A forced detour through Germany in 1953 was unsettling
But made me realise there had been good Germans in WWII too
I thought once the war was over everything would be like heaven. Boy, was I wrong! The turning point came about eight years later when I was twenty. That I must tell you. [1]
I did a lot of scuba diving, helmet diving, and snorkeling then. I even was a scuba diving instructor. So, that year a friend and I decided to go to the Mediterranean. The year before we had traveled through France on mopeds and done underwater photography in one of the smaller rivers. The only problem had been that in those days you needed not only a passport for yourself but also a document for your motorbike or car. A triptyque it was called, and that was only valid for one month. We wanted to be free to stay longer, so we thought hitchhiking would be the only realistic way to go.
We set off with our backpacks full of diving gear, home-built underwater cameras, and even lead weights. The second morning, at the Belgian border, a young lady changed her mind about giving us a ride: 'As a woman on my own, I think maybe I shouldn't take you.'
On the third day, a young lady stopped again: 'You want a ride? Of course, my pleasure. I still have a long way to travel and I like company. You might as well stay the night with me too.' My friend turned her down.
'Why?' I wanted to know.
'Yesterday, in Belgium, it was not safe for a woman on her own to take us,' he said. 'Now we're in France, so it's not safe for us to travel with a woman on her own.'
I couldn't understand him. But from that day onwards, during the entire trip, I never saw a woman traveling on her own again.
On day four, well into France, hitchhiking was getting more difficult and we decided to continue separately. Quite at random we picked a small village at the Riviera, Les Salins de Hyères, to meet again after four days on the steps of the town hall (there was no town hall, so when he arrived, he found me sitting on a beach). We drew straws: my friend got the little tent, I kept the primus and cooking pot, my friend got the map of Southern France, and I the one of Northern France with a tiny map of the whole country on the cover.
One night, in Lyon, I was trying to get a lift out of town so I could sleep in some paddock along the road. Not too successful, I was given a ride to the police station instead by a gendarme: 'What are you doing?'
'Hitchhiking, I want to go the Riviera.'
'Why?'
'To take underwater photographs and catch fish.'
'Where did you come into the country?'
'I don't know the name of the village.'
'Why don't you have a visa?'
'Visa? You don't need a visa to go to France.'
It turned out he meant a stamp on the back of my passport.
'There was nobody at the border to stamp my passport.'
'Impossible.'
'It's true.'
Again they asked where I had entered the country, so I showed them on their wall map. They tried to ring, no answer.
One of the gendarmes took me by the shoulders, shoved me into a little cell, and slammed the door behind me. No food, nothing to drink, and only a bare mattress on a kind of shelf to sleep on.
The following morning they took me out of my cell and admitted that, yes, at night at that small border crossing the customs officers went home, leaving the border unattended.
For a second time, the gendarmes upended my backpack and looked at the tiny kerosene lantern, which should have stayed with the tent my friend took.
'What's that number?'
'What number?'
'Here, on your lantern.'
'I don't know.'
They carefully copied the number in their lengthy report and let me go. Hungry, thirsty, and rather cold.
I took out the lantern: the number was of the Dutch patent. Maybe they thought it was some kind of code? I don't know. It was only eight years after the war and people were still suspicious.
I walked to the outskirts of the town, made my breakfast, and put up my thumb. A small Citroën stopped, with three students inside. They had come from Paris and had been driving all night. They would be happy to take me to the Riviera if I would drive.
Only I had never driven a car. Motorbikes, yes, but never a car. Doesn't matter, they said, they would teach me. I got behind the wheel and followed their instructions. That was my first driving lesson. Easy, or so I thought until we suddenly came to a steep and very winding road downhill. I began to sweat, squeezed the steering wheel, and started to skid in the second hairpin bend. 'That's right,' the student beside me said. 'That's how those racing blokes do it. Keep going.' I sweated a bit more, skidding at every single bend, tires squealing all the way down. We didn't make as good time as we had hoped though, because they wanted me to stop at every second bistro for a drink. No drinks for me: as their driver, I had to stay sober.
Late afternoon they decided they had had enough, and would spend the night in the next village. They dropped me off next to a lush green meadow, perfect to put down my sleeping bag. I put on my backpack and jumped across the ditch along the road. I jumped and only just managed to keep my balance on a strip of dry land no more than half a meter wide. The meadow in front of me wasn't a meadow at all, but a flooded rice field.'
'And did you get to the Riviera, Grandpa?'
'I sure did, Gemma. But what I wanted to tell you, was what happened on the way back. From the Riviera, from Antibes to be exact, I was offered a ride straight into Switzerland and that was too good to turn down. So instead of going back through France, I found myself in Geneva, then Zurich, and lastly in Basel.
There fate stepped in. Fate, luck, call it what you like. Road works had closed the border crossing back into France and all traffic was detoured through the German crossing.
I stood there, pack on my back, passport in my hands. I had no choice: I had to go through Germany. Even for that short detour and back into France, I would be in Germany. Hated, despised Germany. I went through Customs, and got the German stamp on my passport.
Now I was in that country full of moffen. But it had been eight years since the war; did I have the right to condemn all Germans without having seen some of their country for myself, without ever having talked with even a single one of them? Would that be just?
I made a choice that changed my life. Shortly after the war, while I lived in Switzerland, I had spoken Swiss-German. I learned German for four years at High School. I felt I could travel through Germany without letting on I was Dutch. And maybe nobody would recognize me as a Jew. Surely, they wouldn't expect a Jew to go hitchhiking through Germany. Would they?
I put my passport in my backpack, and put up my thumb.
I had more of an accent than I had imagined. Some people who gave me rides thought I came from the Northwest of Germany, somewhere near Hamburg maybe? Others recognized me as Dutch. Many talked about the war. One told me of the happy times he had when he was a soldier in Holland. Another had been a prisoner of war in Russia.
One told me his one, real big regret was that the war ended too soon: if the war had lasted even another six months they would have been able to finish the 'final solution' as the nazis had called it. Now, to his great sorrow, there were still Jews left.
But another man, who did pick me as Dutch, told me of his deep shame. He wanted nothing to do with anybody even faintly pro-nazi, so he had found himself a job with an American company although that paid less than the job he had before. He used his spare time to find ways to try and make up for what his countrymen had done. He took me much further than he needed to travel, shouted me a big lunch in a good restaurant, and bought me a packet of cigarettes. He told me he was sorry he couldn't take me any further, but he had to go back to work. He was already a couple of hours late.
That man, more than anybody else in those years, made me think.
That was the turning point.
[1] 1953