewish origin who died in Auschwitz. At first far from God, she discovered him by looking deep within her and she wrote in her diary: “There is a really deep well inside me. And in it dwells God. Sometimes I am there, too. But more often stones and grit block the well, and God is buried beneath. Then he must be dug out again”. In her disrupted, restless life she found God in the very midst of the great tragedy of the 20th century: the Shoah. This frail and dissatisfied young woman, transfigured by faith, became a woman full of love and inner peace who was able to declare: “I live in constant intimacy with God"...”

From an address by Pope Benedict XVI, on February 13th, 2013. Does such “secret strength” owe anything to religion? This will be something to explore further.