It was brave that Daniël Koerhuis, Member of Parliament for the VVD, joined on Monday evening On 1 sat down. According to the VVD website, the econometrician from Raalte has the following expertise: 1: he doesn’t look like a typical politician and 2: he speaks easy language. The first is quite true, and the second… actually too. Perhaps a little too easy language, language that is certainly easily misunderstood in a tweet.
On May 1, he tweeted a photo of himself at Schiphol. First sentence of the caption: “Heard terrible stories from Dutch people who stand in line for hours and are afraid to miss their vacation.” A lot goes wrong there. Just look at the volumes on the face of NOS reporter Kysia Hekster, opposite him at the table at Op1, she has just returned from Ukraine. Does she really have to kick in the open door for him? Yes, she must, because Koerhuis starts about a crying family from Leeuwarden in line, with three children who were thirsty. An eyebrow raised at Witcher. “Waiting fifty hours with your children at the border, that is terrible.” Yes, yes, Koerhuis hastens to say, he also has four children of his own, he knows all about it. Well, brave nonetheless. He was not there, and the director of Schiphol, responsible for the underpaid and striking ground staff, was not.
Kisses around her belly
Earlier in the evening broadcaster MAX broadcast the first part of the three-part series Forgotten Heroes† When the Netherlands was at war with Germany in 1940, so were the Dutch colonies. Suriname, the Netherlands Antilles, Dutch East Indies. For a moment you think that we are going to see how the war years were experienced there, but as soon as you see presenter Jörgen Tjon walking through Amsterdam and Rotterdam neighbourhoods, it is clear that it is about the war in the Netherlands and therefore about the acts of resistance of people who were originally not came from the Netherlands, but nevertheless “fought with us shoulder and shoulder”.
Elizabeth Bergen, a nurse from Suriname, was in Amsterdam to continue studying when the war broke out. She took in a young Jewish couple, two toddlers without parents, and her own sister with her husband. One of the people in hiding turned out to be pregnant. For nine months, Elizabeth wrapped an ever-larger pillow around her belly to make it plausible to the outside world that she was the mother of this white baby.
Ophthalmologist Leo Lashley from Rotterdam provided food and medical aid to seven people in hiding, who were hidden behind the organ in the Reformed church on Breeplein. Albert Wittenberg and his wife from Amsterdam took six-week-old Betty into their home when her parents were taken to Westerbork. It was strange that Betty was white and their own children were not, says Betty, who is now well into her seventies. She remembers how good it was for her there: “The swing is still attached to my buttocks.” But when the war ended, Betty was returned to relatives who did return from the camps, who gave her up for adoption to a Jewish family.
Nurse Betty was betrayed, but survived the concentration camp. The hiding father of baby Betty was also betrayed, he died during a death march through Germany. Ophthalmologist Lashkey felt betrayed when he aspired to a political position after the war, but was suddenly dismissed as a colored person.
Meanwhile, the war had mainly benefited Suriname itself. Bauxite mines were in full swing, and so was the economy. Suriname donated a Spitfire and a submarine to the Netherlands, and schoolchildren collected money for relief supplies.
What could Daniel Koerhuis have learned from this? A war sometimes turns underdogs into heroes, but doesn’t turn holidaymakers into refugees. something like that?