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.