A Sort Of Life: After The Labor Camps

The Netherlands - Most people know about the Nazi death-camps which long ago reached a cult status through the Hollywood film but not many know what really happened to another five million people who, from various countries, were unwillingly transported to work in Germany between 1939 and 1945. Adrianus Huijser, a former Dutch forced-laborer, was one of them who knew.

They were the darkest days of his life. He had nightmares until his dying day and it was why he’d be up at five every morning, sweeping his terrace or trimming his hedges before the sun rose. It was several years ago that I first became curious about this man when I would hear the clack-snip-snip of his wooden-handled cutter in the early summer hours outside my window across the street. And it was much later before we spoke about his past and he let me take notes, and even later still when I decided to translate his responses and write this piece, as a sort of remembrance.

I remember asking him why he felt it necessary getting up so early to work in the dark:

It’s my way now. Busy then, busy now. But, after the war, sleeping got harder. I can’t say how, or why it was more difficult,” he said, smoking a cigarette he rolled himself. He shook his head and gestured to the world around him, “I cannot explain anything.” Feeling like Sartre’s student, I thought, who really can?

We saw each other three times a week over bitter Dutch coffees in a small but homely, built-in café that overlooks the main entrance of the Nettorama Supermarket. The place was always bright, warm, and cheery. Full of hanging pictures and flowers. Always with a few people on a coffee or late breakfast break, pausing before or after shopping. Maybe these were reasons why Adrianus came so often to sit and watch. A continual attempt to erase the past in this pleasant ordinariness.

He was a tall man, who seemed to have lost a lot of weight, with thin, white hair, combed straight back. One of the kindest men I have ever met. Adrianus, who was to be 81 in April 2004, was assigned to three years at an AEL (Arbeitsziehungslager) camp in Lubeck, working for the Berlin-Lubeck Maschinenfabriken). That was in 1942. The second camp for him during those years was located outside of Lubeck, which was the result of a criminal incarceration for eight months. A small infraction of a rule, leaving the camp without permission, led from one thing to another until one day an officer escorted him to a Gestapo office in Lubeck.

Various charges were thrown at him and that same day he was transported to a prison called Lohmuhle. After months in small cells, beatings, interrogations, and witnessing two executions of fellow prisoners, sick and weak he was released to resume work at his former camp. That was 1944 and it would be another year of forced labor before the allied bombing would knock out his camp, as well as a hole in his cell wall, and he and a fellow inmate would take the long walk back to Holland, sleeping in barns and fields along the way.

Although Adrianus had slender knowledge of what started WWII, he knew the daily camp routines better than any book-educated historian. “Up at four in the morning, I began work at six. Two fifteen-minute breaks in the afternoon and back to camp by 6:30, seven days a week.” I never got much more than this glossed-over information over a comfortably worn table-cloth and hot coffee. Obviously, it is difficult to know anything unless you were there and he wasn’t telling everything and it was slow in coming out. Adrianus had a face that usually did not reflect his past, only the goodness shined through of this good man and only once in a while there was a crack into a darkness.

Sometimes, I think I saw it in his grey adamantine eyes when he was looking out the café window at the fallow fields or the green sprouting wheat while telling me his story. Adrianus’ bicycle seat had a large furry cover on it for the maximum comfort. He cycled everywhere within a seven village radius. It was his greatest pleasure, he said. When it was time for his haircut, he would cycle four kilometers to Mijnsheerijnland and at least three times a week to the Nettorama Supermarket.

What had it been like, I asked, when suddenly you were given your papers to report to a German work camp?

Like most of the answers I got from him, there were long silences before he answered. If he hadn’t been my neighbor and if we hadn’t built a fence together, I don’t think he would have told me much. This is typical of most men like Adrianus in Holland with his experience and why little has been published about Dutch forced laborers.

I didn’t understand what was happening,” he said. “I knew others had had to go earlier but I didn’t understand. In the beginning the Germans were suddenly occupying, we tried to live our lives as usual and I didn’t think I would have to go. You don’t believe it will happen until they come for you. I was eighteen. They hid my brother.”

His brother, Jan, 10 years younger, was whisked away somewhere by the family and when I met him at the funeral, I saw how different and alike these two were. Jan was a younger, heftier image of Adrianus, with soft manicured hands and a cultured look.

I then realized what could have been had the older brother also managed to escape the fascist dragnet in search of laborers. After being “arrested” at age 18, he and others from surrounding villages were brought to the train station in Rotterdam. There, other armed guards made sure they got on the train which was destined for a central distribution center at the German border.

After spending three days confined with Russians, Poles, and other nationalities, he was put on another train for Lubeck. “I remember worrying about what my boss back in Holland would think of me not showing up for work. That was a big concern for some reason. Silly, ya?.” He laughs.

Did he ever get sick after he was taken? “Yes, twice, a flu, but I was pretty strong, so it passed quickly, even with little food” Until October of 2003 was he still physical strong. Not typical for an 80 year old, riding with his ancient bicycle with the big seat through the heat of summer or the cold wet of a harsh winter winds. Many men 20 years his junior wouldn’t have had the stamina, or bothered.

Yet when I look at Adrianus Huijser I see, like I see in most of us, our slow undifferentiated drift down the years of our lives, and a little of the glitter of his seemingly ordinary life. Adrianus died of lung cancer on 20 November 2003.