While writing in my last about “Secret Strength” I had a strong desire to talk about wartime Holland and its sufferings under Nazi occupation. In particular I wanted to share an aria on YouTube, beautiful on its own account but even more moving for this little piece of history:
When the Netherlands were liberated in May 1945, the jubilation in the Zaan region (North Holland) reached the same unsurpassed level as everywhere else. A man hit on the idea of wheeling his old brown piano out on to the street. He sat down and began to play a patriotic song, naturally, with bystanders joining in with utmost emotion. Suddenly someone in the crowd cried: “There’s a real singer living just near by. She must join us.” A few minutes later some bystanders brought a young lady, somewhat thin, smiling shyly, for she was shy by nature: Aafje Heynis. There were cries of “Sing, sing!” Standing by the old piano she began to sing George Frideric Handel’s “Dank sei dir, Herr”. It became completely still, and people began to weep. Aafje’s beautiful timbre, her own emotion, the splendid melody, the greatness of the occasion (freedom after five years of German occupation), all these cast a spell on the dozens of witnesses. “Never again have I been able to sing Handel quite like that”, the famous contralto was later to say.
Aafye Heynis died a few weeks ago. It is now known that the words and music were written by Siegfried Ochs (1858-1929) in parody of Handel, but no matter. They were apt for the occasion, as this translated excerpt shows:
Thanks be to Thee,
Thanks be to Thee, O Lord,
Thou hast led Thy people
With Thee,
Thine is now the land.
Even before these enemies menaced us,
Thy hand protected us,
In Thy grace Thou gavest us salvation.
. . .
My personal connection with this goes deep. On my birth certificate it says my father was Jan Jacobus Mulder, merchant, 38 years, from Den Helder, Holland. My mother never told me that it was otherwise, nor did she confess it to her late husband’s sister living in Arnhem. On the contrary, she left me with “Auntie Non” in 1947, while on her madcap quest for a rich new husband in Switzerland. Thus I lived with my alleged aunt and paternal grandparents, went to school and picked up a knowledge of Dutch, to the extent that I became rusty in English. It’s only in the last few days that I’ve asked myself “Why?”, now when there’s no one else left to ask.
Why did my mother take me away from the convent school in England where I’d spent one term, away from her parents’ house where we’d been living since our arrival from Australia, where I was born? I was barely five. I’d learned to read, at my grandmother’s knee. I had never been emotionally dependent on my mother like most young children. We had lived in a bungalow in Perth WA, where the landlady and other lodgers provided enough child care to let my mother gallivant as she pleased. After that I had roamed unfettered on the ship to England, overloaded with war brides; seeing my mother at mealtimes and in our cramped cabin shared with other passengers. It was unexpected to be left in Holland, suddenly and without a goodbye. Auntie Non offered tea and cake, I sat on the floor absorbed in a new toy, my mother simply slipped out while I wasn’t looking, “so as to avoid a fuss”, as she told me years later. It wasn’t a huge shock. I was used to abrupt changes and new places. The bigger shock was when she suddenly returned months later to take me back to England. I didn’t want to go, just as I hadn’t wanted to leave Australia. In Holland I had a proper life. I was Dutch, spoke the language, was learning to read and write in it.
I became part of a solid family where things made sense. It didn’t matter that my aunt was fierce, six foot tall with a hooked nose; that her husband was a solemn Calvinist schoolteacher given to Bible readings while we sat at table; that her father was a cantankerous old sea-captain, difficult to handle; that her mother was permanently bedridden, up those steep narrow Dutch stairs to the attic. This “grandma” liked to hug me but I would wriggle from her grasp and run from that stuffy room. Reflecting now, I see what I meant by “solid family”. Despite their quirks, they were close-knit and open-hearted. I was only required to take them on their terms. Beyond those, I enjoyed an extraordinary freedom. I have only two concrete memories of Auntie Non. One is of being shooed out of the back door between meals, to give space for her demanding housework and care-providing. I sometimes wandered far and wide, rendered safe by my homing instinct. As on the SS Rangitata sailing to England, hunger would bring me back on time. The other memory is of Auntie Non bathing her daughter Jannie or changing her nappies, telling me what she’d learned about baby-care, considering me old enough to have such conversations. For all I know, she may have guessed I was not her brother’s child, but it wouldn’t have mattered. After the Nazis, what else could matter? The Occupation had hardened the Dutch to tempered steel, sharpened them to survival. Sentiment was clutter and luxury.
