#herdenking

Met al mijn hart hoop ik dat dit nooit meer voorkomt

It was as if each of those people should have asked us questions, read on our faces who we were, and humbly listened to our story. But no one looked at us, no one accepted the challenge; they were deaf, blind and dumb, entrenched in their ruins as in a fortress of not wanting to know, still strong, still capable of hatred and contempt, still trapped in their old confusion of pride and guilt. '

Primo Levi, The respite

A German man walks down the street and asks random passers-by a question.

"Did you know?"

He patiently writes down the answers, takes them home and starts compiling them. The first answer on the first page reads:

'No, not me. No.'

The man's name is Walter Kempowski. From the end of the 1950s to 2005 he collects votes. First through the answers to his questions, later through the thousands of diaries and notes he gathers from all over the world. Intimate testimonials from housewives, prisoners of war, postmen and protagonists from the 1940s-45s. A young farmer who cannot fall asleep because of the screams of girls being raped. Dying children in the ghettos, their bare baby teeth pointed to heaven. A Jewish man who listens to the Pope's 26-page Christmas address and questions why he did not find 'worth mentioning the slaughter of hundreds of thousands of Jews in Europe by Christians'.

Kempowski arranges the testimonies chronologically and without sentiment; without coloring them with political interests, literary interventions, or classifying them as victims, bystanders and perpetrators. The reader has to work for himself, the voices ferment until it hurts. The collective diary will be entitled 'Echosounder', after the instrument that ships at sea use to measure the water depth. The echo sounder sends out sound waves, you count the seconds and wait for them to bounce off the bottom. Hearing out the history to determine your current position.

We are not that far in the Netherlands yet, seventy-six years later. "Our national resistance will be regarded as the most recognizable attitude of our people in this period of history," concluded the first post-war prime minister, Wim Schermerhorn, shortly after the liberation. Our memory model became a story to support moral recovery and reconstruction; a collective incantation of the monsters under the bed who had shown us the places of torture of the human spirit. Even National Remembrance was only for the fallen heroes; it was not until the late 1960s that the two minutes of silence were also for the victims.

This created an uplifting self-image based on not knowing. Not knowing how words led to a well-oiled destruction machine, in which many were indispensable wheels. Not knowing the trauma of the outlawed, whose voices mostly and literally went up in smoke. Not knowing as a source of misplaced melancholy about bygone times, from which contemporary politicians also eagerly tap.

If I were to have an echo sounder descend into the past now, there is a good chance that I will get stuck in shallow, murky water. The twilight zone between myth and knowledge, where everyone shouts "Never again!" without the real suffering underlying it having been fully seen.

The cheering supporters, the silent bystanders, the six million murdered victims: they remain elusive abstractions until we break them into a thousand pieces. Then we see Henk Saatrübe, a former salesman in a fashion store, who, as a Jew hunter, becomes a specialist in the transport of sick and disabled people so that they can be deported - usually on GGD stretchers. Johan Krediet, the Catholic young man who walks home from his office on Herengracht in Amsterdam and passes Jonas Daniël Meijerplein, where dozens of Jewish peers sit on their knees with fearful faces.

Settela Steinbach, the ten-year-old Sinti girl who sticks her head out to look at a dog, before the doors close on the train to Auschwitz, where she is gassed with her mother, two brothers, two sisters, two nephews, a niece and an aunt. In the close-ups of the past we recognize fragments of our own existence.

The Netherlands has lingered on the discussion for a long time: what is right or wrong? Uncle Piet may have betrayed all the Jews in his village, but he was also a dedicated volunteer at the music association. Or, as a descendant of a NSB member came home uninvited to tell me: his father was definitely not an anti-Semite, he only shared the fear of the communists with the Nazis. Accidental victims, accidental perpetrators. Dipped lights on the past, even before the facts have been mapped out. A dead end groove that prevents us from descending further because it is too painful. Descend not only into history - also into ourselves.

To be silent for two minutes without the willingness to hear all the voices is to hold your breath and get stuck in a superficial story. Not only when it comes to what we commemorate, but also who is allowed to speak. Even there we do not recognize polyphony. Man is not an individual of flesh and blood, but the representative of a group.

