Ajax the Dutch the War Read online

  Hazelhoff Roelfzema moved to Hawaii in 1973 and died there in 2007 at age ninety. Soldier of Orange catapulted Verhoeven and Hauer into Hollywood where Hauer would build a career mostly playing Russian and Nazi villains. For me it confirmed Leiden as the home of the mighty Dutch Resistance.

  Our town’s other great Resistance story featured a dour law professor named Rudolf Cleveringa. In the first winter of the occupation, Cleveringa’s former mentor, a brilliant professor named E. M. Meijers, received a standard stenciled letter informing him that as a Jew he was banned from teaching. On the morning of November 26, 1940, Cleveringa said farewell to his wife, and walked down the Rapenburg to the faculty building where Meijers had been scheduled to lecture. Cleveringa took his place.

  The Great Auditorium was packed, and so the lecture was relayed by microphone to a second hall. Cleveringa’s talk was a eulogy to Meijers’s brilliance. Each time the audience tried to break into applause, he silenced it with a wave of his hand. The German dismissal of Meijers was illegal, he said. However, he advised his listeners against committing “pointless follies” (this was undoubtedly said to strengthen his case before the Germans after his inevitable arrest). Instead, he urged them to “always keep in our thoughts and our hearts the image of the figure and the personality of whom we cannot cease to believe ought to be standing here and, if God wills it, will return here.”

  There was silence, then a long ovation, and then a student began singing the national anthem. The audience took it up, many people in tears. Cleveringa handed the text of his speech to a colleague who had asked for it, and walked home.

  That evening a student named Koch assembled some other students in his rooms, sat them down at typewriters, and made them type endless copies of Cleveringa’s speech. “There were chaps there,” Koch said later, “who could barely type. Many bottles of beer were pressed into use.” By five the next morning he had nearly fifty copies. He then assembled ten girl students, “to whom I gave tea,” and set them typing too. The copies were posted around the country, creating the impetus for the Dutch Resistance (or so the popular Leiden version had it). Leiden students went on strike, and in 1942 the Germans closed the university, which is why the Soldier of Orange’s friend had to take his exams in secret.

  Cleveringa had been arrested two days after his speech. After eight months in jail he was released unhurt. He and Meijers both survived the war. Discussing Cleveringa in the mid-1980s with a friend of my mother’s, a local nurse, I asked her whether she knew if he were still alive. “He’s dead,” she said.

  “Are you sure?” I asked peskily.

  “He died in my arms,” she said.

  Even forty years on, the war was still all around us. As a child in Leiden I played soccer and cricket with a gangling, friendly boy whose grandfather, proprietor of a cigar shop, was known to have run the local Resistance. A colleague of my father’s was the only survivor of a wartime raid by his Resistance group. Our Jewish next-door neighbor’s father had lost his first family in the gas chambers. Everyone of the right age had a war story.

  I got the sense that people had never forgiven the Germans, who, in those days before they began heading off to Spanish islands, still took their beach holidays in the chilly Dutch coastal villages a few miles from Leiden. The villagers hung signs in German in their front windows, saying “Room free with breakfast,” and people in Leiden mocked them. One of our neighbors said that if he met a German asking directions he still sent him the wrong way, just as people had done in the war. One reason the occupation remained such an obsession was that no other great event had hit the Netherlands in living memory. “If the world comes to an end, I want to move to Holland, because everything happens there twenty years later,” the German poet Heinrich Heine is supposed to have said (though no one can find the reference).

  If Holland was a backwater of Europe, Leiden was a backwater of Holland. I remember spending many Sundays in the early 1980s looking out of my window (by now we had moved to a house on a main road) and marveling whenever a car drove past. On Heine’s analogy, everything in Leiden happened about forty years later. Albert Einstein, a visiting professor at the university for more than a decade, had once considered moving there permanently. But while he was in Leiden agonizing over the decision, an expat German baroness had told him, “If you move here, you’ll have a very pleasant life and no one will ever hear of you again.” So he never came.

