‘The Bijlmer disaster is still there, every day’

Ivy Davelaar at the monument to the victims of the Bijlmer disaster.Statue Guus Dubbelman / de Volkskrant

Ivy Davelaar (70)’s fingers glide affectionately over her son’s nameplate. Corson Antonio Perret Gentil. “Every time I come here, I just touch his name and wipe the plate clean.” Davelaar – a slender figure in a black down jacket – stands on the spot where she has stood ‘countless times’ in the past thirty years: the monument where the 43 victims, including 18 children, of the Bijlmer disaster are commemorated.

The wind rustles through the tall trees, a little further on, ring-necked parakeets fly one after the other, chattering. Above her head is the thunderous roar of a plane that will land at Schiphol in a few minutes. “This is the place where my son took his last breath. He was 17 years old.’

On Tuesday, at the end of the afternoon, a ceremony will be held at this location in Amsterdam-Zuidoost to commemorate the disaster flight of the El Al-Boeing. Because then, at exactly 6:36 pm, it will be thirty years ago that the plane crashed in the residential area, and that the Groeneveen and Klein Kruitberg flats turned into a conflagration. During the memorial, the names of the victims will be read, there will be singing and a minute of silence will be held at exactly 6:36 pm. And Davelaar will also be at this place again.

“I’ll be in the front row,” she says—with tentative pride. That was different in the first years after the disaster, she explains. ‘Back then I always quietly walked behind during commemorations. I didn’t speak to anyone. My pain was so great then, I just couldn’t talk about it yet. I closed myself off.’

‘He came to say ‘hello’

On the Sunday of the disaster, thirty years ago, Davelaar was visiting a friend in Southeast. Shortly before that she had moved to Haarlem with her children, but almost every weekend the family returned to Amsterdam to see friends. ‘Cörson too, he had come to Zuidoost by moped that day from Haarlem.’

That evening, a little after six, she sees Cörson again. ‘He came to say ‘hello’. He and his girlfriend Morena were going to the cinema with friends that evening.’ Not much later she sees an airplane flying remarkably low from the window. ‘But I didn’t think much of it. Until my girlfriend’s husband came in and said: what are you guys still chatting, a plane has crashed. But even then I didn’t think that Cörson might be a victim. We were in the G neighborhood, the plane had crashed in the H neighborhood and I had seen my son just before that.’ She doesn’t get anything from the chaos at the disaster site in the first hours after the disaster.

The Groeneveen and Klein Kruitberg flats immediately after the crash.  Image ANP

The Groeneveen and Klein Kruitberg flats immediately after the crash.Image ANP

When she wakes up at home the next morning, she feels an oppressive feeling. Cörson and his girlfriend did not come home that night. ‘I left the door of Cörson’s bedroom open a crack and went to work at the medical archive of the VU hospital.’ From work she starts calling around, asking if anyone knows where Cörson is. “I called the paint shop where he worked, but he didn’t show up. That wasn’t for him.’ During her lunch break she goes out, hoping to find her son. ‘I ran into a friend of Morena’s. She said that before the cinema, Corson and Morena went to the convenience store to get milk for their baby, but they never returned from the convenience store and the little one was still with her. I saw her eyes glow with tears. Then I immediately went to the crisis center to report Cörson and Morena as missing. There they tried to reassure me, they said: maybe the young people have run away.’ But Davelaar doesn’t believe that.

“And when I got home in the evening – I remember exactly – I immediately looked at the door of Cörson’s bedroom. It was still open, the same ajar it was in the morning. I stepped into his room, and felt that my son was no longer there. Then I started screaming.’

Five days after the disaster, she receives the final confirmation: Cörson’s body has been identified. He and his 18-year-old girlfriend were riding a moped under one of the affected apartment buildings at the time of the disaster. ‘One minute earlier or later, everything would have been different,’ says Davelaar. She can’t see Corson’s body anymore, it was too battered. She does get back scorched clothes, a gold ring she gave him for his birthday, a lock of hair and his broken glasses. “It felt like part of my heart had died. As if a bleeding wound had been left in my body. A wound that kept bleeding, that no one saw and that no one understood. Only I felt the pain.’

