'This is getting too depressing; I think I'll leave the rest of the war stuff till later. Or maybe I'll just forget about it altogether.'
'You can't do that, Grandpa. We want to know. Don't we, Gemma?'
'OK, Tracy, I'll compromise. I'll tell you some now and some later, but I won't tell you my worst memories.
Let me explain.
A good friend of ours, David, was a holocaust survivor too. The only survivor of his entire family. One day, just before we left for New Zealand, David and I were sitting in our garden and he started to talk. Really talk. David said that as we would never meet again he felt free to talk to me about some of the things that happened to him, things he had never told anyone before. 'I just have to tell someone,' he said.
He needed to talk, only I kept wishing ever since that I could forget what he told me.
David had a very gentle and understanding wife and a beautiful baby daughter. But in the end, he couldn't live with his memories. A few years after we left Holland he killed himself.
Compared to what millions, literally millions of our people went through, my memories are not all that bad at all. However, some of those memories are bad enough to give you nightmares. And that is something I won't do to you.
But I talk so glibly about millions of people, six million, yes, but can you visualise figures like that? This book should be over 100,000 words long by the time it's finished. So, imagine a row of more than sixty books like this one, all next to each other on a long, very long shelf. Every single word in that long row of books represents one person murdered, exterminated. Every single word stands for one innocent person who suffered.
No, I can't tell you my worst memories, and I won't write them down in this book either. I'll tell you about the last war Christmas instead. That was during the Hunger Winter. [1] The South of The Netherlands was liberated by then, but the Germans were still in control of the North West where we were. We were isolated, and by autumn we were in the early stages of a real famine.
Every day one of us would queue up for our portions of soup from the communal kitchens. Half a litre each. A watery soup made of sugar beets with maybe an onion or some cabbage leaves mixed in. Or sugar beet soup with salted endive. It was brought to a long table next to the nearest air raid shelter, and everyone got one ladle full. Mum was scouring the countryside for food on an old pushbike without tires, and Dad was made to do slave labour, filling in bomb craters in the runways of the airport in between bombing raids.
Mum had been away for several days just before Christmas, but when she came home, cold and exhausted, she brought back a paper bag full of pea flour, at least a whole kilogram, and also some onions. All the farmer could spare himself. Pea flour and onions, it was going to be a wonderful Christmas.
People in Amsterdam always cooked on gas, only that winter there was no gas. What we did have though was a gadget called an emergency stove, a fairly large tin with a smaller one inside. You put the thing on the regular stove and built a little fire in the inside tin. The smoke would go between the two tins and down into the normal stove, and you put the cooking pot on top. Of course, there was no coal or firewood either, but Trudi and I had taken a bucket to the railway dike to look for pieces of coal fallen off the steam locomotives when the trains were still running and found enough to cook the pea soup.
Much earlier on, Uncle Herman's house on the canal had been confiscated, and he had been relocated to a small upstairs flat. Now he was in hiding in that flat, the one place the Germans never thought of looking. It was not far from where we lived, so we decided to have Christmas together at his place. Obviously, he couldn't go out on the streets, he couldn't even go near his front windows in case neighbours over the road would see him.
Mum carried my youngest brother, Nico, still a toddler then, Dad brought the pea flour and our largest cooking pot, I took the bucket of coal and Trudi held Arthur, my other brother, by the hand. It was early evening and totally dark, there were no streetlights, and curfew wasn't until eight o'clock, so we could get there unseen.
Uncle Herman was sitting on his pushbike, pedalling steadily, the black-out curtains were in place. There was no electricity, and you couldn't buy candles anymore either, so he had put his pushbike on a stand in the lounge. As long as you pedalled, you had light. At home, we had much the same thing: a bike frame with pedals and a rear wheel. You held the frame between your knees while you turned the pedals with your hands. Dad had rigged it up so we had an extra light in the kitchen as well. Pedalling always made you warm too, and afterwards, you'd wrap yourself in blankets to stay warm.
It took a very long time to cook the pea soup on the little emergency stove, but we didn't mind. We took turns on the bike and sang our songs and for once, when the soup was ready, we could eat as much as we liked. You have no idea how beautiful that soup was.
Christmas for us was not a religious festival, but something even more important: a family celebration of the coming peace. We didn't know how long we would still have to wait. Till spring? Till autumn? We did know however, yes, we felt absolutely sure that one day the war would be over, peace would come, and that we had a fair chance to survive that long. We would be free again.
After that night Christmas became by far the most important of all the family festivals. Every year the whole family would come together again and celebrate in style.'
'Until you emigrated.'
'Yes, until we emigrated from Holland, and that hurt. It hurt our parents, my uncle and aunt, everybody. And it hurt us. But we had no choice, no real choice anyway. We had a few more family Christmases when my parents came to stay with us here in New Zealand, but never since. All the same, we have the memory of happy Christmases and I'll never forget the taste of that pea soup.
That was Christmas 1944.
[1] From early October 1944 till May 1945