Survey
* Your assessment is very important for improving the workof artificial intelligence, which forms the content of this project
* Your assessment is very important for improving the workof artificial intelligence, which forms the content of this project
Allied Control Council wikipedia , lookup
Collaboration with the Axis Powers wikipedia , lookup
End of World War II in Europe wikipedia , lookup
Resistance in the German-occupied Channel Islands wikipedia , lookup
Netherlands in World War II wikipedia , lookup
Battle of Zeeland wikipedia , lookup
Écouché in the Second World War wikipedia , lookup
Allied plans for German industry after World War II wikipedia , lookup
we who came after the war Ian Buruma We Who Came After the War Translated from the Dutch by Harry Lake 2015, Nationaal Comité 4 en 5 mei, Amsterdam We Who Came After the War 2015 Ian Buruma Design: Studio Ron van Roon This year sees the seventieth anniversary of the end of the Second World War. Every year on the evening of 4 May the National Act of Remembrance takes place throughout the Netherlands. Before the laying of wreaths at the National Monument on the Dam in Amsterdam, survivors of the war and surviving relatives of those who died and suffered under it gather in the Nieuwe Kerk at the invitation of the Nationaal Comité 4 en 5 mei. This gathering is attended by HM the King, HM the Queen and invited guests. Every year the Nationaal Comité 4 en 5 mei invites a writer to deliver an oration in the Nieuwe Kerk. This year’s oration will be delivered by Ian Buruma. The text, entitled Wij van na de Oorlog (We Who Came After the War), follows below. Ian Buruma is a writer specializing in the cultures of China and Japan. He is a professor at Bard College, New York, and lives in New York. He was born in The Hague in 1951 as the son of a Dutch father and a British mother. Among his many publications are books on how Germany and Japan are coming to terms with the Second World War, on the murder of Theo van Gogh, and, more recently, on the year 1945. For more information visit www.4en5mei.nl We Who Came After the War I was born six years after the war, in The Hague. At primary school the distinction between what were called ‘right’ and ‘wrong’ was perfectly clear. Our teachers, without exception, had been war heroes. One had sent a German down the wrong road to get to the station; another had scratched Oranje Boven on a wall. Every year on 4 May our headmaster walked at the head of the silent procession through the Scheveningen dunes to the war memorial. Exactly what he had done during the war I do not know. That he had been very brave was a given. We also knew where we could buy sweets – or rather, where we couldn’t: from that woman on the corner who had ‘been with’ a Mof; as for meat – not from that butcher: he’d been in the NSB. Right and wrong during the occupation was the moral yardstick my contemporaries and I gew up with. Everything followed from that. The young heroes in the books of K. Norel were a shining example to us all, even if for me they were almost as fabulous (in the literal sense) as that other hero for the young of Holland, Dik Trom. And because we were Dutch, not Moffen, we could wrap !7 ourselves in a wholly undeserved glow of moral superiority – undeserved because we hadn’t been through the war, which was something our parents occasionally held against us when we refused to eat our plate clean or expressed an opinion that got up their noses. My own father, as it happens, was not someone to rush to judgement when it came to the actions of others. First as a forced labourer in Berlin and later as a young lawyer having to cut his teeth on defending suspected traitors, he had seen too much to divide the world instantly into black and white, wrong and right. Perhaps it was more my British mother who absolutely refused to buy meat from that wrong butcher. She was Jewish. Although in England she had been beyond the reach of the German murder machine, that did not apply to her blood relations in Holland. One by one the members of the Schuster family were carted off to the camps. Eventually the only one left was Martin Schuster, an invalid boy in a wheelchair, until he too was taken away. Some twenty years after the war, when I was at secondary school, our simple picture of right and wrong came to be slightly adjusted. To begin with, the number of former Resistance heroes in my immediate circle had greatly shrunk, at least in my own perception. For example, I was very fond of !8 my history master, an extremely amiable man. He it was who fanned the flame of my love of history. But for years, as a member of the Black Front, he had been as wrong as it was possible to be. Even the beloved K. Norel was taken to court for antiSemitic statements in his book De Tyrannie Verdrijven (Expelling Tyranny). In the rebellious sixties the moral yardstick that had been derived from the war was still very much in evidence. The Provo movement and protesting students claimed the moral high ground by comparing the Amsterdam riot police to the SS and the shocked members of the ruling classes to fascists. By taking to the streets in the struggle against President Johnson, Prince Claus or Amsterdam burgomaster Gijs van Hall (himself, as it happened, a former member of the Resistance), we too, the children of K. Norel, were now in the Resistance. On 7 July 1974 it was once again clear who was on the right side. We Dutch with our ‘total football’ were individualists with a fresh sense of freedom, and the Germans with their zombie-like discipline had stolen grandma’s bike. That Franz Beckenbauer’s team still beat Johan Cruyff’s brave boys was seen not just as a loss on the playing field: it was a moral catastrophe that would only be made good – up to a point – at the European championship in 1988. These traumas, too, now lie !9 far behind us. I do not believe that Dutch people who were born after 1980 