Roots

I first thought my grandparents just didn’t like to talk much about the war. I know heaps of details from the moment they met – how they lived next door to each other; grandma being a tomboy with one brother 6 years older than her and one 6 years younger was very excited about the 11 children that moved in next door. Especially as 8 of them where boys . How she used to play outside with uncle Henkie, who was her age and liked to roam the streets of Amsterdam as much as she did. She never laid eyes on my grandpa. He was three years older than her and way too serious a dude in her opinion. Plus she wanted to marry a tall guy with blond hair and blue eyes that loved sailing. And my grandpa couldn’t swim. He did notice her. Even asked her parents for her hand, but they politely told him to come back when she was eighteen. And so he did. By that time ‘serieus’ had turned ‘intriguing’, much as his dark hair and eyes. After that there’s a lot of stories featuring a shared balcony and a poorly constructed dividing wall. 



I know these things, but I know little from before. Come to think about it, that’s probably cos my grandpa didn’t like to talk, period. It’s my gran who told me the stories above and he’d just sit there grinning as she went on about their early love life and I’d cuddle up to the heater behind me and do the same. It’s my gran’s side of the war that I know best too, even if it’s from a kid’s perspective. She was 10 when the war started. Living in Amsterdam meant living in the exact place where food ran out first and so she was send up north to a farm out in the country quite early on. She always remembered her first night out, scared as a little chicken, spending an overnight with a family that had not spoken one word to her the entire time she was there. But after that the biggest trauma I’ve heard of was losing her flat Amsterdam accent and returning to the city with a country one =) Which her youngest brother Henk never let us forget. He was send out to the far south farms years later, and having learned the lessons of his teased older sister well, he decided he would not pick up on a single sound that wasn’t city like. He succeeded quite well till someone caught him yelling at a dog that was trying to bite its own tail, ‘fat je steertje, fat je steertje!’ Grab your tail. Except the orginal dutch is ‘pak je staartje’. You do the math. Everyone remembers that incident. No one remember my gran’s complete idiom change. And so Henk took it upon himself to regularly remind us of it.


Another story of hers I remember is one that actually made me tear up a little, even though it’s by far the least dramatic one I’ve heard. She told me when I dropped by one time, still finishing the last bit of nougat I picked up on the way there - the square shaped, ultra flat kind, covered in a thin layer of chocolate. It was my newest candy obsessions and it had been hers for a long time as well. But when she was growing up, there was little of anything and that included candy. Food was distributed by monthly coupons. As my gran’s mum was a single mother to 5 children during war time, she had a hard enough time figuring out how to get enough food on the table and so she’d usually forget about the candy. Even though my gran made sure to remind her twice daily. So at the verge of desperation, my great-grandmother gave her a coupon.

My 10yearold mind could still very well fathom the enormity of that gift. The strange power when you were handed 10 cents and could pick out your own kind of licorice. Being exposed to this huge amount of candy and having to make your own choise there. The need for coupons on top of that was something straight out of a children’s book.

She dropped by at the candy shelf in the grocery store every day, and after a few days had narrowed it down to two options: a string of wine gum, and the chocolate covered nougat square. She continued to drop by every day, weighing her options, cautious to spend her one coupon on the best kind of candy there was. Till one day she noticed the date on the coupon had already passed. I think what makes me sad is that she still remembered it 60 years later.

What I remember about grandpa mainly comes in bits and pieces from the rest of the family. I know his older brother was in the resistance, so deep that he spend a great part of the war in hiding. I vaguely remember a story about him being chased down on a train, escaping only by jumping off of it while it was riding. But that was indeed filed under ‘stuff we don't talk about’.

Grandpa being a few years younger was kept away from that stuff and lined up to bring around the resistance’s illegal info bullitins. He once told me about the time when the door swung open as he tried to deliver one and an NSB’er, at dutch guy who had switched to Nazi side, stood in the doorway. He turned around and ran as fast as he could. Spend weeks waiting to be picked up, or shot, or something. And never heard from it again. He spend the rest of the war wondering if the guy was just under cover, or if maybe NSB’ers had a heart.

And maybe even Germans had one. He spend most of the war working at the railway station, that saw a lot of German soldiers being transported. He didn’t particularly like German soldiers. Till one of them gave him a good pair of shoes, that were kinda hard to come by in a family of eleven. Maybe even Germans had a heart. And maybe you didn’t want to know where he got a spare set of boots.


Inspired by Tash and her Pop =) Would love to hear everyone else's stories about their roots!