In Europe

to appear around 1900, and “that terrible stuff” became a highly valued commodity.
    ‘My father first met the Kesslers in summer 1899, during a holiday at Domburg on the North Sea coast. I still have a picture of them, on the hotel tennis court. My mother was seventeen then, my father seven years her senior. They married, that hundred-per-cent Jewish Kohnstamm, and that Kessler girl from the Hague's wealthier business circles. Mixed marriages like that were quite rare then. But I never heard of there being any fuss about it. My parents remained very close all their lives.
    ‘The nineteenth century lasted in our home until 1940. Our whole neighbourhood in Amsterdam was dominated by the narrow, somewhat impoverished and entirely Jewish Weesperstraat. I remember the commotion from early in the morning till late at night, the tram edging its waythrough the quarter. And then the silence on Saturday, the men in their high hats and the neatly dressed boys walking to the synagogue. Did people discriminate? People told jokes sometimes, and because he was Jewish my father wasn't allowed to join one of those elitist clubs, which he wasn't interested in anyway. But there was no real sting in it yet. The tone it took on in the 1930s and 1940s, the thing we all see before us now when we think about it, that wasn't yet there.
    ‘In winter 1939 I drove around the United States for a few months, on my own. I had received a scholarship from the American University, and I wanted to see Roosevelt's New Deal for myself. That trip had an enormous effect on the rest of my life. I came from a continent where most people seemed paralysed by Hitler and the Depression, like rabbits caught in the poacher's lights. And then suddenly you find yourself in America, where people dared to do things, where they said: “Let's give it a try anyway, who knows, maybe it will work out.” During my time there I saw that politics could also be something grand. There couldn't have been a greater contrast with the Netherlands. And it drew me in, I developed a kind of determination; it awakened, as it were, the young American in me.
    ‘This is a letter from my father, from around that time. It was just after Roosevelt's famous speech in which, for the first time, he made clear where he stood: on the side of democracy and against National Socialism. My father wrote, to paraphrase a bit: “Max, it seems to me that the worst is behind us now. The worst, by that I don't mean war, but the capitulation of the entire world – through egoism or indecision – in the face of totalitarian madness. A war does not seem to be ruled out. But that the Caesars in Berlin and Rome will actually seize control of the world seems to me, after Roosevelt's message, more or less unthinkable.”
    ‘The first time I saw Kathleen was in winter 1940, on the train to Leeuwarden. The next day a few friends and I did the Elfmerentocht, a classic skating tour. We skated the way people did in those days, all holding onto a long stick, the weather was beautiful. Suddenly I saw that girl, the same one I'd seen on the train, skating alone. I was a little shy, but the American boy in me said to her, as we passed by: “Grab hold, if you like.” By the end of the day she and I were playing tag on skates on the lake close to Sneek, by the light of the full moon.
    ‘The rest of that winter I worked on my thesis, and in early May 1940 I took my final exams in Amsterdam. So, on the night of 9 May, 1940, I went to bed as a reasonably successful young Amsterdammer. When I woke up it was war, a few days later I was a semi-Aryan, a “
Mischling ersten Grades
”. Getting a job in my own professional field, Dutch and history, was out of the question. Could I really do that to her, let her marry the problematic case that I was? She wasn't even eighteen yet. That dilemma played a constant role in my growing love for her – although her parents continued to receive me very warmly in their home. In the letter in which I finally asked for her hand in marriage, written from the detention camp, you can still see that doubt. But you also see that young American, who simply dared and did.
    ‘My life was very much characterised by the urge to build things anew, after those terrible times. After 1945, we all learned to look ahead, we never did anything else. But I also know, when I on occasion look back on those years before the war, that something was lost for all time. And that certainly applies to