Ajax the Dutch the War Read online

  Table of Contents

  Praise

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Acknowledgments

  A NOTE ON THE TEXT

  Chapter 1 - ORANGE SOLDIERS

  Chapter 2 - A SUNDAY BEFORE THE WAR

  Chapter 3 - A FRIENDLY SALUTE

  Chapter 4 - THE WARM BACK OF EDDY HAMEL

  Chapter 5 - THE LOST MEMORIES OF MEIJER STAD

  Chapter 6 - SPARTA

  I.

  II.

  III.

  IV.

  V.

  VI.

  VII.

  VIII. AFTER THE WAR

  IX.

  X.

  Chapter 7 - BOOM

  Chapter 8 - STRANGE LIES

  I.

  II.

  III.

  IV.

  Chapter 9 - CAPTAIN OF FRANCE, COLLABORATOR IN GORCUM

  STRASBOURG, SUMMER 1940

  GORCUM, AUTUMN 1941

  STRASBOURG, SUMMER 2001

  GORCUM, AUTUMN 1941

  STRASBOURG, 1943

  GORCUM, 1942

  WHY?

  STRASBOURG–POSTSCRIPT

  GORCUM–POSTSCRIPT

  Chapter 10 - THE NETHERLANDS WAS BETTER THAN THE REST

  Chapter 11 - SOLDIER HEROES

  I.

  II.

  III.

  IV.

  V.

  VI.

  VII.

  VIII.

  Chapter 12 - OF BUNKERS AND CIGARS

  I.

  II.

  III.

  IV.

  Chapter 13 - THE MOST POPULAR TEAM IN ISRAEL

  Chapter 14 - SOCCER SONGS OF THE NETHERLANDS

  Chapter 15 - DISNEYTOWN AND THE SECRET MONUMENTS

  AFTERWORD TO THE U.S. EDITION

  SOURCES

  INDEX

  Copyright Page

  PRAISE FOR AJAX, THE DUTCH, THE WAR

  “His fresh-eyed survey has a familiar theme but never

  palls, crowded with a gallery of unlikely figures . . .

  whose stories weave through the book.”

  —Daily Telegraph

  “I have only bought one soccer book recently and

  it’s an absolute belter . . . heartily recommended.”

  —The Times

  “Gripping and brilliant.”—Glasgow Herald

  “An intriguing social history, full of quirky anecdotes,

  written with winning geniality and the dash of a

  Brazilian forward . . . a beguiling book.”

  —Financial Times

  “A fascinating tale, which Kuper describes

  particularly well.”—Spectator

  “Kuper’s poignant and perceptive account again proves

  there can be more to soccer writing than fanzines

  and pale Hornby imitations.”—GQ

  “A fascinating history, full of startling facts

  and sobering detail.”—Telegraph

  “Kuper has fashioned a work which brilliantly juxtaposes

  the everyday life of soccer clubs with the awful fate

  suffered by so many of their Jewish players, officials,

  and supporters.”—Time Out

  “An intriguing work.”—Independent

  Simon Kuper was born in Uganda in 1969 and spent most

  of his childhood in Holland. His first book, Soccer Against the

  Enemy, won the William Hill Sports Book of the Year and

  went on to become an international best seller. He now

  writes for the Financial Times.

  ALSO BY

  SIMON KUPER

  Soccer Against the Enemy

  Soccernomics

  Soccer Men

  To Adam, Jessica, Jeremy, and Hannah, who shared the Dutch experience with me.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  I received hundreds of hours of help in writing this book. Meijer Stad, Leon Greenman, Oscar Heisserer, Bennie Muller, Salo Muller, and many others spoke to me openly and at length. I cannot begin to imagine how difficult that was for some of them.

  This book had an even more complicated genesis than most. Its ur-version appeared in March 2000 under the title Ajax, de joden, Nederland (or “Ajax, the Jews, the Netherlands”), as an entire issue of the fantastic Dutch literary soccer journal Hard Gras. It would never have been written but for the support of Holland’s “Fonds voor Bijzondere Projekten,” or Fund for Special Journalistic Projects. I am very grateful to the fund. Nor would the book ever have existed without the encouragement of the two founding editors of Hard Gras, Matthijs van Nieuwkerk and Henk Spaan. Over the last fifteen years they have become my friends and remained inspirations. I hope to work with them for decades more, as well as with other Hard Gras stalwarts and friends like Hugo Borst, Jimmy Burns, Jos de Putter, and Leo Verheul. Every writer needs a community like Hard Gras.

