Once the war had ended, the Dutch government set up investigatory panels looking into everything from possible war crimes to minor instances of anti-Semitism. A few months on, a letter arrived for Willem, the first official acknowledgement of his role in protecting the Jews. It was from one of the minor panels, which told him that a complaint had been received and a decision had been made to investigate a report of anti-Semitism. The report was that Willem had been abusing and insulting Jews. He was called to face the panel and answer the charges.
As the enquiry unfolded, it soon became clear that it was all connected with the incident when he had spotted Joop leaning out of the window in full view of the street, and the angry language that he had used in reaction. When Willem was called to testify, he described the circumstances and repeated the words he had used: ’Keep your face away from the bedroom window! Your big Jewish nose will be spotted and we will all be taken by the Gestapo!’ His story was unchallenged and the case was dismissed. The tribunal chairman, himself Jewish, privately offered his sympathies to Willem: ‘What you and your family did was good work. This should never have been brought in front of the panel’.
The event deeply upset the family in light of the hardships all of them, including the Jewish onderduikers, had endured. Kieks especially, having at times experienced the brunt of Joop’s abrasiveness, felt angry, indignant and insulted.
Having spent the war confined in the Okmas’ house it was perhaps not unsurprising that Joop lashed out at the people who had both been his protectors and his jailors. His whole world had been reduced to the events in the Okma house and in the room behind the mirror. And so the incident with Willem was one of the very few events where there was real action and it had festered in his mind as a major injustice. Perhaps Joop felt this tribunal was the only way he could receive official recognition of his suffering. The Jews in the house suffered in quite a different way to the Okmas.
With the war over, Piet could now reclaim his true name, Sallie. He and his wife, Lien, quickly went to collect their son, whom they could now speak of as Bram instead of as Jantje. They followed Kieks’ directions and travelled to Willemsdorp, where they found the house set between the dyke and the water, surrounded by traces of the few pigs that had lived there till recently. Kieks had told them that Bram was now formally registered as Jantje, the son of the woman Jantje, and his new status troubled Sallie and Lien. All sorts of scenarios may have played out in their minds as they prepared to collect him. Many young children had disappeared, possibly adopted, and would they ever get him back?
When they reached the house between the dykes, they found an elderly man, and their first thought was probably that he had papers to show that he was the child’s grandfather. Sallie introduced himself and his wife and told the old man that young Jantje was Bram, his son, and that he wanted to see him immediately. The child was produced without hesitation and Grandfather tried to invite them in, but Sallie declined. He was distressed by the overwhelming sense of poverty that clung to the shack, and the aroma of the unclean pigs was an unpleasant reminder that his son had been staying in an environment which was entirely abhorrent to his religion. After a few hurried words, he turned with his wife and son, and set off for their new life.
The poor foster family were still owed the money for the last two months and Kieks visited a few weeks later to settle the outstanding debt and to say thank you. Kieks felt an overwhelming wave of anger towards Sallie for the lack of gratitude and callous sudden removal of the child, but at the same time, wondered if she was overreacting and letting her emotions get out of control.
The Hekschers soon got over the shock of the poverty and the pigs at Willemsdorp, and without prompting, quickly went back to say their own profound thank you. In later years they made several visits, and Bram was to spend several summer holidays at the farm – even though they were farming pigs – maintaining the bond of affection that had formed in these early years.
Sallie and his family returned to their home village of Coevorden, near the German border. Most of their relatives and friends had been wiped out in the Holocaust. He and his wife had had fourteen brothers and sisters between them before the war, now only one survived. The local synagogue had had a congregation of several thousand before the war, but afterwards perhaps only forty returned.
Fortunately for Sallie, his lawyer had continued to manage his affairs meticulously throughout the war, and the man had been pleased and proud to hand back to Sallie all the deeds to his properties. It was then that Sallie was reminded of the visit to Citroenstraat in 1942 by the man with the red stripe on his trousers, and discovered the explanation for the mysterious visit.
The man had in fact been a private investigator. The conscientious lawyer had been keeping Sallie’s drapery business running profitably, putting the profits to one side until the moment he would be able to return them to their owner. The man who had first brought Sallie into contact with the Okmas went by the name of Kraantje, and he had realised that the lawyer had access to Sallie’s money, and so had tried to get his hands on some of it. He had told the lawyer that Sallie was being looked after by the Okmas and they needed money to buy provisions, claiming that he had been asked to get funds and pass them on. The careful lawyer hired the investigator to go into the house and listen for the sounds of other people living upstairs. The report eventually came back that there were no signs of refugees living there, and with that, the lawyer had refused to hand over anything. There was also a suggestion that when he didn’t get any money, Kraantje had tried to spread rumours about where the Hekschers might be hiding. Fortunately, no one had paid any attention to him.
The Heckshers soon renewed contact with the Okmas and the two families maintained good and friendly relations for many years.
The strains of living on top of each other for three years had left their toll, and for a while, little was said between the younger Okmas and the refugees as they went their separate ways. Kieks felt that her family had given everything to people who had continually taken but never given, while the refugees, who knew nothing of the daily hardships the family had endured beyond their hiding place, felt they had been prisoners as much as guests, and had found it stressful having no control of their lives and having to rely on strangers for their every need; living a life which was alien to everything they had experienced before the war.
Kieks slowly adjusted to life without the refugees. There was a sense of victory in having beaten the Nazis by successfully sheltering the onderduikers, but the sense of loss was much greater: the loss of friends and family over the last years, the disruption of their close family bonds, and the unsettling way the Jews had departed with so little acknowledgement after so much effort to keep them alive. Their dangerous work risking their lives for the Resistance also seemed to be disregarded; the Dutch government did little to support the former Resistance workers at this time, as it concentrated its efforts on the overwhelmingly massive task of rebuilding the country after the ravages of war. In the immediate years after the war, Kieks felt it was as if their contribution had been judged pointless and irrelevant. At times she felt despondently flat, at other times she was just angry.
Chris was reunited with his children very soon after the war ended. Martha had visited them regularly and had brought him news of how they were doing, so that was one worry he had not had to face. There had been tensions between Chris and the others in the house, and after they went their separate ways, the Van Gelderens and the Hekschers broke all contact with him. However, Martha remained very close to Chris and to his daughter Lisette, and she and Chris even considered marriage, although the religious differences proved too insurmountable for both of them. In later years, Chris’s eldest daughter, Lisette, was to spend some summer holidays together with members of the Okma family.
