“The Boy Between Worlds” by Annejet Van Der Zihl

Waldemar Nods, a native of Surinam, travels to the Netherlands in 1928. He has a half-brother there, and he’s looking to study and make his way in the world. He’s an excellent swimmer, and he brings to the Netherlands his memories of a warm, sunny climate and swimming in the river, sometimes for miles.

Rika Hagenaar-van der Lans is married and the mother of four children. She’s also increasingly dissatisfied with her marriage and life on an island off the Dutch coast, even though her husband has a good job and is rising with his company. She leaves her husband and returns to The Hague. She’s not interested in reconciliation. To make ends meet, she lets rooms to boarders. One of those boarders is Waldemar. 

The year is 1928. In 1929, Rika gives birth to what is clearly a biracial baby. He’s named Waldemar after his father. Her husband initiates divorce proceedings and gains custody of their children. Her own Catholic family is horrified and cuts her off. But Rika seems unaffected, except for the rarely seeing her children. She and Waldemar manage a succession of boarding houses, and Rika learns how good she is at it. They eventually marry. 

Annejet Van Der Zijl

They are managing a large resort-type house facing the beach near the Hague when May 1940 arrives, bringing with it the Nazi invasion of the Netherlands. Little changes after the first year after the invasion. Then everything begins to change, and Rika with her large heart begins to help hide Jews fleeing the Nazis.

The Boy Between Worlds by Annejet Van Der Zihl tells the story of Waldemar, Rika, and their son Waldy. It’s the story of ordinary Dutch citizens and the part they played in the war.  At first, the reader wonders if Waldemar’s black skin will make him a Nazi target; blacks were considered even lower than Jews in the Nazi genetic hierarchy. Surprisingly, that’s not what happens.

Van der Zihl is one of the best-known writers and journalists in the Netherlands. She’s written biographies of Dutch children’s author Annie M.G. Schmidt; Prince Bernhard, the husband of former Queen Juliana; and Gerard Heineken, founder of the beer company. She is also the author of An American Princess, the biography of American socialite Allene Tew. She’s also received several literary awards for her books. The Boy Between Worlds was published in the Netherlands in 2004 under the title Sonny Boy, where it has remained a bestseller, and was translated into English in 2019 by Kristen Gehrman. 

Until Van Der Zihl completed the book, Waldy (by then 75 years old) never knew what happened to his parents. Through extensive research, and interviewing the few remaining survivors who knew what happened, Can Der Zihl found out. The Boy Between Worlds makes compelling reading as it tells a moving and emotional story.

“A Cold Death in Amsterdam” by Anja De Jager

Europe’s fictional police detectives are a suffering lot. In recent months, I’ve read contemporary police procedurals from Britain, Ireland, and the Continent and found diabetics, recovering alcoholics, neatness neurotics bordering on psychotic, and divorced detectives, struggling with personal problems as they undertake murder and other criminal investigations. In fact, the criminals seem more normal than the detectives trying to bring them in.

And then there’s Amsterdam’s Lotte Meerman.

Meerman investigates cold cases, and she’s just finished a big one – the 15-year-old disappearance of a little girl. She should be gratified, but instead she’s going to pieces. The case and its details continue to haunt her, at times almost immobilizing her.

One cold winter night, just driving around, she stops for gasoline and interrupts a holdup at the gas station. She ends up having to shoot the teenaged perpetrator, but the wound isn’t fatal. And he tells her that his uncle had killed someone. It turns out that the uncle is a very powerful investment banker, and involved in a case from years before.

It was a case her father investigated, the one he was working on when he was told to retire. The case files were supposedly picked up by the new detectives assigned to the case, but somehow the files disappeared. And Meerman must come to grips with the idea that her father may not only be involved in destroying police files but in committing the murder itself.

A Cold Case in Amsterdam, published in 2015, is the first of three Lotte Meerman police novels by Anja De Jager, the others being A Cold Case in Amsterdam Central and The Murderer’s Guide to Family (not yet available in the U.S.). A fourth, Death on the Canal, is scheduled for publication in November.

