The liberation that never came

1.

The bright May sun tries to penetrate through the narrow window, to chase the darkness from the small living room. It hurts my eyes, just as the blare of trumpets, the pounding of drums and the singing of the crowd torment my ears. "Orange above all," it rumbles through the street, and "Long live the queen."

The crowd goes wild as the first tanks drive into the street. Americans, Canadians and British who, of course out of self-interest, have done the dirty work. For a government that has had shit in their eyes for decades. All those years, they refused to invest in the army. For the population, many of whom collaborated with the enemy and helped to plunge their fellow countrymen into misfortune, or at least closed their eyes to reality and continued to live under the terror of the occupiers, cherishing their propaganda pins with the little broken rifles in the darkness of their drawers, convincing themselves that it was not that bad and quietly hoping that it would all go away by itself. Or not. Philips' profits had never been so high. DAF and Fokker happily joined in. Not to mention the NS, the Dutch Railways.

The crowd would rather just continue where they left off five years ago. Bombardments, the occupation, thousands of soldiers and civilians who were simply slaughtered or, whether or not it was better for them, were locked up, starved under brutal conditions, tortured or, simply because they were people of the wrong kind, were arrested, deported and gassed. Five years in the hell of oppression. Let's quickly forget it. As if it never happened. Let’s move on with everyday life. Rotterdam, Eindhoven and Middelburg must be rebuilt quickly, the traces of the bombings erased, as if they never happened. Nijmegen, The Hague and Amsterdamtoo, of course. Some little mistakes by the Allies, so sorry. In our golden archipelago in the Far East, it is also time to put things in order, so the plundering can continue as before. Orange above all, long live the queen.

2.

May 1940. Disbelief all around. "We had declared ourselves neutral!" How naive can a tiny nation be. The arrogance, to think for a moment that we, as a miserable little country, could dictate the law to the largest military power in the world.

When I went to high school seven years earlier, I already shouted around that everyone was stone-blind. That our eastern neighbours had been bad at losing, fifteen years earlier. That a dangerous lunatic had come to power and that, sooner or later, they would flatten their miserable little front garden, The Netherlands.

Of course I was laughed at, as I had been a whipping boy all my life. Small, skinny with a chicken breast, deathly pale, wiry flaxen hair and glasses with lenses as thick as the bottom of a jam jar. I was just about tolerated, because I regularly helped out with homework. But, of course, I was at the bottom of the pecking order. Even my parents seemed ashamed of me. My mother, because my aunts compared me time and again to my nephews and nieces. My father, because he compared me time and again to my brothers and sisters, and had probably come to the conclusion that my mother had gone off the rails. But he needed a doormat to cook, wash and dust and had likely accepted me into the bargain.

Two years before the war broke out, I graduated from my HBS high school and had had enough of home. In the city I found an empty hovel that seemed suitable to bivouac in for a few nights. After three days I unscrewed the government sign 'Declared uninhabitable' from the front with the point of my pocket knife, never to leave again. A squatter avant la lettre. The neighbours seemed to think it was fine. Maybe they were happy that the ruin did not deteriorate any further. Or maybe they had other things to worry about. After all, it was a time of crisis. I found a job at Lippmann, Rosenthal & Co. as a courier. Night and day I walked the streets with pockets full of money, jewels and securities, transporting valuables between the bank, its clients and other banks, camouflaged in a shabby grey long coat that even a tramp would have thrown in the garbage. Of course, there was nothing to be gained from someone with my appearance, they must have thought, so it couldn't have been safer. Soon, things would go badly for the bank, I suspected then, but I wisely kept my mouth shut, held out my hand every week for my wages, which weren't even that bad, and enrolled at the university, where I led an equally invisible and unspectacular life as at the HBS. In the evenings, when I didn't have any evening transports from the bank, I was only too glad to retreat to the safe shelter of the hovel where I lived, and where, by the light of a smoking kerosene lamp, I did my college work and threw myself into a morbid hobby: explosives.

3.

Somehow, I must have impressed Rosenthal. On a bleak, stormy November evening I had to deliver a package to his home. He opened the door himself and invited me in. I was feeling cold, and a cup of hot chocolate would go down well, he thought. Or something stronger, perhaps.

The maid had taken my coat with a disgusted look on her face and had only straightened her face when Rosenthal ordered her to bring two cups of hot chocolate to the study.

