When the then mayor of Amsterdam Ed van Thijn visited the Staatsliedenbuurt in 1984 without police protection, I lived in that neighbourhood. Where squatters had determined the housing distribution and maintenance of public order according to their own insights. Van Thijn, vassal of the civil authorities, was not welcome there. In the JM Kemperstraat he was attacked and spat at by two hundred squatters, a German self-director shouted ‘raus!’ to the Jewish PvdA mayor. Van Thijn’s flight from the neighborhood was celebrated as a victory in many squats. But there were also local residents who, perhaps to this day, were utterly ashamed of that horrifying incident.
The ‘state visit’ was discussed in the 2Doc documentary on Wednesday A war that never ended, in which Van Thijn (1934-2021) himself, his wife Odette, daughters Marion and Carla and some of his close friends looked back on the life of the man who went into hiding as a child and after betrayal had looked in the barrel of a German gun. Who ended up in Westerbork and barely experienced the liberation there. He grew into a prominent social democrat and party leader of the PvdA, minister of the interior and, therefore, mayor of the city that lost 80,000 Jewish inhabitants during the war.
‘I made it far’, said Van Thijn in the last interview he gave in 2020, when the thick head of hair had disappeared, his skin of parchment, his voice trembling, the mild look still on unyielding. The successful and meaningful career was one side of his story. He has always kept silent about the others while alive in public – a gap in his personal historiography that was somewhat closed by his relatives and with his own last look back in this documentary.
He had a life sentence, his wife Odette told me. He always had to take sleeping pills, ‘until the day he died’. The hard work in politics and administration was an escape, daughter Carla said, which made him unattainable for his daughters. Daughter Marion remembered how hard it was to enjoy her father when the days of May arrived. And Odette: ‘Then he couldn’t be hardened. The speech he wrote had to be even better than the last one.’
‘Once a war childalways a war child‘ said Van Thijn himself. When he returned to the Westerbork memorial center for a ceremony, ‘it was always a moment of palpitations. I had to overcome that primitive fear that SS men would again be on the watchtower’.
For example, the documentary sketched a moving portrait, exposing the vulnerability of the man who had always shown himself courageous in life. The man whose name can be honored with a boulevard, but for whom the JM Kemperstraat may also be renamed. If only because it helps the Amsterdammers remember what happened in the Ed van Thijnstraat in 1984.