'I'd like to tell lots of funny stories, Gemma and Tracy, but we have to go back to the war years first. Back to what happened to me, and what may be even more important: to what happened around me.
I never told you how Dad got out of the concentration camp, did I? Now that was a story worth telling, because of Mum's courage and also, because it showed a side of the Germans I still can't understand even now. The Germans were rather weird in our eyes: they were perfectly happy to treat Jews as a kind of sub-human creature who deserved killing, as long as it was done in accordance with the law.
That was how Dad survived, because of a law!
The Germans had established a number of concentration camps in the Netherlands, and as fast as they could accommodate the Jews, they sent out summons to report for transport to those camps. Dad too had received his summons, but several days after he was supposed to report!
However, in those early years of the war the law exempted Jews in mixed marriages. They didn't have to go to the concentration camps - it wasn't their turn yet! - so Mum straight away began to compile her family tree as far back as she could with church records and whatever else she could find - all the way to Claes Compaen, our pirate ancestor - and as soon as she had all the documents ready she actually initiated court proceedings against the German-controlled Dutch government!
Together with a lawyer, she presented two arguments. In the first place she and the lawyer contended it wasn't Dad's fault, he couldn't report on the specified date: the summons had been wrongly addressed. So, Dad shouldn't have been put in a penal camp anyway, but in an ordinary concentration camp. And in the second place that business of mixed marriages. Mum had no Jewish blood at all, so according to German law Dad shouldn't even have been sent to a concentration camp at all.
It took a lot of guts to take on the government, but Mum had plenty of guts. Dad was transferred from the concentration camp to a prison in Amsterdam to appear before a judge. I don't remember how long the court case lasted, but Dad was set free!
Not that Dad felt safe, the Germans could change the law at a moment's notice, and they often did. But for the time being he was home again. Skinny, and with malnutrition sores on his legs, but home.
Next to our village was a large modern mental hospital, 'Duin en Bos'. Dozens of buildings all scattered throughout the forest. Buildings for the patients; houses for the doctors and other medical staff; kitchens; stores. Ideal as barracks, the Germans thought. So those patients who were only mildly ill were transferred to other mental hospitals, and all the others were 'given an injection'. Every single one. I don't know where all those people were buried, maybe they were just cremated. I don't know. In any case, the German army moved in and forced some of the doctors to stay to look after the soldiers.
We knew one of the doctors. Behind his house was an old brick pigsty, he told us. The pigsty was no longer used and easy to clean, the doctor said, so it was as safe a place as you could find anywhere for Dad to hide until the more immediate danger was over. Right in the middle of the German army barracks! The one place they would never look for him.'
'Your Dad had to live in that pigsty?'
'Yes, until it was safe enough again to come home.
Growing up with that kind of experience, how could we not hate the Germans? We hated them so much, we never used the word German but 'mof'. Like the American word Kraut, but absolutely dripping with hatred and contempt. That's the only word we ever used for them: moffen [1] this, moffen that. My hatred for them grew so intense that, thinking back, I can't even understand the feeling myself anymore. I'm not sure if I understood at the time either.
I do remember that the only reason I never tried to kill a mof was the fact that for every soldier killed, the moffen would pick 25 or more ordinary people off the street, completely at random, and shoot them in the nearest public square. Once Trudi came very close to being picked as one of a group of 25. The moffen, at the last moment, picked up one more adult instead, and forced her to watch. I didn't want to be responsible for innocent Dutch people getting killed.
Actually, killing moffen, or at least one or two of them would have been easy. In the top drawer of the small dresser next to Mum and Dad's bed were two pistols and Dad had shown me how to use those 'in the absolutely ultimate emergency', whatever that was going to be. Nobody ever used them, and after the war Dad had the firing pins cut short and the box of cartridges was given to the police.
[1] Dutch slang for Germans