  This book would never have appeared in English but for the Internet. I want to thank Menno Pot and his colleagues on the ajax-usa. com website for translating much of my Dutch book into English and posting it on the Web. There it was spotted by Mike Ticher of the When Saturday Comes fanzine who suggested I publish it in Britain. I remain very grateful to Mike and his colleague, Andy Lyons, and am sorry they were not involved in producing the English version.

  In the mid-1990s I received a grant from the Society of Authors to help with my next book. It turned out to be this one. I am very grateful to the Society.

  A number of excellent researchers worked with me on the book. Bart van Son was the ideal office mate in Amsterdam, collecting me from the hospital once as well as helping with the research. In England I want to thank Simon Martin, Duncan White, and my cousin, Dan Kuper.

  My fellow journalists were surprisingly helpful. In our profession we are seldom generous with contacts or knowledge. Shaul Adar, Frits Barend, Tamarah Benima, Hugo Borst, Saggie Cohen, Gerhard Fischer, Shirley Haasnoot, Ulrich Lindner, Tara Spring, Jurryt van der Vooren, Evert de Vos, Tom Watt, and David Winner were. I am particularly grateful to the Ajax historian Evert Vermeer. I criticized Evert excessively in the Dutch version of this book, yet when I came to him for help in writing the second version, he was very kind—een gentleman, as the Dutch would say. I still disagree with him on one or two points, but no one can write about the history of Ajax without reading his work.

  As a foreigner moving to Amsterdam for four months to write a book, I could easily have landed on the streets. That I did not is thanks to Willem Baars, Shirley Haasnoot, Hanno Huisjes, Muriel Rive, and Jeannette Kruseman. I wrote much of my Dutch book in the Baars Art Gallery on the Henri Polaklaan.

  Much of what I know about the themes in this book I came to understand through conversations with friends and relatives. I may even have cribbed the odd idea. I am grateful to Shilpa Deshmukh, Adriaan Grijns, Raoul Heertje, Jeannette Kruseman, Adam and Jessica Kuper, the Levin family in Wassenaar, Rana Mitter, Will Pryce, Sharmila Rampeearee, Claudia Schnitzler, Hester, Jan Maarten and Rutger Slagter, and Philippe Wolgen.

  Alex Bellos, Saggie Cohen, Adriaan Grijns, Jeannette Kruseman, Adam Kuper, Jan Maarten Slagter, and David Winner all read drafts of chapters and offered suggestions, most of which I used. It would probably be churlish to blame errors in this book on any of them.

  For the time they gave me, I am grateful to David Barber of the Football Association, Victoria Barrett, Belia Brilleman, Wim Cassa, Uri Coronel, Phil Crossley, Remco van Dam, Simone Freeman, Karoline Fricke, Alex Fynn, Dick Gubbels, John Helliar, Chanan Hertzberger, Lex Hes, George Horn, Gerald Jacobs, Ann Jantzen, Olav Kes, Roechamma Koopman, Kuki Krol, Heiman de Leeuw, David Litterer, Guy Oliver, Rika Pais, Nico Salet, Thomas Schnitzler, Wim Schoevaart, Ger Schutte, Dror Shimson, Lennart Speijer, Mrs. Stad, Matthew Taylor, Margriet Valkman, Albert de Vries, Marcel ter Wal, Jacob van der Wijk, Harry van Wijnen, Marie-Ane van Wijnen, Jonathan Wilkinson of the British Council, Hans-Dieter Zimmermann, the Anne-Frankstichting, Amsterdam’s Municipal Transport Company, the Nederlands Instituut voor Oorlogsdocumentatie, and the archivists of the Nieuw Israelietisch Weekblad and the municipal archives of Amsterdam and Rotterdam. Thanks also to Brian Oliver and the others at the Observer for remaining patient with me while I spent months locked in my room working on the book.