When I started school, she must have taken me there on the first day but I don’t remember it, only that I went on my own with a tin of jam sandwiches each day for lunch, forcing myself to remember the route—at least half a mile—and trying not to be frightened of big dogs running free. I can’t imagine a parent or guardian treating their children this way today without intervention from the authorities, but this was Holland, less than two years after Liberation. It must have felt safe everywhere, with the whole country united in thanksgiving, bound together as firmly as the Hop-Mulder family of Beekhuizenseweg in Velp.
I was 49 before I discovered my true paternity, which makes me Australian rather than Dutch. It doesn’t change my feeling about Holland. There’s no language I love to hear more than Dutch, though I can’t speak it any more. Perhaps everyone craves an identity, inventing one if necessary; and perhaps the strongest patriotism burns in the soul of exiles, especially those who can’t decide where they’re exiled from. I know from Fernando Pessoa, another lifelong exile, that the greatest nostalgia is for events we missed, or which only occurred in fancy.
I wanted to speak of these things: what I remember, what I don’t, what I missed, what I’ve invented and imagined, straws to clutch through the torrent of life. Especially when talking of empathy in my last. Slender threads of personal sentiment, like unrequited love. Moving as Victor Frankl’s story is, it feels somehow distant, like hearsay; whereas Holland is mine, I lay claim to the land and its past. But I didn’t know how to connect it to my theme of “Secret Strength”.
Then serendipity lent a hand. Going aimlessly around the town, as mentioned in my last, I visited the Oxfam shop, where they keep shelves of second-hand books. I was drawn to a fat paperback of 700 pages, The Assassin’s Cloak. I wavered, then resisted the idea of adding another volume to my collection of Tsundoku, and left empty-handed. But next day I still hankered for it, hoped it would be still there, and it was. It’s arranged in day order, an anthology based on the diaries of 167 people.
I bought it on February 25th, so started to read from the entries for that day:
February 25th, 1942 [Holland]:
It is now half past seven in the morning. I have clipped my toenails, drunk a mug of genuine Van Houten’s cocoa, and had some bread and honey, all with what you might call abandon. I opened the Bible at random, but it gave me no answers this morning. Just as well, because there were no questions, just enormous faith and gratitude that life should be so beautiful, and that makes this a historic moment, that and not the fact that we are on the way to the Gestapo this morning.
This was from the diary of Etty Hillesum. I wondered anxiously about that visit to the Gestapo, but then discovered this, shortened from her entry of February 27th:
How rash to assume that man shapes his own destiny. All he can do is determine his inner responses. . . . Very early on Wednesday morning a large group of us was crowded into the Gestapo hall, and at that moment the circumstances of all our lives was the same. All of us occupied the same space, the men behind the desk no less than those about to be questioned. I noticed a young man with a sullen expression, who paced up and down looking driven and harassed and making no attempt to hide his irritation. He kept looking for pretexts to shout at the helpless Jews: ‘Take your hands out of your pockets’ and so on. I thought him more pitiable than those he shouted at, and those he shouted at I thought pitiable for being afraid of him. . . . I am not easily frightened. Not because I am brave, but because I know I am dealing with human beings and that I must try as hard as I can to understand everything that anyone does. . . . All the appalling things that happen are no mysterious threats from afar, but arise from fellow human beings very close to us. That makes these happenings more familiar, then, and not so frightening. The terrifying thing is that systems grow too big for men and hold them in a satanic grip, the builders no less than the victims of the system, much as large edifices and spires, created by men’s hands, tower high above us, yet may collapse over our heads and bury us.