The Van Gelderens – Joop and Bep – had a more tortuous journey to reunite their family. They had put their two young children into hiding in 1942, but when the war ended they had no idea where their children were or even whether they had survived the war. For a long time they worked tirelessly trying to track them down, contacting all the various tracking agencies, including Jewish foundations, police authorities, organisations such as the Red Cross, and a government agency set up to track people who had been in hiding. At first they found a number of more distant family members who had survived their own ordeals, but there was no sign of their own children.
Their eldest was Carrie, who had been sheltered by the family of Piet Brakel’s brother, Jet and Wim, until Piet was captured and tortured. The family had moved her as soon as Piet Brakel had been detained, transferring her to Friesland where she had been looked after by a second set of foster parents. These foster parents and Carrie had grown very fond of each other and the family found it hard to hand her over. Eventually the families made contact and Carrie had been handed back to Joop and Bep, an event Carrie herself found quite traumatic.
Their other child was Ernst, who had been sheltered by another church member, and by coincidence had been living in a home in Abrikozenstraat, a street running directly behind Citroenstraat. He had been picked up in a Gestapo raid immediately after the torturing of Piet Brakel and had been sitting locked in the van parked outside number 18 while the Gestapo team had gone on to raid the Okma household. He was later taken to Scheveningen Prison, and subsequently put on a train to a concentration camp. By an amazing stroke of sheer good luck, he was saved by someone from the Resistance, plucked from the train[41] by an individual determined to deprive the Nazis of at least one victim. He was then put in the hands of a second set of foster parents, and finally returned to his parents a year after the end of the war. Joop, Bep and their reunited family kept in touch with Martha for several years, and continued their friendship with the Hekschers for the rest of their lives.
Ruurd and his wife Corrie had managed to sustain their young family through the war. Despite the war, Ruurd’s business had prospered, and he had bought a paint factory in a nearby town. Some three years after he had bought it, a fire had razed it to the ground. There had been a large quantity of sulphur stored in the factory and when it had caught fire, the toxic fumes had drifted over the town, which then had to be evacuated. This storage had been a breach in the regulations and Ruurd had been heavily fined, losing most of what he had made during the war.
Douwe returned to normal life and, as far as Kieks could see, he adjusted with little difficulty. On occasions, he mused that when he wanted to travel somewhere by train, his first urge was sometimes to print himself a ticket – before reminding himself that this was no longer appropriate. He and Tiny had one child, Dirk, who was born in 1943.
Ella had taught throughout the war, though she had often been ill. After the war, the doctors spotted a shadow on her lungs, which they had said may have been a mild form of tuberculosis, and she had to stop teaching until this eventually faded away. Then she could continue her teaching career. She had become closely involved in the work of sheltering the Jews in the year after Kieks had left and was very proud of what the family had done. In the years following the war, she vigorously supported the Zionist movement and was inspired by its efforts to form a Jewish homeland in Palestine. She also became an enthusiastic ambassador for Esperanto, the newly invented language, which its proponents believed could replace the multitude of languages and lead to understanding and peace across the world. She travelled round Europe attending Esperanto conferences until the early 1970s.
After their marriage, Trijntje and Dirk had moved to the city of Groningen in the north-east of Holland. In the autumn of 1944, they had gone into hiding to avoid the forced labour squads and had ended up back in Citroenstraat, where they had stayed until the end of the war. Then they had to deal with the fallout from the death of Dirk’s brother, Popke, who had been killed when the German soldier had fired on the crowd in Dam Square, two days after the end of the war. Instead of returning to Groningen, they moved to Amsterdam, where Dirk took charge of the firm that had belonged to Popke.
Martha left the house in 1945 and moved a short distance away. Jan and Truida married in 1945 and moved out to the nearby street of Galileistraat, and then in 1952, moved on to another house in Leeuweriklaan, where Ella and Moeder joined them.
The last of the Okmas to leave Citroenstraat were Willem and Diny, who left in 1953 and moved to Apeldoorn in central Holland.
Some of the Okmas leaving Citroenstraat after the war
The relationship between Kieks and Kees had ended abruptly when she had discovered the Waffen SS link. Her own harrowing experience had brought home to Kieks what an achievement it had been for Kees to escape the clutches of the Waffen SS; she now recognised the bravery and courage in his actions, and the heroic way he had protected her. Eventually she took her own courage in hand and made contact with Kees, steeling herself to tell the story of the events in the field.
They met and started to talk. Perhaps she even used words she had used before, as she prepared to tell her story. “There must be no secrets between us.” Before she could say more, Kees interrupted. No secrets? He had news of his own to give her.
After her sudden departure, he had moved on with his life and had made friendships with a couple of girls. He was now living with them and wanted time to explore this new lifestyle. He was too young and the future too uncertain to be committed to one girl, to be engaged. He wanted to end his engagement with Kieks. They should continue to go their separate ways.
Kieks left. She felt numb and returned home in a daze, her heart broken and her hopes shattered.
Reeling from another knock, Kieks found it hard to adjust to the new peace and the mundane routines of ordinary life. During the war there had been continual stress, fear and tension, but the time had also been infused with extraordinary excitement and adventure, a feeling that others depended on her, and that she was doing something important. That was all gone.
Some of the memories from the war were happy ones. Thinking of the mischievous operations in the tulip fields always made her feel good, and she embroidered a small scene as a reminder of the occasion when she had helped remove fuel from right under the gaze of the Germans. For many years she kept the picture on her wall, of a tulip field with a small punt in the foreground and a tulip barn in the background.
It was now time to plan for the future, and Kieks thought back to the rescue at Hoofddorp, where she had helped the wounded Resistance fighters. She decided to train as a nurse and enrolled at a local hospital. But as time moved on, other less happy memories started flooding back, clamouring for her attention, and as she began her training, she became increasingly disturbed by them.
Kieks (left) resting while training as a nurse after the war (1946)
As 1945 rolled on towards 1946, Kieks heard from Truida and Jan Boone that Kees had been interrogated by the police and would probably face trial at some time. The way that Willem, and now Kees, were being hounded by the authorities made her feel nervous. What would happen if her own story became known, and how would it be interpreted?
