Friday, the last day

The cheese market at Alkmaar reminded me, at least, of Orange City--or Holland, or Pella, a recreation of the old ways, women and men in hats and traditional dress fussing almost as if the whole business was a pageant, which, I'd say it really was. It drew tons of people, and it was, well, cute. Crowds in Orange City react just like the Dutch crowds, with a kind of sweet charm. They too thought it was all cute.

The cheese was, as they say, to die for. There is some coming along home.

One more gigantically wonderful organ concert, this one in the Oude Kerke of Alkmaar, just up the block, on maybe the finest organ in the Netherlands (that would beg a fight somewhere I'm sure). The young lady, a Hungarian, who was doing the recital, reminded me of my students. She said the word was that the only place in the world an organist can play professionally is in America--and in a church.

Most of the most ancient cathedrals, the ones that take your breath away, are museums these days, businesses really, historical artifacts larger than almost anything else that can be stored or, for that matter, remembered. I suppose it's only right that these ancient pipe organs (the organist played one piece on the oldest playable organ in the Netherlands, built in 1511) go the way of all flesh as well, relegated to history, to antiquity, valuable as a register of what once was but largely irrelevant from day-to-day life. They speak already of another time, really, a time that fits more squarely in these mammoth old cathedrals, where awe sits beside you almost anywhere you plant yourself inside. There you sit, slack-jawed. Then the organ starts, and it's like the voice of God.

I guess we aren't that big today. Maybe we've grown so big that God isn't.

Anyway, one last fling on the biggest organ I saw in the last ten days.

And then Anne Frank, where I've visited twice before. The place itself doesn't stun me anymore, but the story does--this little girl writing out her thoughts, then dying, tragically, horribly, before realizing that her words, scribbled down in the annex, have been read by millions and will be for some time.

Anne Frank House

Yeah, that's a no camera icon in the upper right hand corner, but those bright spots aren't the image of some kind of flash. I snapped this without, but I snapped it nonetheless because I just had to take a picture of the real diary of Anne Frank. Me and tons of others, by the way. It's not sacred, but somehow I can't believe it's not alive.

It's not difficult to determine just why the crowds outside the Anne Frank House were so long, even though the first edition of Anne Frank's diary came out in 1947. The story is something of a love story--love of life at least--and it's lined up against a gargantuan human tragedy and horror: a girl, barely more than a child, up against jackboots. She wins, but dies. Hitler loses, even though, finally, the girl wins, big time.

What's hard, even today, is to get one's mind around what Hitler actually did. Have a look at the plans for Auschwitz someday. Look closely. It's an immense engineering and construction project, undertaken by hundreds, if not thousands of workers of all kinds, all of it aimed at one sure as death purpose, to kill, to murder, to exterminate. I find it hard to use that word, really--because exterminate is what one does to roaches, to fire ants, to whatever kind of unwelcome bug one finds infesting one's cupboards. We exterminate.

How on earth could people sign up to build such a place? Surely they had to know. They simply drank the kool aid.

And inside all of that horror--just one of the 100,000 Dutch Jews who never returned from the camps in Germany--was a slight, dark-haired child who grew up in the annex, a hiding place behind her father's factory, where she hid with her family, hoping to outlive the war.

Someone turned them in--the whole Frank family. Even today no one knows who. Only the father returned after the war, and was then given the diary by Miep Gees, who'd been one of the righteous gentiles to help the Frank family.

Mr. Frank said he couldn't believe his daughter had written what she did, as if the daughter on the pages of that diary was someone other than the daughter he thought he knew so well, having lived in that cramped little upstairs hiding place as long as they had. It was as someone else altogether had been let loose on those pages.

Maybe she was. "The nicest thing about writing down all my thoughts and feelings," this child wrote, "is that otherwise I'd suffocate."

Maybe it was therapy for her, but it's been much more for the hundreds who, once again, lined up in front of that otherwise indistinguishable Amsterdam address today, children and old men and women, families, singles, every color imaginable, all to visit Anne's secret annex.

She could never have known, never have guessed that her little diary would become one of the world's best sellers. But it has.

