A Pre-Christmas Conversation

    Time is getting close, Son..
Yes, Father.
    My children are crying.
They've been crying a long time, Father.
Remember Eve when she had her first baby?
    She cried long before that, Son.
It's not the pain of childbirth only, is it.
    No.

Why are you silent, Father?
    My heart grieves much, Son.
    I did not make my children to suffer so much.
    I have loved them all, you know.

Why did it happen, Father?
    You mean--sin?
Yes.
    It's hard to explain, Son.
    But I did not will it so.
How long must it go on, Father?
    That's what I want to talk to you about.
    I want to comfort them.
    I want to save them.
And you need me for that?
    Yes, Son, I want you to go among them.
How?
    Like one of them.
How can that be?
    How?  Hmm, are you ready for this?
I don't think so.
    Well, the good news is that you'll come among them as a baby.
A baby??
How will I become a baby?
    The human way, mostly.
Will I have a mother?
     Yes.  
Hmm, I see.
I've never had a mother.
    I know.
Will I have a father too?
    I will always be your Father.
Will be human, then?
    Yes, mostly.
Will they know me?
And will they listen?
    A few.
Only a few?
    Yes, at first.
Why?
    My children are so blind, so deaf.
    They take so long to see the light,
    to hear the voice.

Will it be hard?
For me, I mean.
    Yes, very hard.
And painful too?
    It is painful to be human.
Will I suffer, then?
    Yes.
Much?
    Yes, very much.

Will I ... must I ... even ...
    Yes, my Son, you must even die.
You don't love me then!
    I love you very much, my Son.
Then why do you want me to die?
    Because I love my human children too.
    I want to show them how much.
    I want them to believe it.
    I want to forgive them for their blindness, their deafness, their sin.
    That's why you must die for them.
Alone?
    Yes, you will feel all alone.

I'm afraid, Father.
    Yes, Son, and you will be more afraid.
Will you help me?
    I will never leave you.
And will you show me what to do?
    You will always do my will.
Will I see you again?
    Of course.
    I will raise you up again,
    and then you will come back to me.
I'm glad of that!

Will it make a difference?
    A difference?
I mean will the world become a different place,
more like it was at first, long ago?
    Not right away, Son, not for a long time, even.
    But someday, yes:
    What you're going to do now will someday make all the difference.
But till then, will people go on as they are now?
     Most will, yes, and worse.
     They like to change everything, except themselves.
Why should I go, then - what's the use?
    Because you're the only Way, Son,
    to tell them Truth
    and give them Life.
    Those who will receive you as my Son will receive me,
     and they will change.
Why?
     Because they will know Love.

    And now it's time to go, my Son.
As a baby?
    Yes; the world loves a baby,
    but a Savior not so much.
Where will I be born?
     In a humble place in Bethlehem.
    You will be poor, that the poor may be rich.
I will miss you, Father.
    And I will miss you, Son.
    But I will be with you, and through you,
    with all my other children too.
    Tell them that.
    Show them your Father, bring them my word of Peace;
    offer them my gift of Life.
    Bring my kingdom among and within them.
Is that your will?
    Yes, my Son, that is my will.
Then, Father, your will be done.

                       ~.~
   
  

Last Words

Sixty years ago today, Dad suddenly died.

Sixty years dims and erases many a memory, as if a shade were drawn over it.

But not this one.

What happened that day, Nov. 10, 1955, will always be an indelible part of my being.

That morning Dad had done the early morning chores as usual.

The dawn had come promising a crisp but beautiful November day.

According to Greta who had helped with the milking, Heit had been in a good mood, maybe more talkative than usual. 

Could it be that, after seven years of very hard immigrant labor, he especially enjoyed the sweet taste that morning of finally being on his own place and improving the quality of his own livestock?

The pain must’ve hit him suddenly when he was in the silo.  And it was excruciating. Somehow he managed to climb down, to leave the barn, to make it to the house.

Did he sense even then that it would be the last time?

I was still recovering from TB and exempt from farm work.

The ominous sounds downstairs woke me up that morning – agitated voices, rushing footsteps from one room to another, and the frightening moans of someone in great pain.

When I came down, my mom and sister’s faces told me that something very serious was going on.

Heit was in the bedroom now, his moaning growing in intensity.  Mem hurried back to tend to her husband.  I stayed in the kitchen, afraid to go to the bedroom, afraid of facing a father in agony.

But when Mem came back to tell me that Heit wanted me to come to him, I had no choice.

Still I hesitated.

Feelings between fathers and sons are often complex, confused, even strained, especially in those uneasy years when sons grow uncertainly toward adulthood and express their insecurity through a sharp-edged critical faculty.

I had hardly been a rebel, but maybe a self-righteous idealist is worse.

We had sometimes been hard on each other, more often through silence than through words.

So I hesitated.  I was not prepared.

When I entered the bedroom, my insides told me that I was about to step into a new dimension of being.

I saw Heit, stretched out on the bed, his face contorted with the terrible pain that was wracking his body.

His eyes turned to me.  Those light-blue eyes spoke of intense pain, but it wasn’t the pain that struck me.  It was a tenderness, a gentleness I had never seen before that reached my soul.

He beckoned for me to come closer.

He took my hand; he stroked it gently.

This was not the Heit I thought I had known, but my heart told me now that I had always wanted, I had always needed his tenderness, his gentleness, his love.

Then he pulled me closer to him.

In between spasms of pain he tried to say something: “You are such a dear boy.”

He pulled me closer still, put his arms around my neck, and tried to speak again: “I’ve sometimes done you wrong, will you forgive me?”

Too choked to speak, I could only nod.

Then he kissed me.

When I stumbled out of that room, I knew that I had been on sacred ground.

My father’s faith became real to me that day.

Heit died later that night, hours after surgery for a bowel obstruction.

The next day I hid in the barn, among the bales of hay, and wept.

I wept with grief for the years in the past when Heit and I could have been tender and gentle with each other, and weren’t.

I wept with grief for the years to come when our love for each other would not be a part of life.

But I wept too with gratitude for the heavenly gift of grace that had hallowed those last minutes with my dad.

