It's a day late but here is the small story I wrote a few years ago in English class I said I would post. It is very loosely based on the experiences of my grandfather but the characters are entirely fictional.
Occupation
I was born in 1933, the year Hitler became Chancellor of Germany. This meant that by the time war broke out I was only six. My older brother, Roald, was fifteen when France officially declared war. My parents were a part of a generation for whom war had left a wound, still fresh, on the memory. My father was older than my mother and was almost in his forties when the Nazis began conscripting men in occupied Holland. He managed to avoid conscription thanks to that and the expression he wore in those years changed between fear and relief every few days. I didn’t understand much more than smiles or tears back then but it still made sense that my Papa was glad to not be fighting after his own Papa was killed in the First World War. We’d visit his grave when we visited Belgium in the summers. He was one of the ones in Flanders. We didn’t know which cross was his though so we’d walk along in silence while Papa paid his respects to every grave. I would think about how impossible it was that somewhere so quiet and peaceful with playful zephyrs and motherly sunshine could serve as a place of remembrance for a time of shrieking artillery, staccato choruses of gunfire and the howls of dying men. Of course, I didn’t know war was like that until I was a little older but when I was five and I went to Flanders I knew that war was loud and scary and dangerous.
After Hitler thrust his tanks through the Ardennes and France fell we stopped going to Flanders. I didn’t know why we stopped going but I had this almighty sense that the world was just bad at the time, like God himself was separated from earth by a black screen. My brother started to take it upon himself to keep me happy and oblivious to the dangerous Europe we sat on top of. By 1942 I was nine and Roald was eighteen. It was in those times, I now realise, that Papa had the fear on his face. He feared his son would be conscripted and, in hindsight, I can see that my brother was scared too. For me it was almost an adventure sometimes. I would be frightened but it was a fun kind of frightened because at the age of nine I just didn’t know what getting caught meant. It was hide-and-seek to me and it could happen anywhere at any time if I was with my brother. We had been in Rotterdam for the day one time and were only a few streets from our home in Ridderkerk when my brother told me we would be hiding again. It was good to be outside when it happened, I learned, because they came inside the houses and if that happened Roald would have to go out the side window and climb onto the neighbour’s roof where he would crouch in the shadows, trying not to hit any loose shingles. This time we had to dive under a bridge as the Nazis marched around a corner and out to the edge of the canal. We were deep enough in the mud that it didn’t squelch noisily as the drum sound of boots rang out from above us. One of the Nazis slipped on the wet wood and landed awkwardly on one foot and one knee on the bank opposite us. As he collected himself his eyes caught our two faces adrift in the mud and matched frantic movements with frantic words before wrenching us out of our failed hiding spot. He looked at me the way all adults looked at me in those years. Now I realise they were all thinking how unfortunate I was, just a little boy, too young to understand. And I was too young to understand as one of the men spat German at my brother’s face while another translated it into equally angry Dutch. I don’t remember what was said and am not sure I knew at the time what they were saying.
They marched us home where the rest of the day happened in brief images and dreamlike scenes that were seen with clarity but heard and experienced from a distance. Shock is how I describe it now but even though the symptoms of the aftermath would suggest shock I wonder whether my nine-year-old mind was capable of such an emotion. Mama cried, her tears adding new dimensions of flavour to the tea she gave the waiting soldiers. Papa cried too, but he only told me that soon before he passed away many decades later, while he helped his grown son Roald pack under the supervision of one of the Nazis that had played seeker in our game. Roald came downstairs with a suitcase and gave calming hugs to hysterical Mama and received silent advice from Papa about life and death and everything. To me, suitcases meant holidays to Flanders, and holidays to Flanders meant coming home again afterwards. It wasn’t until 1947 when I was a bit older, about thirteen or fourteen, that I came to understand that Roald wasn’t coming back home.
When I was eighteen I packed my own suitcase and gave calming hugs to hysterical Mama and received silent advice from Papa and left to start my own life, like Roald would have if he hadn’t been spotted that day, if his nose had been smaller, or his eyes less blue.
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