We visited there again today, upstairs in an annex that seemed just about as crowded as it did for her once upon a time--before the Nazis came one morning at 10:30, before the Frank family was shipped out to Westerbork, then, finally, Germany. The whole family--save the father--would never return.

"How wonderful it is," she wrote in that diary, "that nobody need wait a single moment before starting to improve the world."

An incredible story. An incredible girl. An incredible inspiration.

Most of this week we've been enjoying Holland's Golden Age, through its music, its art, is extravagant and opulent display of human imagination. The Golden Age is everywhere in this little country, every town, every village, every church. The whole world knows "the Dutch masters." The Rijkmuseum is something of a shrine.

But I dare say there were just as many today at an indistinguishable apartment at 263 Prisengracht, waiting in line to stand for just a minute upstairs in a hiding place where a young lady waited patiently for the end of the war, all the time using her own blood to write her heart out over the pages of her diary.

Maybe the most beautiful thing I saw in the Netherlands in the last ten days was a room where a girl--hardly a woman--dreamed of blue skies and a walk in a park and yet told the rest of us she hoped we were loving what she couldn't.

Maybe William of Orange is more important to Dutch history, but Anne Frank is the very heart of the human story.

The Day of Dutch National Treasures

The pilgrims at Dordtrecht. Twenty years ago, the tourist people didn't know a thing about the Synod of Dort. This year, no one struck out that way. We got a nice tour of the old city, as well as a move into the old church, where a corner of the cathedral--just one little exhibition--is given to the Synod of Dort, 1618-1619. But we were there.

Factoid: All the men wore beaver hats--from Europe, of course. But it wouldn't take long before the European fad had depleted the beaver populations throughout Europe, thereby giving special incentive to North American trappers and wilderness men. The men of the Synod of Dort were not wilderness men. Don't be fooled by the story.
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On to the place of the windmills, a International Register of Historical Places location, where you've got to really be bad not to take gorgeous pictures. For the first time, the wind blew, the sky spit a little, and it was cold, quite cold.

No matter. These windmills only begin to look Dutch when the skies get gray.

And then to Delft, for Delft ware, as well as more walks through old cathedrals, this including the burial vault of Holland's Royal Family from the House of Orange. Another incredible pair of cathedrals, with tons more reminders of death--the ars moriendi (more sometime later maybe).

The grave of William of Orange.

Wherever you look, the art of dying.

Those dang neighbors

If the truth be told, it's happened more than once on this trip--some guide somewhere attempts to explain something about the Dutch, something maybe a shade negative, like their being tight or their worrying about how things look in public. They say it as if to define Dutch people, but our little pilgrim group heartily guffaws, not because the jokes are so funny but because what the hosts and guides say defines Dutch, by our estimation, is not far off the mark. Which is to say, we know what the Dutch are like, even though most of us hadn't taken a step in Holland before last week.

So when the guide in the Delft factory talked about this odd-looking thing, when she told us it was a tulip vase (we're a little late for tulips, by the way), that was one thing. But when she explained that if some portly Dutch housewife bought such an extravagant piece of ornamental home accessory, she would be sure to put a tulip in each opening and set in her front window to show off her wealth.

To her neighbors, of course. It would be her neighbors she would want to impress. She wouldn't have to say a thing, just buy a new Delft tulip vase like this for half a year's wage and stick it in her front window, which is to say, stick it in her neighbor lady's face.

Sure, some of us said quietly--that makes sense.

Lest men giggle, I know there were lots of men in their own machine shops back in Iowa, getting everything greased and ready to go just a few weeks ago, all of them waiting for that smart-ass neighbor who goes into the field first every year, waiting so that, while they certainly wouldn't be first, they wouldn't be fifth or sixth either. Once the green light flashes, they're off on the John Deere as if that green monster was something out of NASCAR.

It's the same thing really; it's being conscious of being seen, being judged by others, others you might know. It's one of a hierarchy of horrors that afflict small-town folks, but I don't think that guide at the Delft factory meant what she said as an indictment of small-town life. What she meant it as was a quick slap and small minds, not small towns.

"Something there is that doesn't love a wall," wrote Robert Frost years ago already, and so begins a little neighborly reflection about Frost and his neighbor spending a fine spring day walking the stone fence their properties share, the two of them putting the stones back in place after the winter, after "something there is that doesn't love a wall" (a bit of a pun--frost itself) has upset things and spilled those rocks into the fields.

