GUEST-POST: HOLLAND, WWII, AND COFFINS

In a previous posting (see here: http://atthebackofthehill.blogspot.com/2007/05/dutch-bigotry-moslim-gezin-wil-snel-weg.html ) I said a number of less than flattering things about the Dutch and their country.

One of my occassional readers had a number of things to say which illuminate another side - a side which, though I do not see entirely eye-to-eye with him, is nevertheless both valid and worthwhile.

He has graciously extended permission to post his letter, which I do below.

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Well now, BOTH,


Your problems at school don’t surprise me, not because of you being American or Jewish, but you lived in he middle of Catholic country and would have had the same trouble if you had been just Protestant, that’s the way it was written in places where most of the people go to church and go to the same church.


As for your friends in Dirksland Goeree-Overflakkee, it is downright stupid to go and live there if you belong to a visible minority, again if most people there go to church, and to the same church. Better find a larger community with more people of your background, there you don’t stand out and won’t attract attention of the zealots.

You can’t change human nature, BOTH.

But you can squawk about it, and you do that very well☺


I grew up in Holland and went to a public school, we had kids with Indonesian parents, kids with German parents, and a girl with Polish parents in our class, and I actually only now become aware of that, and that’s your fault BOTH.☺
Had I gone next door to the Christian school things would have been different, of course you don’t go there unless you are Christian.


After what happened in Poland in 1939 it was utterly stupid of the Dutch government to try to defend the country against the German onslaught, a waste of young lives.
I was on the Grebbeberg in Rhenen in 1940 right after the fighting stopped and I will not forget seeing the still open mass graves nor the smell of desinfectants. I also helped making the 8 coffins for the BS. men that were ordered to attack a German wagon train (1945) with nothing but revolvers. I saw them and remember that they were all shot in the head. The BS. Binnenlandse strijdkrachten caused a lot of trouble for the civil population whenever the Germans ordered them out of their houses in the middle of the night to sweep the roadways clean of nails and cut over trees. They did do a good job robbing the distribution centers for ration tickets, a lot of Dutch Jewish survivors thank their lives on those efforts.


I think that your impression of strong anti-American feelings in Holland is mostly imagination. I haven’t been in Holland for 35 years but still I think that the general opinion there is that in spite of the very large contributions of the Brits and the Canadians, the second world war would not have been won without the might an resources of the U.S.A. without them Europe would be speaking German, and Asia Japanese. They won’t forget.


-----A. M.


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The reader, doing the math, will realize that A. M. is probably nearing eighty years old, and was last in the Netherlands when Nixon was still the American president. As such, he represents a generation which was quite different from the current one - over there as much as here. Those were different times. The people who came through WWII were different people.
Europe and America have never been closer than they were then.