Remembrance Day

In the Netherlands, 4 May has real significance. The annual event known as Remembrance Day is as serious and solemn as the Dutch can stand. I knew I wanted to be in Dam Square at 20:00, but the longer I sat on my couch after work that day, the easier it got not to go.

Dam Square, 4 May, 2012

I went. When I got there it was already 19:50 and the twenty thousand people who got there before me filled the square. Sure enough, at 20:00 Queen Beatrix and her entourage appeared. They walked the length of the square in the most somber environment I have experienced since I left Normandy, only this time I was hardly alone.

Dutch Resistance Fighters, 1945

Remembrance Day and the next day—Liberation Day—mark the struggle and the subsequent triumph of the Dutch nation during the Nazi occupation. On May 5, 1945 Holland was liberated from the Third Reich. Nowadays, the Dutch honor their dead and celebrate their liberation on these days.

The longer I stay here, the more I am convinced of two things: Europe is deeply scarred; and at some point in the not-so-distant future no one will know why. On this day though from my vantage point a hundred yards away, I watched the proceedings via the large screen telecasts in the square. The commentary was in Dutch but I didn’t need words to know I was seeing Resistance fighters being led toward the wreaths they placed in honor of the day. I wondered what their stories entailed. Did they fight? Did they resist?

WWII Dutch resistance fighters, 2012

I ask for one good reason: most of the people who fought or resisted died doing so. It is estimated that 107,000 Jews (some 75% of the Jewish population) were killed. Total Dutch casualties during World War II exceeded 200,000.

Not very long ago I sat with a colleague at school and the topic of WWII and Dutch resistance came up. At some point she said, “I have no family. The Germans killed them.” I asked about her parents. “My mother was two,” she said. “Her mother gave her to the neighbors. It was my mother’s only chance.”

“My father was nine,” she told me. “He lived for four years by going from one cellar to the next. He ate what people gave him.” She explained that he survived and was sent to Israel after the war. He was raised in a kibbutz before returning to Holland years later. “His parents never returned,” she said. Caught. Killed.

Dutch Children, 1945

So as I sat on my comfortable couch, beverage in hand, making up reasons why it wasn’t necessary to go, I thought of my colleague. I remembered what she said about the two-year old. I thought of the nine-year old boy—my grandson turns nine this year.

Canadian liberators, 1945

What does it feel like to look into the eyes of your nine-year old for what you know is the last time? What is it like to know he will suffer, that he will die?

I went. I had to.