Wikipedia tells us she died in Auschwitz a year later. World of Books Ltd has mailed me a copy of her diary. I want to know how her strength held out as things got darker. Meanwhile, I leave you with this:
…I am also thinking of Etty Hillesum, a young Dutch girl of Jewish origin who died in Auschwitz. At first far from God, she discovered him by looking deep within her and she wrote in her diary: “There is a really deep well inside me. And in it dwells God. Sometimes I am there, too. But more often stones and grit block the well, and God is buried beneath. Then he must be dug out again”. In her disrupted, restless life she found God in the very midst of the great tragedy of the 20th century: the Shoah. This frail and dissatisfied young woman, transfigured by faith, became a woman full of love and inner peace who was able to declare: “I live in constant intimacy with God…”
From an address by Pope Benedict XVI, on February 13th, 2013. Does such “secret strength” owe anything to religion? This will be something to explore further.
a wayfarer’s notes 
I often wonder how anyone survived any of those camps. I worked with several who did. I was very surprised at what they went through. One thing those I knew had in common a great outlook on life and none seemed to dwell on the past. They'd say they survived (and name the camp) and at that I knew to let it alone and respect those who made it as well as those who did not.
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To me religions are systems devised by men to codify the experience of the Divine. Jesus did not found a religion, he taught that God is universally accessible through recognizing the activities of the spirit in mankind, in the created world, and in the non-physical world which is beyond sensory perception.
Jesus taught in images and examples; Paul translated Jesus' teaching into ideas and abstractions. This verse stretches our minds to incorporate the concrete words, 'substance' and 'evidence' with the unsubstantial words 'faith' and 'things not seen.' The bringing together of the material and the spiritual into a unified being is the activity of faith which comes from within, not of religion which comes from without. Even when you get to the bottom of the well or the sinkhole, you keep digging because that is where the treasure is to be found.
Hebrews 11:1
“Now faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen.”
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Apart from the philosophical question you raise, I'm very moved by the account of your uprooted childhood, its loneliness, the lack of affection from a mother too absorbed in her own world to even notice yours. But who am I to judge – it's hard enough to know one's self so how can I presume to make assumptions about someone else's behaviour? Nevertheless I will never cease to be baffled and, yes, outraged by the cruelty and deceitfulness which some parents inflict on their children. I'm not speaking of outright evil abusers but normal adults who generally believe they love their children, yet are completely unaware of their children's actual feelings and thoughts.
As I see it, the heart of faith – or religion that is not necessarily tied to any particular tradition – is indeed love, but that sounds like such a sentimental greeting-card cliché. I mean love that is enlightened by awareness of the “other”. Which implies recognising the other's soul (another cliché). In other words, faith in the unseen but most real part of the other, the divine in them which is like the divine in one's self. Without getting into the unanswerable question of whether there exists a Divinity outside of ourselves (I happen to think so) it seems to me that the 'secret strength' you gave examples of does indeed reside in faith, however one defines it. Etty's discovery of God is an example of aware love: awareness of the Other…from which both strength and compassion derive.
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Apart from the philosophical question you raise, I'm very moved by the account of your uprooted childhood, its loneliness, the lack of affection from a mother too absorbed in her own world to even notice yours. But who am I to judge – it's hard enough to know one's self so how can I presume to make assumptions about someone else's behaviour? Nevertheless I will never cease to be baffled and, yes, outraged by the cruelty and deceitfulness which some parents inflict on their children. I'm not speaking of outright evil abusers but normal adults who generally believe they love their children, yet are completely unaware of their children's actual feelings and thoughts.As I see it, the heart of faith – or religion that is not necessarily tied to any particular tradition – is indeed love, but that sounds like such a sentimental greeting-card cliché. I mean love that is enlightened by awareness of the “other”. Which implies recognising the other's soul (another cliché). In other words, faith in the unseen but most real part of the other, the divine in them which is like the divine in one's self. Without getting into the unanswerable question of whether there exists a Divinity outside of ourselves (I happen to think so) it seems to me that the 'secret strength' you gave examples of does indeed reside in faith, however one defines it. Etty's discovery of God is an example of aware love: awareness of the Other…from which both strength and compassion derive.
