May 5. Cinco de Bevrijdingsdag!

As everyone knows, Cinco de Mayo commemorates 1862’s Battle of Puebla. That’s the one in which an underequipped, outnumbered, and profoundly annoyed collection of hastily summoned Mexican army regulars absolutely clobbered several thousand haughty French marines, who at the battle’s denouement could be seen actually fleeing down a hill with the Mexican army in hot pursuit. It was a start, and a nationally energizing victory for the swinging young Mexican nation. Six years later the French roundly abandoned their cause of basing a new French empire in Mexico. Cinco de Mayo, baby! 

May 5 is also a big deal in The Netherlands; more colloquially known as Holland. That’s the day in 1945 the Canadian First Army swept into Holland to show the Nazis the door. The Dutch call May 5 “bevrijdingsdag.” Liberation Day. My wife Judie’s hometown is on the Dutch channel coast, a cozy village (dorp) called ‘Monster’ – not in honor of Frankenstein, but because the town had played 12th century host to a well-known medieval monastery. The town, like the rest of the country, was brutally occupied by the Germans in WWII.

The Germans had arrived with a bang in neutral Holland some five years before, storming the country and signaling their displeasure with the stiff Dutch resistance by leveling Rotterdam in a remonstrative carpet-bombing raid. About a half-mile from Judie’s childhood home, the desperate and terrified Dutch and German soldiers would fight savagely at close quarters in the bucolic forest of Ockenburgh, where today there are swings, slides, climbing structures for toddlers, and birdsong.

Jacobus and Hendrika in the Crucible

As kids themselves in the middle of a merciless war, my in-laws Koos and Riek van Vliet (Jacobus and Hendrika) remember the occupation. Once the Germans arrived, Koos and other boys his age and older were conscripted by the occupiers into factory work with little food and less sleep; indentured child laborers assembling munitions day and night. 

One afternoon, Koos walked by a room where several German officers were dining. He hadn’t eaten in days. The officers asked if he was hungry and gestured him over, allowed him to eat his fill, laughing and smoking as he attacked the sumptuous foods spread out on the table. They knew the sudden feast would likely kill him, and it nearly did.

Stories of privation are many from 1944, in particular the Hunger Winter (Hongerwinter), brought about when the German occupiers responded punitively to a railway strike called in by Holland’s government-in-exile. In angry response to the strike, Germany ordered a blockade of food shipments to Holland. The resulting cataclysm unfolded so quickly, the German commander in the region foresaw the scale of the disaster and tried to roll back the blockade orders. 

But by then the inland waterways, Holland’s famous canal system on which so much transport of goods depended, had frozen solid. Nothing could get through. Tens of thousands starved. In the countryside, families dug up and ate tulip bulbs and trapped birds in the otherwise useless greenhouses. 

Riek’s mother (my wife’s grandmother) reached out to share her family’s meager supplies with the starving families on whom she took pity as they trudged past, to the fury of Riek’s dad, who would’ve been gone for days on a bicycle in the countryside seeking bread for the family to eat. “M’n moeder was een goed mens,” Riek says often in the telling, nodding and teary.

Bikes

It once would’ve seemed utterly impossible, but by the early 1980s a grudging and ragged rapprochement was in the air between the Germans and the Dutch. The conflict some 40 years past by then, German families had been vacationing on Monster’s beaches for some time, but the intermingling of the populations also began to give expression to a latent animus among certain of the Dutch. During the war, Dutch bikes had been confiscated in their tens of thousands by the German occupiers.

The primacy of the bicycle to the Dutch culture and identity was an unknown to the Germans; they didn’t grasp the relationship between the Dutch and their bicycles. What the Germans did understand was that the mobility of the Dutch on their innumerable bikes – and particularly the bike-based fluidity of the Dutch Resistance – was an unclear but intolerable threat the Germans had to shut down. 

Given the broader horrors that had been visited on the Dutch, the taking of the bikes remained, in the post-war years, a curious sore point. 

As the long thaw between the countries incrementally crawled along, the angry lament for the stolen bikes stubbornly hung on as a rallying cry of post-war Dutch national anger, shouted at unwitting German people wherever they were spotted – summering in Holland, or at football
matches abroad. 

Shouted or murmured, it was a hectoring, innocuous, even childish thing for a Dutch adult to say these decades after the war, they who had experienced the Nazi occupation. But the cry contained unarticulated volumes, for years summing up lingering Dutch anger with the Germans.

“Geef me mijn fiets terug!” – “Give me my bike back!”

Mühleip and Monster

Then in the early ‘80s, there began a timorous exchange program between a church choir from the tiny village of Mühleip in Germany, and Koos’s church choir in Monster. Someone in Koos’s choir knew someone who knew someone – and it did seem like an idea whose time had come. Arrangements were nervously made. 

One year, the German choir would come by bus to Monster and be hosted and housed, performing with Koos’ choir in a show of modern post-war unity. The next year, Koos’s choir would be received as guests and performers in Mühleip. 

The informal, seat-of-the-pants arrangement began with trepidation on both sides and crept along in stutter-steps at first. The enmity ran very deep; again, on both sides. But slowly, the ice cracked. The thaw was glacial, but over time hesitant friendships grew, to everyone’s mild surprise. The respective choir members began to see each other not as historical ciphers or symbols, but as flesh and blood people; or to put it more prosaically, as singers in a couple of small-town church choirs. 

Koos, though, during one visit of the German guest chorale, his personal history momentarily uncontainable, reflexively burst out with a comment that set the whole enterprise back on its heels: “How about you guys bring back the bike you stole from me!” After some downcast faces and throat clearing, the awkward remark was allowed to drift away.

When Koos’s choir next made the trip to Germany to perform and be hosted by their counterparts there, a couple of the German singers pulled him aside with solemn expressions.

“Koos, we must tell you something.”

He waited. “Ja? Wat is er?”

The Germans looked at each other.

“Koos, we found your bike.”

“… my bike?”

His smiling German hosts wheeled out a beautiful 10-speed racing bike amid clapping and laughter. They’d painted it Dutch royal orange. When the German group next visited Monster, Koos met the bus at the edge of town and led his pals, in a singularly grand procession, down the winding streets to the church where they would sing together, Koos on his royal orange steed gesturing as grandly as a parade master. It would be the second momentous rolling into Monster of a loud German mob. This one cheering and embracing the locals.

The human race has its moments. We are not stamped by destiny. Happy Cinco de Mayo, and Happy Liberation Day. Every day. (Koosje, je bent altijd in onze gedachte.)