  Many thanks to Ian Preece at Orion for agreeing to publish a book on the unpromising theme of Dutch soccer in World War II—although admittedly I did put in some English, German, and French soccer too. My previous agent Vivienne Schuster was a fierce supporter of this project despite knowing little about soccer and caring less. I am extremely grateful to Carl Bromley, my indefatigable editor at Nation Books, for being willing to risk this book in the United States. My agents at Curtis Brown, Gordon Wise and John Parton, fought my corner with their usual panache. Lori Hobkirk brilliantly managed the production of the American version, and Cynthia Young designed it. Thanks to all of them.

  I thank everyone who is interviewed in the book.

  A NOTE ON THE TEXT

  Strictly speaking, the word “Holland” only refers to the two western provinces of the Netherlands. In this book I have often used it to mean the country as a whole. I have yet to meet a Dutch person who would be offended by this.

  1

  ORANGE SOLDIERS

  In the Dutch movie Soldier of Orange, the main character, Erik (played by Rutger Hauer), is canoodling with a Jewish woman in a garden one night when they are startled by the sound of airplanes. “Germans, going to England,” Erik reassure
s her, and they resume canoodling. Then the planes start firing their guns. It is the early morning of May 10, 1940, and the Germans are invading the Netherlands.

  The unfamiliar sound of aircraft had awoken people all over the country. Few had expected the invasion because nothing much ever happened in the Netherlands. The Dutch had avoided the First World War, pretending not to notice when the German Army took a brief shortcut over their soil on its way into Flanders, and so had had no experience of war on their own land since Napoleon. So quiet was the Netherlands that after the Armistice in 1918 the Kaiser took gardening exile on a Dutch country estate. He was still there in 1940.

  If the world’s fires ever made it to the Netherlands, it was at a pretty low heat. A man named Pieter Troelstra had tried to proclaim a Dutch socialist republic in November 1918, but nobody paid much attention, and he was chastised in Parliament. Thirteen years later, while Stalin was executing hundreds of thousands of “Trotskyists” in the USSR, and street battles were raging in the Weimar Republic, the leading Dutch Trotskyist Henk Sneevliet was threatened by Stalinist thugs after a public meeting in Rotterdam. But he was escorted safely to the train station. Before World War II, that was about as hot as things got in Holland.

  Waking in a Dutch hotel room on the night the Germans invaded in 1940 was a journalist named Ballantijn. He was traveling home from Rotterdam, where he had collected a Belgian visa to travel with Holland’s soccer team to play Luxembourg on May 15. Hearing the planes, he raced outside to find German soldiers everywhere (this story is told by the Dutch historian Chris van der Heijden). Ballantijn asked one of the soldiers if he could return to his house near the German border, where his wife would be worrying about him. The German let him go. And so Ballantijn found himself ploughing eastward past a stream of German vehicles busy invading his country. “Strangely,” he wrote later, “the drivers . . . gave all possible cooperation by making way for me.”

  Much of the Netherlands experienced something of a velvet invasion. In one spot, German soldiers needing planks to build a bridge over the river (one of the hazards of invading Holland) were looking for a wood mill. “The local people,” recorded the author Anton Coolen, “argue among each other about whether the mill is still there, yes or no, and strain themselves to give the Germans the information they are asking for. . . . Some women have come out of their houses with trays of steaming coffee; they take these to the Germans, who fold up their maps and laugh.”

  The Dutch Army put up a brief fight, but on May 14 Luftwaffe bombs demolished central Rotterdam, and the next day the Netherlands capitulated. The first years of occupation passed calmly for most Dutch people. The few thousand Germans stationed in the country behaved themselves most of the time. The Nazi terror affected only a couple of hundred thousand people in the Netherlands: Resistance fighters, gypsies, and Jews. About three-quarters of the latter were murdered in the gas chambers; in all of Europe only Poland lost a larger proportion of its Jews.

  On “Crazy Tuesday,” September 5, 1944, there were sightings of Allied troops near the southern town of Breda. Premature celebrations of the Liberation began across the Netherlands. But the Allied landings at Arnhem failed (“a bridge too far”), and the part of the country north of the great rivers was doomed to a final winter of war. The Hongerwinter, in which people were reduced to eating tulip bulbs and about twenty thousand starved to death, remains a live memory in many Dutch families. Only on May 5, 1945, did the Germans surrender. Allied soldiers—mostly Canadians—drove through the country throwing emaciated people cigarettes and chocolate.