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Forgot to thank you for the clip of Aafje Heynis' stunning voice and for the moving story that goes with it.
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Forgot to thank you for the clip of Aafje Heynis' stunning voice and for the moving story that goes with it.
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I found a short biography of Etty Hillesum which says that “she developed religious insights that have little to do with established religion and culminated in a mystical relationship with the God inside her”. WHich in a single sentence illustrates the complex relationship between the word “religion” and “the experience of the Divine”. I intend to explore this well-worn theme in my next, avoiding if possible the clichés and accumulated baggage of two millennia, while taking a fresh look.
If I were to sum up Etty, from the little I’ve so far learned, in a single word, it would be “thankfulness”. For Aafje Heynis, after listening to some of her singing repertoire, I’d say the word is “joy”.
In my experience, abiding thankfulness and joy both come from an abundance of love, no matter how we identify the source of that love. Etty speaks in her diary of two men, two lovers in her life. The enduring love was Julius Spier, though the affair itself lasted only a few months:
“The third and last section of the diary, which starts on September 15, 1942, during her first trip back to Amsterdam after Spier had suddenly died of illness, is both in style and spirit quite different from the first two sections. It reads like a long prayer to her personal God, interspersed with the aftermath of her feelings about her lover’s death and her attempts to cope with her emotions.”
Setting aside theology, one may say that “her personal God” is the name for an enduring place in her heart where love dwells.
Ellie & Natalie both refer to faith. “The substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen” may be a good definition of faith, but faith is a tool of religion, leading us beyond a simple place in the heart which a person can know without benefit of hope in something unseen. Religion offers an alleged path to that place, through faith. Or so I see it, and will try and spell out in my next.
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When Bill M says “those I knew had in common a great outlook on life and none seemed to dwell on the past”, it makes me think that their experiences in the camps would have made them thankful for everything that happened to them since, after their liberation; maybe to feel that thankfulness constantly.
And it makes me think that it shouldn’t be necessary for a person to undergo those horrors as a prerequisite to constant thankfulness. Something happened to Etty! (Something happened to me too, I would call it the discovery of love.)
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I remember you talking about being on the ship in another post.
You've lived quite a life. I was somewhat confused about the matter of your father (although I know you've touched on that before, as well) and I was going to ask about it, but then you cleared it up (or cleared up my question at least.) I agree with Natalie about that loneliness of being tossed around in a world of adults preoccupied with other things. Maybe it didn't seem lonely at the time, though. I don't know. Coming into life is a little walking into the middle of a movie. Everyone is already playing their parts and absorbed in their ongoing dramas. You try to ask someone next to you what's going on and they curtly snap back, “Shhh! She's about to marry the Count! Quiet!” Who is this Count? Why are they getting married? Who am I am? Why am I am here? How did I get here?
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No, loneliness wasn’t ever something I felt in the periods mentioned. There were so many new impressions, the whole movie, as far as I was concerned, a string of memorable things encountered for the first time.
Your question, and Natalie’s assumption of loneliness which prompted it, is interesting though, makes me wonder. Can a five-year-old do anything but take for granted what happens? We like it or we don’t. It makes us happy or miserable. Or perhaps it is a mark of an imposed isolation that we are not in the position of being able to compare our lot with something we might recognize as the norm, or something acceptable.
The most isolated time of my life was back in England, when I was six, in the months before I was sent to boarding school. But still I would not call it loneliness, but confinement, deprivation and neglect. That was the beginning of a terrible movie. “Shh! My mother & stepfather just got married. It’s a disaster from the start. Why did they get married? Why am I here? Everything before this was better.”