"They say you're studying at the university," Rosenthal started off as he directed me into one of the leather armchairs in his study with its mahogany panelling and the smell of French polish.

"Physics," I replied, "and every now and then I take a chemistry lecture."

"How do you combine that with your courier work?"

"The advantage of being a student. If I have courier work in the afternoon, I study in the evening. And vice versa. And if I work in the afternoon and evening, I get up early in the morning."

"Why physics and chemistry?"

"I specialize in electricity. Electricity is the future. In twenty years at most, there will be no more steam trains. Industry will become a major consumer. Households too. In twenty-five, thirty years everyone will have television."

Rosenthal said nothing. He just looked at me. If he had called me crazy or laughed at me, I wouldn't have cared. I was used to it. But his dark eyes just stared at me, from his bony face with his bushy eyebrows and his hawk nose. I couldn't read his gaze.

"A cigar?" he asked, leaning forward to the oak coffee table and opening a cigar box.

"I'd rather not, thank you."

"But you'll have a drink, right?"

"I certainly won't turn that down, sir, very much so."

He walked to the buffet, returned with a bottle of Dutch gin, and two gin goblets which he filled to the brim.

"Cheers!" He raised his glass and downed it in one go. I thought it would be appropriate to leave the hot chocolate for what it was and follow his example, after which he filled the glasses again.

"Don't you want another job?" he asked, after he had emptied half of his glass. "That coat doesn't suit you. And a student has to study. Not walk the streets at all hours of the night with his pockets full of money and who knows what else. It's a crisis. People who are hungry do crazy things. For a few bucks they'll kick you out of life."

"Never thought about it that way, sir. Besides, I need the money."

"Like I said: I have other work for you."

He urged me to finish my second glass and started talking. His daughter was getting stuck in the fourth year of high school. Smart enough, but yes, she was at an age where she was getting the creeps. Boys, kissing, making out, well, I would understood what he was talking about, wouldn’t I? I didn't understand a thing, green as I was, but I kept a straight face. Fifteen minutes later we had a deal. Tutoring on weekdays from four to six. A banker's daughter who didn't finish high school, that was unthinkable, of course. What she needed was a guiding hand at university level. Mathematics, physics, chemistry, those were the subjects where she went off the rails. The same salary as what I earned as a courier, paid every Friday. When there were rehearsals, also working in the evenings, for extra compensation, of course. If I brought a pan myself, I could take dinner home. When I would work in the evenings, I could eat with the maid in the kitchen.

Even if I could have refused his offer, I wouldn't have. Indeed, it had happened a few times in the last few weeks that I was stared at very pointedly on the street. We sealed the deal with one last drink. In a generous mood, I was given the half-full bottle to take home with me.

About 300 meters from my home, my way was blocked by a stubbled loser who was a bit unsteady on his feet, but half a head taller than me. He demanded my wallet, and fast. Normally, I would have complied with his demand, trembling with fear, but the three goblets had made me overconfident. I took the bottle from the pocket of my coat, bent my arm backwards in one movement and swung. His head banged dully against the wall and then on the pavement. The bottle wasn't even broken. I looked around. No one in sight. I thought it best to just keep walking.

When I got home, I poured myself one more drink and toasted myself.

It was time for a new step in my career.

4.

That's how we came into contact with each other. I saw the flash in your eyes. Rejected at first glance. Not that I expected anything different. I had not stood a chance with the girls at the HBS for five years and at university it was not much better. For someone with my poor physical qualities, working hard and getting rich was the only way to ever have a chance of getting a wife, I had figured out early on, with J. Paul Getty, Joseph P. Kennedy, Charlie Chaplin and Aristotle Onassis as striking examples. Money was power. Even the daughter of the queen had found a husband.

But I had no illusions about a banker's daughter for the time being.

To me you were 'Miss Suzanne', and it would remain Miss Suzanne for a year and a half. After a difficult start, the homework sessions started to run more smoothly when the first successes were scored. Your grades slowly crept up from the valley, the fours and fives became sevens, with even a single eight for chemistry. In a moment of overconfidence, I once explained to you some secrets of explosives. I actually saw a hint of interest in your eyes. So, we had something in common after all.

