Sylvia's Journal

We (home) exchanged a spacious oceanside 4 bedroom 3 bathroom home for a tiny 1 bedroom 1 bathroom 2nd floor rear apartment in Paris for 11 days. It may not seem a good deal but it is all in the novelty, variety and choices that our spacious home in Manchester doesn’t have.

We were welcomed to our new temporary digs by Marie who showed us how to navigate 5 doors, codes and locks and all corners of the small apartment.

We are living next door to a chocolatier and glacier (which even had licorice ice cream!). We are a mere 10 steps from a fruit shop with loads of fresh figs, chanterelles, mirabelles and any summer fruit imaginable. All the best French foods (vegetables, meats, cheeses, wines, breads, pastries) are also on our block, and if we don’t feel like cooking (which we always do) we cross the street to buy our dinner ready made from a Lebanese, Asian or Greek traiteur. One block further is a fish shop and restaurant that serves platters of fresh oysters from all over France and other cru delicacies from the ocean aside from regular french fish dishes. And at the corner of the next block on each side is a grocery store. And finally, for the days we don’t feel like shopping or even warming up traiteur foods, we have a choice of 4 cafés that are within sight of our front door and open all day long.

And that’s just the food. We are a 10 minute walk from Paris big lung, the Bois de Boulogne with its pleasure chalet imported in pieces from Switzerland for empress Eugenie in 1854 and rebuilt on an island in the park’s interior lake, a little ferry taking us across the water, for free. We arrived too late for lunch and too early for the bar to open, so we sat in the sun and sketched until the bar opened.

And then there is a large collection of Monets and Morisots a short walk from here at Musée Marmottan, la maison de Balzac and a thousand things more to discover as indicated by the countless books about Paris in the apartment: Dimanches à Paris, On Va Déguster Paris, Secret Paris, A Paris Walking Guide, and more.

It is fun to be here for a while but I am so glad not to live here permanently. Weather information comes from an app rather than see and feel for oneself, the sun’s rays never come down far enough in the courtyard to feel their warmth, neighbors across the 6 meter wide courtyard are practically at one’s dinner table.

This is the Dutch word for pickpockets (zakkenrollers). We left Holland yesterday and took the train from Schiphol to Gare du Nord in Paris for our home exchange stay in the XVIème arrondissement.

Halfway our 3 hour trip we were alerted through the the barely audible PA system to be watchful because pickpockets were on the prowl. I was mostly concerned about our small suitcases and had a watchful eye on people leaving the train. Little did we know that Axel’s wallet had already (and expertly) been removed from his pocket.

A while later the lady who had checked our tickets showed up with his wallet. The forty dollars had been removed but luckily the bank and credit cards had been left in place. We don’t know how the conductress had gotten in possession of the wallet. We were so stunned that we forgot to ask.

And now we are in Paris, $40 lighter. We are in a small urban apartment in the middle of a cornucopia of French foods: patisseries (several), chocolatier and ice cream, next door, butcher/deli, cheeses, wines (2 close by), fruits, nuts and mushrooms, groceries, and then there are all the outdoor terrasses, open for lunch, cocktails and dinner.

And best of all, we went from autumn in Holland, back to summer in Paris.

A few months ago I was alerted to a the publication of a new book about WWII. I would not have known about this (Dutch) book except that it was announced in the alumni newsletter of the student society Minerva to which at least 2 generations in my family belonged. Moreover, the book was written by the grandson – Miles Fabius – of one of my father’s best friends with who he sat on the student council during the war years. The book is titled Breek Punt (breakpoint) and tells the story of the student resistance against the persecution of the jews in the Netherlands. 

It is a thick tome, some 500+pages with lots of photos, diaries, notes, letters, and newspaper clippings that had been sitting in a suitcase for decades and left to be opened someday.  My brother read the book without much of a pause. His wife told me he was deeply touched because of the many mentions of our father. My sister is reading the book too. I am staying at her house and saw the half read on her table. I started to look at the pictures, many of which are of very well dressed men in evening dress, sitting at dining tables set for royalty. And there was my father, in many of the pictures, and my mother in the only picture with women in it. I started to read and soon realized I wanted my own copy because this was a keeper, even though no one in my American family can read it, but they can see the pictures.

I have nearly finished the book; like my brother I could not put it away. And what has emerged is a history of my father’s resistance work I knew nothing about. My parents did not talk much about the war to us, the immediate post-war generation. I hear this from many others. I imagine it was too painful. They wanted to resume the life that had been so brutally disturbed and forget all about the bad things that happened. 

The resistance workers did not tell anyone outside the circle of trusted fellow students, what they were doing and about their whereabouts. The leaders of the student movement, my father being one of the them, were on the Gestapo’s radar and had to move from hiding place to hiding place to avoid arrest, prison and execution or transport to a concentration camp. He was dating my mother during those years. I have her diary (1939-1943). He may have told her not to write about any of his underground work or maybe she didn’t know.

The governance of the student society is in the hands of a presiding board called ‘collegium.’ It is the most supreme of the various structures that guide the running of the society and its assets. The club (Leidsch Studenten Corps) had already been in existence for 100 years by the late 1930s, when the book starts. Tradition has it that this group of young men (in their early 20s) – most from well off families – is selected to serve for a year. But times were not usual and this particular collegium ended up serving for 5 years.  The collegium occupies its own very well appointed room in the building, the president has a personal servant, and all their meals are served by liveried servants. Within the large club exists a myriad of other groupings, some by year (“jaarclub”), some by sport, some by intellectual interests (debate, chess, antique pistols), or even by province.

The names of the members of the various boards and year clubs are sprinkled throughout the book. These names were very familiar to me as these men stayed friends with my father for life, and one became my uncle. I got to know many of them during my childhood, including the main character, the grandfather of the author. These deep and long friendships are also true for my mother, sister and brother who also studied in Leiden. And I have kept a few of these friendships even though I live far away and left Holland more than 50 years ago.

Some of the people in the book disappear over the course of the war. Some are incarcerated in the infamous ‘Oranje Hotel’ prison in Scheveningen before being executed or shipped east to one of the many concentrations camps. A few were lucky and let go. Resistance work was dangerous and the Dutch authorities weren’t alway supportive out of fear of consequences. Earlier in the runup to the war, the terrible consequences of resisting had been demonstrated in Prague, and the students knew about this.

We are staying very near the Oranje Hotel, which is now a museum. I wanted to learn more about that place and the experiences of people who I was reading about and who were sent to that prison. It is full of oral histories, gotten in time before that generation disappears, most have by now.

Reading about WWII, listening to the stories of those who were kept there (some as young as 6 years old), seeing the cells, and reading the goodbye letters from the ones that knew they would be executed, fills me with dread and gloom, as so many of the early signs in 1930s Germany are now visible in the US. After calamities we always hear people say ‘we should never forget’ but the forgetting appears to be in full swing, even in Germany now.