Who am I here on behalf of - on behalf of the women? The women, on the one hand, who are said to have had very little to say 76 years ago, but who were nevertheless the first to be driven around on the shit cart after the war, while the male-dominated industrial vanguard was, deliberately, never fundamentally punished. Or the women in the ghettos, in hiding, in the concentration camps; their wombs confiscated, their hair shaved everywhere. Or am I here on behalf of the Resistance women, as fearless as they are underappreciated? Well, as a woman I know that sex has nothing to do with courage, said resistance woman Lau Mazirel. You could infer something else from tradition.

A hallmark of inequality is that members of the inferior group always have a task; they have to prove their right to be heard. The successful migrant. The integrated Roma. The modest gay. But the Dutch Jews had been assimilated, speaking the same language as their neighbors, with whom they had lived side by side for centuries. Nevertheless, three quarters of them were murdered - the highest number in Western Europe.

Minorities who must prove their worth: another groove that keeps recurring, at this point in the debate around the coronavirus Whatever you think of the approach, you could not ignore the discussion about selection, or 'triage'. Civilized language is always the first witness to disaster.

The essence: who deserves a place at the table when the table gets too full? I am thinking of the 'useless eaters' in the work of historian Götz Aly, about the 200,000 German elderly, chronically ill and disabled people who disappeared in a silent mass murder between '39 and '41. A large-scale 'euthanasia' legitimized by pragmatic considerations. How much does a person contribute, how much space his death creates - with the number of visits from relatives determining who went first. The passive assent of the German people turned out to be an important step towards moral dullness.

To make room for a recovery home of the Waffen-SS in Gelderland, 1200 psychiatric patients and 50 staff members from the Dutch Jewish institution Het Apeldoornsche Bosch were evacuated in one night on 21 January 1943. Stacked on top of each other in human layers in freight wagons, which arrived in Auschwitz-Birkenau after a day-long journey through the winter cold. Rudolf Vrba, one of five prisoners who once escaped from Auschwitz, remembered it well.

Many of them had obviously been dead for a few days, for the bodies were decomposing and the smell of rotting flesh was pouring from the open doors. But… what horrified me was the state of the living. And above all else […] the outbursts of pain and fear […] . '

The eviction was no longer discussed in Apeldoorn, neither in nor long after the war.

'No, not me. No.'

We rethink who we don't want to be, without realizing that everything we look at is already within us. We rethink ourselves, the elements that awaken when circumstances turn.

Asking questions and wanting to hear all the answers, not colored by the dominant story as it is shaped in our collective memory, puts us to work. The voices may be telling us something we don't want to know. Walter Kempowski, who eventually died as a celebrated writer in 2007, was therefore reviled in his country for decades. His extensive voice archive did not fit the chosen German memory model of collective guilt.

I only realized how tightly tuned our own memory model is when I started asking questions to reconstruct the history of my house. In the woods of Naarden, two Jewish resistance sisters, Janny and Lien Brilleslijper, sheltered a large group of other hunted Jews, at a time when the trains were already running at full speed to the east. To my surprise, hardly anyone seemed to share that fascination; there was little interest in my findings about Jewish resistance, or about NSB members in 't Gooi and other well-to-do areas in which the upper class lived. Findings that did not relate well to the official version of the Dutch as 'resilient people'.

In search of answers, I placed a table in front of the house on May 4 every year, with the information I already had and the names of people in hiding. Including an empty book, a pen and a question.

"Did you know?"

Countless people passed by, the years passed and the pages filled up. Variants of the same answer without exception.

'No, not me. No.'

After a long and painstaking investigation, 't Hooge Nest was published at the end of 2018, and then something amazing happened. Voices rose from all over the world, at first softly and separately, but soon a steady stream of revelations, desires and testimonies reached our home. As if the book was the key to the deep; a certificate of patience through which people dared to unlock their buried experiences.

'I am 78 years old and sometimes dream that the Germans are chasing me. […] Nobody knows this story and I wanted to share it with someone anyway. '

We have to face the dark side of the Netherlands. I used to hear nothing but praise at school for the courage of the Dutch. '

"Going into hiding was also an act of resistance!"

The recurring fuss about parts of our history proves that a collective identity, if it exists at all, cannot rely on an incomplete story. Whether it concerns traumas of the Second World War, the Dutch East Indies, the colonial era, Srebrenica, the Moluccans or the veterans: the burden of the uncontrolled past is only lightened when myth gives way to knowledge. That requires mourning labor. Descend, be silent and hear all voices, even the deepest outbursts of sorrow and fear.

Silver & Yellow Plane

www.opvleugelsdervrijheid.nl

www.erikschepers.com

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