Six months later your father's fear had been banished. You were likely to complete the year successfully, but the exam year was approaching. Your father was extremely pleased with the results, had even given me a generous raise. In the meantime, you had, against my will, little by little manoeuvred me into a different position, which I did not appreciate at all, but from which there was no escape. Endlessly I had to listen, as if I were your personal eunuch slave, to your stories, how the sons of bankers, insurers and commissioners were lining up in front of you. How often didn’t you ask my advice, mind you, to make your choice: a son of the Asscher diamond family, or a scion of the founders of the Dutch East Indies Trading Bank, who had a lot more to offer physically, but... was not a descendant of Abraham's chosen people, which became all the more painful when he had planted his seed in your belly. In the middle of the night, I took you to an obscure clinic in a suburb where, for a suitable fee, they would help you with your problem. I did it out of loyalty to your father. The scandal would have put his head on the block. And, against my better judgment, in the hope of my reward, of which I could only dream, which I did wholeheartedly, withdrawn into the gloomy darkness of my home, where I could then forget for a moment the sound of the rats running around between the ceiling.

Our contact stopped as abruptly as it had begun. The Germans had humiliated our army to the bone and had razed Rotterdam to the ground, but the HBS exams had still gone ahead a month later. My services were no longer needed. Your father had offered me to retake my work as a courier, but I declined the honour. It would become a long war, I knew then, and there was more important work to do. I heard through the grapevine that you had passed your exam.

5.

There were few who, in the first year of the war, saw the seriousness of the situation. Life seemed to go on as usual, while Reichskommissar Seyss-Inquart told the people fairy tales about a better world, in which the Dutch and the Germans, who had so much in common, would live side by side as brothers and sisters. But my HBS reputation had endured. At the time as the class idiot, but that changed abruptly, when it finally turned out that the Rat had not seen things so wrongly after all.

They came to sit at my table, when the university canteen slowly emptied. A pale lout with hollow eyes, just a little taller than me, but certainly not wider, and an equally pale girl with a high forehead, jet-black hair and equally jet-black eyes. She could have been called pretty, if she had not been so skinny and the bags under her eyes not so dark.

"Hey Rat, how is life?" It was inevitable. A former classmate. I didn't recognize him until he gave me a hint. His close-cropped hair was a perfect disguise.

"Curly Head," he helped me on my way, his former HBS alias, with which his classmates had paid tribute to his spiky, very prematurely balding head.

I had planned to illegally attend a chemistry class, but I decided against it. Curly Head had not been my best HBS friend, if I had had any friends at all, but he had always tolerated me, even respected me. As one of the very few, he had not burst out laughing, even given me a thumbs-up, when I had argued during a class speech that the innocent swastika would one day become the symbol of tyranny and genocide.

"Coffee?" he didn't wait for an answer, walked to the buffet and returned with three cups of what had to pass for coffee at the university. "Willie, do we have anything nice to eat for the Rat?" The girl fished a paper bag from the right pocket of her grey coat, tore it open and motioned for me to help myself to one of the double dark brown sandwiches. I politely decided to have a bite to eat.

"My sister has a certain majesty, but Wilhelmina doesn't sound well," Curly Head continued with a mouthful of bread, which he then washed down with a sip of coffee. "But now to the point."

In the following hour Curly Head inaugurated me into a world of which its existence I had only vaguely suspected. The obscure world of organised Resistance. The Netherlands was being thrown to the Germans. And Joe Public seemed to be okay with it, despite Rotterdam. Seyss-Inquart could tell nice fables, but he was just as dangerous a lunatic as his boss in Germany. For ten months now, the people had been fooled. Ten months in which the Germans were slowly eroding our society. In which preparations were being made for deportations to Germany. Roads had to be built, and war equipment. And fast too. And for those who still stubbornly continued to deny the rising persecution of Jews: they should read through the Leader's personal book. And to be clear: 'Mein Kampf' did not mean 'My camp', although the word 'camp' would acquire a sinister meaning in the coming years. 'Kampf' meant 'struggle' and after reading the book it took little imagination to imagine what the consequences would be for the Jews.

Last February, for better or worse, the country had gone on strike for a few days. Government, public transport, factories, everything had been shut down. And that would only be the beginning. The reality was that it had only been a pitiful nuisance. The minor inconvenience of those few days of strike had mainly affected the Dutch themselves. But it had been a start. It was war, although many did their best not to believe that. And if the government let themselves be fooled, then the Resistance would have to do the dirty work. Underground, if necessary.

At least we had learned something from previous wars. Sabotage was the magic word. There was no point in breaching dikes anymore. Airplanes simply didn't care much about high tide. But there were plenty of other ways.