  Half the Dutch novels I had to read at school were about the war (many of the others were about the main character’s struggle to unshackle himself from the Calvinism of his parents, and a few combined both themes). Of course I read Anne Frank, who apart from everything else was a Jewish teenager of about my age living as a foreigner in the same country and writing better Dutch than most of the professional novelists. And in 1985, when I was fifteen, a flood of popular histories were published to mark the fortieth anniversary of the Liberation. The general theme was of Dutch resistance to the Nazis.

  At the time it was customary to use the words goed (“good”) or fout (“wrong”) to classify the behavior of almost everybody in the Netherlands in the war. Quite naturally, I came to believe that the vast majority of Dutch people had been goed. I can see now that this belief was an emotional necessity. My family did not belong in the Netherlands. I wanted to belong, and I also wanted my parents (who belonged less than I did) to feel they belonged, and so the thought that the Dutch had been good to the Jews was particularly attractive to me. (Once again, though, I do not want to imply a tortured childhood lived under the shadow of the war. It was not like that.)

  Most of my generation, educated by the same films and books and war stories, reached the same conclusion about Dutch goodness. In my first book, Soccer Against the Enemy, I described the explosion of these feelings when Holland beat West Germany 2–1 in the semi-final of the European Championships of 1988. Millions of Dutch people went on to the streets that night to celebrate. Though a Tuesday, it was the largest public gathering since the Liberation. “When Holland scores I dance through the room,” revealed Professor Lou de Jong, the historian who had spent the previous forty years writing the official history of the Netherlands in World War II in umpteen volumes. “Of course it has to do with the war. Strange that people deny that.”

  The general Dutch sentiment was best expressed in a book that appeared a few months later called Holland–Germany: Soccer Poetry. I quote a few representative extracts:Ever since I can remember

  And before that

  The Germans wanted to be world champions

  —A. J. HEERMA VAN VOS

  Dumb generalizations about a people

  Or a nation, I despise.

  A sense of proportion is very

  Dear to me.

  Sweet revenge, I thought, does not exist

  Or lasts only briefly

  And then there was that unbelievably beautiful

  Tuesday evening in Hamburg.

  —HANS BOSKAMP

  Those who fell

  Rose cheering from their graves.

  —JULES DEELDER, IN A POEM TITLED “6-21-88”

  (In Soccer Against the Enemy I also discussed the poems in the collection that were attributed to soccer players [“Jan Wouters” effort is the most sophisticated: blank verse with enjambements . . . ” etc.], but when I later met the editor of the collection and said how good some of the players’ poems were, he replied, “Thank you. I wrote them.”)

  The point is that the general Dutch feeling was that we were goed and the Germans were fout, and that our soccer victory proved it. For the next few years soccer matches between Holland and Germany remained ferocious affairs. Then, gradually, the feeling waned.

  In part this was because in the 1990s the Dutch were starting to accept that they had not been so goed in the war after all. An Amsterdam historian named Hans Blom had been arguing since the late 1970s that the terms goed and fout were too simplistic to encapsulate the years of occupation. Most Dutch people, he sai
d, had never made great moral choices. They had just gone on with their lives (like the student in the film taking his exams), and late in the war, when the occupation became more brutal, their main preoccupation had been “the question of how to incur as little damage as possible.” They “retreated into a small familiar circle,” going to the cinema, for instance, rather than engaging with the war.

  Blom’s view was very much a minority one and only became at all widely known in the early 1980s. But gradually more histories came to be written about the other side of the Dutch war: the worst survival rate among Jews outside Poland, the betrayal of Anne Frank, the second-largest Nazi movement in Europe outside Germany.

  This is not to say the Dutch were actively anti-Semitic. They had welcomed Jews across the centuries, never showing the slightest impulse to kill them. A Dutch Jewish survivor of the Holocaust once told me that whatever else one says about the Dutch, one must always remember that it was the Germans who invaded Holland and deported the Jews, and not the Dutch who deported them from Germany. The Dutch could never have conceived of the Holocaust. (In Holland, if you really want to punish people you review their social-security benefits.)