Famously, the poem ends, "Good fences make good neighbors." There's enough ambiguity in that line so that only the real Frost aficianado can tell whether Frost likes fences or not, but I've always thought that poem finished with a furrowed brow--Frost the curmudgeon wishes we didn't need fences, but confesses, sadly, that we do, us humans. That's my nickel's worth anyway.

Psychologists now claim that solitary confinement can turn men mad--crazy, that is--in part because their ideas can find no boundries. They have no one to bounce those ideas off, so, curses and horrors, they start believing themselves. No one questions them. No one counter argues. No one furrows a brow. Like old preachers and teachers, they start believing what's going on in their heads. Which is dangerous. They go, well, mad.

So we need neighbors, and I suppose we even need picture windows next door and stone fences and people who disagree. We need contrary voices. We need skeptics and even unbelievers. We need irony and all kinds of dubiousness. We need neighbors to question whether or not we should have shelled out half a grand for Delft tulip vase that looks as much like a pretty
blue barnacle as some kind of national Dutch treasure.

We don't need too much, however. Everything in moderation.

And this one here--if I'd have bought it, I'd have to keep teaching for the next decade. It's still there at the factory, as are all of its replicas. So don't look for it in the Schaap's windows.

Besides, if I would have bought one, I wouldn't put it in the window anyway. You think I'd want the whole world to see?

No way.

(Good Lord, we are no less curiously made than that tulip vase.)

Day #7 Rotterdam, physics, and surf

The most impressive piece of sculpture--most memorable--stands in downtown Rotterdam, a looming human figure who is missing his heart somehow, just as Rotterdam itself missed its heart after being leveled by the Nazis in a move to end the war that lasted not much more than a day longer than they thought it would--a frantic human figure with a hole in his heart.

Physics 101--how to cure a country of tragedy by water. Build a series of canals, monsters--add some gates, some sluises, maybe a lock or two--create an island from which to work (after all this is under sea water), then reinforce like mad, and live in relative comfort. The name of the project, circa 1953, is the Delta works, a project some wise engineer deemed the seventh wonder of the modern world.

A helpful lecture.

A fine guide through the guts of the operation.




Heringvliet flood control.

I don't remember what this was :).

It's hard to believe that just about every soul on our trip had at least one relative, often more, who left the Netherlands from this very spot, the pier on the Holland-American line in the harbor at Rotterdam. Really, it's impossible to imagine what all those people--all those families--thought the moment they stepped on the ship.

A larger-than-life sculpture out at the end of the pier brought the reality a little bit closer.

And, finally, again today, perfect weather. Couldn't have designed a finer afternoon to spend on a beach. It was simply wonderful. Scheveningen, to my mind, will always be Diet Eman's first prison. But there was nothing but recreation there today, loads of people of all ages, surf and sun, and joy.

Pannakoeken and ice cream, all of it calorie-less.

Socialism

During the night of 31 January 1953, a flood disaster hit the South-west of the Netherlands. About 1850 people and tens of thousands of animals lost their lives. Around 100,000 people had to be evacuated, 4500 buildings were destroyed and many more were damaged. Almost 200,000 hectares of land were flooded. Nine months later the last hole in the dike was closed.

In 1953, a North Sea monsoon, a 100-year storm, hit the Netherlands. While as many as 100,000 people were evacuated safely, 1850 people lost their lives, as did many times that many animals. Close to 5000 buildings were destroyed when the pressure of the water Dutch people have spent most of their life fighting came pressing through the dikes and berms and washed over people’s lives in a wave of destruction unseen before in the history of the Netherlands, the low lands.

What the Dutch people knew, however, is that this flood wasn’t a first—and therefore wasn’t likely the last either. In the 15th century 70 villages were swallowed by the sea, 10,000 people killed. In the 16th century, it happened again, this time killing 30,000.

The 1953 floods prompted the country’s finest engineers to put together a plan to build some kind of mechanism by which the Netherlands could be protected from such horrific nightmares, and the product of those finest Dutch minds, Delta Works, was undertaken. The year was 1953, soon after the disaster. The project itself wasn’t completed until 1997. But the result, some say, is one of the seven wonders of the modern world, the world’s own largest flood protection project.

