When Facts Are Stranger Than Fiction

Literature lovers know that they are expected “to suspend their disbelief” when immersing themselves in the writer’s world of imagination.

Yet, unless the fiction offers “verisimilitude,” the semblance of truth, the reader’s disbelief will kick in and short-circuit the aesthetic literary experience.

The events of De Treastfûgel really happened, though they often sound like fiction.

It’s written by Hylke Speerstra, a Frisian author who also wrote the bestseller It wrede paradys (Cruel Paradise), the stories of Dutch immigrants scattered around the globe.
I translated that book almost a dozen years ago now, and now am translating De Treastfûgel (The Comfort Bird).

 

It’s the story of two families and their descendants who in the 1800s start out in the same small village of Hichtum, Friesland, then find themselves nearly a century later not only on two different continents but, shockingly, on two opposing sides in WWII. The families are bonded by a common metaphor: the figure of the “treastfûgel,” introduced early in the book when Meindert Boorsma, the bird lover, tells young Ytsje Wytsma: “In every flight of migrating birds another kind of bird flies along to lend comfort, for they have a long and difficult journey ahead of them.”  For Ytsje, in her long and difficult life that ended as a migrating widow in disaster-plagued S. Dakota, her treastfûgel was her faith.  For the original Meindert Boorsma’s grandson Meindert, as an unwilling German SS soldier struggling desperately for survival in the disastrous siege of Leningrad and subsequent retreat, his treastfûgel was his father’s bird whistle that doubled as a guardian angel.

 Ytsje Wytsma-Namminga long nurtured what she perceived as a divine mandate: to emigrate to America.  In the early 1900s, as widow now, she with her descendants set out for South Dakota, where floods, disease, fatal accidents, drought, and the great depression made life more cruel than kind. 

Sometime after Ytsje’s death in 1934, her son and family move to Wisconsin for a brighter future.  It is there that Ytsje’s grandson Nanno is drafted into the Army, takes part in the hell of WWII’s D-Day and every major battle after that, then in the “liberation” of Germany, including a concentration camp, inexplicably living through it all without incurring a scratch.

Though the reader knows that sometimes fact is stranger than fiction, there is nonetheless some incredulity when the diverse paths of Meindert Boorsma and Nanno Namminga cross among the ruins of Hitler’s land, Meindert a deserter from the defeated German army and Nanno a corporal in the conquering U.S. army.  They revel in their survival and their common Frisian ties and origins.

I hope to share some excerpts from The Comfort Bird in the weeks ahead with the readers of this blog.