Grace that had softened a sometimes stern, proud spirit into a loving father who asked his son’s forgiveness.

That was the Father’s gift when Heit died sixty years ago.

And that gift became my lifelong blessing.

For on that day my Dad’s faith became real to me.

A Love Remembered

Today, Nov. 3, is the day I would call my mom to wish her another Happy Birthday.

I wish I could do that one more time, but she’s been gone for some years now.

I’d say: “Happy Birthday, Mom,” but often in Frisian: “Lokwinsken mei de jierdei, Mem!”

And then I’d sing to her over the phone, across the 2500 miles that separated us:

O wat zijn we heden blij,

Memke is jarig, memke is jarig!

O wat zijn we heden blij,

Memke’s verjaardag vieren wij!

Yes, it was long distance, but for those special minutes on the phone we’d sometimes feel closer than if we had sat together around the table with all her children and grandchildren watching her blow out the candles.

I miss Mem, and I know I always will.

When I think back on her life now, I feel sadness that she was more acquainted with life’s shadows than its sunshine.

Life was hard in the early years of the 20^th century. 

She loved her school and teachers, but she had to go to work when she was only twelve.

A brother she loved drowned when he suffered a seizure close to home.

In her later teens, much of the farm work fell on her sturdy shoulders when she had so much wanted to spend more time with friends.

My thoughts go back to the war years now in Holland, when this feisty Frisian mother had four children to raise, took on the risks of giving a hiding place to a resistance fighter wanted dead or alive by the Germans, took in his wife and baby as well, and showed her mettle by joining the resistance movement herself as a distributor of underground publications throughout the area. I will never lose my mental image when I saw her peddling through town, the saddlebags of her bike bulging with illegal papers.

As a young boy I was afraid for her.  But I was in awe too, and felt strongly bonded to this plucky woman who was my mother.

On this day I remember especially the day the shadows darkened and dreams shattered when Heit, Mem’s husband of twenty-eight years, suddenly passed away.  There would be no visit back to the homeland as husband and wife; there would be no sunlit ascent toward the leisure years when all the setbacks, frustrations, and hard work of post-immigration would finally give way to some stability and security and contentment.

She did what she had to do when she was twelve.  Now as a widow of fifty-three, with herself and a young daughter to support, she once again had to go to work outside her own home.

But what I remember especially this day is her love.

It was love that kept her letters and phone calls coming when I felt lonely as a sick soldier in an Army hospital.

It was love that didn’t pressure me to become a farmer when that would’ve enabled her to stay on the place she and dad had worked so hard for.

It was love that let me go to Calvin College after her recent loss. She did not lay a guilt trip on me.  Instead she hugged me tight; our tears were the language of love.

That love is my permanent treasure.

Thank you, Mem!

And thank you, God.

Fear Not?

“He will cover you with his feathers, and under his wings you

will find refuge. . . . You will not fear the terror of night, nor the

arrow that flies by day, nor the pestilence that stalks in the darkness,

nor the plague that destroys at midday” Psalm 91:4-6.

 

Oh, but I did fear the terror of night.

It was wartime in Holland, and our family was hiding someone the

Germans were hunting – a Dutch police officer who secretly had been

in charge of Allied weapon drops. A knocking on the windows in the dead

of night would stop my heart. But terror is not limited to the night.

 

The day came when Germans went from house to house.

We watched them come, my hero and I. A boy of ten, I shook with terror when I saw this commander in underground resistance pull his gun.

Suddenly we heard shouts and shots, and we saw the hired man led away. They thought they had their man; no one searched our house that day.

But my heart still palpitates when I think of what could have happened (and often did): my hero killed, Germans too, consequently Dad, and the farm burned down to the ground.

 

Not fear the flying arrows, not fear the stalking pestilence? For years those

biblical promises sounded empty to me. Not fear the evils of a Holocaust, starvation,

epidemics, accidents that can take the life of an only child, an incurable

cancer diagnosis, a future with Alzheimer’s?

God couldn’t be serious, I thought.

For we all know, don’t we, that there’s no horror from which we are exempt?

 

But there is.

I had not understood what God was really saying.

I had not understood how Psalm 118 could confidently exclaim: “The Lord is with

me; I will not be afraid. What can man do to me?”

I knew and know they can do unspeakably horrible things.

They can take young women and rape them in the name of their god.

They can unleash Sarin, the invisible poison that makes one choke to death within minutes.

They can brutalize; they can maim; they can burn; they can hang; they can

starve; they can destroy everything that was ever held dear in a human heart.

Refuge

So what had I not understood?

God did not say we would never go through valleys of death.

He did not say that we wouldn’t have enemies who would be out to kill us, that we

would not suffer fires and droughts and floods and pestilence and bullets

and strokes and heart attacks and cancer and dementia.

He did say that he would always be with us.

And I began to understand that the promise refers to who God is and not to who I am – vulnerable and afraid.

He knows I am, and that’s why he keeps telling me who he is: one whom I

can cling to like a scared child clings to his daddy when disaster strikes.

Like David clung when he was afraid: “The Lord is with me. . . . When I am afraid,

I will trust in you . . . in you my soul takes refuge.”

 

Then Matthew enlarges my understanding when he reminds me of the words

of our Lord to his disciples, and to all of us: “Don’t be afraid of those who want

to kill your body; they cannot touch your soul.”

And I say, Yes, Lord, let me remember that the God who made me, the God who loves me, is the God who saves me. He is the Lord who places his right hand on me and says: “Do not be afraid. I am the First and the Last. I am the Living One.”

That’s who God is.

But he knows I am one of those with little faith who will still be afraid.

Then I will cling to his promise: “I am with you.”

Yes, he will be with me, as he was with Joseph, David, Stephen, Paul, Bonhoeffer,

Corrie ten Boom and with all who have faith that no evil can touch

the soul that is covered with his feathers, that is sheltered under his wings.

 

And that surely will dissolve my fear – and yours.