The memories of the wartime events were continuing to prey on her mind all the time now. The most deeply etched memory was her experience in the field when she had been briefly captured by the convoy guards, her slow, slow roll in the snow, rolling in full view of the guards, the guard silhouetted against the grey sky, approaching closer and closer, and then turning away. Lying there stock-still, for hour after hour, petrified that at any moment the soldier would come back and shoot. The cracking machine-gun fire, the piercing screams, the guns roaring long after the screams had stopped.
Sometimes she thought about the soldier who had started to walk towards her and then turned. Was he the man she had seduced? Had he seen a movement? Had he seen her there, recognised her and let her lie away from the other hostages, to escape the firing squad? Or had he just got up to relieve himself, and not seen further than a few inches beyond his boots?
As Kieks wondered if she should step forward and provide support for Kees, she became increasingly worried that the questioning would lead to her humiliating and painful story being revealed. Would the courts see her actions as having been a desperate effort to save her life, or would they turn round and accuse her of treason? That was the accusation being levelled at Kees. It was frightening that the people who had risked their lives fighting against the Germans, people like Willem and Kees, were being pursued by the police, while the people who had done nothing were encouraged to get on with rebuilding their lives.
She was to replay the events of that day in her mind many times: Was there anything else she could have done to escape with her life? The answer was always no. She had used the only means she had of saving her life. If she had gone back to Kees sooner, would their romance have continued? That she didn’t know. Each time she replayed the events, they became more vivid, but there was never any closure. She couldn’t possibly process the devastating memories, nor comprehend their full effect.
In 1947, when the diary of Anne Frank was published, Kieks was quick to get a copy. She could readily identify with the events and the atmosphere described in the house, the tensions and the fear, but reading it left her with a hollow sense of frustration.
For Kieks, it brought into focus many of the unsettling events following her own family’s efforts. She dwelled despondently on the way they had been repaid for their years of struggle by a summons to an anti-Semitism tribunal. How could the complex ordeal be distilled into such a trivial accusation? She thought again of the ordeal that Kees was facing. Jan Boone and Truida were still passing on news about the likely trial, and Jan expected to be questioned as a witness. He was worried about how the investigators were focusing on the details of Kees’s involvement with the SS at the start of the war, and ignoring how he had relentlessly fought for Holland against the Germans in the later years.
Kieks felt families such as hers were being ignored, the only recognition her family had received being the quiet words of kindness from the tribunal chairman at the end of Willem’s hearing. She felt deeply hurt and forsaken. She clearly recognised the abysmally difficult conditions experienced by Anne Frank and those like her who had hidden in shelters, but in the years immediately after the war, she felt the diary and popular sentiment seemed to completely overlook the people who had chosen to protect them. In Anne Frank’s case, that disregard had been an inevitable consequence of the circumstances, the Franks and the families who protected them had lived apart, and anyway, the journal had been written as a private journal, never intended to be published for the world to read. When she read the diary it also struck her that the events Anne Frank had experienced seemed so ordinary and mundane, sometimes quite similar to how their own everyday routines had been. Her own experiences made the security blunders these people had made jump out of the page at her. The Franks had not properly considered their own version of Willem’s stern security strictures, but there again: they had not been able to go out in the street to learn what was needed to survive the Nazi Occupation.
The feelings of bitterness and acrimony that welled up when Kieks read the diary were intense. She knew her reaction was not quite rational but, these days, she couldn’t quite control the overwhelming waves of anger that seemed to spring out of nowhere, pushing rational thought aside.
She kept coming back to the possibility of testifying in Kees’s trial, and worrying that their probing questions might lead them to the story about the German guard in the field. That wouldn’t just be publicly humiliating and dangerous for her and the family; the overriding fear was that she might be charged with treason.[42] She played the events over in her mind again and again, trying to recollect exactly what had happened, how she could describe it in a way that didn’t bring shame to the family. What would she say? How would she describe it?
She eventually discussed things with Jan Boone, and came to realise the significance in his preoccupation with Kees’s links with the SS. It dawned on her that Kees’s involvement with the SS at the start of the war was something that Jan had witnessed, but she had not. Perhaps, after all, it was reasonable for her to avoid the trial.
As she replayed those events from the snow-covered field in her mind, the nightmares started: the field, the snow, the trailers, the soldier. The torment always ended with her lying in the ditch looking up, the menacing German soldier outlined against the grey sky. She would wake up, sometimes paralysed in a cold sweat, sometimes screaming with fear.
Kees’s story was slightly more complex than the one he had told Kieks in November 1944. Kieks had found his involvement with the Waffen SS abhorrent; after the war, the authorities also found it so. He would eventually pay for his dalliance with an investigation and trial. The investigation started in July 1945, where every step of his path through the war was explored, probed, tested with witnesses, challenged, and prepared for a report to the court. As was customary in Holland, the trial itself was a short review of the evidence gathered in the investigation, and completed in just a few days. For Kees the whole experience was protracted and deeply distressing. The proceedings were inscribed on the court record, providing later historians with the opportunity to explore the events, but that was little comfort to Kees.
The evidence presented was that immediately after Germany had invaded Holland, Kees had contacted his school friend, Jan Boone, and another friend, telling them of his intention to get training in the Waffen SS, infiltrating them to gain insight into how best to fight them from within the Resistance. There had been adverts in the newspapers for training courses and he had gone to Munich in June 1940 to attend such a course. The evidence also stated that while he was there, he had taken every opportunity to persuade other Dutch people to leave the training course and go back to Holland, singing patriotic Dutch songs on the piano and disrupting events as much as possible. It stated that in October that year, he had refused to take an oath to Hitler, resulting in his being sent to prison back in Holland and from there to the Sachsenhausen concentration camp in Germany. He had arrived at the camp in March 1941, and after eighteen months had emerged in September 1942. Returning to Holland, he had first gone to Zeeland for ten months and then had renewed his contact with Jan Boone and had headed to The Hague, finding refuge with the Okmas at Citroenstraat.
