My mother’s oft-repeated axiom to me was, “Remember the good, forget the bad.” Undoubtedly, that is how she willed herself to move on with life after the Nazis robbed her of a husband and two daughters. And she hoped the axiom would encourage me to ignore the rough edges of the unsavory neighborhood where we were forced to live after the war. But her advice did not keep me from standing my ground where I felt it counted. I must have been about eight when an incident at the Weeshuisschool forced my mother to transfer me to the Brederodeschool, a public school located in the better-off part of the city where my family had lived before the war.
I adored my first and second grade teachers at the Weeshuisschool, especially Juffrouw Kramer, who was born in Friesland, an exotic province, she told us, in the far north of the Netherlands, which even had its own language. But in third grade we had a male teacher, and he and I did not get along. Things came to a head when I took offense at a lewd song he taught us, all the while pointing to his open fly. I refused to share the specifics with my mother but told her I did not want to continue in that school. The principal, Mr. Bos, had taken a special interest in me, the only Jewish student in a Christian school, and was terribly upset to learn of my refusal to attend class. That evening, he came to our home, where while we were all seated in the living room behind my mother’s store, I told him exactly what had happened, including the specifics that I had withheld from my mother. He shook his head in disbelief and told us that the teacher came from a very respectable family and moreover, that his father was a pastor. He asked that I come to school and confront the teacher in person with my complaint, which I did. As I looked the teacher in the eye, he shook his head and smiled benevolently but adamantly denied that anything improper had happened. Later, however, I learned from my mother that other students had corroborated my story. That put an end to the Weeshuisschool and began my stint at the Brederodeschool and a whole new degree of independence.
I had always enjoyed walking to school, often picking up classmates along the way and detouring into alleys, where we could peek into people’s homes and call out to the turkeys kept in a backyard, sometimes stopping at a basement store on the Oranjeplein to buy some drop, strands of licorice, before class or a zure bom, a sour pickle, after class. But now, I was suddenly one step closer to adulthood and got to travel unaccompanied by tram to the Brederodeschool. Since the school was much too far to go home for lunch, I had my lunch instead at the home of one of my mother’s friends, Sara Smulewicz. There was a new sense of power as I walked along Van Merlenstraat, then the canals, Suezkade and Conradkade, to go to Tante Sara’s apartment and back.
It was at the Brederodeschool that I produced my first play. My mother had regaled me with stories about performing in the Yiddish theater of her hometown in Galicia. But her greatest gift to me was her ability to weave a story to suit any occasion or any lesson in life. She taught me how those stories could be brought to life in a play, something, she added quietly, she had done previously with my sister Eefje, whose name I have, in recent years, anglicized to Eva. That is how I came to write, “De stoute spijbelaars,” Dutch for “Those Nasty Hooky Players.”
Earlier I had tried my hand at acting, nothing as serious as the role of a young widow waiting for her husband missing in war that my mother told me she had played, but of a much loved Dutch character, Sinterklaas. The arrival of Sinterklaas—St. Nicholas—is an especially important event on the Dutch calendar. Several weeks before December 6—the saint’s day on the calendar—kids anxiously await the arrival of Sinterklaas by boat from Spain. He then rides through the city on his white horse accompanied by his helper Zwarte Piet—black Pete, a figure in blackface that fortunately has been banished in recent years. Somehow over the next few days, Santa manages to visit every elementary school classroom where he solemnly takes out a large book and reads out the names of kids who have been particularly well- or especially ill-behaved. I passionately (fervently) believed in Santa. Like other kids, I would leave my shoes by the chimney on the eve of December 6, always adding a carrot for his horse. But my faith was shattered when I overheard a conversation at the home of my mother’s closest friends whom I called Tante Hella and Oom Max Vander Pool. Tante Hella was a survivor who had shared the same concentration camp itinerary as my mother. Oom Max mentioned that a friend of his friend had been that year’s Santa and had fallen off his horse. I was sad about the accident but suddenly realized that Santa was just an impersonator. My response to the deception was that I too could be Sinterklaas. I persuaded my mother to lend me her red robe and to make me a red miter with the requisite gold stripe in the middle instead of a cross in deference to the predominantly Protestant Netherlands. I also borrowed her massive volume of the newly published Dutch translation of Pearl Buck’s masterpiece The Good Earth, appropriately bound in red linen, and used it to read the names out loud of the kids in my class. I managed to overcome another major hurdle and persuaded teachers to allow me and a friend who played Zwarte Piet to visit adjoining classrooms too. We had to work fast because we were followed closely by the “real” Sinterklaas.
I quickly learned that while writing a play was a private endeavor, producing a play like “De stoute spijbelaars” required a team effort. I had no trouble recruiting three actors and brought the draperies from our living room to school to serve as a curtain for the stage. My ever-creative mother used the foil closures of milk bottles to transform the ordinary buttons on my peacoat into those of a policeman’s uniform. The greater challenge, of course, was getting an audience. I rewarded the classmates who attended with small pink and cream hand-shaped Goude Hand soap samples, taken from my mother’s store. For the teachers who attended, I had small sample packages of cigarettes that I think were given to me by Oom Filip, my mother’s friend who helped her dealing with the Dutch bureaucracy and whom she hoped would serve as a male role model for me. This was 16 years before the Surgeon General’s advice on smoking and health and 24 years before I would become a pulmonologist. The play must have run all of ten minutes, but the effort of putting it on was exhausting, so much so that on the way home, I fell asleep on the tram with the curtains, the costumes, and the remaining samples of soap and cigarettes in my lap, and had to be awakened by the conductor who, to my great embarrassment, called my mother. It is surprising how quickly my fear of mixing with other kids that had been manifest in the summer camp Wijk-aan-Zee had been replaced by the persona of a producer who could bring actors, students, and teachers together to see his play.
Writing became my passion. Although it was she who had planted the seed, my mother desperately tried to get me interested in other more “manly” activities. After I had outgrown wooden blocks, she bribed me with erector sets. But the only things I ever built were stage sets. Some years later, when someone gave me a small chess set, I used the pawns to envision characters in a play. I was forever scribbling. Many years later my mother told me that she despaired of ever finding a slingshot or some pebbles in my pockets like other boys my age, but it was always scraps of paper written in blue ink, which invariably would turn the garments in the laundry blue. My mother would later vehemently deny this, by blaming the paper shortage in the post-war Netherlands, but at one point she rationed the amount of paper I could have. I had always bought my notebooks at a store across the street on the Hoefkade, but was now forced to create my own notebooks, recycling and pasting together odd sheets of paper, raiding my mother’s store to create a backing from a fashion magazine and a cover from the plain brown paper intended to discreetly wrap women’s hygienic products sold at the store. That is how I wrote my second play, “Het Boek,” “The Book,” based on a short story, “HaSefer,” which my mother told me she had read in her Hebrew class when she was my age. My adaptation, however, was all in Dutch. Klaas and his classmate Piet are doing their homework; Klaas reads out loud from a biography of Charles the Great, then asks Piet questions about the reading; Piet rebels and tosses his copy of the book on the floor and walks out. The third character, whom I called The Poor Boy, has been listening to the reading and tells Klaas that he cannot afford a book of his own and that his mother is ill. Klaas gives the boy Piet’s copy of the book and tells him that his father is a doctor whom he will ask to take care of the boy’s mother. And indeed, with the right medicine, the boy’s mother recovers.
The homemade notebook in which Alfred wrote a play, “Het Boek.” Courtesy of Alfred Münzer
My mother had tears in her eyes when I read the play to her and hugged me and held me tight for an exceptionally long time. In my mind, I had rescued my sister Eefje and taken up where she had left off.
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