 

Brother Memories

The little boy had a brother, Sietze, four years older, a big buddy he looked up to as daring, smart, and inventive.  He loved to go out in the fields with his brother early in the morning, before breakfast.  The dew would still lie heavy on the grass.  Their footsteps left a trail across the silent fields, footsteps searching for the silver strips tossed from allied planes to jam enemy radar.  Sometimes they would be able to gather a big bundle of these strips and pass it on to underground resistance, for silver paper was much in demand.  But to the boy, the best part of those occasional early morning forays was the silence of the still slumbering world all around, the peacefulness of paths and pastures, of streets and sky.  It made him forget in those mist-shrouded hours that the world was at war, that the enemy ruled the land, and that danger was never far away.

                                                                       

*-*

 

There were other things the brothers would do together.  Every Saturday afternoon the two were given the chore of peeling the potatoes for the family’s Sunday meal.  They would sit across from each other, the basket of potatoes between them.

It was a tedious and boring task, and Sietze did not take kindly to boredom.  He would usually invent a way of lessening the tedium, a way of amusing himself.

On this particular late afternoon, Sietze took a piece of potato peel and reached across the basket to “paint” a swastika on his little brother’s forehead.  It felt clammy and dirty.  “Quit that!”  protested the victim.  But the peel hadn’t made enough of a mark to satisfy Sietze.  He took another peel, this one a little thicker and dirtier to do a better job.  Again he reached across to put the mark of the hated enemy on his brother.  But this time the younger boy was ready to retaliate.  He had his own dirty peel ready on his paring knife and now leaned toward his good-natured tormentor to pay back in kind.  But that’s not how it turned out.  It wasn’t only the peel that reached Sietze’s forehead; it was the blade of the sharp little paring knife as well.

The blade went in smoothly and deep, and blood came out—lots of it.

Screams.  The mother rushing.  Gasping.  Grabbing a towel, pressing it to Sietze’s bloody forehead, yelling for somebody to get the doctor, quick!

More blood.  The mother finally pressing the two lips of the gaping wound firmly together with thumb and forefinger of each hand, stemming the bleeding till the doctor arrived at last.

The doctor sewed Sietze up right then and there, without anesthetic.  The trauma ended, but a two-inch scar would always remind the brothers that once blood flowed between them because of a potato peel.

 

But the young boy, though unintentionally, had spilled his brother’s blood, and the shock and fear of it drove him into hiding.  He lurked nearby until the doctor came and it was clear his beloved older brother would live.  Then he sought a hiding place where he felt safe.  He could not face anyone.  The shame of his careless mistake weighed on him like the curse of Cain.  He simply had to hide because he was afraid of himself, of his parents, even of life itself that so quickly could turn teasing into near tragedy.

So he hid inside a large open wooden box that functioned as a liquid manure tank in all seasons except summer.  With the box resting on a wagon and a spreading device behind it, the farm horse would pull it across the fields.  The home-produced fertilizer was potent both in smell and in effectiveness.  But in late spring, when the cattle were released in pasture, the manure box would be thoroughly cleaned and disinfected.  It was then ready for use as a playhouse; sometimes it even functioned as a huge kind of crib for children and friends to sleep in.

This is where the young fugitive hid.  Cowering at first under the awful knowledge of what his hand had done.  Visions, of his mother, her face tight with tension and a terrible exertion of will power to keep the gate shut tight on her son’s lifeblood.  At last the doctor’s arrival.  Relief.  But his brother’s blood stained his conscience, though he knew it had been an accident.

The late afternoon turned into evening. When voices began to call for him to come to supper, he did not respond.  He heard them searching, but they looked in the wrong places.  After a while it grew quiet, and he knew they were eating without him.

He hoped they worried a little about him. If they worried enough, maybe their anger at his misdeed would subside.

Even when it grew dark, he stayed in his hiding place.  Only when he felt some confidence at last that his parents might regard his self-exile as sufficient punishment, did he emerge.

He went to sleep that night, not filled with food, but filled with a kind of grace that came from his brother beside him and his parents’ hug that said, “We know what you’ve been feeling, and it’s all right now.”

 

                                                                        *-*

 

Sometimes the boy would sit close to his brother on the hay wagon in the backyard, looking out over the fields that were slowly fading in the descending dusk.  They would talk about war, the war that was raging in nearby lands where the German enemy was pursued by soldiers from England and Canada and America.  Even now they heard the steady drone of planes overhead on their way to bomb Germany.  He listened intently when his brother began to talk about his dreams.

“I’m going to tell you a secret.  I know you’re good at keeping secrets.  And this will be our secret, nobody else’s. I’m building an airplane, with my friend Steffen.  Someday I’m going to fly it, just like the pilots are in the planes above us.  And I want you to fly with me.  I want you to be my navigator.  That means you will sit next to me, in the co-pilot seat.  You will study maps and help us find the way.  We will fly all over the country, maybe all over the world.  And if the war is still on, we will drop baskets of food for the hungry people.”

The boy’s eyes grew wide, and his imagination nearly exploded: flying a plane, sitting up front beside his brother, becoming heroes for feeding the hungry from the air.  Suddenly, in the chill of early evening, he felt warm and good all over.  The future had lost some of its mystery.  He and his brother, they would be part of the future and part of an exciting adventure that now became his dream too.

“When is the plane going to be finished?”

“I don’t know.  It’s a big job.”

“Can I watch you build it?”

“No, I’m afraid not.  Nobody’s allowed in the building where we’re working on it.”

“All right, but will you tell me about it again sometime?”

“Oh yeah, we’ll talk about it lots of times.”

“That’s good.  I think I’m going to bed now.”

“Sweet dreams.”

And they were.  That night the boy dreamed about floating through the air, dropping food to the hungry people, and watching the children race to find white loaves of bread and oranges and candy bars—all the things they had not eaten during the years of war.

 

 

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.”

  

THE MEETING

Excerpt 16: Meindert is picked up by the Americans, treated as survivor of a German forced labor camp, and sent on his way back to Friesland after an extraordinary meeting.

When he comes to and opens his eyes, he sees only the wheel of a car, then a pair of soldier shoes.

   “Hey you!”  It sounds threatening.  …  An officer comes on the scene, at least an important dude, who grabs him vigorously by the sore shoulder. … behind him he hears the officer who searches him from top to bottom.