After the Gestapo search of Citroenstraat, he had stayed in the area around The Hague until about May 1944, when he had travelled to Dordrecht. During this time he was working with Douwe in Hillegom. The move to Dordrecht had been in response to his Resistance group being betrayed by a traitor, Pieter Marsman. Once the traitor was identified, the man was killed and after that Kees had departed for Dordrecht.
Kees had arrived in Hillegom just before Dolle Dinsdag, and a few days before Kieks had. He had stayed only a couple of weeks before moving on to Haarlemmermeer to start a new Resistance group. He claimed not to have made any effort to hide his past links with the Waffen SS, and some of the team there would later remember the truth of these details after the war was over. While at Haarlemmermeer he had undertaken a large number of sabotage activities, including raids on administration offices, and distribution of food stamps.
He remembered the transporting of weapons and deliveries around the area. There had been several close calls. In September 1944 there had been two incidents on successive days, both outside the area where he was commander: in the first there had been a shoot-out with the Germans and a narrow escape when the three Resistance fighters had almost crashed their car, and the next day the men delivering the weapons had been surprised by Landwachters at a farm and had been shot. Kieks’ memory of that time was probably a confabulation of the two events.
After the war, in July 1945, Kees was arrested on a charge of treason on the basis of having joined the SS. There was speculation that some people in the area may have wanted him out of the way. He had been hiding on a farm and was arrested after a letter he had sent had been passed on to the ‘special investigations police’, a special group of police investigating wartime events. This letter had included mention that he had called off his engagement to Kieks.
He was interrogated by the special police, released, and sent for trial in 1949. Jan Boone was one of many witnesses interviewed, and in February 1949 Kees went to trial, which in Holland at that time was more of a formal review of the evidence gathered in the interview process. Kees was acquitted in the Special Court in Middelburg at the request of the prosecutor. One of the arguments presented was that legally he could not be found guilty of joining the enemy because he had refused to take the oath of allegiance to Hitler. The training he had taken was advertised as ‘training with no strings attached’. In addition to his acquittal, the court went beyond the remit of the proceedings and commended him for his work in the Resistance.
The investigation and trial angered Kees tremendously, with his anger directed at the so-called ‘heroes of Dolle Dinsdag’ who had joined his group in September 1944, but had been too afraid to get involved with the truly dangerous dirty work. The only ‘courage’ they had shown was to turn on him after the war. He would later acknowledge that his link with the SS had been reckless; at his trial his lawyer had pointed out that he had since paid a high price with his time in Sachsenhausen concentration camp.
A report of the time also revealed more details of the story about the young German Jew in his Resistance group, Kareltje. The evidence came from a Ge van Buuren[43]. Van Buuren said that Kareltje had told Kees he was going to contact him to get a weapon, and Kees had subsequently told Van Buuren not to give Kareltje the gun because he was too young. On the same day Van Buuren had turned him down, Kareltje must have lost his temper because he had gone out and hit a German soldier with a brick and stolen his gun. It was shortly after this that Kareltje had died in a gun fight.
As Willem tried to rebuild the harmony of family life, he came across the letter from Scotland that had come at the start of the war, and remembered that first pang of fear as he had worried how it might be perceived by the Gestapo. He now wrote back to Archie Scott, thanking him for his letter and affirming that the whole family was well after surviving the war.
Archie had been in an Air Defence battery in Glasgow during the war, and afterwards he was part of the occupying forces in Belgium. When he received their letter, he took some leave and travelled across to visit the Okmas.
Archie in Belgium
He made several visits there, and when Kieks had an occasional afternoon off from nursing training, the two of them would take the family’s growing brood of children down to the local beach and let them play in the sand. Kieks found it difficult to understand him, but their attempts at speaking French and his efforts to communicate were humorous, forcing her to concentrate on the challenge of understanding what he was trying to communicate and to stop feeling sorry for herself. She found herself increasingly enjoying his company, and relaxing away from Citroenstraat, taking her mind off all the tumultuous memories.
Archie and Douwe in 1945 (Archie was 5 foot 10 or 175 cm tall)
Other members of the family were having children; her closest sister, Trijntje, had had her first son in November 1944, whom they named Miente, followed by a second, Popke, in 1946, and twin girls, Martha and Truida, in 1947. Her second sister, Truida, had married Jan and had had two boys, Pieter (1946) and Dirk (1949). Life was moving on with a fresh start for all the family.
The relationship between Archie and Kieks blossomed, and they began to talk of getting married. Kieks’ mother was not sure: Scotland was a long way away, and little snippets of Archie’s behaviour hinted at a big cultural gap. Kieks was enjoying the romance, and the promise of moving to Scotland held an extra allure: the chance to get away from Holland and all the bad memories of the war that seemed to stare back at her everywhere she looked, haunting her and invading the very fabric of her dreams. If she went to Scotland, she might escape this haunting, flee this vendetta by the authorities that had already engulfed Willem and Kees and seemed to rage around her.
As she succumbed to the courtship, the lure continued to pull at her and in May 1948 they got married. Kieks set off with him for a new life in Scotland, trying to leave her wartime memories behind.
The wedding of Kieks and Archie (1948)
Kieks and Archie with Ruurd’s children, Dirk and Ineke, in attendance
Wedding of Kieks and Archie Scott
Wedding map
1) Tante Sibbel, sister of Kieks’ Father; 2) Oom Jan Verdam, Sibbel’s husband; 3) Martha; 4) Douwe; 5) Diny, wife of Willem; 6) Willem; 7) Jan Boone, husband of Truida; 8) Wil Spaans (with whom Kieks stayed at the end of the war); 9) Truida; 10) Ella; 11) Corrie, wife of Ruurd; 12) Tiny, wife of Douwe; 13) Bessie Scott, sister of Archie; 14) Dirk, husband of Trijntje; 15) Ruurd; 16) Archie Scott; 17) Trijntje; 18) Kieks; 19) Moeder, Truida Okma; 20) Rev Muir Henderson, Church of Scotland minister in Rotterdam; 21) Alex McFarlane, Best Man; 22) Dirk, son of Ruurd; 23) Ineke, daughter of Ruurd
They travelled over to Glasgow and settled in the centre of the city. In 1953, their first son, Andrew (this author), was born, followed in 1956 by a second, David, and finally twin girls, Ella and Christine, in 1961. Kieks’ mother occasionally visited Glasgow, and Kieks took the family over to Holland to visit the family every other summer for several years.