They needed hands, and especially brains, with knowledge of electricity. And explosives. Or, better yet: both electricity and explosives.

Curly Head paused for effect. Willie washed down her last piece of bread with a sip of cold coffee. She hadn't said a word all that time. Then Curly Head took a deep breath and penetrated his eyes straight into mine.

"We need you, Rat..."

6.

The bright, blinding flash of light came half a second before the shock wave and the demonic boom of the explosion.

The first explosion went as expected, although it rained shards of the blown-out windows dangerously close to us. We were just about to crawl away backwards, when a second explosion really unleashed hell. Blinded by the hellishly intense white flash of light, I lost my mind and my orientation, stood up straight, only to be immediately thrown back into the dry ditch by the shock wave that hit my body like a sledgehammer. I opened my eyes again, but saw only white balls against a pitch-black background. All I could hear was a piercing whistle in my ears. In sheer panic, I crawled back to my feet, but Willie tackled me and held me down at the bottom of the ditch. We must have laid there for minutes, my face pressed to the ground, my teeth grinding on a stale mouthful of damp earth that I had swallowed against my will. Then Willie yanked me onto my back and began to hit me left and right on my cheeks. I slowly opened my tightly shut eyes. My vision slowly returned. Mixed with the white spots I saw the silhouette of Willie. She was on her knees next to me, shouting something that I could not understand because of the piercing sound in my ears, pointed into the forest and began to pull me like a madman. The message was clear. Get out of here, and quickly!

In retrospect I could have named at least ten beginner's mistakes. My book-knowledge from the caverns of my studyroom nearly proved fatal during my first operation. We had only wanted to blow up the vehicles in the building. The shed itself would then burn down of its own accord. No victims, because that would lead to merciless reprisals, as many had already painfully learned after almost two years of war. And in the darkness of the moonless night, we would have enough time to get away unseen.

In fact, it had not been that stupid to choose the cover of the dry ditch, 150 meters from the shed. If everything had gone according to plan. But I had grossly underestimated the power of the explosives. I had also not been very economical with the explosives. My first mission should not fail. Still, I should have done my homework better. I should have expected that a considerable amount of ammunition was stored in the shed, and probably also the necessary barrels of fuel. Fortunately, my sight and hearing had returned quite quickly.

My biggest mistake had been my blind panic. Luckily, Willie had been with me. "Sorry," she had said later, while she had pulled a splinter of glass from my upper arm and applied a pressure bandage that she had fished out of one of the numerous pockets of her long coat. "For that tackle and those blows to your face," she had added, when I had stared at her questioningly. It had been one of the rare times she had spoken more than five words. After that, we went our separate ways. Safety first. Me, via a wide detour, to my dark shelter. Willie to who knows where. I would never know where she had been hiding all those years. But that, too, was safety protocol. Just like the cyanide pills we all carried. If we were ever captured, there was only one way out.

7.

Despite the clumsy blunders during my first operation, I had made fame. The success was celebrated in our small underground circle with a modest glass of illegal gin. Curly Head, his sister Willie, skinny Jumbo, the towering Norseman, the Hawk with his eponymous nose, and a few others, all with more or less appropriate aliases. Then we split up again, to dissolve into the night. Caution was the key. Only two months ago, a group of fifteen had been arrested and summarily executed, including one of the leaders of the Resistance. It was only much later that I heard about the terrible tortures he had had to endure. The Germans had pulled out all the stops to squeeze his real name out of him. Only after they had finally given him his redeeming coup de grace had it become clear to them that he had never used an alias. IJzerdraat (Iron-wire) had been his real name.

Gradually, the actions became more daring. Blowing up power stations, factories, convoys. We even thought about sabotaging fighter planes of the Germans, which were grounded at Gilze-Rijen Airbase, but it didn't get that far yet. Not least because another specter appeared.

The Jew-trap had sprung. For two years, the Germans had been thoroughly mapping the whereabouts of Jewish families, with excellent help from the Dutch government, which gave full access to the meticulously kept population register without much fuss. The next step was only a matter of time.