   “As thin as a stick!”  There’s laughter.

   The officer gives his victim half a turn so that he can look at him from very close up.  Then he waves for his driver, who pops from behind the wheel, lifts him up as if he were a toddler of four, and plops him in the jeep on the seat next to his.

   Fifteen minutes later he’s dropped off in front of a huge factory building with tall open sliding doors.

… [He is checked thoroughly.  They wash and disinfect him.  They give him clean clothes and conclude that he must’ve been a forced laborer for the Germans. All this time his injured shoulder gives him unbearable pain.]

…

He’s on a bunk bed in a large dormitory and appears to be a part of a bunch of skinny forced laborers whom the Americans have raked together.  Apparently to help them recuperate.  … By the sound of it, some of them are Dutch; one of the men introduces himself as Jan Terhorst from Dordrecht.  And there’s a Harm, from Winschoten.  “Did you work in the Messerschmitt factories too?”

   “I believe so, but they’ve beaten me, I can’t remember anything anymore.”

…

Later … he sits on a wooden bench in a walled-in garden.  A bright new spring day?  A mild summer evening?  The plover whistle!  Yes, he’s still wearing it on his chest.  He notices the smell of green soap, it brings him back to his childhood years when his mom let him use the tub.

…

   A tall American in a sharply creased khaki uniform appears in the garden.  An imposing figure.  A couple of stripes on his upper arm, no stars on the collar.  …

   “Yes,” he shouts.  A slumbering soldier pretends to be startled, then takes his seat on the chair next to the small table.  The corporal in khaki opens a small container and begins to lather the soldier with the shaving brush, and after that to shave and cut hair.  When he’s finished, the khaki man looks for the first time in Meindert’s direction and says: “Your turn, poor devil!”

… Apparently it’s his turn to get a shave and a haircut.  When he sits and points to his sore shoulder, the barber nods with understanding and begins to cut.  It feels like not much hair is left on his noggin.  Only when he’s shaving, talk resumes.

   “Where are you from!”

   It takes a while before Meindert has his answer ready.  “The Netherlands.”

   “The Netherlands!”  The American keeps on shaving and wants to know just where he’s from in the Netherlands.

   “Friesland.”

   The man in khaki puts the razor on the table with the foam still on.  “Well, then just talk Frisian to me, I speak and understand the language of my folks a little.”  Meindert hears Frisian the American way.  “Dad and Mom came over in 1911 from a town with a stubby tower, and the name of the town is Hichtum.”

   “My folks are from there too!”

   “Your folks and my folks both from Hichtum?  Let me tell you that my grandma was very high on that town, because such amazing people lived there.  Like the man who wanted to be free as a bird, but even though he could at last sing just as beautiful as a bird, he never became a free bird.”

   “That was Meindert Boorsma, my grandpa, I’m named after him.”

It’s a day later.  For both men, talking Frisian is the song of the lark which tries to serenade the last turf of its lost land; they exchange stories in the language both of them haven’t heard or spoken in a long time.  The ghost of a stuffed water curlew flies through the garden, like the comfort bird which after its death lived on for years on the mantelpiece of Nanno’s Grandpa Hizkia and Grandma Ytsje.  There’s the sound of a church hymn running through the walled-in garden, a psalm that a Grandma sang to her grandson.

…. They talk about that singular Grandpa Meindert, who as a boy with the girl Ytsje conceived of the idea that there was such a thing as a comfort bird.  It was needed in a country where the children could be happy with a couple of manure-smeared tufts of sheep’s wool.

… at last, the plover whistle is hauled out and there in the walled-in garden the sound is heard of the bird’s wistful song for the land where it was hatched but lost along the way.

[Meindert is recruited to accompany troop transports to the Antwerp harbor as translator and guide to help them stay within the road markers.  From Antwerp he will find his way back to Friesland.]

….

Nanno says: “Go home, give my greetings to my people, the people of Friesland, and tell them that I’m fine…. They’ll be happy to know.”

   Time to shake hands.  Nanno adds:  “Meindert, whistle for me one more time the song of the comfort bird.”

   He tries to, for a moment there’s a sound, then it’s only tears.

The Escape

This is excerpt 15 from The Comfort Bird translation, a book written in Frisian and Dutch by Hylke Speerstra.

In this excerpt the action switches to the Russian front where Meindert Boorsma is forced to join the SS in its fateful attempt to make Russia a part of the German Reich.

The same war, but then a few years earlier.  Meindert Boorsma finds himself with his combat buddies ten kilometers from Zagreb.  The Croatian winter is harsh, and the enemy is too, but one day there’s good news: “All is well.  Croatia has fallen.”  Still that same day another message follows: “And now on to the Volga! Stalingrad!”  The communication strikes him as hard and bitter cold.  He entertains the thought again of vanishing into thin air, but where would he go?  Flee from under the flag?  He sees himself running away as hard as he can and then smash forward to the ground with a load of lead in his back.  “Auf der Flucht erschossen.” [Shot in flight.]  His most trusted comrade Wolfgang Hanssen would like to escape too, but what did Wolfie whisper a few days ago?  “Meinhart, there’s no getting away anymore, we have to try to survive."

…

The winter goes on and on. …  One more night he digs himself in with his commando group; the last partisan can still cause a hell on earth.  … For the umpteenth time he digs a hole, not only in the snow, but deeper, in the frozen earth. … he settles down deep into the ground on a small stack of slender branches and some brush.

   “A bird catcher must think himself warm.”  While he’s on the way to a few winks, he hears his dad saying it.  His ears still buzz from yesterday’s hand grenades.  He thinks himself warm, imagines himself behind the hiding place deep in the Heidenskip Skar, hears the rustling of the reeds and the panting of the waves against the basalt.  And thus he sinks further and further into sleep.

   But then it happens; it’s like the whole earth is exploding and he’s lifted out of his grave.  He falls down again, along with a load of snow with something warm to cover him, tries to get his breath, doesn’t know if he’s dead or alive.

