Download 4 May speech - Buruma EN - Nationaal Comité 4 en 5 mei

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