The Children Who Stayed

During the occupation, NSB members constituted a small minority of the Dutch population. They were generally seen as traitors to the national cause, supporters of an “un-Dutch” ideology and of the Nazi dictatorship and its regime of terror.¹⁰ The Germans were, of course, the real enemy, but followers of the NSB were regarded as the “enemy within,” a position even more worthy of contempt and disgust.

Unsurprisingly, among collaborators and their families, there was a con­stant fear of a Bijltjesdag.

Sytze van der Zee's memoirs exhibit similar preoccupations when he writes that his parents left the NSB long before the war's end hoping to salvage their reputations.¹⁴ The damage had already been done, though. The fact that his father sold his WA (Weerafdeling, NSB militia group) combat uniform after he ended his membership did not make his neighbors forget that he had once possessed it. When Dolle Dinsdag came, Sytze and his siblings were sent to their grandparents in the countryside. When nothing happened, the children soon returned. Their parents had, in the meantime, begun a wild hunt for any incriminating documents that then had to be destroyed.¹⁵ This chaos within the domestic sphere mirrored what was happening on the streets. Van der Zee describes his experiences as a six-year-old in an increasingly dev­astated bourgeois neighborhood during the last winter of the war. The young Van der Zee tried to assert his place as a part of the neighborhood where everything revolved around finding wood, coal, and food.

Van der Zee's memoirs, Potgieterlaan 7, were published in 1997 and received considerable media attention.¹⁶ During the 1980s, Van der Zee was chief editor of Het Parool, a newspaper that had been founded illegally dur­ing the occupation and still had a strong identification as a “resistance” publication. People were, therefore, surprised to find out that he was descended from an NSB family. Van der Zee's secret only became public knowledge when he published his memoirs after the deaths of his parents and eldest brother. He waited until then to shield them from nega­tive reactions to their past. In this way, the “innocent child” became his parents' protector. In his book, Van der Zee moved between past and pres­ent, examining his childhood and its effects on his later life and particularly his relationship with his parents. During and shortly after the war, he was known in the neighborhood and at school as the son of an NSB member. The other children called him and his brother “filthy NSB-ers” and “traitors,” but at the same time, Van der Zee describes how they shared the other children's fear of a real fanatic and authoritarian NSB man who lived close by.¹⁷ Although Van der Zee was teased by his peers, he was also a member of their street gang and took part in fights with children from other neighborhoods. When liberation finally came, the Van der Zee children were nevertheless excluded from the liberation parties in the neighborhood. Amid rumors about people being arrested, the family sat at home and waited for something to happen. Finally, soldiers came to the door and arrested his father at gunpoint. This, naturally, made a huge impression on the rest of the family and especially the mother, who was also desperately afraid of being arrested. The family went underground in their own house, hoping that people would assume they had left. The house and the house­hold deteriorated. After a while, news from his father came and they went to visit him in a nearby camp.

Sytze's mother seemed far more disturbed by what had happened than his father. After his arrest, she was on her own in a hostile environment and with an entire family to feed. She began to lose control. She cried, was sui­cidal, and fought constantly with Sytze's eldest brother. Sytze hung around on the streets with the other children where he more or less belonged to the group. Still, for this young boy, the well-known, trusted neighborhood could suddenly become a hostile environment where his father could be taken away and he could be bullied. The gap between his experience and that of the other children in the street is clearly described in his book when he observes how he saw the city's recovery from the war: the garbage was collected again, the streets were rebuilt, the houses painted. It was only his house that gradually began to crumble away. Like the house, his family had fallen to pieces and seemed to recover far more slowly than everyone else's.

The dual face of their own community was felt even more directly by other children of collaborators. Sometimes NSB families were dramatically torn apart, and the arrests were accompanied by violence and the humiliation

of the parents. Janny and Pia, for instance, recall beatings by locals and public humiliation,¹⁹ as do Eva and Marrie.20 Marrie was fifteen when her village was liberated. The local population besieged and pillaged her family house. Before being arrested and taken away by the local authorities, her parents were dragged into the street, where Marries mother's head was shaven and her father was beaten. In the end, Marrie was left alone with her little brothers and sisters until friends of her parents came to collect them.²¹ Marries story stresses the punishment of these children who had not been “active” as collaborators, let alone as combatants, and were, there­fore, not guilty of any wrongdoing.

The moment that their fathers, or sometimes both parents, were arrested is crucial in the recollections of many collaborators' children who experi­enced the liberation on the thresholds of their own homes. It was at this point that their trust in what they had assumed to be a known and safe world was eroded. Their stories often revolve around being threatened (men with guns or people yelling that they will shoot them) or actual physical violence (a father pushed down the stairs or beaten in the street).²² The moment of arrest marked a point of tremendous insecurity for the children.

When studying instances of violence and punishment in the memoirs, it is important to point out how some of the testimonies were collected. Janny and Pia, for example, were interviewed about their experiences as a part of a student's research project in the late 1980s. The resultant thesis intended to “give a voice” to former children of collaborators who had negative experiences in the immediate postwar period. Eva and Marrie were interviewed over a decade later with a similar purpose, although this time the interview project was initiated by a popular historical magazine and resulted in a book.²³ The aim of both works was to promote stories and interests of the “silenced victims” of postwar reconstruction. The interviewees were invited to talk about their negative experiences but not necessarily exam­ine what may have shaped their memories. This approach had a huge impact on what was recalled and presented in the subsequent publications. Negative experiences were regarded as the rule and the positive ones as exceptional. Many stories stressed moral outrage at a society that visited the crimes of the collaborator parents upon the “innocent” shoulders of the children.

The purpose of giving “a voice” to “a silenced group” may be therapeuti­cally adequate under certain circumstances and may also facilitate public debate about the long-term consequences of war, but it is also a way of according primacy to some memories while marginalizing the impact of others.

Different liberation experiences are connected with the fact that there was no consistent or clear policy on the arrest of collaborators. In some cities, the organized resistance had lists of NSB members who were required to be turned in. In others, personal scores were settled or it was disputed whether the resistance, Binnenlandse Strijdkrachten (Domestic Forces, BS), or the police were to do the arresting.²⁵ Sometimes the arrest developed into an “event” with crowds watching and shouting. Compared with France, for instance, only a few collaborators were actually killed. But when it came to the threat of violence, Bijltjesdag expectations seemed to be a confirmation of what many NSB members and their children had feared all along. It felt like the whole population had turned against them. It was the moment in which children of collaborators realized that their social position had been dependent on Hitler’s occupying forces. For children of collaborators, who experienced the liberation at home, the shock that known and trusted people could turn against them was thus central to their war experience.