And it’s had other benefits—the creation of what the Dutch call “sweet water” lakes, capable of offering fresh water—not salt water—to farmers and industrial plants. Some would say everyone profited from Delta Works. I’m not an ecologist, but I’m guessing some of them would disagree.

No matter. Delta Works is a project which has not only saved human lives, but also offered new and wonderful opportunities to the people of the region.

We toured the place today, went down into its bowels, heard the story first hand, got a sense of its immense power, stood on its ramparts, as if Delta Works was really little more than a huge Dutch castle. In a way it is, keeping out the North Sea at bay.

Zeeland’s own coat of arms features a roaring lion trying to bring down the unruly sea. Think of Delta Works that way, the roaring lion that powerfully tames the sea.

Back in 1953, no sooner had the flood subsided than those fine engineering minds were at it, determining what had to be built in order to guarantee no more such horrifying tragedies. What they come up with, no free enterprise building would have. It took the government to do it. It took the combined will of the Dutch people to build Delta Works because it was a project that went to the heart of the nation’s fears. I’m sure it took taxes.

There is, in my home country, a kind of derision for all things European right now, a sense that the Netherlands, like just about everybody else in the world has sold its free soul to the Devil, in exchange for a cushy life.

It may well be true that the Dutch have a cushy life. I haven’t seen much poverty in the last week, although we haven’t been touring the dreary sections of Amsterdam, Rotterdam, or Leeuwarden. Maybe we’ve stayed with the touristy places. We haven’t seen the darkness most right-wing Americans attribute to France or England or Holland.

But then people love to use socialism as a bogey man in the U.S., love to claim that there could be nothing more un-American than Obamacare, than the loss of another flag-draped blessing of American exceptionalism—freedom. Freedom. Freedom.

Who can be against it? Well, certainly not the Dutch, who probably exercise more license, more freedom, in their everyday lives than most Americans.

Are the Dutch free? Maybe not. Maybe not to build homes wherever they want, to build garages as big as hay barns, to do a whole ton of things.

But there’s a trade-off. We just spent most of the afternoon on the beach at Schevenengen, one of the Netherlands’ biggest coast-line resort areas. People didn’t look like they were suffering all that much, despite the fact that they have socialized medicine.

I’m no socialist, but it seems to me that if some Yankees want to understand something about European socialism all they need to do is have a look at Delta Works. Almost 70 years ago now, the Netherlands suffered the worst tragedy they had since being occupied by neighboring thugs from Germany. What did they do about it?—the dreamed up Delta Works, designed it themselves, created a portable island to carry out the work, and then put it up--dams, sluices, locks, dikes, levees, and storm surge barriers—to keep its people safe.

The government did it. It won’t make money. The American Society of Civil Engineers calls it one of the seven wonders of the modern world.

But they’re socialists--

--Maybe more so than we are; but if you want to understand why they don’t want to be like us, like Americans, it might be instructive to take a tour of Delta Works sometime and realize that this incredible series of contraptions is a national project. The government did it.

Perhaps the Dutch people don’t grouse about taxes any less than Americans; perhaps they do. What’s clear, however, from the story of Delta Works, from the pictures in its belly, is that once upon a time the Dutch people threw in all kinds of cash, all kinds of revenue, in order to build the seventh wonder of the modern world. It wasn’t Phillips; it wasn’t Shell.

It was the Netherlands.

The temp was somewhere around 70 today on Schevenengen beach. No storms, no rambunctious tides, no ferocious waves. Maybe the Netherlands didn’t need the Delta Works today.

But there’s always tomorrow. And there’s always someday.

If you want to understand why many Dutch people don’t complain about what we call “socialism,” you might consider a bike along the Delta Works, just to see for yourself.

Maybe, sometimes—just sometimes. . .it works.

On a visit to Het Loo

We’d just passed the bridge at Nijmegen where, 600 yards to the west, hundreds of GIs paddled flimsy Brit boats with their rifle butts in order to cross a river flowing with current fast enough to knock you off your feet. What’s worse, all kinds of Nazi armaments were fixed and firing on them—and what’s even worse, it was daytime.