…

   A while later.  … He risks surfacing, and there things look terrible.  Blood, snow, and mud.  Three hand grenades delivered three dead enemies to the partisans.  And now ten of them are left.  Footsteps in the snow show his squad their heels.  The footprints indicate only three partisans.

… . “The skunks must’ve come from the hamlet on the other side of the woods.  Look, their footprints.  Find them and finish them off in their own stinking nest!”  Lübke selects three men to carry out the assignment: the radio operator, Eckhart Koch, Wolfie Hanssen, “and you, Meinhart.”

…      They get fifteen minutes to study the ordnance map, don a white camouflage overall, and follow the footprints of the Croats.  It’s as if the woods are still whizzing from the recent violence.  “We’re in luck,” Wolfie whispers.  “The sky is clouding over, visibility is getting worse.”

…   Meindert tries hard to control his rising fear. … Ahead, against the hills, must be the village of the partisans; the map says that it’s not much more than twenty houses.  Not a light anywhere.  “But they must be there!”  Echkart proposes not to follow the footprints any longer but to walk around the village in a wide circle.  “Into the village from the other side, where they don’t expect us.”

…   An hour and a half later they stand on the other side of the village behind a wooden cattle shed.  A humble farmhouse sits tight against it.  Had they seen a dim light a moment ago, or not?  Had they heard some male voices?  They decide to wait fifteen minutes, without moving a muscle.  When the fifteen minutes are up, they still wait motionless.  It’s getting even quieter around the place.  There’s a soft whisper: “They must be here.”

   “Why don’t they have one on guard, then?”

   “They think they killed all of us.”

   In the meantime it has been snowing so hard that their own footprints are no longer visible.

   “You or I,” gestures Wolfie.

   All fear ebbs away with Meindert; he appoints himself.  Is it because of the cow barn smell that is so familiar to him?

…

On the side of the old shed he finds a couple of loose boards in the wall.  Every time a cow snorts or coughs, he wiggles a board loose with the bayonet.  He succeeds in quietly sneaking his way inside the shed.  He’s landed in pitch darkness.  The cattle react nervously, but soon everything is back to normal.

…

With the revolver in his hand and a hand grenade within quick reach, he takes a chance on getting past the straw to a door and stands in the only living space of the little farm.

In the cramped room he notices a small table and a couple of chairs.  The inside blinds are closed, the stove is still warm enough to warm his hands on it.  An oil lamp on the wall.  Damn, it feels lukewarm, there sure as hell must be someone living here.  He risks taking the lit flashlight from his pocket.  Light.  And at the same moment he sees that a door in the wall is slowly opening.  With the finger on the trigger he’s ready to waste a Croatian.  He rams the door farther open and stands face to face with an old man who tries to get out from under a load of blankets.  A very old man with a silver-gray beard and a fearless glance.

   “Partisans, where partisans!” Meindert wants to know.

   The man shakes his old head and sits down.  Eyes too old to show fear.

…

  With the flashlight he trudges between the skinny cows to the loose boards in the shed’s wall.  Then he turns around one more time and shines the flashlight around the deep litter space.   What?  Is that a hatch carefully lifted up in the straw and then immediately lowered again?  He gives it no second thought, lunges toward it with two hand grenades ready to toss, lifts the hatch a few inches, flings the whole load of death woes inside, races to the opening in the wall, and gets stuck.  What happens after that he does not experience fully consciously, but he’s blown through the hole from a tremendous blast.

…

That afternoon they witness one of the consequences of their actions: on the square in the middle of the village with the wooden cow shed the very last of the partisans early that morning hanged the little old man with the silver gray beard by his heels on a pole for suspected treason.

After Stalingrad they’re done. … On to Leningrad.  “And when we have our claws on that city, Moscow will be a cinch.”

  After four months they know better.

…

Of this Meindert is certain: should the hour come that he has to surrender to the Russians, he will hold this letter (from his parents) above his head with both hands and call out “Hollanski, Hollanski.”  He will try to explain to them that he doesn’t belong in this war, he will show them the bone whistle that he’s worn night and day on a string underneath his thin woolen undershirt.

… It’s winter again.  They have as good as surrounded Leningrad – the old St. Petersburg – for a couple of months already and bombarded it with hundreds of thousands grenades.

…

How long is this madness still bearable? … Should he, against all logic, survive this hell, then the things he has seen will haunt him the rest of his life.

… The cannons continue to bark, and that has awakened a horrendously cruel beast.  And it’s coming: the Red Army.  Above the eastern horizon the rumble begins.  With might and main the positions of the Wehrmacht have to be fortified.

…

 On the longest day the men of Fortification 216 get a couple of hours off to stretch their legs.  Meindert no longer indulges in the illusion of escape.  He tramps through a village where at the most only a cat might still be alive. …  He steps inside a small, green house through an open door, sees himself in a high narrow mirror.  He’s shocked; is that him?

… he undresses himself completely to check whether it’s really him; he sees what’s left of him is as skinny as a beanpole.  He must already have lost his soul.  Yes, a plover whistle on a string still dangles around his skinny neck.  He raises both of his bony arms and shows the SS mark in his left arm pit, and he knows now that his old name doesn’t fit him anymore; he will live on as a man without a soul.  How much longer?

   “Mom, I promise Mom that I will come home again.”  He doesn’t even have his own voice anymore.  Completely defeated, he gets dressed and rejoins the other men.

… In the southeast the boom-boom steadily thunders louder, more massive, more threatening, till the sky and the ground tremble. …   They come to take revenge, accompanied by the winter cold of 1944-45.  A cold more deadly than the two thousand cannons and three thousand tanks of the Red Army.  Meindert sees a frozen hand sticking out of the snow as a grotesque symbol of the madness.   

   And he, only son of Johannes and Pytsje from the houseboat, is one of the hundred thousands who had let themselves get dragged along….   Three-hundred and seventy days he had camped out in desperate conditions before old St. Petersburg; more than a hundred thousand bombs and grenades they had disgorged over a city with three million poor souls.  At the end of the madness some seven-hundred thousand starving poor wretches will be left.  Hitler may regard them as subhuman creatures, but whoever can still fight keeps fighting fearlessly for wife and children.  Behind them they know of the comrades of the advancing Red Army.  Now far past the Urals they’re advancing in a front 1500 kilometers wide.  With four times as many men, cannons, tanks, airplanes, icebreakers, and armor ships than the Germans had in 1944 on the east and west fronts.