The deportations began in July. It took a while before it dawned on everyone, that Camp Westerbork was only a transit camp. A stopover station where the German Krauts herded the Untermenschen, the people they had declared the lowest cast of mankind. They meticulously registered them and stripped them of their last possessions. In the meantime, the German pigs had taken over my former employer, Lippmann, Rosenthal & Co, and had even opened a branch in Camp Westerbork. The Jewish Bank became responsible for the 'management' of all Jewish property. The possessions of those who died were transferred to the State. The German State, to be clear. The horrors of the greatest genocide in history had only just begun.

We shifted our focus to helping Jews. Helping them going into hiding. False identity cards. Escapes, when the ground became too hot underfoot. Placing children with foster families. False birth certificates. We had immediately stopped blowing up railway lines after those godforsaken Germans had retaliated and blown fire to a railway carriage full of Jews. In this way, they even temporarily brought the Resistance to its knees, but hatred is a powerful instigator of revenge. After I had blown up the railway yard and had been forced to watch, hear and smell from a distance how a railway carriage was converted into a baking oven, I had realized that we were on our own. 

The royal family and God were gone, the army was a disgrace. Government officials, Dutch companies and thousands of citizens collaborated with the Germans, and the Jewish people were on the verge of being exterminated for the umpteenth time in history. But this time they were very close.

It would be a long, gruesome war.

8.

Those who were in the Resistance led a life of always being on guard, constantly looking over their shoulder, distrusting everyone in advance and, perhaps the hardest part, always sleeping lightly. We lived in a rhythm in which day and night were often reversed. Like night owls, we prepared and carried out our operations, preferably on moonless nights. Rain was even better, when even the most fanatical German patrols cut corners.

At home, I lived and slept on the top floor, except for cooking and sanitary needs. I had attached a makeshift flamethrower to the stove. The stairwell to the top floor was full of booby traps. If it were ever necessary, I still had an escape route via the roofs of the neighbours.

The macabre thing about it all was, that I got used to it. And more than that. From childhood, I had lived in the shadow of real life. At home my father's whipping boy, at primary school a shy mousy boy, who could learn quite well, but who, during sport lessons, was always assigned to a team last, when there was no-one else left to choose from, and who had to constantly struggle to weave through the bullying. At the HBS and university, real life had passed me by and I had drawn inspiration from my study books, hoping that everything would be better later.

The 'later' and 'better' had finally arrived. Finally, I was someone. Someone who helped decide when an operation was imminent. Who did jobs of which the others didn't have any clue. Who provided the Resistance with self made radio transmitters and who had the underground patent on remote-controlled crude explosives. Who, in the euphoria of a successful operation, enjoyed a drink with his fellow resistance members to celebrate the good outcome.

I was all too aware of the irony of the war. Millions would lose their lives. Mine had finally begun.

The knock on the door put me on edge within three seconds. I slept with my clothes on, in case I ever had to escape via the roofs. I crept to the window on the street side by touch, turned the switch of the clandestine outdoor lamp camouflaged as a flower pot by the door and peered through the hole in the curtain at the small mirror that I had mounted on the outside of the window frame, which allowed me to look at my front door 'around a corner'. It took me about ten seconds to get over the shock, an insanely long time for a Resistance fighter. But this was a special case, I told myself. I switched off the booby traps and walked down the stairs, towards the front door.

I unlocked the front door, pulled you in by your soaked herringbone coat, looked left and right outside to be sure, but no one else dared to venture out on the street at night in this miserable weather. I rammed the bolts back into the lock. I groped my way to the kitchen table, lit the smoky kerosene lamp and gestured for you to follow me upstairs and sit down at my rickety work table. Making coffee was the least I could do before I had to send you back out into the street, while it was still dark. But things turned out differently. It took you half an hour at most to tell your story. It would change my life, our lives, forever.

Just after dinner, a group of four Germans in Wehrmacht uniforms had knocked on the door. Dürfen wir reinkommen? had not been a question, but just a demand to enter the house. They had completely overwhelmed the maid and had immediately walked on to the study room, where Dad was drinking his well-earned cognac after a busy day of business. The Krauts had left the door open and had kept their voices at their German level. With your HBS German, the conversation had been easy to follow. Herr und Frau Rosenthal were to be driven to Westerbork that same evening, where Herr Direktor would personally be in charge of the brand-new branch office of Lippmann, Rosenthal und Partner. And, of course, Fraülein Suzanne would be allowed to come along too. Suitable accommodation would be provided.

