In Europe

Amsterdam. I remember when they arrested me: I was walking through lovely, snowy Amsterdam, the city can be so beautiful at times like that, and when I got to my house on the Amstel the police were waiting for me, my landlady was weeping, and a little later I found myself walking across the bare, icy parade grounds of Camp Amersfoort, with my head shaved. I was lucky that eventually they released me again, but during those three months I still lost twenty-five kilos.
    ‘Being in a place like that makes it clear that lawlessness is hell. Nowhere else have I ever felt so fully surrendered into God's hands. And yet, that is where the roots of my present agnosticism lie. I remember how one evening I had to drag a corpse from the mortuary, accompanied by a guard and a dog. While I was doing that, it suddenly occurred to me how ridiculous it was: a half-dead man dragging a dead man, with a German and a dog behind him. But the thought uppermost in my mind was whether, when I got back to the barracks, someone would have stolen my bread.
    ‘In some ways Camp Amersfoort also conferred on me an accolade. There is, after all, a profound difference between being ground to pieces because of one's race and being ground to pieces because of one's political convictions. And if I had not belonged to that latter group – in autumn 1940, by way of student protest, I had read aloud a couplet fromthe Dutch national anthem in the university auditorium – then I don't know whether I would finally have dared to propose to Kathleen.
    ‘Those years working for my first boss were good ones. My dealings with Queen Wilhelmina were marked, of course, by a certain distance. Her sense of duty, her grandeur, temperament and loneliness all made her a person who touched you to the quick. She hated the royal birthday celebrations on 31 August; she would never allow anyone to congratulate her, she always shrunk from that. But on 31 August, 1947 she said to me without preamble: “Next year, on this day, I will step down.” When it finally came to that point, she dreaded the coronation ceremonies. She was very fatigued, and deeply disappointed by certain things.
    ‘On the day of her abdication, a special train rode from the Hague to Amsterdam-Amstel Station. I was in her Pullman car, and I saw little more than a tired, rather difficult old lady. On the way to the palace on the Dam we were in the coach behind hers, and when we got there that old lady climbed down from the train, and suddenly she was the queen again, Queen Wilhelmina, and she strode past the honour guard and she waved to the crowd. She was grand, truly grand. And even if she hadn't been born a queen, but the daughter of a washerwoman, Wilhelmina would have been a grand woman.
    ‘It was in summer 1947 that I first went back to Germany. It was a wasteland. Cologne, Kassel, all you saw was debris. Some of the cities were teetering on the verge of starvation. The children who came crawling out of the piles of rubble in the morning carrying their book bags, you couldn't hold them responsible for Amersfoort or Auschwitz, could you?
    ‘It was quite a shock to set foot on German soil again, but I travelled around the whole time knowing that this country must someday come back to life again, and deal with itself in peace. I also had the feeling that we, the Dutch, were also to blame, if only for the way we hadn't wanted to know. When the first roll-call was held in Amersfoort, I heard someone behind me in our group say: “Can this really be happening?” That was in 1942!
    ‘As a survivor, I felt guilty myself as well. The fact that you emerged alive from the camp and the occupation meant that you, too, had occasionally looked the other way when someone was in trouble. I have never been able to adopt the self-assured stance of the “pure angel” with regardto an “evil” Germany. I have often thought about the biblical story of Sodom and Gomorrah, and about Lot's wife who was allowed to flee and who, despite God's warning, stopped and looked back at the destruction and was turned into a pillar of salt. Of course we must never forget, but I had no desire to turn into a pillar of salt.
    ‘After Queen Wilhelmina stepped down, I became an assistant to Dr H. M. Hirschfeld, the man who supervised the introduction of the Marshall Plan to the Netherlands. He also advised the government on its relations with Germany. Holland was in a tough situation in that regard. As long as the German