…  the Americans have already reached the Rhine… but they don’t know that.

Beginning of 1945.

 … there’s the call, it sounds like for the last time, “Zurück!”  “Retreat, on the double!”  … Leningrad is abandoned, the men of his squadron wander away from their command.  Chaos. 

…

  Meindert has little sense of time anymore, walks in the uniform of a regular Wehrmacht infantry soldier.  Except for the SS sign in his armpit, he doesn’t have a single mark or paper on him anymore.  Only the plover whistle still dangles on his bony chest.  Underneath his stolen long military coat a stolen chunk of sour bread and some cold coffee in a metal field bottle.

   A few days later on a late afternoon, Meindert follows railroad tracks running in a southwesterly direction at a safe distance.  He hides in the bushes when for the third time a Wehrmacht train is approaching.  When it’s become dark and a fourth one approaches, he grabs his chance when the train has almost come to a standstill.  It pulls ahead and then stops anew.  It turns out to be a passenger train instead of a freight train, and seemingly hardly armed.  He’s able to jump on the footboard, but he can’t open the entry door.  The train starts moving again, he sees a deep bank in front of him, can no longer jump off safely, but then the caravan stops again.  He takes the chance to crawl under the steel connectors between two train units to the other side of the wagon.

   Right in front of him he sees the boots of a soldier who with his back toward him is taking a leak.  He hops on the footboard, darts through the open door, and is in the train.  In the dim light of the inside he sees wounded and apparently dead bodies lie on the floor; a nurse or helper hardly pays attention to him as he moves to another wagon.  Unnoticed, he lies down, between the living and the dead.  Huffing and puffing, the train is back in motion.

…

   An eternity later it’s a final stop.  The train appears to have made the Oder.  Meindert Boorsma gathers from the conversations that they have indeed reached the vicinity of Frankfurt on the Oder.

   “They blew up the bridge to keep the Russians back.”

   “We have to cross, but can’t now.”

…

Meindert begins to prepare for his escape, manages to gather some extra food and liquids, and offers to substitute for the ailing guard.  In the night, close to three, when the coast seems clear, he stands before the river with a backpack made from sturdy sailcloth and containing Red Cross clothes and some provisions.  He can see the destroyed railway bridge up ahead a ways.

…

The crossing is going to be more than a hundred meters.  …

   His war of attrition begins by a piece of bridge wreckage that sticks halfway out of the river.  He scrambles from beam to beam, from pillar to pillar. … at a given moment he can’t go on.  His last ounce of strength is depleted….  But the will not to give up has not quite left him, not for the whole long crossing; he makes it.

…

Much later he arrives at a farm which at the break of day he already had in view.  It looks like its residents left hearth and home in a hurry, all the doors are open, the cattle are gone. …

He stumbles onto a pair of work shoes that fit him pretty well.  Darn, in the front part of the place there are a couple of piles of clothes in one of the cabinets, without a doubt from the farmer himself: the underpants with patches for the knees, a neat blue outer pants, a heavy farmer’s jacket.  When he’s put it on and feels the comfort, he can’t help crying.  Wait, the cord with the plover whistle came off over his head.  Here, you!  The whistle has to go back to the houseboat.  If it is not his comfort bird, then it’s his protection bird.

   In the cellar he finds some food and drink he’s in need of, tries to eat it, takes off for the barn, makes himself a nest in the hay, and goes to sleep.

   After at least twelve hours he wakes soaked with sweat. …

…

Later, he’s ready to follow the path behind the old shed, when he’s startled by a loose-running horse.  The brown horse apparently had been hiding behind the shed. …

… Like a German farmer driven from his property, Meindert that afternoon rides on horseback toward the southwest.

…

     A good week and a half after he left the farm not far from the Oder, his flight is beginning to take its toll. …

He still manages and makes it across a half caved-in wooden bridge on horseback, though he doesn’t know what stream he’s crossing.

   “A small side-river of the Upper Elbe,” he finds out from a fellow fleeing companion.  “The allied already have Regensburg in hand.”  All right, that direction then.

   “The burning smell from a few days ago came from Dresden,” someone claims.  “The English bombed the whole city to smithereens.”  From a passer-by – one of the hundreds of loners on the run – he learns that the Americans indeed have established control of Regensburg.  “And the Russians have crossed the Oder.”

…

It can’t be long anymore, and Uncle Sam and Ivan will shake hands. 

   Four, five times he’s stopped by Wehrmacht soldiers, and each time he saves himself with a tale.  In perfect German: “They burned my farm down, I’m looking for wife and kids.”  But one evening at around eight there’s trouble.  An armed officer stops him and insolently demands his horse. … before he knows what hit him he goes down from a blow with the butt end of a gun, and not just any kind of blow.  As a reflex he must have raised both arms to protect his head, and that costs him a serious injury, maybe a broken shoulder.

   Done in, he’s sprawled on the ground. … His battle for survival is now challenged to the extreme.

   “The Americans are only five kilometer ahead.”

   “Yes, they’re in the Bohemian Forest, right across the Czech border here!”  There’s a catch in the voice.  “The Wehrmacht there has already surrendered.”

   He doesn’t really care anymore where he stays, the pain in his shoulder is unbearable.  His head is spinning from the roaring and the buzzing. …   He finds shelter in a small dilapidated and sagging gazebo behind the largest home of the hamlet.  There’s a worn, smelly armchair standing on three legs.  On account of his damaged left shoulder he tries to sleep sitting up.

A loud noise awakens him; droning and growling it’s coming his way.  Heavy tanks.

…

… he stumbles outside and tries to head in the same direction as the colossal caravan of rolling materiel of the Americans.

… To the left of him is the American 90th Infantry Division of the Third American Army under the command of George Patton….  There’s no end to the droning and rumbling, no end to the afternoon.  But then he can’t go on anymore.

