In the late 1930’s, the Dutch government built Camp Westerbork to house thousands of German Jews fleeing National Socialism in Germany. When the Nazis occupied Holland in May 1940, they took over the camp, enlisting Dutch police servicemen as guards. Rients Dijkstra was one of such police officers, and when he reported for duty, he couldn’t do what the Nazis demanded. He lasted one day and never returned to Westerbork. Like thousands of other Dutch citizens, he went underground, hiding in the chicken coop of his girlfriend’s parents’ home, where for a time he was safe. However, as supplies dwindled, it became difficult for citizens to feed the thousands of onderduikers, those who had gone underground. Meanwhile, the Germans paid informants fifty guilders to track down runaways. Rients’ luck ran out when someone took the money. Though the house was searched, they skipped the chicken coop. Frustrated, the Germans grabbed Rients’ girlfriend’s father instead.
My button from Ten Thousand Villages
In this season of remembering, my thoughts drift back to the Second World War, and the ways it has defined my life and the lives of so many others . It’s quite something to be marked by violence, by a war that occurred before my birth or my parents’ births. Though I was raised Calvinist (in the vein of Marilynne Robinson’s Reverend Boughton) I have always longed to be Anglican (for the beautiful churches) or Baptist (for the best summer camps). But in November, I want to be Mennonite for the particular way that Mennonites think about remembering. Many of my Mennonite friends wear buttons on their lapels which read: “to remember is to work for peace”. This call to work speaks deeply to my soul, especially in this time of toppled monuments and divided countries.
Recall that in the past six months we’ve seen statues torn down around the world, as people cry out against systematic racism and centuries of pain caused by colonial legacies. From a slave trader thrown into Bristol Harbour to the burning of Belgian monarch King Leopold in Europe to the downed figures of racist lawmakers and confederate generals in America and the toppled statue of Canada’s first Prime Minister, Sir John A. Macdonald. Citizens everywhere are divided about what to do with controversial historical figures. Some advocate putting marble busts in museums, while others do not object to wholesale removals, but dispute what they see as arbitrary acts of vandalism. A wise friend commented that it isn’t about the proxy war of toppled monuments; the peacemaking is in the conversation itself.
So all this meditation on state symbols and shrines to victims of state violence has me wondering about the kinds of monuments that honour the civilian victims of war, the collateral damage left in the wake of the glamourized military campaigns or sinister systematic murders. A couple years ago, I was introduced to a unique kind of tribute when I travelled to Camp Westerbork to research my WWII novel. We stopped in a small town near Westerbork, on a quiet street, and paused at the end of a laneway where embedded in the cobblestone was a small brass plaque with the name of a resident arrested by the Nazis early in 1944. These plaques, and there are over 70,000 of them across Europe, represent individuals spirited from their homes by the Nazis. It is a grassroots initiative that began almost thirty years ago in Berlin. Each stolpersteine (stumbling stone) is handmade and costs 120 euros. With the consent of victim’s families (if possible), volunteers install and maintain the plaques. *
Stolpersteine Installation in Beilen, NL
Unlike cannons or men abreast horses with bayonets, these small plaques require viewers to bow down and read the names of the lost and then look up and see the homes they left against their will. There is something sacred about remembering the past in the space we occupy right now. In the same way it is now commonplace in Canada to hear Land Acknowledgements before public gatherings, what would it mean to walk through the park and see something like this?
Photo credit @dorsalstream via Twitter
This morning on the radio I heard the brilliant historian Margaret MacMillan talk about how today France, Germany and Britain remember the collective losses that war wrought upon their countries, a shift away from an “us versus them” ceremonies of decades past, which gave me fresh hope for peace, because really, isn’t this also a tearing down of monuments, too? To consider the humanity of the “Jerries” and “Japs”? To remember the cost of war on innocent civilians on every side of conflict?
The plaque that I read that day in Holland read “Here lived Hendrik Bel.” Hendrik Bel was Rients Dijkstra’s girlfriend’s father, and Rients was my great-uncle. Betrayed by a neighbour, or perhaps even a family member, Hendrik was eventually sent to Zöschen, a labour camp in Germany, where he died of exhaustion. I can only suppose that my great-uncle Rients lived with the consequences of his choice to defy Nazi orders his entire life.
Stolpersteine, Beilen, NL
So on this unusual Remembrance Day, as a one hundred year tradition of meeting together at the cenotaph has been disrupted, maybe this is a year to extend our remembrance beyond November 11th. In the words of King Solomon, there’s “a time to tear down and a time to build…a time for war and a time for peace.” Maybe there’s a time to stand for two minutes of silence and a time to stumble. And what if it’s in the interruptions, in the stumbling as we go about our everyday lives, as grief sneaks upon us, that we are inspired to take a moment, on our knees remembering, working for peace.
NOTE: Not everyone likes the stolpersteine movement. In researching my novel I discovered that many municipalities found it embarrassing to have a public display of citizens who disappeared. They felt it reflected badly on the towns and villages, that they were unwilling or unable to protect their neighbours and friends. There are other reasons people object to memorializing people in this way, and you can read about some of that here.