"Get out of here," Dad had urged you, after the quartet of Krauts had withdrawn, with the message in zwei Stunden wiederzukommen, to be back in two hours. My address had still been somewhere deep in his desk drawer, a considerable risk, but he had pulverized the piece of scrap paper to ashes with the end of his cigar, just as he had had the presence of mind to make sure that you had exchanged your banker's daughter clothes for black Manchester trousers, an equally black coarse wool sweater, and the tweed coat with herringbone pattern. It didn't even look bad on you, but then again, even a jute sack would have suited you.

That night you stayed, never to leave again. In my rickety bed you used me to calm your body, which was stiff with adrenaline. The next morning the bruises, the welts on my chest and the vague cramp somewhere deep down under were the painful, sweet witnesses. I had not dreamed it. Finally, it had happened, what I had only fantasized about for about ten years.

The fact that I now had a Jewish woman in hiding in my house was a concern for later.

9.

Curly Head and the others had not been happy with my new roommate, to say the least. A banker's daughter, who of course knew nothing about real life, probably wasn't dry behind the ears yet. A Jewess, no less. Could it be any more dangerous?

The pain had been somewhat eased by the fact that Dad had given you a generous stack of banknotes from his safe and you were certainly generous in letting the Resistance have their share. Explosives cost money and of course we all had to eat as well. Your star had risen further when, after a few weeks, you had emerged as a valuable assistant in making explosives. During the sabotage of a bridge, a month or two later, Willie had been blown into the river by the shock wave of the explosion. At the risk of your own life, you had dived after her, got her to shore and breathed life back into her. No one had doubted you anymore.

We arranged a Resistance wardrobe for you. Your hair was dyed a few shades lighter. We had our channels for another identity card. You quickly exchanged the accent of a banker's daughter for the sharp 'r' and 'g' and your hands looked nothing like your manicured high society hands of a few months ago. Moreover, you developed into a natural talent for making explosives and you were not even afraid of the devil during operations. You lived on pure adrenaline, which had to be released at night in the darkness of our cramped upper floor.

For two years we lived by the day, knowing that it was war, that everything could end abruptly any moment. Two years in which we, with Curly Head, Willie, Jumbo, the Norseman and a dozen others, carried out operations in which we became increasingly daring, and further expanded our established hiding-network. We lived on the euphoria of successful attacks and of successful hiding-operations and food transports.

But we also had to deal with tough setbacks. People in hiding who were tracked down and abgeführt, sometimes dozens at a time. Randomly picked up victims who were summarily executed. One night, we had to watch helplessly as Hawk, surrounded out of nowhere by an unexpected German patrol, had pulled out his pistol and shot himself in the head, to spare himself his hellish dilemma: burn himself from the inside out with his cyanide pill, or be tortured to death by the Germans.

Two years, during which sometimes at night, in the shelter of our bed with the sagging mattress and the frayed blankets, when we were not making love, or after making love, we philosophized about the hopelessness of the war. About your parents who, when your father's services were no longer needed in the Westerbork branch of the Jüdenbank, were eventually put on transport to Sobibor, where your father with his severe diabetes and your mother with her weak heart were doomed to die. About the Allies, who did their utmost, but still had little chance against the German Atlantic Wall. About our dispute with a few other Resistance groups, because we refused to risk our lives supporting the dangerous Resistance Corridor to Brittain. If the queen insisted to reign the country, she’d better come back, instead of hiding in her shelter on the British countryside. After all, her son-in-law regularly flew to occupied territory to amuse himself with his mistress, so it was apparently not that unsafe after all.

"May this life go on for years," you whispered once in the darkness. I could not see you, could only feel the warmth of your body against mine. "I finally feel like I'm alive. The HBS-bitch hasn't become a fraternity babe. What would have been the point anyway, if I would already be destined to bear babies for yet another banker, yet another money-grubber? No... we face it now. Money is worthless. The Krauts are robbing the country. It's going to be a long winter. Very bad for everyone else. Children, the sick, the elderly especially. But me... I'm finally someone."

I had never felt so connected to anyone. I wanted to freeze time, never let go of the most beautiful moment of my life.

"Come to me, while we still can," you whispered, as you pulled me on top of you.

10.

The Allies had finally broken through the Atlantic Wall. The south of the Netherlands had been liberated, but you were so right. The northern part of the country suffered a long winter.

In mid-December, the biting cold set in. The irony of a white Christmas, in a country plundered by the Germans, who knew damned well that they had already lost, but wanted to strike one last death blow to the suffering population, with a barbaric reign of terror with which they wanted to destroy the morale in their last piece of occupied territory.