After-Easter Thoughts

Mary Magdalene had seen the broken, bloodied body writhe on the cross.

With anguished disbelief she watched him, who had healed her, die.

She had believed in him as she had never believed in anyone before.

She loved him.  Now she had lost him, and, heart-broken, she felt bereft.

All this we understand.

We know something of the soul-slicing sword and the pain of losing whom we loved.

But what happens next leaves us bewildered.

Mary has lingered by the empty tomb, weeping for what is not there.

When she sees two angels.

Angels?!

The tombs we’ve filled with loved ones have not emptied.

We’ve seen no angels on guard at our gravesites.

None has needed to ask us why we wept.

And none of those we lost have called our name.

(We would have heard, for we would know a loved one’s voice.)

There’s one who said much before:

“Do not fear, I have called you by name, you are mine.”

When Mary hears her name called, she knows the voice.

It is the Lord whose dead body she had been looking for.

That cannot be, we say.

When you die, you’re dead:

“Dust you are, and to dust you will return.”

And shake our heads, like Thomas:

“I have to see it to believe it.”

Thomas, who had been ready to die with Jesus,

Was not ready to believe him risen.

As we are not.

But then our incredulity takes a hit.

Jesus shows up; especially for Thomas.

(Especially for us?)

The doubter touches Jesus, looks into Jesus’ eyes,

Hears Jesus say: “Stop doubting and believe.”

Then, with Job, he could’ve said:

“My ears had heard, but now my eyes have seen you.

Therefore I despise myself and repent in dust and ashes.”

Perhaps all that was implied in his confession:

“My Lord and my God!”

Yes, seeing is believing.

It’s the mantra by which we tend to live.

But the words of Jesus make us ponder:

“…blessed are those who have not seen and yet have believed.”

The faith of Noah, of Abraham, of Moses?

Those who walked by faith and not by sight?

The faith that “is being sure of what we hope for and certain of what we do not see”?

Of being sure that “on the third day he rose again and ascended into heaven”?

Of being certain that where he is, we shall be also?

Is such faith a gift, then, not unlike love?

And when it’s ours, will Easter joy fill our souls too?

Even when we, like his disciples, walk our own via dolorosa to the grave?

Believing that on the other side, the Lord is waiting?

It’s the Easter blessing we have yearned for.

For we would walk with God.

The Liberator

This chapter in The Comfort Bird follows Nanno through the hell fires of the allied battles against the deadly Nazi enemy.  The following excerpt features some parts of Nanno’s experience.

On the fourth story of the Chicago Grand Railroad Office, Nanno finds a small table for himself.  He and another couple of hundred thousand American military were just informed that after this there will be no communication possible at all with the home front.  “Time to say goodbye,” he hears all around him.  But what does that mean in the old language of Dad and Mom?  Write a letter first to Alice.  No, better write the old folks first.  A few sentences, that will long be saved, first in a small drawer in his parents’ house, later in his own drawer that he will not often open:

            ‘[…] Whatever will happen to me, what I took with me from my parents

is worth more than gold.  That’s what makes the writing of these lines

so difficult.  What is precious to you is hard to let go.  I promise

dad and mom that I will do my best to come back safe and sound. […]

[The men embark on a troop ship by the end of March 1944.] …

Circling the convoy is a swarm of speedy destroyer escorts and frigates armed with torpedoes to keep the German submarines at bay.  And they have all they can handle. 

[They make it across.] …

Liverpool.  Nanno Hiemstra does not yet know at this point that on the northern Atlantic Ocean, he became the Dad of a healthy baby girl.

…

In the second half of May 1944, hundreds and hundreds of boats lie anchored in Liverpool and Cardiff, but also in many other English and Irish harbors, and a hundred thousand soldiers are ready to do what will be asked of them. 

…

   There stands his loyal brother-in-arms of iron and steel: a thirteen-ton M5 Caterpillar truck Diamond T, and coupled behind it a piece of artillery of 105mm and a weight of six ton. He’s to boss that around as long as the war shall last.  He’s practiced with such a behemoth for longer than a year, till he could handle it as easily as a pair of horses in front of his wheat meal-and gravel wagon in South Dakota.  Another friend joins who introduces himself as Doug.  He will be his riding mate.

   Five thousand sea ships with a hundred thousand heavily armed men; twenty thousand pieces of heavy equipment; a thousand parachutists who – for all anybody knows – are already in the air somewhere over enemy territory; hundreds and hundreds of airplanes, waiting somewhere for a signal from higher up to take off; gigantic battleships which soon will emerge from behind the scene and storm ahead into the battle to unload their firepower. 

   When they near the French coast, earth turns into hell.  Light that’s unbearable to look at rises from the cellars of the sea, all begins to shake, his body, his ship, the sea, even the sky. The cannons roar, everything that can unload fire, unloads fire.  Everywhere – in front, on the sides, behind him – there’s light; around him he sees hundreds of ships advance, with a wrathful foaming of the mouth. Far ahead of him a coastline that begins to light up as in a raging thunderstorm; arcs of fire sail from behind over the enormous fleet to the front and land on the continent from which Dad and Mom still carry with them its joys and sorrows.

   “Don’t hit me, don’t hit me!” Nanno screams inside.  He advances falteringly, toward an elevation, till the Cat with howitzer runs stuck in the loose sand of the steep dune.  “Doug, I’m not dead, I’m not dead!  Doug, where are you hanging out!”  He stares at the place where his buddy had just been sitting.  Two holes in the seat, some blood and bone fragments, that’s all.  He sees that the right door with the white star is totally gone.

   For the 90th infantry division of Patton’s Third Army it becomes a matter of life or death for an endless week.  Facing them is an SS regiment willing to fight them to the death.  How long is this supposed to last?  What day is it?  Or has time stopped?  This is no way to live anymore.

…

   They succeed in taking 1500 SS prisoners.  “Arms up!”  If they don’t see it from the uniform or from the skull on their cap that one is an SS’r, they can see it from the blood type mark on the underarm. 