still share the prejudice against Germans that was cherished by older generations. We now know only too well that the Germans were not unique in their murderousness, that Nazis and Germans are not the same thing, that mass murder can happen anywhere, and that we Dutch have no special claim to moral excellence. But these are abstractions. On a day such as this it is better, perhaps, to pause for more personal memories of people dear to us. For us who came after the war it is at times difficult to fully understand the moral dilemmas that are sometimes unavoidable in war. Here I am not even talking about some of the extreme examples that occurred in the concentration camps, where for their own amusement the SS would make a man choose who was to be shot: his mother or his wife. And then, when that impossible choice had been made, did the opposite. No: this is about less dramatic events that could happen to almost anyone. I think of my own father, for example, who as a student had gone into hiding to escape the Arbeidseinsatz – forced labour in Germany. One fine day in 1943 he received a message from someone in the student Resistance that he had to return to his parental home. When he and his father, !10 who had gone underground with him in Friesland, were met by his mother at Arnhem station , the platform had already been completely surrounded by the German police. It had been announced in advance that young men who did not immediately sign up for labour in Germany would not only pay the penalty themselves: their parents too would be arrested. My grandfather left the decision entirely to his son. Should he try to escape, and by doing so possibly put his parents in danger? Or not? He signed up. In the summer of 1940, when a German invasion of Britain still seemed imminent, my British grandparents were faced with another dilemma. The family, as I say, were Jewish. Should they keep their children safe by sending them to Canada? Not only might that tear the family apart, perhaps for ever, but for my patriotic grandparents it seemed a form of defeatism. It was safety for their own children, or the national spirit. They chose the second. In 1939 they had also managed to save twelve Jewish children from Berlin through the so-called Kindertransport – essentially, shipments of children from Germany, sanctioned by the German authorities. The British government had decreed that the children of the Kindertransport couldn’t !11 bring their own parents with them, so most never saw them again. While walking through London that same summer, a non-Jewish family friend told my grandmother: ‘You may all end up dead, but you’ll never be refugees.’ It reduced her to tears. One of the moral lessons that we can learn from the history of the German occupation of the Netherlands, the concentration and extermination camps in many European countries, and the camps in Asia under the Japanese, is that human decency can stand resilient even in the most wretched of circumstances. But decency does not always mean acts of derring-do. I believe my father acted out of decency when he decided the safety of his parents was more important than a possible flight from forced labour in Germany. Now it may be true, as some camp survivors tell us, that surviving was usually a matter of luck. But it is also true that there have always been people who have risked their lives to protect others. Perhaps it is true that most people will reach out to snatch the last crust of bread. But not all. Even in the worst camps there were prisoners who shared their meagre rations to help another live a little longer. That sort of moral decency has nothing to do with acts of heroism à la K. Norel. !12 Life during the occupation was lived in something of an upside-down world: under the Nazis, immoral behaviour – or you could call it wrong behaviour – was richly rewarded while decent behaviour was often heavily punished. Despite that, there were people who simply refused to collaborate in the injustice that was being done to others. Their refusal was not based just on political or religious beliefs but because it was the right thing to do. It was seldom an easy choice, and often a dangerous one. Too often, at every level of society, people chose the easy way out. It is not for me, and this is not the moment, to condemn people for this retrospectively, but my generation was not entirely mistaken when it took the behaviour of people under German occupation as a moral yardstick. To remain morally upright in an immoral system was a choice our parents were forced to make – and that comes with consequences. But it was a choice made by our parents, not us, which is why it behoves us to to be more humble than has often been our wont. We shall never know how we ourselves would have behaved. Would we have risked our lives to help others? Would we have refused to go along with a criminal regime? Or would we have looked the other way when someone else was being expelled from their home by brute force? !13 Back in the sixties, the temptation was strong to act heroically when there was little at stake – to reprise the occupation, as it were, but without the risk. We had reason enough to revolt against the often obsolete values of the smug elite at the top of our society. But we did not have the right to assert our moral rectitude on the basis of an ordeal to which we had never been subjected. Let us therefore in all humility pause in remembrance of those who died in the war. Remembrance is not the same as remembering. Remembering can be bitter, but it is seldom unambiguous: bitter and sweet can go hand in hand. And now I am reminded of the surviving children of that Kindertransport who in 1939 ended up in London by way of Holland. At the thought of the parents they never saw again, their eyes fill with tears. But so they do too when they remember the people – my future grandparents – who saved them from an almost certain death. !14