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A policeman calls 27/05/2008 00:00
For my father, the war didn't end on the fifth of May 1945. My grandfather had gone missing, and there would be several more months of anguish and uncertainty before he suddenly turned up. With nothing more than a jam jar, a paperweight and an old casino coin.
By Perro de Jong
He had been sent to Germany in 1941 and forced to work in the factories. Which is strange, as the Germans didn't usually take men in their forties. But someone in the village had apparently spread the rumour that my gentle grandfather was a closet communist. That someone later turned out to be a local policeman with Nazi-sympathies, who had been told off by my great-grandmother in her dairy shop one day because he didn't pay his bills. So you could say my grandfather was sent to Germany over a bottle of milk.
"While his surviving fellow workers enthusiastically
looted the rubble for Meissen porcelain and other
valuables the souvenir he brought back to the village
that betrayed him was a coin" (Photo left: Bayrische
Vervalting der Staatlichen Schloesser, Gaerten und Seen)
Cartoonist
What reminded me of this was the arrest last week of Dutch cartoonist Gregorius Nekschot. No fewer than ten policemen detained Nekschot - a pseudonym meaning 'shot to the neck' - and raided his apartment, in order to confirm his carefully guarded identity and establish if his cartoons were racist or xenophobic.
Nekschot is known for his extreme, no-holds barred style. But as far as I can tell, he is no more a racist than my grandfather was a communist. Of course I'm not a judge. But then neither is prosecutor Paul Velleman, who ordered his arrest, or justice minister Ernst Hirsch Ballin, under whose ultimate authority the raid took place. It's these two men who remind me uncannily of the policeman who deported my granddad.
A strange time, the war. All kinds of people came crawling out of the woodwork with petty dislikes and pent-up frustrations that would never have been taken seriously if the Nazi occupation hadn't given them a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. Well, pent-up frustration is something the ruling Dutch Christian Democrats - Mr Hirsch Ballin's party - are no strangers to.
They have had to stand by for decades as people insulted or made fun of Christianity under the twin banners of secularisation and free speech. Now, suddenly, religion is back on the agenda and it's because of Islam. 'Why them and not us', I can almost hear the Christian Democrats think.
Skirts
I have had difficulty accepting them as honest brokers in the Islam debate ever since then justice minister Piet Hein Donner proposed responding to the murder of filmmaker Theo van Gogh by an Islamic fundamentalist by reviving an old Dutch blasphemy law. Which - if you think about it - isn't all that different from saying the best way to tackle rape is by making it compulsory for women to wear long skirts.
And now this. The arrest of an artist, a champion of free speech, as if he were producing bombs instead of drawings. And the only official complaint about his cartoons was from a Dutch convert to Islam whose other claim to fame is wishing a deadly disease on the politician Geert Wilders. Most people hadn't even heard of Nekschot before last week - let alone had the opportunity to be offended by him.
Porcelain
So why all the shock and awe? Except, of course, if Mr Velleman and Mr Hirsch Ballin were looking for a precedent. Something to bring home their point that there should be limits to free speech. Even in the Netherlands, and even - or especially - the free speech of artists. What they had need for that is someone not too well known or popular. Someone whose work could raise legitimate questions about possible racist content. Someone, in other words, like Gregorius Nekschot.
My grandfather was in Cologne when allied forces bombed it and left little more than the famous Dome standing. While his surviving fellow workers enthusiastically looted the rubble for Meissen porcelain and other valuables, the souvenir he brought back to the village that betrayed him was that coin.
I still have it, flattened and polished by the shock and awe of the allied bombs to a perfect shiny oval. The poet Robert Frost famously compared truth to a pebble of quartz. Perhaps for my grandfather it was a coin. Worthless, you may say. But it's still more than I'd give for all of Ernst Hirsch Ballin's and Paul Velleman's principles put together.
27 May 2008
[Copyright Radio Netherlands 2008]
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