The Discovery of Heaven by Harry Mulisch

Author:Harry Mulisch [Mulisch, Harry]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi, azw3, pdf
Published: 2010-11-14T16:00:00+00:00

He stopped at a barrier in the barbed-wire fence, got out, and looked at the camp with bated breath. From the plans and blueprints, which he had looked at repeatedly in Leiden and Dwingeloo, he knew that it was a trapezoid approximately a third of a mile long and a third of a mile wide.

What he saw was a large forest-framed space, the freezing air filled with minute icicles that gleamed in the sunlight; there were rows of dilapidated huts, set carefully at right angles like in Birkenau, as if they were still on the drawing-board—an inhuman pattern that seemed to have served as a model for postwar housing developments. Smoke still rose from some chimneys, but most of the huts were obviously no longer occupied; a few had burned down, and here and there huts had disappeared. Children were playing; somewhere someone was cycling along who undoubtedly would have a great deal to say about what went on in Indonesia during the Japanese occupation but knew nothing of what had taken place here.

Straight in front of him the rails continued to the other end of the camp—and parallel with them, farther to the right like . . . yes, like what?— like a vision, a mirage, a dream over a distance of a mile, the procession of huge dish aerials, entering the camp on one side and leaving it on the other. His eyes grew moist. Here, in this asshole of the Netherlands, they entreated the blessing of heaven like sacrificial altars in the total silence. At the same moment he felt the pressure that had weighed on him for the past few years lifting: the pressure of having to work in this accursed spot. Suddenly he could think of no place on earth where he would rather work than here. Wasn't everything that he was gathered together here, as in the focal point of a lens?

Without looking at Sophia, he got back in the car and drove slowly to the new low-rise service building, suddenly unable to stop talking. Agitatedly, occasionally half turning around, he told them that the camp had been set up by the Dutch government in 1939 for German Jewish refugees—the first Jewish camp outside Germany—but that the cost had been recovered from the Jewish community in the Netherlands. So that when the Germans arrived, they had the refugees neatly collected in one place. Subsequently, over a hundred thousand Dutch Jews were transported to Poland from this place—proportionately more even than from Germany itself. After the war Dutch fascists, of which Drenthe was full, were imprisoned in it. For a while it was a military camp, then Dutch citizens expelled from Indonesia were accommodated in it, and finally the Moluccans, who were now, reluctantly and with regular police intervention, being forced into more or less normal housing developments. In order to prevent their return to the camp, everything was deliberately being allowed to fall into disrepair. By establishing the observatory here, the government hoped that the name Westerbork would lose its unpleasant connotations.

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