When I was growing up in the Dutch town of Leiden in the 1970s and 80s, everything looked placid yet it felt as if the second world war was still all around us. A colleague of my dad was the sole survivor of a wartime raid by his Resistance group. Our Jewish next-door neighbour had discovered only as a teenager that her father lost his first family in the gas chambers. My sixtysomething history teacher had come to Leiden as a young man, reportedly because he had to leave his hometown after having been fout (meaning “wrong”, a collaborator) under German occupation.
Eighty years after the Nazi surrender, what’s left of the war now? The political impacts are fading: the US no longer values Nato; the post-Auschwitz message, “Never again”, is barely heard, as ethnic massacres continue; and the post-Hitler taboo on the far right has lifted. The war’s deepest remaining effects are now personal traumas, handed down from the wartime generation to their descendants.
As a child, I realised only dimly that many of my contemporaries, born around 1970, were marked by the war. A friend on our street had a mother from Indonesia, who had spent five years of her childhood in a Japanese prison camp. Every morning in the camp, she and her older sister would collect their daily cup of rice. “Eat yours,” her sister would urge her, and the girl would finish it in two bites. Then the sister would taunt, “Now your rice is gone, but I still have mine.” When my friend was 17, his mother died young of liver cancer, possibly a belated consequence of childhood malnutrition. Those Japanese prison guards finally got her in 1987.