Wars are breeding grounds for conflicts of conscience, as is shown time and again in the Ukrainian war. I remember from the beginning of the war the Ukrainian men who ignored a travel ban and hastily escaped abroad when the Russians invaded their country. How will they look back on that now, while their homeland is struggling to break free from the Russian hold thanks to those who have stayed at home? Do they still dare to return?
And what does the Russian deserter who wants to flee his country say to his brother who has decided to join Putin’s army? Besides, what does that brother say to him? Entire families and families will thus be split for good.
For literary writers, such conflicts are gold mines from which they can draw without hesitation. Think of Bill Styron in his novel Sophie’s Choice pushed the limits of melodrama when he made his character Sophie, forced by a camp doctor in Auschwitz, choose between her two children, a boy and a girl. Only one of them was allowed to keep them. She decides to sacrifice her eight-year-old daughter Eva – a decision that will haunt her until her death.
In the book We survived van Sytze van der Zee I came across a staggering, true variant of Styron’s fictional find. For this book, which was published in 2019, Van der Zee visited about eighty survivors of the Second World War to record their memories. It has oral history delivered from the top shelf, comparable to the work of American interviewer Studs Terkel.
John Blom, the son of a Jewish confectioner in Amsterdam South, is twelve years old when the doorbell rings in the evening. “Two men from the Black Police came stumbling up the stairs. Mother had been sick in bed for months and could hardly walk. I heard Father say outside my bedroom door, ‘I’m not coming. You can jump high or low. My wife is sick. She can’t come and I won’t go without her.’ He stood his ground: ‘I really won’t go without her.’ To which a policeman said very clearly: ‘Then we’ll take the little boy with us.’ Father replied, ‘Then take the little boy, but I’m not going with you.’”
John was taken to SD headquarters where one of the German officials said to him: “Ah, du smaller Jungewhat are you still doing here? Go away.” Two hours later John was again with his briefcase at the door of his parental home.
“Then take the little boy.” Like Sophie in Sophie’s Choice chose her son, so Blom’s father chose his wife. Did he also experience it as a conflict of conscience? And what happened between father and son? History doesn’t mention that. The son was later saved by going into hiding, but his parents and brother were murdered in the German camps.
John: “The following years I behaved very socially towards the outside world. Once alone I collapsed and felt extremely depressed. I didn’t realize it was because of the war. It took me a long time to get over it.”
The question remains whether the Dutch policeman who said so intelligibly: “Then we’ll take the little boy with us” slept well that night.
A version of this article also appeared in the newspaper of September 28, 2022