Leo’s father took the despised star that every Jew had to wear off their clothes and took my father from Amsterdam to Friesland by train, to hide on a farm owned by the family of a guard in the camp where was a prisoner, on the island of Texel, in the Netherlands. Friesland has a long and interesting history, a little of which he shared in this autobiography.
Chapt. 4
'One of my favourite authors is Steinbeck, and in books like Cannery Row or Sweet Thursday, he occasionally interrupts the story with a short light-hearted chapter. I like that. I think we have had enough heavy stuff for the moment.'
'Yeah, Grandpa, tell us about that photo you have on your desk, with you sitting on that big horse. Was that in Haulerwijk?'
'That's right, Tracy. That was when I was in hiding with Pake and Beppe, and with their sons, uncle Eb and uncle Freerk, at their farm. The son of Uncle Eb sent it the other day. I didn't even know that photo still existed, so it was a nice surprise to see it again. Doesn't the horse look great? She was called Nestoria, and I loved her. She liked people and she always enjoyed pulling a plow or a harvester. Nestoria was an important part of life on the farm, and that farm played an important part in my youth. But before I tell you more about the farm I'll have to give you a short geography lesson.
Much of The Netherlands is no more than the delta of the two great rivers, the Rhine and the Meuse. Smaller rivers branch off through the flat sandy or clayey land with stretches of peat land in between. A group of islands in the southwest is called Zeeland – they gave New Zealand its name! The north-western district is Holland, wedged in between the North Sea and the inland sea now called the IJselmeer. Beyond the IJselmeer is Friesland, and to the north of The Netherlands lies a whole string of islands. Those Friesian Islands, like Ameland and Terschelling, are little more than enormous sandbanks with a little village on each. Only the first of the islands, Texel, is a bit bigger.
During the last ice age, the arctic icecap reached as far as Friesland and left a number of gigantic boulders behind when the ice retreated. The pre-historic settlers in Friesland found an ideal land: fertile, with great forests, plenty of game like deer and boar, many lakes full of fish, a gentle coastline, and boulders to make their special graves. They made enormous tunnels of those boulders to bury their dead. Two long rows of boulders close together, and even bigger boulders on top as a roof. The whole was covered with soil, and grass and trees were growing all over. A kind of dolmen actually, which the modern Friesians call hunebedden. So, the people who lived there then are now called the Hunebed-Builders. This was around 1200 BC. We know next to nothing about the Hunebed-Builders. You should see those boulders though. Years after the war I almost got shipwrecked on one of them. We changed course just in time. But that's another story.
Anyway, Haulerwijk is a village in the peatland not all that far from hunebed country. Pake and Beppe's old farmhouse was fairly small. In front was the good room, where on Sunday morning everybody would sit together after church and drink coffee. Next to the good room was Pake and Beppe's bedroom and behind the good room was the kitchen. That was the entire living area. In the kitchen was a cupboard bed. At night you opened the two cupboard doors and climbed into the bed. No mattress in there, only a very thick layer of long reeds covered with a blanket. On top of that blanket, the bed was made just as in a modern bedroom, with sheets and pillows and further blankets. Uncle Freerk, Uncle Eb, and I had to share the cupboard bed. There was one tap in the house, in the kitchen, and outside, next to the kitchen door, a large cast-iron pump gave us more drinking water: peat water, the colour of weak tea, but tasting nice and clean.
In the kitchen was the door to the stable, with a long row of stalls for twelve cows and Nestoria. The long-drop toilet was at the far end of the stable. Next to the stable the threshing floor, with bales of straw stored at the back, and the pigpen. All of it is under one roof.
When I arrived in Haulerwijk in 1943, the cows were still out in a paddock, but not long after they were brought into the stable. In winter it was far too cold for them to stay outside and they wouldn't be able to graze with the paddock deep in snow anyway. But you should have seen them go crazy when they were put outside again in spring. Then they just raced up and down in the paddock.
THE FRIESIAN “NESTORIA”
The only way I could get on Nestoria’s back was by making her wait next to a fence post or farm gate.