Boris Wanders grew up with a feeling of guilt. There was no talk about his grandfather at home. Why didn’t he actually know either. “It was something you couldn’t talk about. But that feeling is guilty without knowing why, that has been important in my life.”
Wanders is already in the sixty when he finally dares to dig deeper. In the archives he comes across receipts from the butcher’s shop of his grandfather. It was seized after the war. Then the pieces fall into place. His grandfather was arrested after the war. He was a NSB member and a member of the Helplandwacht.
For years, Wanders and his wife Judith Lechner have been walking through the nature reserve at Glimmen. In that swamp area there is a monument for victims of the April-May’s branches of 1943. But now he finds out that his grandfather is involved in the death of some of those strikers. “My grandfather helped the Germans to arrest a number of people, who were also dumped here by the Germans. It was a very nice place. But when I heard that, this place got a very different color.”
Debt and shame go hand in hand with an error family history. But Wanders can now put that debt back to his grandfather. “What I have been working on with Judith, my wife, is a creative investigation. This way we can see how my grandfather’s fault has worked in my own life. How that was passed on in our family.”
That creative research is a years of process. Boris does that with poems, in which he confronts his past, places and his grandfather. His wife Judith supports with photos. The result is a book with poems and photos. But Judith also sees the difference at Boris. “If I have to say briefly, it went from heavy to light.”
The grandfather of Boris is not mentioned by name in the book. The book is not about him or what he did. Today the accompanying exhibition opens in the Veenhuizen prison museum, which is about living with the burden of a concealed past. It is no coincidence where the grandfather of Boris was stuck for ten years after the war.