  I left Leiden for London in 1986, when I was sixteen. I visited Holland often in the years that followed, but didn’t live there again until the winter of 1999, when I moved to Amsterdam to write a short book about Dutch soccer in World War II.

  Although I was press-ganged into it by a friend and editor named Henk Spaan, I had various motives. Partly, I just wanted to live in Holland again and see what it was like, whether it was different from the country I remembered. I particularly wanted to get to know Amsterdam, a lovely city. (Whenever foreigners tell me it is “tacky,” I want to say, “Try leaving the red-light district.”)

  At the time, Ajax Amsterdam, Holland’s biggest soccer club and probably the country’s most popular institution after the royal family, was approaching its centenary. I was curious about the rumor (hotly denied by Ajax) that the club had been “Jewish” until the war. I had also heard fascinating snippets of other wartime soccer stories.

  More than that, I have always thought that soccer is a good way into the daily life of a country. This is particularly true in the Netherlands, where joining a soccer club is almost as fundamental a rite of male life as anything to do with girls. Most nations are described by their inhabitants as “soccer mad,” but for much of the latter part of the twentieth century the country with the highest proportion of registered soccer players was the Netherlands. Those great Holland teams of 1974, 1978, 1988, and 1998 (and even the violent thugs of 2010) were the product of a culture.

  A book about soccer and World War II would go to the heart of Holland. Soccer was a place where the Holocaust met daily life. What had happened in Dutch soccer clubs during the war would be a microcosm of what happened in the country. It might even produce wider truths about the war in the rest of occupied Western Europe. So I moved across and spent a winter lodging with various old school friends who had escaped Leiden for Amsterdam.

  Even before beginning my research I had grasped that the Dutch had not been as goed in the war as I had once thought. In 1999 this realization was dawning on practically the whole country. The newspapers (many of them former Resistance news sheets) were full of official reports revealing how the Dutch had used the deportations to steal Jewish property. The Groene Amsterdammer magazine discovered that in the late 1960s civil servants at the Finance Ministry had held a sort of bring-and-buy at which jewels, gold, and silver belonging to dead Jews were sold. One former civil servant recalled, “My colleagues showed each other what they had bought. Someone came up to me with beautiful earrings. She was happy as I don’t know what.” I had long since ceased to be a starry-eyed schoolboy, but when I began researching the book I was still shocked by what I found. This was not the country I had imagined it to be.

  My book (Ajax, de Joden, Nederland, or Ajax, the Jews, the Netherlands ) appeared in Dutch in March 2000, in the week of Ajax’s centenary. It told lots of stories about soccer in the war that I hope were new. The book’s argument, however, was not. It read like a J’accuse against the Dutch nation. Soon after the book appeared, a Dutch friend told me she had found it ridiculously naïve, as everyone already knew that the country had not been goed in the war. I had wasted my time restating a case made by many people before me, she said. (The Dutch tend to be frank.)

  She was exaggerating, but she had a point. All historians of the war in the Netherlands know that Dutch collaboration was at least as significant as Dutch resistance. This is not a country that hushes up its past. None of the reviews of my book objected to my criticism of the nation, and nor did anyone I meet rebuke me for spilling the family secrets. Only my old school friends became a bit irritated at being told every day how gray and cowardly their country had been.

  Yet the Dutch seemed to know they had been gray and cowardly without wanting to think about it. There was a highbrow debate about the war full of breast-beating and remorse, and simultaneously a public sense that “we” had been goed regardless. Many people still consumed the war as a Resistance tale, like Soldier of Orange. Even at the Dutch Institute for War Documentation in Amsterdam, I found six and a half shelves of books on “Dutch Resistance” and just half a shelf on “Dutch Collaboration.”

  A year after finishing the book, driving through California with an English photographer, I told him about my discovery that Holland had not been goed in the war.

  “Doesn’t surprise me at all,” he said.