Somehow, some made it to the other side—about half with the first contingent. The other half perished. Somehow, they established a beachhead, then went on to take the bridge, if you can believe it, only to be joined by Brit tanks. But those tanks shut down. They were ordered not to go on.

The story goes that the commander of this miniature D-Day near-suicide mission was so incensed at their failure to move—he’d lost tons of his men because he knew Allied troops up river at Arnhem were pinned down and needed help badly—the man was so incensed that what he said to the Brits, having tea, really can’t be repeated.

And that’s the story I was thinking about—the whole story of Operation Market Garden—when we rolled up to Het Loo, the summer palace of the Dutch Royal Family, a monumental national treasure hidden neatly in the woods.

I will never understand royalty. I am too much an American. I have few links to the patriots who signed the Declaration of Independence, and I don’t really share their deep hatred for royalty either. I just don’t understand the whole concept—I’m too much a yankee, for better or for worse.

So I wasn’t impressed by Het Loo. Which is not to say it was hard to be impressed; after all, the place is stunning. There are so many Golden Age paintings on those walls that some visitors—I’m sure not all—get a headache. You could spend all day in any one of that mansion’s rooms and not see everything. Riches galore are on each wall, each ceiling, each floor.

Okay, I was impressed, but not enchanted. Opulence, after all, is by definition elitist. If you don’t mind asserting that some people are simply created more equal than others, then what you see in the royal palace is just wonderful. Okay.

But I got tired, fast. And I got to thinking that if I was the first lieutenant who’d just lost half his men in crossing the river and taking Nijmegen bridge, and if I just happened to stumble into Het Loo, just down the road, my uniform still stinking of river water, my hands still shaking from picking up the bodies of my men out of the river—if I just walked into all that opulence after all that death, I’d sit down and cry. I wouldn’t even swear. I’d just cry.

Maybe the two, juxtaposed the way they were today, were just too dissonant: the horrors of war and stench of riches. I wish I hadn’t been thinking about a hundred dead men.

Het Loo rules say no pix, but I just wanted one and I got it. This one. Contraband. Ten seconds later, a youthful guide reminded me that no cameras were permitted. I felt like asking him if he had any idea how much American blood was forever sewn in his country’s soil.

This is a bedroom, a tiny one. Multiple the opulence here by about twenty or so--well, how about fifty, and you have Het Loo. The place was impressive, but I was not enchanted because I have no history with endearing royal families. I’ve never sworn allegiance to a king or queen, and I don’t know what it’s like to live with a Queen Mother. I don’t get it. To me, a king or queen is just something other, just something other.

And then I came on a room upstairs where, in the corner, quite unobtrusively, a table stood, stacked with books, books about the Dutch Resistance in the Second World War. In addition, a couple of photographs stood there, one of them a group of six Dutch men, members of the underground, the other a woman who was herself deeply immersed in resistance work.

Two delft plates inscribed with Dutch words stood on that table—Al ware doot op de lippen daerommie moet men geen couragie verliegen, one of them said: “Even when death is very near there is no reason to lose courage.”

There was nothing gaudy about that table, no antiquities traceable to Holland’s Golden Age. It was little more than a black table holding aging books and a couple of framed mementos.

The Queen put it there, a note said. The Queen insisted that table be there, amid all the paunchy Rubens women, the darkened portraits of rich noblemen and their plump little high-collared children, amid enough tapestry to cover the walls of the Corn Palace three times over.

But that table was enough to alter my perceptions a bit, to understand why women I know who were in Holland in 1940, who suffered through an awful five-day war and the incineration of Rotterdam--why those women were heartbroken when Wilhelmina left the Netherlands for Britian, why those women felt abandoned, or so they told me, why they had real trouble not being furious.

They loved their queen, which is something I have always had trouble understanding.
But that ordinary table, amid all the splendor, the antiquities, the riches—that table, put there on the insistence of Queen Wilhelmina, that table told me that this wasn’t just any queen either, but someone who was, without a doubt, blessed with a heart for her people.

That table and those pictures and that single sentence helped this ugly American appreciate Het Loo.