   It is the evening of 30 July, the sky is clear but there’s roaring around the city of Avranches.  Nanno sits with a steaming mug of coffee, staring ahead, when an officer appears who’s looking for him.

   “Soldier Nanno Hiemstra?”

   “Yes sir!”  He’s told that in the coming night he will drive at the head of the column into the city of Avranches.  “Because we want to have that city in our hands by tomorrow night!  ….”

   The subordinate from Wisconsin wants to say something too; he says that he’s just become a Dad, and that…but the officer is not ready to tell his story again.

Avranches is burning, but that’s not the worst: the resistance is so all-out powerful.  Snipers, machine gun-and grenade fire.  With his steel brother-in-arms he searches for the path that he’s imprinted on his brain by studying the city map.  There’s no time to look around now; it’s as if he’s the only one riding into the city.  Whole blocks of homes that have been erased confuse his sense of direction; it becomes a gamble.  Here and there he sees personnel from his 90th division who’re there to give his column cover.

   All around him there’s flaming firepower, but he succeeds in reaching the city center.  With the Cat hiding between two walls of a skeleton that once was a church, he looks around.  His column!  … Now he will need to be the first to hurry to the center square, and then across it, but what through-street must he take to reach the northeast side of the city?  The enemy is clever enough and turn the signposts pointing in the wrong direction.

   Then something happens that he will never forget: someone is running as hard as he can across the square with a white flag right toward his Caterpillar.  Is it the road guide who’s been designated by the French resistance to show the Americans the way?  One wouldn’t think so, because it turns out to be a boy of somewhere around sixteen.

   “That way, sir!”  Nanno sees in a pair of dark eyes a burning city.  But does he also see the truth in those eyes?

   “That way,” the boy repeats, and he points to a narrow street that comes out on the other end of the square.  Why shouldn’t it be the other, wider street?  Nanno hesitates.  Right behind him a grenade explodes; here life is short-lived.

   “Say boy, point me the way to the northeast! Now!”  Nanno grabs the boy by his chin.  Two big eyes.  Tears.  Whistling bullets, but the boy doesn’t duck; crying from the stress and agitation he points again emphatically to the narrowest passage.

   “Yes, boy?”

   “Oui, mon libérateur.” [Yes, my liberator.]  Nanno signals the column behind him, gives gas, hears an explosion right behind him, looks around for the boy  –  what happened to the boy?  For the first time since Utah Beach, Nanno again hollers aloud while he races across the square like a madman: “This boy must come home again!”

   Years later he will relive this scene in scary dreams, still always calling out loudly as he chases across the square of Avranches: “This boy must come home again.”  Because that boy showed him the right way.

…

   The way one can hardly stand oneself without a clothes change for weeks, the same way one’s spirit can also become grimy.  How long has it been since he thought about the dearest in his life?  How’s it possible that for a whole day he hasn’t given a thought to his lovely wife and tender baby?  It seems like a mere instinct has taken the place of human feelings.  Survive, who cares how.

At long last his division has arrived at the Mosel, but no matter where they try to cross, they land in easy range of an SS regiment that dug themselves into the hills on the other side of the river. … Again it is Nanno’s role to be in the lead for crossing the river.  …   It is as if someone is standing by Nanno as he crosses the Mosel three times in a row; he is never hit. 

…

They still have to fight their way across the Rhine.  Who’s going to survive?  Who isn’t?  Nanno thinks of the first sentence in his dad’s first letter, which he had first read somewhere in the Ardennes: “It’s good growing weather here, but Nanno my boy, Mom and I think about you more often than about the weather.” …

   A few days later he thunders behind the columns of Sherman tanks right across sprouting patches of meadows and farmland where the un-reaped harvest of last fall lies in decay.  At the edge of the town they take time for a break. 

   Nanno takes his sten gun, strolls over the farmyard, and feels the heat of the sun when he touches the shed’s brick wall.  … when he comes face to face with a woman.  She must be the farmer’s wife.  The woman doesn’t give a sign of surprise.  He’s enjoying this encounter and reaches out his hand, but she beats him to it, she grabs his hand and walks alongside him.  But then, while still holding his hand, she turns to him, and what he sees is a mother.  She’s all in black, like his mom in the three months after Grandma Ytsje’s death.  She’s in mourning.  He stands beside her and can see over her, the way he could see over his own mom on the small train station platform in Sharon.  He takes off his helm.

   “Handsome young man,” she says, “I’ve lost everything!”  She points to her house, her field with grape bushes that were plowed under by the tanks, and makes clear to him that that isn’t the worst.  “The scars in the field will fade in time, but the scars of a mother who first lost her husband and then two of her sons will never heal!”

   Is it possible that all mothers have one and the same voice?

…  

   [ And finally they make it across the Rhine.]

…

Beginning of April 1945.  Nanno is there when the 90th Infantry Division liberates the concentration camp Flossenbürg, not far from the Czech border.  Not till decades later does he decide to tell about it.  He wouldn’t have, except that one of his large number of grandchildren asks him about it.  And that boy is the spitting image of the boy of Avranches.  “I want to know, Grandpa, I want to hear it from Grandpa himself,” the boy says.  And then he tells, he passes it on, but then the unbearable images reappear, of the boy, of the emaciated souls who stared at him through large eyes in hollow eye sockets.  “They no longer had hope or tears, and now they had to cry from joy.”

   Of the 90,000 inmates in Flossenbürg, 30,000 had died by the day of liberation.

…

   Now it is 8 May. …  Germany capitulates.  Exhausted and battered, a large part of the 90th Infantry Division of the 3rd American Army has camped in and around the town of Bodenwöhr.  Thousands of military, endless columns of heavy equipment, temporary barracks and kitchens and hospitals.  There Nanno says farewell to his brother-in-arms of iron and steel, his Cat.  “No, not a single emotion over the scars in the steel.”  Or does he?  The tall Corporal Hiemstra needs to be alone for a moment.  He strolls through the village, sees a mother with a small girl standing in an open front door and asks how old the girl is.  She turns out to be a little over a year old.  “My girl is the same age, but I’ve never seen her.”

                                          -from The Comfort Bird, tr. from De treastfûgel by Hylke Speerstra