A Chosen Few - Mark Kurlansky [196]
“I was always able to speak out about my memories,” Van Weren said. “People like Joopie de Groot, they have their memories and they can speak out with some acquaintances. But I have had the chance to speak out to people all over Holland. To millions, and that's good for a person. I am lucky that every thought inside has come out. I have had the opportunity to speak about it. That is the pity for all the hundreds and hundreds who are living now. They have had no chance to speak about it.”
He seemed very pleased with his life, in his flat modern house in the flat modern Buitenveldert in the expanding south, where many affluent Jews settled. He sat on his patio looking across his small lawn at the rosebushes that edged the canal. “This is a very expensive neighborhood. My neighbors are rich. I'm just a musician. It was hard for me to get the money. But every time I look out at my roses, I feel happy.”
Behind his blustery optimism was a voice of isolation like that often heard from camp survivors. “I don't trust people. I don't want to need anyone, but that is very difficult to achieve. You do need people. But I am ninety percent there. I don't believe in friends.”
Mauritz Auerhaan, who never married, retired to a Jewish home for the elderly and made a similar observation, “To make friends is very difficult. To make a real friend, I couldn't find one. Everybody looks after his own life and to make money without caring.”
Some remained fixated on their memories, like the woman who had a larger-than-life-size photo of her friend who had been with her in Auschwitz and had not survived. The photo was on the inside of the kitchen cabinet door, staring mournfully at her every time she opened the cabinet.
To de Groot, not thinking about the Holocaust was a prerequisite of living well. “I want to live. When you think about the concentration camp, you don't live. If I start thinking about my friends in the concentration camps, how they died—the more you see of the concentration camp on the television, the more it is in your dreams. I watch football. That is my hobby.”
Somewhere in the 1980s it started to get increasingly difficult for those who wanted to avoid reminders. Both television and publishing rained Holland with information about World War II and the Holocaust. Most of it was general. Sometimes it dealt with the Dutch past. Survivors found Auschwitz images coming into their peripheral vision regularly. Some survivors feared turning on the television, and random channel flipping was not to be risked.
THE GHOSTLY PRESENCE of World War II was part of Dutch life. Political careers were still being ruined by revelations of dubious wartime activities. The underground Resistance tabloids, notably Het Parool, had become the press establishment. In crowded, cosmopolitan Amsterdam, a city of northern Renaissance architecture along a maze of interconnecting canals, tourists could ask directions in any Western language but German. Most Amsterdamers were multilingual, but they always said that German, which has the same roots as Dutch, was too difficult. Amsterdamers deliberately gave German tourists wrong directions. Some would respond to a question from a lost German, “First give me back my bicycle,” as though the mass deportation of bicycles to Germany was the most remembered atrocity.
Even de Groot's hobby, soccer, was a reminder of the war. When the Netherlands’ soccer team played Germany, signs saying “Give me back my bicycle” were held up in the Dutch crowd. De Groot was a fan of the Ajax team, as many Jews had been before the war. In those days, when Holland still had a large Jewish population, a number of Jewish soccer stars played for Ajax. De Groot said, “I have three Jewish places: shul, the Jewish cemetery, and Ajax.” In modern times Ajax has Surinamers but not Jews on the team. But that does not stop people from referring to it as the Jodeclub, the Jewish team. Fans of opposing teams show up at Ajax games with swastikas and have at times chanted, “Jodeclub, sieg heil, gas them!” The Jewish community is assured