The cold and hunger became even worse in January. People died in droves, after having tried in vain to survive on potato peelings, flower bulbs and sugar beets. The end of the war was so close, but thousands lost the battle against the hardships of that last winter. That last winter, in which we took in a Jewish orphan girl of barely two years old. Left behind in an attic room, while her parents had been dragged outside by the Germans and, together with about ten others, summarily executed in the street. After the godforsaken SS scum had left, leaving the corpses behind like garbage on the street, you heard crying from the upper floor. You had made up your mind.

We called her Hannah, Hebrew for 'mercy'. Despite the horror of the famine winter, I saw you blossoming. We would never have a biological child, otherwise you would have become pregnant long ago. We never spoke about it, but we both knew. Maybe something had gone wrong in that obscure clinic, just before the war broke out. Maybe it was me. But what did it matter? We would give Hannah the chances that her parents had not had. In a world where the war would soon be over.

But the war was not over yet. And the horror winter crept on, with temperatures well below minus 10, in a city where even flower bulbs had become a rare treat. One evening when I came home, you were in the kitchen, skinning a captured cat. "Hannah must eat," you whispered like a mantra to the rhythm of your chopping knife as you chopped the skinned cat into pieces. For hours you simmered the meat on the stove, knowing that at any moment we could run out of kerosene. Our hunger overcame our revulsion, but Hannah would not eat. Not anymore.

The next morning, we wrapped her in a sheet. All we had left to bury her in was an old overnight bag. Early in the morning we walked through the city, stubbornly ignoring the risk of being stopped. When we reached the waterfront, I managed to punch a hole in the ice. After one last look inside the overnight bag, I weighed it down with a paving stone and pulled the zipper closed. We carefully let the bag slide into the hole. It was the first time I had seen you cry. And it would be the last time.

Spring made early attempts to break through. The mild February weather was a sharp contrast to our sorrow. The people outside brightened up. Yes, they were still hungry, but spring was coming. And the end of the war.

In our house, the darkness of sorrow for Hannah reigned. For three weeks we had been allowed to taste the happiness of saving a child from the terror of the enemy, taking her in as our own, promising her a future in a war-free world. Fate had decided otherwise.

During the last months of the war, I saw your change. Your fierceness faded. The Resistance left you indifferent. What was there left to resist? The war was coming to an end. Your enthusiasm turned into apathy. Apathy towards the enemy, the horrors of the concentration camps, the last convulsions of the merciless occupation.

Apathy towards me.

On a warm, sunny afternoon in April, I came home. I had managed to score a pound of beef and six potatoes. Nice weather for an hour outside, just the two of us, I thought. And then a feast, determined as I was to distract you, to make you forget your depression for a moment.

I'm leaving you, read the note on the kitchen table.

You did your best. Thank you for everything. Sorry.

The kitchen and the upstairs were tidy. Your clothes were gone. The bed was made, still with the same bedspread that I had brought with me from my parents' house when I moved in here. Every trace of you had been erased. Everything was the same as three years ago. The silence. The dark gloom.

As if you had never been here.

11.

I see you sitting on one of the tanks thundering through the street, together with a few other girls, a green beret tilted on your head, surrounded by a bunch of horny Allies, who can hardly wait for what they're going to do to you girls when the ride is over. Judging by your lips and jaws, you even have the nerve to sing 'Orange above all' at the top of your lungs. And 'Long live the queen.' How low have you sunk.

You don't look up or around when the tank passes my house. My house, which was our house for three years.

I know. Power is irresistible. For five years I've had a taste of it. Five years in which I meant something, in which I was someone.

But the war is over. And I'm back to square one. An insignificant physics student, small, skinny with a chicken breast, pale as a sheet, wiry flaxen hair and glasses with lenses as thick as the bottom of a jam jar. And it doesn't help that I walk with a slight limp, a souvenir of a piece of a grenade, sustained when my life still had a meaning.

People want to forget the war, so they will forget the Resistance too, preferably as soon as possible. Thank you, ladies and gentlemen of the Resistance, but it's over. Your services are no longer needed. Good luck with the rest of your life.

I don't feel like it anymore. For five years I've tasted real life, and I refuse to go back to square one, to the futility of vegetating in the shadows. Let me just take those five beautiful years with me. My task here is done. I'm quitting. I'm resigning from this thoroughly sick world. We've had a wonderful time together, but after this letter I'll take my memories of you with me, into oblivion.