  “Why not?”

  “It’s always that way. All countries have myths about having been good, and they always turn out to be lies. I’m not shocked.”

  “It’s probably more shocking if you grew up with the myth,” I countered.

  “Yeah, probably.”

  Meanwhile, I had decided that I wanted to rewrite my book. I had written the Dutch version too quickly (just under four months from start to finish including all the research; is this a record?) and wanted to expand and deepen the material. I wanted to write a book that did more than just accuse the Dutch of having been fout. I also wanted to reach foreign readers, because the myth of a tolerant country that was goed in the war is today believed most strongly outside the Netherlands.

  Beyond Holland, I wanted to examine soccer in the war in other European countries: it astonished me that even while Stalingrad and Auschwitz were taking place, the ball had rolled on. World War II instantly takes on a different aspect when you know, for instance, that on June 22, 1941, the day the Germans invaded the Soviet Union, the decisive act of the entire conflict, ninety thousand spectators watched the German league final in Berlin. What were they thinking of? It recalled Kafka’s famous diary entry for August 2, 1914: “Germany has declared war on Russia. Swimming in the afternoon.”

  And I wanted to go back to the years before the Second World War. The 1930s, root of all evil, had been a fascinating decade in soccer. There were the Nazis with their knack for propaganda, Mussolini’s Italy winning two World Cups and the Berlin Olympics, and England still regarded as the untouchable masters. This was the epoch when the game became a political item.

  I spent weeks in the excellent Football Association library, reading the minutes of old FA meetings, once running into England’s then manager Sven Goran Eriksson at the front door (he said, “Hello”). I took trains from Paris to Munich to the Swiss lake resort of Lugano to meet a man who had played for Germany until 1942 and on the way back stopped in Strasbourg, France, to meet a man who had refused to do so. I read books and magazines from all over Europe (often with the help of a friend), and have tried to piece everything together to produce a sort of alternative history of World War II.

  2

  A SUNDAY BEFORE THE WAR

  I wrote much of this book in the old Jewish Quarter of Amsterdam, sitting in a friend’s art gallery amid stacks of Andy Warhol lithographs. The gallery hadn’t always been a gallery. It was once the Dutch Communist Par
ty’s headquarters, and before that it had been a hospital for the Portuguese Jews of Amsterdam. Their symbol, a stone pelican, still marks the building’s front door, but in 1943 the hospital’s patients were deported to the death camps.

  The gallery stands on the elegant little Henri Polaklaan, a street named after the Jewish trade-union leader who was regarded by Amsterdam’s Jews as a species of Moses. Across the street from the gallery is the headquarters of Polak’s Bond, his union: a people’s palace with famous murals that his diamond cutters built, even though their trade was perennially in recession and they, like actresses waiting tables in Manhattan restaurants, were always “resting.” Polak had these uneducated men reading Dickens and Zola from the Bond’s library.

  The Henri Polaklaan is in the lovely, leafy Plantage neighborhood, which used to be the posh end of the Jewish Quarter. The poorer end, around the mammoth Portuguese synagogue, was where the Jewish rag merchants, banana sellers, and diamond cutters lived. On the day in 1940 that the Germans invaded, most of the eighty thousand Jews in Amsterdam inhabited the Quarter, or Jodenbuurt.

  I once saw about thirty seconds of a film of the Quarter: people in rags selling rags to each other, a sort of cold Calcutta. This was Amsterdam’s poorest and busiest neighborhood. Whole families lived in single rooms. Their internal feuds, and fights with the neighbors, would sometimes occupy the local police station for decades; but on the other hand there were hardly any drunks.

  “In the poverty of the decayed Quarter,” wrote its greatest memoirist, Meyer Sluyser, after the war, “they dreamed in detail of the unheard-of riches they would divide among their relatives, if only the orphans who drew the lottery numbers from the drum would ensure they won the hundred thousand guilders. . . . There is only one fairy tale: you do nothing and are rewarded with as much as possible.”