The early years in Scotland
The Scott family in Glasgow (from left): David, Kieks with Ella, Archie, Moeder, now Grandmother Okma (‘Oma’) with Christine, and Andrew
Andrew and David with Trijntje’s husband, Dirk, on a family holiday on Texel, circa 1960
Even after the move to Glasgow and setting up a new life there, and despite all the pleasant distractions of raising a young family, the unresolved memories continued to haunt Kieks. Night after night she would wake up screaming, terrified, torn out of sleep by her recurring nightmare: slowly, slowly rolling in the snow and then looking up into the ominous profile of a German soldier silhouetted against the bleak grey sky, her moment of death at hand.
Some thirteen years after leaving Holland, just after the girls were born, Archie, at a loss as to how else to help her, persuaded her to seek psychiatric help, and he went with her on her first consultation.
With great effort, she started to recount her wartime experiences to the psychiatrist, in all their painful detail. He sat and listened quietly, occasionally asking probing questions as she spoke.
The war had finished some sixteen years previously, and the amazing stories of the exploits of the French Resistance had caught the public imagination, generating many fictional accounts, films and TV dramas in the intervening years. To those people who had never left Scotland, the exploits may have seemed just that: dramatic fiction. No one will ever know what went through the psychiatrist’s mind. It is quite possible he was a religious man, possibly with very clear Presbyterian views on what was right and what was wrong, as was common in Scotland at this time. It is quite possible that he had had little experience in dealing with foreign patients; Kieks’ accent was quite strong and her English was not altogether fluent, especially when she became emotional. It is possible that he regarded post-traumatic stress as a man’s disease, a soldier’s disease. It is possible that he regarded compassion or empathy as unprofessional, a sin.
He pronounced his diagnosis. He said the stories were unbelievable, so unbelievable that they could only be a figment of her imagination. He twisted the knife further. If her story was true, it contained evidence that she was unfit to be a mother. The outrageous story of her lying in the snow with the German soldier was an indecent and shameful fabrication; if it was true, it proved she had no moral compass and was especially unfit to raise children. It implied she was morally incapable of bringing them up properly, and if that was the case, he had a responsibility to have the children removed and put into care. He would do this – unless she admitted to making up the whole story. What she really needed, he told her, was counselling to stop telling and believing these lies. His treatment would be to assist her to come to terms with reality, to curb her overactive imagination, and to realise that the events had never happened outside her head.
Whatever thoughts went through his mind, he could be confident that this diagnosis and its barbed codicil would ensure that this troublesome woman would never disturb the serenity of his consulting room again. He may well have regarded this as a quick, simple diagnosis, one of his more successful cases.
His reaction shocked Kieks to her core. She left incredulous and speechless with rage. As she returned home, his words came sharply into focus, for she knew he truly did have the power to have her children removed and put into foster care. I remember vividly, as a young child, her coming home that day with my father, cursing the psychiatrist and swearing she would never go back. The late afternoon light was fading, the lights on the Christmas tree were on, and my father’s sister was babysitting us.
When she first came home, she was shouting and swearing, cursing the man roundly and repeatedly. In the days that followed, her raging emotions soon turned to fear and alarm, as the full significance of his cruel threat hit home; the possibility that we children might all be taken away. What menacing and callous new nightmare had this man visited upon her? This was only a decade after young women in Britain were being sent to mental institutions for the rest of their lives, for the mere act of having an illegitimate child. As a woman, she was powerless in the face of this cold propriety. The more she thought about this the more frightened she became, and she was adamant she would never have anything more to do with that man.
The threat from the Nazis was now in the past, but this new threat was very present. It would cast its shadow over her every day until all the children had left home. This greater fear of losing her children chilled her to the bone, overshadowing the nightmares that had haunted her since the war. She must now survive a new treachery, and bear the pain of salt rubbed viciously into her still-fresh wounds.
The words of the psychiatrist had far-reaching effects. My father did not know what to believe; he had heard many words of praise and support from her family in Holland, and allusions to her work in the Resistance, but he did not know the whole of my mother’s story; she had only ever spoken of fragmented parts. Were these words of praise all based on lies? They both spoke separately to the church minister to find guidance. By the time Kieks spoke with him, the minister gave her some comfort, but seemed distant and detached. Sometime later, she went back to talk with him again but he was away on holiday, and instead she spoke with a church elder. He told her that ’they knew she made up these stories’, but that they would still try to help her.
She was furious at this dismissal, and the way her confidence had been betrayed. It was absolutely clear to her that she could talk to no one, because no one would believe or respect what she had done. For the duration of the war she had felt that God had been looking over her, protecting her as she tried to do good. Now, she felt abandoned by Him, forsaken. She was proud of the brave things she had done, but now she was being forced to treat them as something to be ashamed of, as a vulgar secret to be smothered and hidden away. She never spoke to the minister or anyone from the church about her experiences again. Instead, she gave herself the focused goals of proving the psychiatrist wrong by bringing up her children as a virtuous and conscientious mother until they were old enough to leave home, and of trying to conform to the expectations of the alien society that surrounded her with its alien values.
A few years later, the teacher in my junior school asked us all to go and find out from our parents what they had done in the Second World War. We headed home with great excitement and a sense of competitiveness: Whose parents had had the most exciting story to tell?
As soon as I got home I asked my mother what she had done during the war. She was evasive at first, but eventually said, ’There were Jews in the fireplace’. The answer frightened me. A few weeks before, I had found a book in the back of the bookcase, hidden from view, containing upsetting pictures of Jews in concentration camps at the moment of liberation. Groups of skeletal bodies, piles of corpses and cremation ovens had stared out at me.
I hesitantly asked if she had been burning Jews, but she quickly corrected herself, ’No, no, the Jews were in a space behind the fireplace and the family had been hiding them’.
Now I sensed respectable excitement. ’Were you in the Resistance?’ I asked.
‘No, we have to say that there was no such thing as the Resistance,’ she replied, her voice thick with stress. ’There were individuals who fought against the Germans, but we have to say there was no organisation’.
She couldn’t put out of her mind the strictures of the psychiatrist, the threats that had prompted her to repeat the words of his formulaic admonishment. She quickly became very emotional, choked with tears and unable to say more.
