Re: Reply to Eberhard and Mary
Kees Vanderheyden (keesv@sympatico.ca)
Mon, 12 May 1997 17:55:39 -0400
Coping with life
I just read with great interest Eberhard=92s thoughts about the scars and=
memories of the war and his search for meaning, purpose and redemption.
You are right, I feel, when you conclude =93the message we seek to delive=
r
(in telling our stories) does not lie in the stories themselves so much
as in their meaning as it relates to war itself=94 and I would risk to ad=
d
if I think of my own subtexts "in what they tell about the way we come
to grips with their reality". =
That is what I have tried in writing down my memories for my daughters,
later published in a little book in french, titled =93La guerre dans ma
cour=94. I remember when I told my many fresh war stories to my student
friends at the Gymnasium (High School) in Holland, they laughed at them.
They found that I had not seen all the horrors of war they had seen. We
possibly missed the point by comparing horror with horror, tragedy with
tragedy. It was what we did from there that counts. If we could put
together the gigantic puzzle of our great and small experiences, of our
ways of handling them, we would get a better and more useful overall
picture. My coping with the experience is no better or more important
than anybody=92s, but let me give you a few things experienced and than
the things I have been looking for ever since the fall of 1944 and the
spring of 45. The troubling fact for me as a kid of eleven years old was
that the General who took over our house was not the brute and the
killer he was supposed to be. He would discretely leave rare food on our
kitchen table for us. I even discovered that one of his staff was a dad
like my dad. I thought all soldiers were men with big boots and loud
mouths who lived to scare and kill. He would stare in total despair at
the allied bombers that thundered over our heads every morning towards
his country. He had lost his wife and children under the bombs. A few
days after the liberation by the Canadians I saw the General as a
prisoner, broken. I thought the war was awful, crual and stupid for
everybody. After the war my parents decided to adopt for a while a
little German girl. The arrival of a little girl coming from the enemy
was for us kids a ray of hope that there might be peace in
reconciliation rather than in humiliation and vengence. Ever since I
have looked for ways to find places for reconciliation. I=92m translating=
right now one of these efforts, I=92ll post them soon. I don=92t know if =
my
ponderings are of any great help, but I think they are at least little
pieces of a great puzzle that we are all trying to finish, before it is
too late. =
Au revoir! Kees (the dutch schoolboy).