Good luck with your American, or your Canadian, I can't see from behind my dirty window whether there's a Yank or a Canuck with his hands under your blouse on top of that tank. Let him marry you first. And then go with him. The Netherlands is a beautiful country, at least if you're content with an idyllic existence in a noisy, damp upstairs apartment for the first 10, 20 years, where you can wash yourself with stinking river water at the kitchen tap and teach your children to write in the soot from the coal stove that settles on the wallpaper. And those 9 million people huddled together in the Netherlands will have become 12 million in 20 years. And 15 million before the end of the century.

If you do decide to stay in the Netherlands, get used to it, but you won't have much trouble with that either: within ten years or so, trade-business with the Krauts will be back to normal, as if they've never been acting like animals here. In the summers, German will be spoken again in Scheveningen and Zandvoort. As if they never bombed Rotterdam to the ground, and as if those damned concentration camps never existed. As if those tens of thousands of Jews were never deported from the Netherlands to their final destination, the godforsaken gas chambers.

The persecution of Jews will never really stop. At the beginning of the next century, most of those who consciously experienced the war will have died. And with them, the last brake on anti-Semitism will have been buried, and it will only be a matter of time before your grandchildren will witness a new Kristallnacht.

The royal family will continue for a long time, although Wilhelmina's daughter will have a hard time, not least with that German gold digger of hers. But people see what they want to see. Their faith in the Orange fairy tale is rock solid.

Speaking of faith: the eternal polarization between Catholics and Protestants will resolve itself. Churches will be almost empty at the end of the century. Except perhaps on Christmas Eve and, who knows, on the eve of the fifth of May, the day the last SS flag was removed.

I have put on my old Sunday-suit for the occasion. My parents would be proud of me, except for the circumstances. I have tidied up the house, turned out the kerosene flame and taken out the garbage can. Let me stop now. Upstairs I will have my last drink and lie down on the bed, put the letter on the bedside table, and then slowly slip away.

It has been enough.

12.

The past few weeks I saw you slide into sadness. The irony of fate. The famine winter had been banished by spring, the war was almost over. A bright future in sight in the free Netherlands, where the red-white-blue will wave again in the west wind. Where the apple blossoms, the tulip fields, Scheveningen and Zandvoort will shine in the sun again. Where we will rebuild our country like never before. But you, my love, you slid further and further into the darkness.

I loved you, for four years. I loved you so much that it hurt. And suddenly there was that banker's daughter, that godforsaken rotten bitch, who forced herself into your life. But what could I do? She brought enough money to keep our Resistance group going for months. She even saved my life once. It couldn't be more ironic.

Silence was the only thing left for me. No one would listen to me. Who listens to an autistic person? No, I had to be silent and wait. One day that slut would run away from you. I would wait, even until the end of the war.

Today I had to see you. I knew that you would not endure the frenzied revelry, that you would lock yourself in the dark caverns of loneliness in your own home. From the last food drop I still had a whole loaf of bread. I fried the two remaining eggs. How much didn’t you like fried eggs! I stuffed everything, with some apples, into my bag and set off, pushing my way through the exuberant crowd, ignoring the contemptible noise of the trumpets, the drums and the 'Long live the queen' as best as I could.

I knocked on the door. Again. And again. Worried, I rattled and turned the doorknob. To my utter amazement, the door simply opened. Something was very wrong. I closed the door behind me and walked cautiously to the stairs. From a distance I threw my bag on the stairs, but nothing happened. The booby traps were deactivated. I carefully walked upstairs.

The way you were lying on your bed, your glass and the envelope on the makeshift bedside table, made me realize the reality. Your face was blue, but your cheeks still felt warm. If only I had been here half an hour earlier. If only I had…

I have been sitting next to you on your bed for half an hour now, my love. I hold your hand, but I know that I cannot stop your hands from slowly getting cold. My tears have finally come. Today, after five years of war, I am allowed to cry. Just for a little while. I will go and get the others soon. Curly Head, Jumbo and the Norseman. We will give you a beautiful funeral. I will keep your grave tidy, so that you will still be with us. We will keep your memory alive. The memory that our struggle of the past years has not been in vain. The knowledge that you now have the peace that you have longed for so much.

I will carry your memory with me forever, my love…

… as long as I live.