I was confused. Later I heard from my father about his work in the anti-aircraft batteries near Glasgow, and decided to use his story to report to class. When we returned to school, we all agreed that the most exciting story was from one boy whose father had flown a Spitfire and had parachuted over England.
A while later I came across her small Dutch Bible, with most of the pages torn out and only a few fine paper leaves of the Gospels remaining. When I asked about it, she told me of the hunger during the Hongerwinter of the final year of the war, and how they had needed to smoke just to cope with the dreadful ache of the hunger. She exclaimed how painful it was for her to talk about these times, and quickly moved on to other things. The full extent of her story would elude me for many years.
As I look back to those times, I wonder if this psychiatrist’s laziness and incompetence sowed the seeds that led to the eventual end of my parents’ marriage. With this flawed diagnosis, my mother had been labelled a fanciful liar, and my father never knew how much to believe of what she said. The core of mutual respect that is needed to secure a marriage had been destroyed.
As time wore on, the nightmares became less frequent, suppressed and superseded by the threat of the psychiatrist’s words, but they did not stop completely. I remember being asked occasionally if her screams had disturbed my childhood sleep.
Kieks did try to tell her story to the world in the late 1960s. The Reader’s Digest was a popular magazine of the time that invited their readers to send in their stories. My mother had tried to write down her story, and she gave me the manuscript to read just before sending it off. Reading it, I found it incomprehensible, with many confusing allusions to parts of the story she couldn’t tell. When I tried to ask her about it, she dismissed my questions angrily, exclaiming that some parts of her story could never be told. Her story was politely turned down by the magazine.
As we grew up in Glasgow, she seldom mentioned her experiences during the war, although occasionally glimpses slipped through. I decided to take up German, an option that would allow me to escape Latin, a subject I just couldn’t come to terms with. At first she was angry at me for choosing to learn a language she detested, when I had never learnt her mother tongue. However, she quickly accepted my decision and was always willing to help me learn my vocabulary. She was briefly irritated by my choice of German but at least no one in the family was interested in psychiatry. That would have been completely unacceptable.
Perhaps we gained further insight from her reaction to a television programme that appeared in the 1970s. The programme was ‘’Allo ‘Allo!’, a comedy about the French Resistance. All the family enjoyed it – apart from my mother. It angered her, made her feel the Resistance was being laughed at, and she felt compelled to go out of the room whenever it was on.
Our family lived near Glasgow, and from 1963 we often travelled to the Isle of Eigg for summer holidays. The island is a small green patch among the Inner Hebrides, off the west of Scotland, about five miles from the mainland town of Mallaig. It is a few miles across, crowned by An Sgùrr, a dramatic towering block of granite almost 1,000 feet high at its centre, and swathed with attractive beaches on the west coast. Its population then was less than seventy and it was a wonderful wilderness of dramatic geology and beautiful beaches, including the ‘Singing Sands’, which screech noisily when people walk on them. At that time, there was a single farmhouse on the island that took guests, and those visitors who were prepared to put up with the absence of mains gas and the intermittent electricity would come for a week and explore the walks that range over the island. They were joined by occasional larger groups from schools or universities, who also camped or used a caravan nearby.
The Eigg landscape with the granite An Sgùrr forming the skyline
One summer, in about 1976, my mother travelled up with the family by train to Mallaig and on to Eigg, as she had done so often before. They went to stay with the family at Laig Farm, where Margaret Kirk, the proprietor, was now a good family friend. The large house now had running water and a generator that provided electricity in the evening, facilities that were still not available in many of the other houses on the island. On this occasion it was crowded, as a group of German school children were visiting for a few days. As Kieks strolled around, she caught sight of one of the teachers, and froze in shock: She was convinced she was staring at the face of the guard she had seduced all those years ago. A startled look, of recognition perhaps, passed across his face also, and an hour later she received a message from one of the guesthouse helpers. The teacher would like to meet with her privately, and would she please join him in one of the quieter communal rooms?
In blind horror she grabbed a coat and hastened out into the wild countryside. She walked for over an hour, and eventually came back to a barn on the edge of the farm. She sat there for several hours silently, filled with dread, unable to face going back into the building, and the possibility of having to speak to this man. Later, when it was dark, she heard people out on the farm calling for her and looking around with torches. She went back in, but carefully avoided all the common rooms and any possible meeting with any of the Germans.
Following the disruption caused by the search, the teacher perhaps understood something of her feelings and seemed to avoid her from then on. As was common with such groups, he and the German party left the next day on an expedition and would camp for a few nights. My father was bewildered at what had happened, uncomprehending as to why she had completely disappeared for four hours, and angry with embarrassment because of the search parties that had gone out to look for her. She would offer no word of explanation to him or anyone else.
Later, they each spoke to me separately on the phone: my father venting his frustration at her disappearance and my mother talking only of a man she had met during the war, someone she absolutely couldn’t speak to now.
The family did wonder about this event on Eigg. When I spoke to the proprietor, Margaret Kirk, she was politely dubious and uncharacteristically reluctant to get involved in a discussion. Some thought that the experience of unexpectedly meeting German speakers may have triggered a false memory in my mother; the diagnosis of the psychiatrist still left its shadow. On the other hand, the shooting of civilians, as my mother later described, was a war crime. If the teacher was asked about my mother’s reaction, he had a very strong motive to deny the story, even if it were true.
In October 1979, seventeen years after our mother had visited the psychiatrist, my sisters left home to go to university, the last of the children to leave home.
In December that year, just three months after the departure of the girls, the whole Okma family was part of a group of ninety-six people who were honoured by the Israeli government through their official memorial to victims of the Holocaust, Yad Vashem. The memorial recognised the role and sacrifices the family had made in sheltering Jews during the war, and awarded them the Medal of the Righteous, inscribed with the words ‘Whosoever saves a single life, saves an entire universe’ (Mishnah, Sanhedrin 4:5). Their names were to be added to the Wall of Honour in Jerusalem’s Garden of the Righteous.
