In some way, I suppose that we're all damaged by events in our past. While it's true that we're also shaped by those joyous, illuminating, life-changing moments, a first kiss, the birth of a child, and others that we may barely recognize as significant at the times they occur, our characters, the essence of who we are as human beings is more a result of how we deal with the trauma in our lives. The psychic scars that form in the wake of those jarring confrontations we all experience with the way the world truly is, as opposed to our misperceptions and fantasies of how we'd like it to be are indelible. Pain, in the end, is more instructive than pleasure, and more lasting.
Sometimes the damage that we suffer as human beings, while intensely personal to each individual, is so widespread across a community, a race, a generation that the scarring becomes hereditary, and continues to mark the children who were yet to be born at the time that events have taken place. Even the children’s children are not immune, and the cultural psyche of whole peoples can be formed by experiences that are decades old, branding them arbitrarily as victims, or survivors, or simply as broken.
Anyone who's ever been through analysis will tell you that rediscovering the episodes where their personal damage first occurred, dragging those memories kicking and screaming into the light from the dark recesses of their minds where they've hidden them away from consciousness is an excruciating experience, but ultimately a liberating one, like the removal of an emotional cancer. The catharsis begins with the recognition of the occurrences that we’ve kept secret from ourselves, but there are some wounds that can never be completely healed, and for better or for worse, they define us. Those wounds become our character.
My wife is Dutch, and while she was born more than a decade after the Second World War in Europe, a good deal of who she is, of who so many of the children of those who experienced the events of that period firsthand are as well, was formed as a result of their families' histories. Sacha's mother, Adrie was born in the '20s to the daughter of a Christian family, and because she was illegitimate, and unwanted, she was raised in a home for unwed mothers, and later by loving strangers. Adrie's mother died of a respiratory illness when the girl was 3, and she once told Sacha about her earliest childhood memory of a woman, perhaps her mother, but she couldn’t be sure, in a hospital bed hugging her with a death grip, crying hysterically, and saying goodbye.
As a teenager, Adrie spent the years during the war shuttled between Rotterdam, where she was placed temporarily with an aunt and uncle, and a residence in the north of Holland. When the Allied bombing became overwhelming, she was sent back to Jet, her teacher and surrogate mother, who’d taken her from the orphanage after her own mother had passed. De Werkplaats where Jet taught, and where Adrie lived and studied was closed by the new government of occupation because of the socialist philosophies taught by it’s founder Kees Boeke, and Jet found a remote house where she and others could look after displaced children, including several Jewish babies who were being hidden from the Germans and their Dutch collaborators. As Sacha grew old enough to understand what her mother had experienced, and curious enough to ask, Adrie told her about how she'd helped keep the babies safe from soldiers who would come periodically to inspect their nappies. They were looking for the boys who'd been circumcised, and when sympathetic villagers would alert Jet that the Germans were on their way, Adrie would take the babies into a small boat and row out onto the lake nearby where she would keep them quiet for hours while the houses were searched. One of the boys who survived the war stayed with Jet Kirpensteyn as another of her special boarders, and like Adrie completed his studies at de Werkplaats Kindergemeenschap Bilthoven. Rolf became a lifelong friend to the young girl who helped save his life in the little rowboat, and later to her daughter.
Sacha’s father, Benjamin was born just after the turn of the 20th Century to Jewish parents. His father was a craftsman who built railway carriages, and a member of the socialist workers party. Too young to fight in the Great War, and too old for the military in World War Two, Ben supported his wife and two children, Ab and Ita, by working for a printing company, a job his father helped him secure with his connections in the party. A handsome and charismatic man, Ben was able to acquire false papers for himself and his family before the Germans began deporting Jews to the camps, and he managed to find separate homes across the country for his wife, his son of seven, and his daughter, only four years old at the time. For the duration, they were disguised as Dutch Christians while he went to work helping to distribute an underground resistance newspaper Het Parool,‘The Password’. Ben would devote his life’s work to the paper, which became one of the country’s largest dailies after the war, and he served as its managing director in Amsterdam until his retirement in the early ‘70s. While Ben, his wife and children made it through the war physically unscathed, more than five years of distance took its toll on their family, and ultimately it did not survive. Ben separated from his wife a few years after their reunion in 1945, and the two children remained with their mother. Ben’s mother had died years earlier and his father remarried, and when word began to spread in early ‘41 that Jews in the cities were being detained, Ben’s father and his wife fled to the countryside where they were certain they’d be safe. A local farmer betrayed them for the reward of five guilders, and like more than 50,000 of their fellow Dutch Jews, neither ever returned from Auschwitz.