Again, the question: why are some people resilient & others not? I went to a day school at 12 and sat next to a boy named Cowley, that is, when he attended, which was not often. Then we read in the paper that he’d hanged himself with a dressing-gown cord over the banisters. Stepfather, parental quarrels, neglect, deprivation . . .
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“Can a five-year-old do anything but take for granted what happens?”
Exactly. That's a good point. I think about that too. When you're little, you just kind of take the world as it comes. What else can you do? And really, what else can you compare it to? You think this is how life is. You don't know any different life.
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Although Ian, you did not have a 'standard' childhood, seen in the light of your life-script, it may have been required.
Not every culture raises their children in a nuclear family. Even in those cultures for whom that is the ideal, exceptions are common. Children will gravitate to those in their circle with whom they establish a psychological connection. (My strongest connections were with my grandmother, and with my high school science teacher.) You may have been unusual in being able to easily became autonomous and independent. You prospered in an environment which was not overprotective. Love came to you not through a single individual but through communities which accepted and encouraged you. Perhaps you benefited because the love you received was not possessive or smothering.
If you felt neglected by your mother there were compensations. You could be yourself, and not somebody's little boy. You could explore and relate to adults as peers. You could develop the self-image of a competent wanderer in a world that was not unfriendly.
I am reminded of how children were raised in Huxley's The Island.
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Thanks for this, Ellie, it lends dignity to a chequered past!
And this too is something to think about: “. . . seen in the light of your life-script, it may have been required.”
Yes, I still haven’t come to any conclusion about the idea that our life-scripts are somehow preordained or even chosen by us before birth in order to learn particular lessons, as claimed by Steve Rother in his book Spiritual Psychology: the twelve primary life lessons, as mentioned at the end of my post of Jan 13th.
But then, as I suggested in the subsequent post “I don’t know”, one doesn’t need to reach such a conclusion. Truth is, whether we know it or not.
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True, I was interpreting the account you wrote of your childhood from a perspective which was not your own perspective when you were that child. Sorry about that. Of course it's presumptious and impossible to experience someone else's life as they experience it at any age.
The most talented novelists have the gift to create characters whose inner lives we can indeed sometimes recognise as our own. I certainly don't have that gift!
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True, I was interpreting the account you wrote of your childhood from a perspective which was not your own perspective when you were that child. Sorry about that. Of course it's presumptious and impossible to experience someone else's life as they experience it at any age.The most talented novelists have the gift to create characters whose inner lives we can indeed sometimes recognise as our own. I certainly don't have that gift!
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You may have noticed I appended a couple of responses and then deleted them as being based on suspect sources. I've had the good fortune in the past few years of reading many memoirs which speak honestly about childhood (and later years)as actually experienced, rather than tarted up or reinterpreted, though you can never truly know. They convey a convincing sense of the limited perspective they must have had at the time.
I like what you say about novelists who create characters whose inner lives we can recognize as our own. It makes me think of John Cowper Powys, in my view one of the greatest 20th century novelists, each of whose characters were vehicles for some part of himself, so they came alive, and had a profound inner life, bounded by the limits of their own experience. As opposed to being faceless puppets forced into an author-devised plot, a fundamental defect which does not stop them becoming the “New York Times Number One Bestseller”, winning the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, being described in The Times as “sublime” and in the Guardian as “magnificent”; or by me as “irritatingly clever, nevertheless unreadable”. I shall say no more, having received it as a birthday present.
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Love: the force that expands consciousness
Fear: the force that shuts consciousness down
Love and Fear is arguably the prime polarity in human existence. No doubt the Nazis and other controllers capitalised and continue to capitalise on the polarity of fear.
I find that art, be it visual, musical or poetic is one of the great ways to promulgate the polarity of love.
P.S. Haven't read your blog for a while. We had a small falling out prior to the 2015 UK general election – politics being as divisive as it is – but let me give you my new blog address which has been revamped top to bottom. http://scruffyowlet.blogspot.co.uk.
Happy blogging!
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