The award was made only when Jews had nominated individuals and provided testimony to confirm that the nominees had saved their lives. More than thirty-four years after the war, the family was presented with the award in the Utrecht Congress Centre in Holland, an eventual acknowledgement of their role in saving the onderduikers from Nazi capture and certain death. Yad Vashem was mandated to pay tribute to those people who had ‘acted in stark contrast to the mainstream of indifference and hostility that prevailed in the darkest time of history’.
The Yad Vashem records would show that the first letter on the Okma file was one from the Van Gelderens; clearly they were keen to record how much they fully appreciated the efforts that the Okmas had gone to in looking after them. The Hekshers and Kurt Lewin also provided testimony about the family’s bravery and kindness in risking their lives to help them, with Kurt also highlighting how much Teun van Dien had done to save his life.
Sallie Hekscher and Chris Lewin were present, but Lien and Bram were absent, while the Van Gelderens had both died just before the award was publicly announced. Bram explained that he had to look after his two-year-old son. His son was the age that he had been when Kieks had played with little Jantje and made sure he was safely sheltered through the war.
Later there was a reception with the Dutch Ambassador at the Kelvingrove Art Gallery in Glasgow. Kieks was humbled and honoured to receive this acknowledgement. Though the ordeal had been so many years ago, her life had been inexorably affected by her experiences, and she wore the award, a small decorative pin, proudly on her lapel for many years to come.
The letter announcing the award of the Yad Vashem Medal of the Righteous
In 1980, Kieks was persuaded by her nieces and sisters in Holland to apply for a Dutch Resistance pension. The memories of the guard approaching silhouetted against the sky, the screams and the gunfire in the field had at last started to fade, but at the same time she and Archie had separated and her financial circumstances in Glasgow were making life uncomfortable. She applied for a disability pension from a Dutch organisation called Stichting 1940-1945, an organisation funded to help former members of the wartime Resistance. As she put together her application for her Resistance pension, her sister, Trijntje, managed to make contact with Kees, who agreed to provide evidence in support of Kieks’ application.
Kees was already receiving a pension, and provided testimony in the form of a short letter to the Stichting 1940-1945. As a recognised Resistance commander his statement was not challenged. His letter was short (see Annex 2), but it confirmed the outlines of her claims: that she had been with the Resistance, acting as a courier, taking part in operations, setting up links with other groups, taking part in sheltering onderduikers, and it linked her with other high-profile individuals also known to have been in the Resistance. Twenty years too late, it proved that what she had revealed to the psychiatrist was not a tissue of lies.
As she wrote her application for the pension, she was again forced to confront and describe her wartime experiences in detail. This released many memories that she had managed to keep bottled up for almost half a century. The terrifying nightmares of the 1960s returned; the vivid image of the German Wehrmacht guard standing over her, silhouetted against the grey sky, reminding her of a time when she alone, of perhaps twenty Dutch people, had escaped a firing squad and cheated death.
Some time later, she was interviewed by a Pensions official and recounted her story in a quiet room, describing the various events she had been caught up in; dramatic, sometimes intimate vignettes that were still as vivid as if they had happened yesterday. They were also scrambled, fragments tumbling forth out of order, with strange gaps where the continuity didn’t seem to fit. As she talked, she felt a sense of heightened unreality in the peaceful interview room. At times she discerned an air of incredulity from the man, but at the same time she sensed compassion and reassurance in his responses. She was relieved that her story had already been corroborated by Kees, the man who ’had been there’. When she came out of the hearing she was utterly emotionally drained. At last she had been able to tell her story without criticism or rebuke, but the strain had been intense, exhausting to dredge through all that long-buried pain. She swore that if her application was turned down, she would never apply again, never relive the memories.
As she waited for the decision on her application, she was surprised to find how much the hearing had helped her cope with the memories. Having finally spoken them out loud, she could now handle them in a way she had not experienced before. The atmosphere of suspended disbelief seemed to make them less real and intrusive, while the compassion and the moral support eased her self-doubt and the feelings of shame and anger she had tried to fight for so many years.
She was awarded the pension. The sense of psychological support and respect, and the boost it gave to her self-esteem, was at least as valuable to her as the financial benefit. She also took comfort from the evidence that was now out there to support her story, the evidence filed with Yad Vashem, and the letter from Kees to the Pensions tribunal – a final, open recognition and confirmation of the shrouded truth of her story. For the first time, the intense feelings of persecution and anger ebbed away and she was able to talk.
In 1986, Trijntje told her that Kees had been interviewed on Dutch TV and there were stories everywhere about his wartime exploits. They had been triggered by the film that was appearing all over Holland, ’De Aanslag’, or ’The Assault’. It told the story of the police inspector’s assassination in October 1944, and the fallout from that event. It was clear that it was the same incident as the one Kees had talked about before going off to Haarlem, and the film was to win an Oscar for the ‘Best Foreign Language Film’. Trijntje and her daughters managed to get in touch with Kees again, and met him to reminisce over his time in Citroenstraat.
Even after my mother went through this final challenge and its successful outcome, there was another last twist in the narrative. My wife and I had our first son, Colin, in 1985, and in January 1987, I was diagnosed with Acute Myeloid Leukaemia, with my chance of surviving put at 50%. I now had my own struggle for survival – with a less dramatic backdrop than hers, but with the same stakes. As the family rallied round to support me, my mother’s struggle and her final recognition were relegated to the margins for a while. My treatment was stressful but very successful, and after a bone marrow transplant from my brother, I returned to work in December that year. I was preoccupied with getting back to living a normal family life and to resuming responsibilities at work, and for a while my mother and I were somewhat distant and detached.
I received a temporary posting in 1992 to work at the US Naval Research Laboratory in Washington DC. My mother came to visit me in Washington, and on the first evening, the state of my health was an inevitable topic of conversation. The talk drifted into her trip to Holland for the hearing on her pension, several years before the diagnosis. She talked first about the pension interview, which led her, at long last, to talk to me about the details of the war, describing where the Jews had been hiding, how they had been brought to the house, how she had helped bring in food, and how the family had worked together to support the household during the war. The events were dramatic, but her account involved unfamiliar and confusing names, with haphazard meanderings from one story to another, and I was soon very confused.
