There they sat, at the bottom of a box of real winter stuff, unused and totally unnoted because the winter just hadn't been cold enough. Last week--my word!--it got cold enough.
They may well be my only pair of woolen socks, but they are not the only pair of thick, winter socks. Chances are, if I hadn't been looking for a old and warm waffle-knit shirt, they'd still be in the back room, unused, hiding in the corner of that box of cold weather stuff--actual "stuff in the basement."
The minute I saw them, I recognized them, not for being the only pair of warm woolen socks I have, but because of the story that resides with them--not in them, but with them, the story of how it was they came to be down here in the basement, our basement, my basement.
We were in Spakenburg, the Netherlands, the whole Schaap family, because I wanted to see what that world looked like--I had to see it to write about it. We'd scored some cheap tickets--the early 90s--and thus decided to take a family trip to the Netherlands. None of us had ever been there. We were and are all of Dutch ancestry.
I'd come to know a woman named Berendina (Diet) Ehrlich (she would soon change her name to her maiden name, Eman), a Resistance fighter during the Nazi occupation of the Netherlands. I wanted to help her write her life story. I thought I'd be far more helpful to her and the cause if I knew what her world looked like, the world where she'd walked so many back roads through the years of the Occupation, working ceaselessly and dangerously to keep alive the Jews she'd hidden with Dutch farmers.
Her Resistance work originated when her fiancé, a man named Hein Sietsma, read Mein Kampf and determined that Dutch Jews were in peril. Hein grew up in the country, a tiny town named Holk, where his father was the principal in a little Christian school I'd visited the day before. The two of them were working for a makeshift group of resistance fighters they'd come to call Group Hein, but the two of them, very much in love, had not been working the same 80 acres. They'd deliberately separated because they didn't want to know much about what the other was doing--and for a very good reason: should either be arrested by the Gestapo, they didn't want to know much because the Nazis employed fiendish tortures to get men and women singing. If you didn't know anything, you couldn't give up significant information.
Diet and Hein were Christian kids. This was, after all, a Christian organization, built on the premise that what was happening to Dutch Jewry was contrary to the teachings of the scriptures. Resistance was a terrible task, imminently dangerous, but, to them, something that simply had to be done. God wanted it done.
Barbara and I bought cheap tickets to go to the Netherlands because I wanted to see at least some of the places Diet told me about when we spent a week going through the her story. I wanted to see that little Christian school in Holk. I wanted to drive down roads north from Arnhem, roads filled with refugees when Operation Market Garden went bust, unable to take "the bridge too far." I wanted to see her world.
Diet and Hein were young and in love, and it hurt both immensely that they couldn't spend more time together. They were engaged--she had a ring, and her wedding dress hung in her closet in her parents' home in The Hague. But she didn't live at home, couldn't really, never got there once the SS started snooping around, visiting her parents and asking about their daughter.
So they'd meet clandestinely, when they could, where they could, and one of those places was the church at Spankenburg, where they knew they could see each other. It would be some Sabbath night, a place to meet and celebrate communion together in a place no one knew either of them.
What I couldn't imagine--and still can't--is the immensity of their passion for each other in the middle of that cauldron of horrors the Occupation brought to every segment of Dutch life--from the Catholic south to the Reformed north, to cities and towns and even to a thousand Dutch farms and dairies. In the middle of all of that, and the omnipresent danger of being caught, these two young lovers would meet in a safe place, at church, for communion. One of the churches she mentioned was the church at Spakenburg. That's why we were there.
I wanted to see the church. That's where the story of my gray wool Spakenburg socks begins.
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| Noorderkerk (Geref. Kerk Vrijgemaakt), Spakenburg, the Netherlands |
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More on the Spakenburg socks tomorrow.
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