Epilogue: 2012 – A 90th Birthday Party

With time, further fragments appeared, almost seventy years after they happened. The full story of the horrendous events that happened in Leeuwarden was not told until a few months before Kieks’ 90th birthday. It filled a gap I had always known existed: Why had she gone to a town on the other side of the country from where she lived? I suspected these memories were more fragile and may have been distorted with time. Now the memories were fading quickly; when I asked her about some other events of the time, she could no longer remember the details. She said that she had forgotten the things that she told me, and she had to tell me a few last things she had tried to keep secret, because they were still going round in her head and annoying her.

In January 2012, the family arranged a party to celebrate Kieks’ 90th birthday. I told part of the story to her local newspaper to commemorate the birthday, and was soon syndicated across Scotland. For the first time in her life, people she barely knew in her sheltered housing complex came up to her and congratulated her on what she had done during the war. In a quiet way, she was very pleased. Her response persuaded me to investigate getting this book published.

The story has had several working titles as it evolved. For a while it was called ’A roll in the snow’, but this seemed trite, and later ’Silhouettes from the past’, before I settled on the current one.

As I put the manuscript into its final form, Trijntje’s son, Miente, identified another set of inaccuracies, and I have gratefully adopted his suggestions. It was only at a very late stage that I discovered the role and prominence that Kees had had in the Resistance at a national level. I had misread my mother’s handwriting in a letter she had sent me with the translation of his letter of support, and so I had misspelt his surname, and as a result I had not been able to trace him on the Internet.

We can now be a little more open about what happened, as those who might be hurt are no longer here. Kieks is the last of her siblings; her remaining sister, Truida, and her husband, Jan Boone, died just a few years ago. With the death of my mother in January 2016, only Bram and Donald, Sallie’s children; Chris’s daughter, Lisette; and Ernst and Carrie, Joop’s children, are still alive. I have exchanged emails with Bram, Lisette and Ernst, and appreciate their comments on the text.

In a concluding revelation to my mother’s story in 2015, the family of the one remaining key character, Kees, got in contact with me. Dirk Jan Laman, whose mother-in-law was the daughter of Kees, contacted me and provided me with some of the background to Kees’s own experience before and after he had been with Kieks. He too is writing a book. The last few pieces of the jigsaw have fallen into place.

Kieks died peacefully in her sleep on 4 January 2016.

Shortly after her funeral in Scotland, we travelled to Leewarden for a memorial service where we interred her ashes in the grave of her father, following a wish that she had often expressed in her latter years. We were joined by our own children and by sons and daughters of her brothers and sisters, and also by the children of all the refugees that had been sheltered by the family during the war.

The next day we had one last meeting. We met with Dirk Jan Laman, the man who had written to me shortly after my mothers ninetieth birthday, telling me that he was trying to trace Grietje Okma, a woman who had been engaged to Kees, Gommert Krijger. When he first wrote, the only thing he had known about my mother was that Kees had called off the engagement at the end of the war because he was living with two other women at the time.

In a coincidence that no writer of fiction would ever dare to invoke, it transpired that Dirk had a colleague who lived at Citroenstraat 18, the very house that my mother’s family and Kees had lived during the war. The man, Erik, invited us to visit, and there we met with Dirk and Els, Kees’s daughter by his second marriage. We were invited to walk round the house, seeing the various rooms, the balconies, and the view over the roof. We walked onto the flat roof of the neighbouring house to see the chimney stack in which Jews had hidden, and looked back on the pitched roof to see the skylight windows similar to the one that Chris had climbed through when escaping from the Gestapo. (The actual window had been removed in the course of house improvements.) In the final part of the tour, we had gone into the attic space, now the master bedroom. In the course of renovation, Erik and his wife had spotted a minor blemish where the original opening had been filled over. They had also heard from neighbours that the house had been used to hide Jews, and sensing the history, they had reopened it, installed new floor boards to form a storage space, and an ornate mirror to act as the door. We could go up to it and see it as it might have looked during the war. We could look in, climb in, and there we could still see some old wires that presumably had been put there by Willem when he first created the room.

Finally, we returned to the living room for a cup of tea, and an opportunity to talk with Erik, Dirk and Els. I talked for a while with Els, through Dirk, as neither Els nor I could speak the other’s language. Eventually she said, “I think Kieks was my father’s first true love, and she always lived in a corner of his heart. I think he always regretted losing her.” She gave me the impression that the words Kees had used to end their engagement had haunted him for the rest of his life. I knew they had haunted Kieks. Possibly like Kees, she had felt a shadow of guilt that perhaps she had been responsible for their separation. When she married, she made her marriage vows before God, and once made she would never have left my father for another man, but the memory of Kees, her lost love, had burned inside her all those years, as she wished for a life that might have been. The thoughts had kept her memories fresh and painful in the decades that followed, until the telling of them had finally put them to rest.