Epilogue

Excerpt 17

This is the last excerpt of The Comfort Bird, a nonfiction story by Hylke Speerstra, which I translated from the Frisian.

In this Epilogue the author tells what happened to the WWII soldiers, linked to the same town of Hichtum, but one on the side of the Allied Forces, the other forced into the German SS.

It is 3 January 2012; the wind is rising, a storm is on the way.  …

I’m climbing the tower of Hichtum, up the stair steps that have been worn down by twenty generations of bell-tollers, flag-raisers, and men in hiding during the war.  Right before me I see, written with a carpenter’s pencil, a sign of past life: a hardly readable farewell greeting from another couple of people who took the boat to America - Nammen H. Namminga, Douwe J. Hiemstra.  …

   Two steps higher the din of the storm comes roaring through the tower’s belfry openings.  I venture myself in front of one of the gaping holes and what I observe in a glimmer is a flight of geese that waffles between flying on or staying.  The soaked field takes on the ruddy shape of a golden plover. 

…

   [ I think of the people who] stayed through the years where they were and what they were: farmer and farmer’s wife in the land where the dike embraced not only the land but also themselves.  Their dreams reached to the sea dike, not beyond.  They sang it as their fatherland, at weddings, coffees, and funerals: “Where the dike the land embraces.”

   But on those farms the hardworking farm workers and cow milkers also had dreams and hopes; they felt themselves embraced by more than just a dike.  Their roofs were too small to catch a just portion of heaven’s water; they took the chance of crossing the sea dike.  There, between the homeland and the land of dreams, the cruel path.  “Sea, sea, you wide sea, who knows what misfortunes and woe are hidden in thee.”

NANNO HIEMSTRA

In South Dakota and later in Wisconsin Nanno Hiemstra would hardly talk about the war until his 70th.  He did often regale the family surrounding him with stories about the old Friesland that his parents had told him about.  But for years he kept silent about the horrors of war, till one of his grandchildren kept asking him about it.  Then it came out that he had already entrusted some stories to paper.

…

     He survived the Normandy invasion, the Ardennes offensive, and the battles in Germany to the other side of the Czechoslovak border.  “That I was spared again and again for 332 days of battle is inconceivable.  However grateful I am for that, till my death I will also lug the horrors with me.”

   His 90th Infantry Division lost 6500 men, suffered 15,000 wounded, and hundreds missing in action.

   After Germany surrendered on 8 May, 1945, he had to stay in Europe till September of that year to help dismantle the sizeable American armed forces and to help in the logistics for the transport of materiel.  …  [Eventually]“ I saw the ship in harbor that could sail me home.  And waiting for me in Wisconsin were my young wife Alice, and the little girl I knew only from a picture, who was born when a year-and-a-half earlier I crossed the Atlantic Ocean on the way to war.”

…

“…on the train platform of Sharon stood my beloved with little Lorraine.  The little one was at first scared of the tall stranger and started to cry, and I cried with her, because it was as if I was being born anew, began to live anew.  And there were my parents too; there stood my past and my future.”

Within three days of his homecoming, Nanno was back to work.  As Grandma Ytsje would have said: “The work has to pull you through.”

   Nanno was blessed to have a winsome partner in Alice (Aaltsje) Coehoorn, an Iowa-born farmer’s daughter.  The household expanded with eight more healthy children who for the most part would also become farmer and farmer’s wife.

   …

   In 1981 Nanno and Alice decided to take a trip to France, Germany, and, – at the end – to The Netherlands.  He couldn’t avoid it, soldier Hiemstra stood again on Utah Beach, speechless and overtaken by his own emotions.  …

   Nanno Hiemstra’s high military honors included the Bronze Star, the Invasion Arrowhead, and all five Battle Stars: for Normandy, Northern France, the Ardennes, Rhineland, and Central Europe.  The French War Cross he received from the hands of General Charles de Gaulle.…

The final leg of their trip ended in Friesland.  In the first place, of course, to see the village with the stubby tower and the old terp full of names and stories which from Hichtum would live on far beyond the Hudson.  But also to reconnect with that emaciated young Frisian who had suddenly shown up one day in the barber chair.  To their great disappointment, no one was able to help them locate Meindert Boorsma.  They could only wonder what had happened to him. 

