Welcome everyone to this special place. My name is Marga van Praag, and I was asked by the Holland Festival to open this event. It’s a great honour to be here with you today.
My mother, Sari, once spent the night here on the concrete floor of the bicycle storage. Without a blanket or matrass. Right on the cold, hard floor. It was in April 1942 when the Germans arrested her on the street during a raid. She was 28. A pretty Jewish woman, married to my father Max van Praag just a few years. My mother and father were one of the last Jewish couples to marry in Amsterdam during the war. And now she’d been arrested. Alongside others rounded up in the bicycle storage of the SD (Sicherheitsdienst). At what was then called Euterpestraat, where we’re all joined now.
She spent many frightful hours here. During the prisoner roll call, she stood face to face with SS Hauptstürmführer Aus der Fünten, who was known to be a fanatical Nazi with no mercy. There was a long line of people who were terrified. He barked at everyone. What’s your profession? What? Another tailor, move it! Move it! The unfortunate ones were put into trucks that belonged to the Wehrmacht. A one-way trip to the death camps.
Then he got to my mother. He didn’t bark at her. He scrutinised her, then mumbled something like: “You remind me of my cousin.” Adding: “You can go”. Incredible, but true.
She would say how all it left her with was a bladder infection and a tilted hip. Of course, this isn’t true. She told me this story all her life. About the luck she’d had, that time on Euterpestraat. And that’s not the only time she slipped through the needle’s eye. She escaped deportation several times together with my father.
That time when their house was the only one that was skipped during a raid.
That time when their hiding address was raided and they quickly hid in a closet, where they felt a German soldier’s hand go through the clothes.
My parents were lucky - perhaps. After the war, whenever anyone said such a thing to my father, he would always answer, “I wasn’t lucky. You were lucky, for not being born a Jew”. His parents, his sister, my mother’s brother, they were all sent to the gas chambers. Betrayed. I still have a photo of my parents’ wedding in 1941. Nearly half the people pictured didn’t survive the war.
My mother felt guilty about this all her life. Guilty for having survived the war, when so many hadn’t. In fact, after everything they’d been through during the Second World War, she felt it best if no Jewish children were born ever again. Though she was quick to add, “I loved children so much, and I was so old already after the war, so I was selfish.”
In September 1946, I was born Margaretha, named after my grandmother, who’d been killed. Three years later, my brother Chiel was born. At our house, not a day went by without the war coming up in some way. With every mishap, my mother would say: I survived the war, so I’ll survive this, too. Everything was far less serious than what had happened during the war. Or they would talk about the war in terms of funny or unusual anecdotes about their time in hiding, which we could laugh about. The same stories, in the same sequence, with the same inflections every birthday. The real story - about the fear and feeling of being deemed too inferior to live - remained hidden for a long time. Still, as a child I felt this fear myself sometimes, and I’d be so afraid that I’d hide under the table some evenings. Because if the Germans returned, I thought, they wouldn’t be able to find me.
Much later, when I interviewed her about the war, my mother said, “There’s only one punishment I wish upon the Germans - fear, endless fear”. In the same interview, my father said, “I’d sometimes think, if only I’d been caught, then I’d be free of this fear”. Honestly, until I was 37, I thought life in the Netherlands had come to a standstill during the war. It opened my eyes when I interviewed the writer-poet Remco Campert about the Dutch famine of 1944-1945. As a fifteen-year-old, Remco had been evacuated from The Hague to Epe in the Veluwe. Life there was like a boys’ adventure book, free from school, which was closed because of fuel shortages. Romping around with friends in the forest all day. Hey, I thought. Isn’t that the same time when my parents were in hiding and part of my family had already been killed? I’ve always been well aware of my Jewish background. A bad word, an off-colour joke, an anti-Semitic remark: well, you picked the wrong person for that with me!
I might follow my father’s example. One hot day, we were on the terrace of a beachside cafe in our swimsuits. My brother and I were still very young. A couple joined us at our table, the woman wearing a salmon two-piece, the man a white suit. He was reading Panorama magazine. My father, who’d been away for a minute, returned in his swimsuit, when the man in the white suit said: “You’d have to be a Jew to come sit here looking like that”. My father didn’t say a word, grabbed the man’s magazine, crumpled it up and threw it in his face. And cried: “The days of denigrating Jews are over”. He threw coffee on the man’s white suit, then upended the whole table, spilling coffee and chocolate milk all over these people, crying “Over for good!” By then, everyone around us recognised my father, who’d been a quite popular singer in the 1950s. 'Maxi, Maxi!’ they cried. The couple slinked off to great applause and cheers, and us kids were both treated to sorbets.
My parents had already been through so much that I saw it as my duty to be a great daughter that they could only be proud of. That they could always rely on. My own setbacks and grief didn’t matter that much, because what was that compared with their history? We, who had to make up for what our parents went through; a generation of children, born after the war. Who hadn’t experienced anything ourselves, but had parents who were all traumatised in some way. It creates a sense of obligation. That’s how I’ve always felt. Be vigilant, alert. Attentive to injustice. 81 years ago at this place, my mother stood face to face with SS Hauptsturmführer Aus der Fünten, who spared her but sent 18 thousand unfortunates to their death. To the Nazis, they were little more than vermin.
Euterpestraat, a street of grief and despair. With this indescribable history of human destruction in mind, we need to stay alert. We need to oppose - continue opposing discrimination, racism, sexism and anti-Semitism. Opposing all instances of one person feeling superior to another. We owe this to future generations, to our children and grandchildren. I wish you a wonderful afternoon.
Marga van Praag (Amsterdam, 1946) was the face of the NOS Jeugdjournaal for decades. Generations of children grew up with her, and with her clear and warm diction she helped countless new inhabitants of the Netherlands understand our language better. She also presented the regular news broadcasts for many years. In addition, she made special reports for the 8 o'clock news. Her unconventional approach was considered controversial.