A procession of children on their way to destruction

At the Spinoza Lyceum in Amsterdam, history teacher Cees Koole had set up an exhibition about the thirty-nine Jewish students who were expelled from school during the Second World War and had to go to the Jewish Lyceum established by the Germans. Almost half of them, seven of whom I know, would survive the war in hiding. Maurits van Witsen, my wife's uncle, is one of them, now 97 years old.

Before the opening of the exhibition, clear-headed as ever, he recalled his two years at that Jewish Lyceum. He found it quite pleasant there, got good grades and made fun of the teachers in the school newspaper. Only his history teacher Jaap Meijer drove him crazy, who wanted to convert his students to Zionism. At one point, they had had enough that they threatened to jump into the Amstel and be baptized into Christianity. Uncle Maurits also told how one day he and his older sister Judith were no longer allowed to go to school by bike or tram, but had to walk from Amsterdam-Zuid to the other end of the city. During that long walk, more and more fellow sufferers joined them. That cinematic image of that procession of children will never leave me. And in my imagination of it I was strengthened by the recently published Still Storm by Peter Handke.

This work by the Austrian writer, beautifully translated by Miek Zwamborn, reads like a combination of a play, a novel and a language game. The narrator sits on a bench on the heath and lets his entire dead family pass by: his mother, her three brothers, her sister, and his grandparents, simple Slovenian farmers in the Carinthian countryside. These brothers are conscripted into the Wehrmacht during the Second World War and fight against Slovenian partisans on the other side of the border. One of them dies in Russia, the other in Yugoslavia, the third deserts and joins the partisans, just like his sister, and disappears into the woods.

The narrator, who is now older than his grandparents, is the only one who still remembers his family members. He dreams of them and remembers them. They themselves would rather not, because they would feel held accountable by someone who has escaped from their world. But because there is no one else, they invite him for the 'family photo' anyway.

His unmarried mother then still has to become pregnant by him. Not by a Slovenian, but by a German soldier, the enemy, whom she never saw again after that one night. Her child is the future narrator, who will always feel like an outsider. It is not for nothing that he speaks German differently than his relatives. Or as his mother says when they meet again after her death: "My son who would never belong to our family, the clan, you fatherless, who seek a substitute, support and light in your ancestors."

The Austrian Slovenes call themselves a people of suffering. The grandfather finds nothing tragic about that. "Tragedy presupposes that you have taken action," he says. And that has never been the case. Rather, you should speak of anti-tragic. At that moment I suddenly saw that procession of Jewish children passing by on their way to school and I realized how great their tragedy was. Also because almost no one stood up for them.