Adrie and Ben met one summer when she took a casual job as a receptionist in the building where Ben’s newspaper was published. Although separated by more than twenty years in age, they fell in love, and it would have been easy to understand the attraction. Ben was successful and exceedingly charming, and Adrie was tall, blond, and beautiful. They had both endured tremendous ordeals and were searching for fresh beginnings. It took five long years of trying for the couple to create the new family that they both so desperately wanted, and finally in 1956, Sacha, the girl that Ben called his golden child, was born.
For a while the three of them led a charmed life together in post-war Europe with summer vacations to Italy and skiing holidays in Switzerland, but beneath the surface was a recurring historical problem. Because Ben’s wife wouldn’t grant him a divorce, Sacha could not legally bear his name, and so like her mother before her, she carried the social stigma of illegitimacy. The reminders of Adrie’s own troubled childhood, along with rumors of Ben’s infidelities eventually drove a wedge between them, and as a result, family life became increasingly difficult for young Sacha, who was inheriting the damages that had been inflicted upon her parents long before her arrival.
By the time Sacha was a teenager, the house was not the most pleasant place to be. Her father had moved out for a time, and her mother had sought the comfort of a lover. Their pasts had caught up with them, and while Adrie, still the fragile abandoned child wanting desperately to be loved fell into a deeper depression, exacerbated by ‘60s era antidepressants, Ben sought solace away from home in his work as well as in his social life. The winter after Sacha turned fourteen, her mother, having had a few glasses of wine one evening, left the house and didn’t return. Sacha learned years later that her mother’s lover had refused to leave his wife and marry her, and the news had thrown her into an even darker despair than she’d been struggling with the past few years in her marriage. It was a freezing night, and when Ben realized that Adrie was missing, he contacted friends and eventually the police. A search was conducted, but it wasn’t until two days later that her body was discovered in a nearby wood. A little more than five years later, and just that long into his retirement, Ben de Vries died of a heart attack in an airport in the south of France, leaving his golden child alone in the world at the age of 20. Their new beginnings were overshadowed by their pasts, and tragically short-lived.
For most of 1942 and ‘43, Ben’s daughter Ita, Sacha’s older half-sister, had been living with a Christian family, her false papers identifying her as one of their own. She’d not seen her real mother or father for more than two years at that point, and out of caution, she was never allowed to leave the house for fear of her being exposed. Even if all the other family members needed to be away on any given day, Ita, at that time only six years old, was forced to remain behind alone with strict instructions not to answer the door to anyone. No exceptions.
She must have been a very bright little girl who grasped the consequences of breaking this hard and fast rule, and a very brave one as well because she’d left her family, her parents, her brother, and everything she knew to live with strangers, taking with her only a small poppen koffertje, a doll’s suitcase, carrying her few belongings.
One day while looking out of the window of her bedroom on an upper floor of the house, she noticed a man approaching the front door, and as he came closer, she recognized him as her father, whom she’d not seen since she was four. Ben had taken a great risk in coming to the home, but he felt compelled to try and see his young daughter, even if only for a moment. From her window, Ita could see her father at the door, and could hear his knock coming from downstairs, but she couldn’t cry out for fear of breaking the rules, rules that had been made for her safety. Sadly, he couldn’t see his little girl in the window, and for several minutes, she watched him in silence. After a time, Ben decided that it was no longer safe to wait for an answer, and he left. They wouldn’t see one another again for more than two years, after Holland’s liberation in the spring of 1945.
In literature, tragedy is defined by a character who is destined to destruction through some fatal flaw or by an overwhelming power, but in life, tragedy is more often the residue of history, events and circumstances that arise from our past to shadow our present, and if we allow them, our future.
Ironically, the components that draw us to tragedy are hope and longing, because even faced with a destiny of downfall, it’s human nature to try to cheat death, to conquer tragedy, and it’s that hope that we live for, that longing, against the odds, for things to turn out differently than we fear they might.
We are all damaged, but the antidote as well as the path forward is consciousness, and understanding. In the interim, the salve is hope.
downandunder
