liberated. This is how writer Frits Kappers feels after the release of his autobiographical novel In the shadow of error† In the book, the Hoogevener settles with the NSB past of his parents. “It is never completely finished, but it no longer bothers me,” he says in the Radio Drenthe program Cassata.
Hairdressers had to come from far, because he has suffered from that past for at least half his life. His parents came from Winterswijk and were members of the NSB. So ‘wrong in the war’. Kappers had no idea at first. When he was 10 years old, his mother told him. Father had already passed away several years ago.
“My mother thought I should hear it from her, not from someone else,” says Kappers. “She told no untruths, because I was able to trace everything back to the files in the National Archives.” Where his father realized after the war that he had made the wrong choice, this was not the case for his mother. “She kept insisting that the Germans prevented us from being occupied by the English. That was the talk within the NSB, there the Germans were seen as liberators.”
Kappers remembers well that he was in disbelief after his mother told the news. “I immediately had a loyalty conflict,” he recalls. “At school I heard children say that they should have hanged NSB members. But if that had happened, I would not have been there.”
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