Anja De Jager

The book is much as psychological novel as it is a police procedural.  De Jager allows us to crawl inside Meerman’s head, as she slowly unwinds what happened with the missing child case and gradually winds up the current case. This detective is suffering from what she learned, what she did, how she unknowingly became personally involved, and the known (to her) reason for her parents’ divorce years before.

Netherlands-born Anja De Jager worked for 20 years in London’s business district before becoming a full-time writer. Her father is a retired police detective, and she herself is more than familiar the investment and financial transactions, which become important to the Meerman investigation.. She lives in London.

A Cold Case in Amsterdam starts slowly and gradually works itself to almost fever pitch. We’re not sure how to react to this detective, isolated from colleagues and family, who seems bent on her own destruction and not particularly caring about what is happening to her. But she will work her way through the personal and investigatory challenges to solve the case.

And leave just enough issues hanging to make the reader want to reader the second novel.

Photograph of Amsterdam in winter courtesy of Netherlands Tourism.

The Hiding Place: Misery, Tedium, and Kindness

As Corrie ten Boom describes in The Hiding Place, after their arrest in Haarlem in February 1944, members of the ten Boom family are trucked to Gestapo headquarters in The Hague. From there, they’re taken to nearby Scheveningen, the site of what had been the Dutch federal penitentiary but is not a prison used by the Nazis. The women are divided from the men, and she sees her elderly father sitting in a chair, brought by a guard out of respect for his age.

It is the last time Corrie will see her father.

She’s separated from her sister Betsie, other family members and anyone else from Haarlem. Corrie is still sick, trying to recover from the flu.

There in Scheveningen, she discovers the misery of prison life, not the least of which is the tedium. She also discovers occasional kindness, such as when she’s transported to a doctor and a nurse slips her some soap and four gospel tracts.

She will learn through the prison grapevine that, of all the ten Boom family members arrested, only she, Betsie and their father remain in prison; the others have been released. She will also learn that the “watches in her closet” – that is, the Jews who were hiding in the concealed room at the ten Boom clock shop – were all able to escape. They were not found by the Gestapo. She will receive a message from Betsie: “God is good.” And she will find out that her father died 10 days after the arrest.

She reads her gospel tracts. And Corrie discovers something.

The gospels are stories of – initially – a defeat. Jesus is arrested, interrogated, beaten, forced to carry his cross to Golgotha, and then crucified. For his disciples, the spiritual and emotional darkness that followed Jesus’ death lasted for three days. Most if not all of them were in hiding. It appeared as if Jesus’ ministry had been destroyed, and they were all marked men, without a leader, a teacher, or anyone to guide them.

What Corrie discovered from the gospel accounts was surprisingly simple, and something she might not have realized before she was in prison.

Defeat wasn’t the end.

Defeat was the beginning.

Led by Jason Stasyszen and Sarah Salter, we’ve been reading the hiding Place. To see more posts on this chapter, “Scheveningen,” please visit Sarah at LivingBetween the Lines.

Photograph of a prison cell bathroom by Ken Kistler via Public Domain Pictures. Used with permission. The cell occupied by Corrie ten Boom at Scheveningen wasn’t as well lit or as well furnished as this one.

The Hiding Place: The Rope Tightens

It is two years into the Nazi occupation of Holland. Each month, Corrie ten Boom writes in The Hiding Place, the occupation grew harsher, the restrictions more numerous. Corrie’s brother Peter violates one of the latest edicts and plays the Dutch national anthem, the “Wilhelmus,” during a church service. He’s imprisoned for three months.

More Jews are being arrested and deported to the camps in the east. The numbers seeking help and hiding remain steady. One friend organizes the “burglary” of an identity card office, including a very real physical beating to convince the Germans. Corrie is later taken to a meeting of the Dutch underground, bicycling with a contact with tires wrapped in cloth to muffle the sound.