When I went to bed, the fragments of stories flitted around my mind, and I lay there, trying to fit them together to form a more complete picture. I had difficulty getting to sleep, and after a while I found a scrap of paper, and wrote down some headings, simply to follow the sequence and spot the inconsistencies where one memory had entangled with another. This led to more questions arising, and over two weeks in 1992, as we walked round taking in the sights of Washington, and sat over meals in restaurants and my apartment, she talked of more memories; vivid vignettes of the various incidents she had been caught up in. The story was something far more dramatic and complex than any of us in the family had ever suspected.
I worked on capturing, assimilating and writing the story behind ‘the Jews in the fireplace’ for some two years, and then in 1994 showed it to friends and family. My mother’s sister, Trijntje, and her family identified some inaccuracies, and after correcting them I sent out further copies and put the book to one side.
When she first started telling me the story, it still produced an overwhelming anger in her, and she couldn’t bring herself to talk about many of the events now described in this book. She could talk of the struggles to feed the extra mouths, the early events before the war, and the arrival of the Jews, little excitements like Willem stealing the suckling pig, and taking Jantje to the potato fields. She talked of delivering newsletters at night, guiding soldiers with her white envelope, and going into houses to prepare food for British parachutists. She also spoke of the frequent nightmares of the firing squad, and although she was careful to avoid spelling out exactly what had happened between her and the guard, she described the manhandling of the trailer with the secret weapon, referring obliquely to using her own ‘secret weapon’ (a description that I did not understand for a long time), and stumbling around in the dark trying to avoid the bodies lying in that field. Sorting these fragments out, putting them into order and into context, finally expressing and processing them, helped to calm her down.
At first, she tried to hide some of the details: her relationship with Kees, then his link with the Waffen SS and her reaction to this, and the events in Leeuwarden which had caused her to be up in North Holland and led to the incident with the secret weapon. I could sense that the telling of the story provided a therapy, and my frequent challenges to clarify the confusions caused her to rethink what had happened, and when, and who actually had been responsible for what. The order of events was particularly confused, and I started putting a month and year to each small fragment of the story, striving to make sense of the whole story. In the process of answering my questions and recognising the admiration from the family, her temperament changed. Her anger and unpredictability, which had often been close to the surface, receded.
In 1996, I heard that Kurt (Chris) Lewin had written his own journal and shortly after, Trijntje received a bound copy, with the impression that it was about to be published.[44] My mother and Trijntje remembered how he had frequently locked himself in the family bathroom in Citroenstraat, and now it was apparent that he had been writing his diaries rather than the detective stories he had claimed. In the Seventies, he had shown his notebooks to his daughter, Lisette, and she had persuaded him to write them up as a book, with an attempt to capture the exact atmosphere of the time.
The refugees had never been privy to any of the details of the Resistance, so although Kieks was identified as the family contact with the Resistance, the details were absent in his journal. However, life in the house was portrayed in detail. The Okma family had been given the name Oldersma, with fictitious names given to each of the family members, and he had painted a picture of life in the household as he had experienced it. He had paid for the printing of fifty copies, sending one to Trijntje as a courtesy and to help her understand how he had felt during that time.
The Okma family were not pleased by the book. During the war they had exposed their own human failings as they sought to protect and feed five Jews in their house for three years, and there had been frictions as two cultures had rubbed together, but they had saved the man’s life and the lives of his fellow refugees. My mother scanned through it, and took pleasure in noting how completely unaware he had been of the role she and Willem had played in the Resistance. She later tried to analyse his story, but often got distracted by angry thoughts and memories.
As he prepared his book, Chris had gone back to Citroenstraat with his daughter and revisited the secret chamber, taking photographs of the entrance and the interior, which was now stripped of the fittings and shelving that Willem had made for their wartime shelter. His photographs showed the entrance to the secret chamber, a small square hole, barely a shoulders’ width across, highlighting quite how small the entrance was and how difficult it would have been to climb through quickly.
Chris Lewin and his daughter, Lisette, revisit Citroenstraat and the entrance to the secret chamber, in the 1980s or 1990s. Behind Chris, the door into the secret chamber can be seen.
Chris Lewin standing beside the entrance into the secret room. The small size of the entrance is clear
Some years later, I exchanged messages with Chris’s daughter, Lisette. She explained that her father’s book had never been intended for publication and only a few copies had been printed and bound. Writing his memoir had helped Chris in the same way that the writing of this book has helped my mother. Lisette also mentioned another book that her father had been writing during the war. It had been an academic treatise on economics and he had been disappointed at how little interest there had been in the house when he had announced it was finished. I thought about this and wondered if my mother might have misconstrued words on academic research and economics and ended up with recollections of ‘detective work’ and ‘making money’.
In about 1997, my mother gave my manuscript to her solicitor, who read it and told her he thought he might be able to get it published. He passed it on to a literary agent, but later my mother told me the agent had returned it. In 2010 I met the solicitor on another matter and we discussed the rejection. He was positive about the story and encouraged me to try again to get it published.
For decades my mother had thought that the family’s efforts in sheltering the Jews had been ignored and neglected, and that the work of the Resistance had been dismissed as pointless and irrelevant. Now she finds that her wartime activities are touched on by several written accounts. There is the work of Chris, the account in this book of own memories, a separate unpublished set of diaries kept by Salomon Hecksher and more recently we discovered that Ernst van Gelderen, son of Joop, had written a fourth book, the story of his family’s memories and travels, entitled ‘I missed my train’, which was intended for their children and grandchildren’s posterity. The diary that Sallie had kept during the war was originally regarded as just a small journal that mainly described the festive events, such as birthday parties for the members of the Okma family. It was said to describe the delicious food and drink, which had been so plentiful in the first year, and the suckling pig which had cheered everyone up but which Sallie had declined to eat. In recent weeks it has been read more closely and provides yet more details of the atmosphere and events in the house.
Kieks had been surprised by how much publicity there had been for Kees’s role in assassinating a police inspector: one single event, but the focus of an Oscar-winning film. The years had passed, and in some ways the memories had faded, but in the late 1990s, the memories came flooding back, as the mental barriers that once silenced her were removed. As I wrote in 2000, her memories were fading faster, but she had had recognition from the family and that had given her some closure and satisfaction.
When I was ten years old my mother had told me ’there were Jews behind the fireplace’. It hadn’t made any sense then, and the hidden story had profoundly coloured the years between, but now I feel I understand.