Corson.  Image

Corson.

In the first years after the disaster she hardly talks about it. ‘I left the VU hospital, which was too close to the crash site. I got a job in The Hague, and I still worked at the PTT in the evenings. I just worked, like some kind of robot. That was the only way I could function. It was as if everyone lived on, but I got stuck in that one moment: the moment I saw the crack in Cörson’s bedroom door. The only person I sometimes talked to was God. I was angry. Also angry with God. Why my son?’

Davelaar does not remember the exact date. “I think it must have been 1996.” She had been approached through the media by spiritual counselor Otto Ruff of the Stichting Relatives Bijlmerramp (NaBij) to ask if he could help her. At first she didn’t quite know how.

‘But at one point there was a three-day meeting with relatives. He wanted me to go with him. I thought: I won’t stay the night, but I’ll come one day. We sat in a circle and I sat next to Mrs. Truideman. She said she had lost both her children in the disaster. I didn’t know her, and looked at her. I thought: I have lost only one son, I have two other children, and yet I do not know how to live on. How can you live on if you have lost both your children? She said: God has a purpose for your life. Then I burst into tears. She hugged me and said: I feel what you feel.’

‘From then on I understood that I had to talk about it, but only with people who understand me. I had tried a psychologist before, but the man just looked at me. He didn’t feel what I felt. Mrs Truideman did, she became my example.’ That day was a tipping point, from that moment Davelaar begins to process the loss of her son step by step. In addition, through chaplain Ruff, she becomes involved in ‘The Growing Monument’, the foundation that manages the Bijlmer monument. ‘Because the disaster site remains an important place for me.’

Ivy Davelaar at 'the tree that saw everything'.  Statue Guus Dubbelman / de Volkskrant

Ivy Davelaar at ‘the tree that saw everything’.Statue Guus Dubbelman / de Volkskrant

Often when she hadn’t been feeling well for the past thirty years, she drove here, Davelaar says, rubbing her son’s name one more time with her fingers, and then stroking his friend’s name: Morena.

She walks past the monument to ‘the tree that saw everything’, a poplar surrounded by benches and flowers. ‘Sometimes I planted a plant. But mostly I just sat here for a while. To talk to myself, to cry or to be quiet’, she says, while again the raging sound of an airplane flying over. Still, Davelaar says, she stiffens at this sound. “But it’s not as bad as it used to be. For a long time I would cringe when I saw an airplane.’

In recent years she has been less often to the memorial, because a few years ago she moved back to Curaçao – the island where Cörson was born and is buried. She now sees the grief as a suitcase. ‘A suitcase in which I have collected the good memories. It is no longer a heavy burden that I carry on my back, but a suitcase that I can carry with me for the rest of my life. Why my son died that day I do not know, nor do I understand the meaning of his death. God will never give me the answer to that question. I am no longer angry, apparently his time had come that day. But the tears in my heart will always be there. And when I want to talk about it, I open my suitcase full of fond memories.’

Disaster flight 1862 continues to raise questions

On October 4, 1992, a cargo plane belonging to the Israeli airline El Al pierced two flats in the Amsterdam neighborhood of Bijlmermeer. The Flight 1862 disaster killed at least 43 people, including the crew of three and the only passenger on board.

The aircraft was en route from New York to Tel Aviv and made a stopover at Schiphol to refuel. Shortly after departure from the airport, both engines on the right wing broke down. Air traffic control directed the aircraft back to the runway, forcing the crew to fly another round over Amsterdam. Above the Bijlmer, the aircraft slowed down, after which it became uncontrollable and flew vertically into the flats.

There is still a cloud of uncertainty surrounding the Bijlmer disaster. For example, the cockpit voice recorder was never recovered and witnesses saw mysterious figures in white suits at the crash site shortly after the crash. Hundreds of Bijlmer residents suffered from unexplained physical complaints after the disaster. Whether the health problems are related to the depleted uranium in the tail or the – much speculated – payload of the plane has never been proven.

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