  My family moved to the Netherlands just over thirty years later, in 1976. This was a fluke. My parents, Jews from South Africa, had spent the previous fifteen years traversing Cambridge, the Kalahari Desert, southern California, Uganda (where I was born), Jamaica, Sweden, and north London. My father, an anthropologist, had been hoping for a job in Ethiopia when he was unexpectedly offered one at the ancient Dutch university of Leiden. I was nearly seven years old at the time and had never heard of the Netherlands.

  We moved into what I now know to be a typical Dutch street. The tiny terraced houses were fronted by large windows, through which passers-by could peer to make sure nothing untoward was happening inside. On one of our first Dutch evenings, my brother and I ventured outside to meet the other children, who greeted us by singing what were probably the only English words they knew: “Crazy boys, crazy boys!” But over the next few evenings relations improved, and soon we were regulars in the street’s daily soccer match.

  We integrated, more or less, learning Dutch and joining the local soccer club. But, without wishing to sound pathetic, we were never going to become entirely local. Our parents spoke Dutch with funny accents, and we were all too dark and too small to look Dutch. Nor were there many other Jews in Leiden, because they had almost all been killed in the war. My family was not religious, but I remember visiting the Leiden synagogue, an eighteenth-century building that was always virtually empty.

  While I was at school the Dutch were just beginning to rediscover World War II, and particularly their resistance to the Germans. This was a thrilling topic if you were a boy in Leiden. Soldier of Orange, made in 1977 by the director Paul Verhoeven and nominated for the foreign-film Oscar of 1979, was set in our town. Watching the film again recently, I realized how cardboard it often is. The heroes are two-dimensional, and the British characters almost all speak like members of the royal family. Yet it remains probably the most popular Dutch film ever made, and it helped shape the Dutch memory of the war.

  The film was based on the autobiography of Erik Hazelhoff Roelfzema, nicknamed the “Soldier of Orange.” Born in 1917 into an upper-class Dutch family in Surabaya in the Dutch East Indies (now Indonesia), he had hitchhiked across the United States in the late 1930s and written Rendezvous in San Francisco, a book that would become a nonfiction best-seller in the Netherlands. Then he reverted to the classic path of posh Dutchmen, moving to Leiden, joining the student fraternity Minerva, and gently studying law. He was there when the Germans arrived.

  The Leiden setting of Soldier of Orange was familiar to me. The city’s ancient and beautiful center of brick houses along canals had barely changed since the war—in fact, it had barely changed since Rembrandt was born there in 1606. The Leiden I knew was still dominated by braying Minerva members dressed like nineteenth-century bankers, cycling from café to café, and intermittently diving drunk into canals. (Paul Verhoeven, inevitably, had been a Minerva fraternity brother.) Soldier of Orange was shown at Minerva every year, and many of the members knew the film by heart. They were carrying on the student life that Hazelhoff Roelfzema had known until that night of May 10, 1940. A few of them even inhabited his old student digs above a café on the magnificent Rapenburg canal street.

  The film describes the war’s effect on a group of Leiden students. One of the group, a Jew named Jan, is executed in the dunes while birds twitter and the wind howls. Another, the half-German Alex, joins the SS and is blown up on the Eastern Front while sitting on a toilet. A third, Robbie, initially operates a radio for the Resistance, but unbeknownst to his comrades is “turned” by the Germans. The Soldier of Orange himself, played by the extremely Aryan-looking Hauer, ends up fleeing with his friend Guus to England. There they meet Wilhelmina, the Dutch queen, in exile on London’s Eaton Square. She sends them back to Holland on a Resistance mission.

  Guus shoots the traitor Robbie and is then caught and executed, but the Soldier of Orange survives to escort the Queen back to Holland for the Liberation. In the final scene, he toasts the Liberation in the Leiden student digs of a friend who has sat out the war secretly taking exams. But the general impression the film gives is that half of Leiden was in the Resistance.