In Europe

bolt,’ she tells me. ‘We had it open in no time. Fortunately the border guards understood that there was no way to stop that crowd.’ Even then she had been amazed by the East Germans and the way they left everything behind: Trabants, family photos, teddy bears. ‘I remember thinking: these people have brought their last, cherished possessions with them here, and now they are leaving even those things behind in order to cross the border.’
    Together we went looking for the spot again, in the rolling fields behind the border town of Sopron. Today there is a small monument to the famous 1989 picnic, and an unmanned gate for bicyclists andfarm vehicles; you can walk right into Austria there. It was the first time she had been back since 1989, she was a little sad about the way her life had gone. ‘Capitalism was much less charitable than we ever realised,’ she said. ‘Back then we thought: now everything is going to be all right.’



Chapter FIFTY-ONE
Brussels
    ‘ I HAD RIDDEN OUT TO ZAANDAM ON A BICYCLE WITH WOODEN TYRES. When I got back, there was a car waiting in front of our house: the queen wanted to talk to me. It was May, Holland had been liberated only two weeks before, Kathleen and I were living in a little attic room for students along the Amstel in Amsterdam. We were dumbfounded, but we climbed in and were driven to the south of the Netherlands, which had been liberated for a long time already. Queen Wilhelmina had her residence there, at Breda. It was like a dream for both of us: we were put up in a hotel, in Breda the street lights came on at night as normal, you could buy strawberries in the market, the sheets were white instead of yellow. The next morning the queen asked me to be her private secretary. Which is how Queen Wilhelmina of the Netherlands became my first boss.
    ‘The Dutch government at that time applied the following rule of thumb: if you hadn't been bad, you were good. The queen saw it precisely the other way around: if you hadn't been good, you were bad. I remember the first time she came back to her Noordeinde Palace in the Hague, hopping mad, and how the mayor and the aldermen of the city were all standing there in a row. Queen Wilhelmina walked up to the first one, and the only thing she asked him was: “Which concentration camp were you in?” And she asked the same question of everyone who was there that day. I didn't have the faintest idea what those people had actually done in the war, but it became awfully quiet in that reception hall.
    ‘Look, this is a photograph of my father, he's the big, handsome fellow with the beard and the aristocratic air. Philip Kohnstamm, physicist, later professor. Due to all kinds of family complications, he grew up in the home of his uncle, the Amsterdam banker A. C. Wertheim, completelyimmersed in that atmosphere of assimilated Judaism. My father was a man of exceptionally broad interests: he was a private tutor of philosophy, he was deeply interested in theology, and later in educational theory, and of course in politics, both national and international.
    ‘He was born in 1875, my mother in 1882. Her father was J. B. A. Kessler, director of the Koninklijke Nederlandsche Petroleum Maatschappij (KNPM), which later became the Royal Dutch/Shell Group. But when my mother was still young, the family was not at all wealthy. In those days the KNPM was only a small company with an oil concession in North Sumatra, for the production of kerosene for lanterns and things like that. My grandfather would go into the jungle and come back with a couple of barrels of oil, that's what it boiled down to. Petroleum was only a troublesome by-product, they couldn't earn anything with it, “that terrible stuff that's always bursting into flames” as he wrote in one of his letters. He brought Henri Deterding into the venture, and together they salvaged the firm. He himself was always travelling back and forth to the wells in the Indies, he was a real jungle hand, but it ruined his health. And when he would get home – you can detect that in his letters as well – it was always a bit of a disappointment. A tragic life.
    ‘My mother was crazy about him, though. When she turned sixteen, he gave her a bicycle. She was furious with him: “You shouldn't do that, you don't have the money for it, you have to work so hard for what you have.” But when he died at the age of forty-nine, he was one of the richest men in the Netherlands. The first cars had begun