  …

[Back home, whenever …] he’d drive back onto their own yard, he’d routinely lapse back in the old language of long ago: “Grandma Ytsje would say: ‘Wy binne wer thús - ‘We’re home again.’”

MEINDERT BOORSMA

In the early summer of 1945 Meindert Boorsma began his own return from Germany. 

… “I had had a feeling for a long time already that I was heading toward a lot of trouble.  I really had only one wish left: one hour of peace in Friesland, one hour with Dad and Mom in the houseboat on the Workum Tow Canal below Nijhuizum.”

…

  With his ugly secret he fled from the column of liberators long before reaching Antwerp and landed in the south of the Netherlands.  By then he had already been on the run for more than three months. 

…

     It was a mild summer evening in June when he started walking toward Sneek.

   “I smelled the scent of cut grass, of pungent hay, and was nearly dizzy from it.  The sun was setting so beautifully, …. The evening dew stole through the field gullies, around me I saw white-edged fields, and I thought:  this is heaven, but then a heaven which will not take me in.”

… Dead tired and hungry he arrived in the night in Scharnegoutum.  One house still had light showing.  He saw a white shape in the dim glow of a kerosene lamp, a man in white underwear.  Meindert took a chance and knocked on the window.  The door opened at once, the way it does when a new freedom has been ushered in.

   “Meindert!  You here!”  He’s standing right in front of Red Simen, a former farm worker in the area.  He had once spent a fall season spreading manure with Red Simon.

…

“You know something?  I’m going to rustle up a bike for you, then you can ride in a good hour to your dear mom in the houseboat.  Come on, boy, make yourself comfortable in the hay in the meanwhile.”

  Red Simon did not come back with a bike but with three men from what had been the anti-Nazi Dutch Interior Forces.  An hour later he was confined in an old tobacco factory in Sneek that had been converted to a house of detention.

   They wouldn’t spare him here; every night he heard that someone was roughly dragged from his cell, and every time the commotion ended with a gunshot.  And again and again he was told the next day that someone was placed against the wall and that it would be his turn soon.

       When it got that far, he asked if he would be allowed a short visit with his mom in the houseboat.  His request was denied.  Meindert’s last hour seemed to have arrived; he walked himself to the wall.

   “Someone who had partially covered his face with a red handkerchief pointed his carbine at me, but at the last second he shot in the air.  I will tell you honestly: I experienced it as a disappointment.” 

   …   “Before I was transported, a policeman came to me.  Policeman Blijham.   ‘Tomorrow I’ll bring you to your mom in the houseboat. 

   Meindert by the Nijhuizem Bridge came to the “Meadows and Water,” and indeed there was no dad anymore.  A mother, yes.  Pytsje Boorsma-Jongsma at first couldn’t utter a word, didn’t know better than that her son had been killed in the winter of 1944 by Leningrad.  And here he stood before her.  A man of 6’3” who weighed only 115 pounds.

…   Right after Workum was liberated on 17 April 1945, Johannes had been arrested.  While awaiting his trial, he with others who had stood on the wrong side had to dig up live grenades along the railroad track between Workum and Ijlst and take them away with horse and wagon.  It went well till Thursday morning, 17 May.  A grenade exploded which had been placed on the wagon by Johannes himself.  He was killed instantly. …

Johannes Boorsma was laid to rest in the place not far from the bricked window and the cistern, where his dad Meindert lay buried with his plover whistle since 1912. 

…

   Meindert got four years penal camp detention, spending time in Sondel, Veenhuizen, and Westerbork.  There he became known as a hard worker.  In the course of 1948 he was granted for reason of good behavior a “provisional remission.”  In the late summer of 1990 his Dutch citizenship was restored through the advocacy of a couple of Heidenskip farmers.  

   On Thursday 13 April 1950 he married Jacoba Muizelaar from Koudum.  … they were blessed with four healthy children who all turned out well: Johannes, Jacob, Albert, and Tytsje.

   “Though for me it was never ‘after the war,’ I can say that I nevertheless experienced a lot of love and friendship.”

…

   When his wife died on 21 May 1993, Meindert was a broken man.  A good year later, on 3 September 1994, he passed away in the Teatske Home in Blauwhuis.  I had visited him there just two weeks earlier.  With great animation he told me then how on 5 November 1964 in the Flait below Molkwar he had caught a flight of 44 plovers.  “And the best thing was, there was a beautiful curlew among them.”