This is the line between amateur underground operations and the professionals. Corrie and the ten Booms will cross that line, and what results is the construction of a secret room in their home, a place that Jews and others can be temporarily hidden, the “hiding place” of the book’s title.

The risks for the family were enormous.

And yet they took them, with barely a second thought. As Corrie’s father would say, “In this household, God’s people are always welcome.” His meaning extended to God’s original chosen people, the Jews.

Was this courage? Foolhardiness? Recklessness?

Or was it an expression and extension of the ten Booms’ faith?

What does it mean to have that kind of reckless faith? Their lives, the lives of the extended family, the security of their church were all at great risk. And yet they continued.

We haven’t faced that kind of test of faith and courage here in the United States, but many say the time is coming. Christians in the Mideast have faced it and continue to face it. Globally, the number of persecutions of Christians has been increasing. We are likely fooling ourselves if we believe that something like this could never happen here.

I think about my children and my three grandsons. Would my faith be that reckless if I knew I would be putting them in jeopardy?

It’s a question I hope I never have to answer.

But I need to be prepared to answer it.

Led by Jason Stasyszen and Sarah Salter, we’ve been reading and discussing The Hiding Place. To see more posts on this chapter, “The Secret Room,” please visit Jason at Connectingto Impact.

Photograph: Members of the Dutch underground in 1944, via Wikimedia Commons.

The Hiding Place: Invasion

Haarlem, The Netherlands, September, 1939. A family of aging sisters, and an elderly father and aunt, listen to the assurances of the Dutch government on the radio that the country is neutral, it will not be invaded by Nazi Germany and there will be no war. A few hours later, Holland is at war. Five days after that, the queen flees to Britain and the government surrenders. And everything changes.

German military uniforms are everywhere. Curfews are announced. Radios have to be surrendered.

We’ve reached the point in our book discussion of The Hiding Place by Corrie ten Boom where the introductory chapters are over, and the story turns to one of the darkest times in Dutch and European history. It is difficult time to be Dutch, and occupied by Nazis. It’s an impossible time to be Jewish. The Jews of Haarlem gradually begin to disappear, starting with the rabbi and other religious leaders. (In a separate story, in Amsterdam, the Frank family, including their daughter Anne, goes into hiding, and will evade the Nazis for three years.)

Corrie ten Boom finds a wide array of responses to the occupation. Some people will fight it and join the resistance. Some will embrace the new conquerors and become much like them. Most will try to muddle through and focus on surviving. And some will be consumed, never to be seen again.

The last time any part of the United States was occupied at least partially by a conquering army was the Civil War. Before that, it had happened during the American Revolution. (During the War of 1812, there were battles and forays like the burning of Washington, but no sustained occupation.) Those occupations, while disruptive and often terrible, cannot compare with what happened in Europe with the Nazis. And yet people’s responses were similar – some resist and fight, some collaborate, most try to survive.

Corrie faced a choice in how she would respond. She could have ducked and likely been left largely alone. But Corrie and her family were strong Christians, and they’re horrified by what’s happening. Persecution of a Jewish neighbor leads her to help him escape, and Corrie ten Boom discovers the underground. And more than that, she will become part of the underground. She will offer herself to God to help the Jewish people.

You read a story like this one and can’t help but ask, what would you do in her situation? You’d like to think you would be courageous – we all like to think of ourselves as noble heroes – but the fact is that you don’t know. And you won’t know until you face the kind of choice and the decision Corrie faced.

She chose the path of courage and danger. She could have kept her head down and ridden out the war relatively unbothered, ignoring what was happening to neighbors and friends, ignoring the men, women and children wearing the yellow star, herded into trucks and taken away.

And she knew there could be a heavy price to pay.

Led by Jason Stasyszen and Sarah Salter, we’ve been reading The Hiding Place. To see more posts on this chapter, “Invasion,” please visit Sarah at Living Between the Lines.

Photograph: German troops rounding up Dutch Jews for deportation to the camps in Poland.