All Ships Follow Me_A Family Memoir of War Across Three Continents by Mieke Eerkens

Author:Mieke Eerkens [Eerkens, Mieke]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: history
ISBN: 9781250117793
Google: KxtGDwAAQBAJ
Amazon: 1250117798
Goodreads: 37805257
Publisher: Picador
Published: 2019-04-02T00:00:00+00:00

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In 1941, my mother is two years old, toddling about the house, walking through the woods nearby, sitting on the banks of the Hill and Dale nature park with her brother Pim, now five. When school lets out, her face lights up as she sees her brother Bert, now eight, and sister Hannie, now nine, come in through the back door into the mudroom and set their book bags on the ground. Across town, thirteen Jews are removed from their homes in Apeldoorn and sent to concentration camps. My grandfather, like all Apeldoorn community members, will be told of their deportation, though he doesn’t know what their ultimate fate will be in the “detention” camps.

At the end of 1942, my mother is three, and scooting around on her tricycle. Pim is practicing writing his letters: P-i-m. Meanwhile, all Jewish bank accounts are frozen, and in Apeldoorn, another two hundred Jews are removed from their homes during Nazi razzias, their doors kicked in, and men, women, and children dragged out into waiting trucks.

In early 1943, my mother is four. My grandfather is still working at the auto mechanics’ school, cycling there and back every day. His Jewish students and colleagues are missing, and for most of the remaining faculty and student body, maybe it’s easy to forget they were ever there. He comes home, grabbing the newspaper off the stoop, and pours himself a cup of tea. Across town, thirteen hundred people in a Jewish mental hospital in Apeldoorn who had been allowed to stay up to that point are led out of the facility, loaded onto trucks, and deported to concentration camps, thereby emptying the city of all its Jewish citizens, with the exception of the onderduikers in hiding.

By all accounts, both by witnesses in his postwar trial and by people who knew him, my grandfather condemned these acts to those who challenged him on his NSB membership. He agreed in their political debates at the time that the Nazis had gone too far, and that the NSB should never have allied themselves with the Nazi party to begin with.

But did he rethink his NSB membership? Is knowing about one onderduiker in hiding and saying nothing an excuse for knowing about thousands of others being pulled from their homes and put on trains and taking no action to stop it? We could ask the non-NSB citizens the same thing. Here is where I always get caught up: If my grandfather was afraid of the repercussions of turning his back on the party, does it make any of it OK? What about the others, the hundreds of thousands of residents who cursed the Nazis, who weren’t in the NSB, but who bought their Jewish neighbors’ silverware at the market stalls and moved into their homes for a bargain?

My mother was a toddler during the worst of war, during the razzias and the increasing anger. She recalls very little of that period, and her parents did their best to shelter their children.

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