Preface

One day, as a child in Scotland in the early 1960s, my teacher at junior school asked us to find out about the lives of our parents the Second World War. What were their jobs? What events did they remember? My mother talked of her life in Holland and used the words ‘Jews behind the fireplace’, but when she tried to explain further, she became so emotional that she was unable to say more. I eventually reported back to my teacher on my father’s work in an anti-aircraft battery, but I sensed there was an untold story that I did not yet understand.

It was to be almost forty years before I was to discover the extraordinary narrative behind these words, and another twenty before the story was talked of outside the family. It is with a sense of respect and pride that I now share this story with you, as testimony to my mother’s courage and determination in the face of the deeply traumatic events the war unleashed in her world.

My mother’s story is a profound story of two distinct parts. During World War II, she and her family, the Okmas, sheltered seven people hiding from the Gestapo, six of them Jews, and this led to her becoming absorbed into the Dutch Resistance as part of a team fighting the Nazis. After the war, the second part of her ordeal began.

She had initially joined the Resistance as a payback for the support her family was receiving in sheltering the Jews. At first her role had been minor, but as the war progressed, the dangers increased, and by the end she had escaped the clutches of the Gestapo four times, the last occasion being when she alone, out of a group of some twenty Dutch folk, escaped a firing squad. The events left their legacy, and for years she would wake up at screaming point, overwhelmed by the image of a German soldier silhouetted against a grey sky, pointing his rifle at her as she cowered on the ground.

In 1962, she had eventually sought help from a psychiatrist for her debilitating distress. His diagnosis threatened the very fabric of her family. For eighteen years she lived with his threat looming over her until the last of her children left home. It was only in the 1970s and 1980s – when other organisations started to formally recognise her role in the war – that this recognition gave her the confidence to finally talk to the family about the events of that time.

In 1979, she and her family received recognition with the award of the Medal of the Righteous, from the Israeli organisation Yad Vashem. In 1980, she applied for a pension from the Dutch Foundation, Stichting 1940-1945, an organisation funded to help former members of the wartime Resistance. As she prepared for a hearing, she needed to find a witness to provide independent testimony to the Foundation. Her boyfriend during the war had been a commander in the Resistance and he agreed to provide testimony. The letter from this recognised Resistance commander had concluded with the words ’...if you could capture in words what she did when she was in the Resistance, you would capture the essence of what the Resistance was all about.’

The writing of this story started in 1992, when I was stationed in Washington DC. My mother had come to visit me for two weeks, and on the first evening, the conversation had drifted back to the Second World War. She had started talking, first about one event, then another, painting vivid vignettes of times past. She is not a natural storyteller, and I quickly became confused as she hopped back and forth in time, leaving many tales part-told, or trailing randomly into other unrelated events. Over some five years I stitched together the fragments, reviewed it with family members and refined it until it held together. It was circulated round the family, and the recounting and writing gave my mother a degree of therapy and helped put the more strident memories to rest. In 2012, as we celebrated her 90th birthday, we told the local paper a bit about what had happened. The story rapidly gained the attention of the Scottish press, and strangers in the sheltered home where she lived started approaching her and congratulating her, something that gave her a quiet pleasure.

Over the years, I was able to trace descendants of all the Jews who had hidden in the house and, through their comments, gain insight into their parents’ experiences, which I have incorporated in this book. The appearance in the press also helped others trace my mother. In 2015, seventy years after the end of the war, the descendants of her wartime boyfriend were able to locate the article in the Scottish press and use it to track her down, and we were able to exchange memories of these past events. Some final pieces of the puzzle fell into place.

This is my mother’s story. It is the story of a young, single woman in Occupied Holland. She was christened Grietje[1], but was affectionately called Kieks by everyone.

The events described here occurred fifty years before I first started to write them down. The first strands my mother related with intensity and anger: anger directed towards the Germans, the Jews, her family, everyone, and most especially psychiatrists. With the retelling, her anger subsided and in some cases was redirected. This is not a contemporaneous account, but an attempt to unscramble confused memories, many of which had been locked away unspoken for half a century. There may inevitably be mistakes, inconsistencies and ambiguities, but I believe these do not detract from the essence of the overall story. All the major events that shaped her war have been included in the story.

Finally, I recognise that the experiences she and her family went through were not unique in Holland. When the war ended, thousands of Jewish refugees appeared on the streets all around the country. The people of Holland hid many Jews during the war; these Jews were sheltered by individuals and families such as the Okmas, and these other families suffered similar experiences and pressures. This book is dedicated to all these families.

Grietje Okma Scott died in her sleep on 4th January 2016.

 

Kieks on her 90th birthday