Beginning Anew

A Study in Memory and History

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Copyright © 2024 Jan de Vries

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Table of Contents

Preface

Part I. Departing the Old World: 1870s-1951.

Setting the Stage

War and Marriage.

Leaving Duivendrecht/ Weg uit Duivendrecht.

Passage to the New World.

The First Years.

Part II.Growing up in the New World: 1948-1961.

Going to School.

Leaving farming for good.

Onward to adolescence.

Hopkins Junior High School

Radio Daze.

Hopkins High School.

Taping sheetrock.

Becoming Minnesotan. Region and political identity.

Calvinists are we.

Part III.1961-1965.

College years.

Where the trains were all above average

Summer of ’65. The Soo Line.

On the Road

Later Years of Cor and Elly.

Part IV.Becoming an Economic Historian.

Economic History at Yale.

1968: Democracy in action.

1968: Turning point in (my) history.

Dissertation writing in interesting times.

A first job and an offer I couldn’t refuse

Conclusion.

Photo credits – Beginning Anew 471685A

Preface

"SO, WHAT ARE you up to now that you finished your book? This is a question I have gotten often over the years, and the answer was always, Another book. For an academic historian this is a fairly predictable response. After all, that is what they pay us to do – that and teaching. But now, well into retirement and a year after finishing another book, I found myself answering evasively, until finally I admitted: I’m writing my memoirs."

Saying that sounded preposterous to my ears. The French call texts of the sort I have written ego-histories, which to the Anglophone reader reminds one immediately that a memoir writer must have quite an ego. Just what makes you think, I hear you saying already, that your life is so consequential that you should feel obliged to share it – page after page, chapter after chapter – with others? Is the world really waiting for the story of your life? Moreover, if your life story deserves a broad circulation, are you – the subject of the story – the right person to tell it honestly and fairly? Shouldn’t you wait for your biographer – perhaps still unborn – to take up this weighty task?

These are serious questions, and they gave me pause. And yet, I proceeded. I proceeded because at first I was writing not a personal memoir but a family history: an account of my parents, of their own family backgrounds, and of the decisions they made as they established and raised their own family. Here I could pose as an historian – albeit an interested, participant-historian. Moreover, I was following a well-trodden path in preparing an immigrant narrative, a story of leaving the old world and struggling to make good in a new one. Not everyone involved in our family story is equipped to tell it. So, if not me, who?

But I didn’t stop there. In recreating something of the Dutch worlds of my parents – worlds I know primarily as an historian rather than a participant – I was laying a foundation essential to all exercises in memoir writing: evoking a lost time and place: things were different then, and they were different there. Yet those differences shaped people who went on to live in our own times. You can’t understand them until you know something about their past. In other words, The past isn’t dead. It isn’t even past.

As I proceeded, it seemed to me that it was not only the Holland of my birth and of my parents’ early lives that required some explanation. The America to which we traveled, and the Minnesota in which we settled, also requires explanation. The ’new world’ of the mid-twentieth century is now old – perhaps not exotic, but certainly unfamiliar – just as is the ‘old world’ from which we had departed. And my education – in high school, college, and graduate school – also now carries the patina of age and seems in need of some explanation. Those are all now worlds we have lost.

With this heightened sense of the modern acceleration with which time and place are rendered alien and unrecognizable I was motivated to extend what began as an immigrant family story to a personal account of ‘coming of age’ and of gaining an education and a vocation. This, too, addresses a familiar theme in memoir writing: the working-class boy entering a rarified world of elite education and privilege. I have been working with some familiar themes – clichés, one might say – but as I proceeded, I convinced myself that our family story and my personal story had some twists, offered variants on a theme of new beginnings, that were worthy of inscription, dissemination and reflection.

The memoir writer, especially if he is a professional historian, faces dangerous pitfalls. First, there is the obvious problem of memory. Many historians today are more indulgent of basing history on memory, or even conflating the two, than they once were. I am not one of those indulgent historians, yet I, too, inescapably, had to weave memory with verifiable historical evidence in this account.¹ I have tried to be attentive to memory’s limitations and the tricks it can play. I am acutely aware of the silences of memory – of things not spoken. I note those silences, but I have resisted the temptation to fill them in with fiction.

A second pitfall is an absence of candor. Just as my now deceased family members surely went to their graves with some secrets, I am not ‘remembering’ everything here either. This is not a psychological exploration, or a meditation on my emotional growth or regression, or a confession. On the other hand, I have tried to be honest about my reactions to things as they occurred, rather than as I would like to have thought about them in retrospect. In short, this work seeks to be frank in the matters it addresses.

A third pitfall is an unconscious tendency to introduce a factitious coherence into the path of history.² We want our lives, and those of our loved ones, to make sense and to have meaning. And one way to do that is to attach them to established and honorable narratives – such as ‘the immigrant experience’ and ‘working class boy makes good’. I am the sort of historian who is attentive to ‘structure’, the constraining factors that limit human agency. But the memoir is usually all about agency, highlighting individuals making their way through time, steering their little boat through the structural shoals. This study does not escape the inherent limitations of the memoir genre, but I have tried to contextualize the events that enter the narrative, and to scrutinize family memories for self-justifying and self-congratulating elements.

Still, the question remains, aren’t these lives too inconsequential to merit a full-blown memoir? I have lived my career as an historian in a time when it has been precisely the minor and the micro, the subaltern and the ‘exceptional normal’, that have become a major focus of historians’ attention. Ego-historie has come to be central to contemporary historical concerns. I have been skeptical, more than skeptical, of this tendency for a long time, but now, happily, I can benefit from its chief message: no life is too inconsequential to be the stuff of historical curiosity.

Finally, a word about the title. This is a family and personal memoir that focuses on a series of new beginnings, breaks with the past, made by my parents and then by me. But even when one breaks new ground and enters unfamiliar terrain, one does not go without ‘baggage’. Sometimes this baggage, the accumulation of experiences in the preceding life, weighs one down; sometimes it provides the resources needed to reach one’s destination. What I have tried to achieve here is an account of our experiences that pays attention to both the acts of beginning and the contexts in which those acts were taken; by agency and structure, if you will; by change and continuity. This can only be done by looking backward. Looking backward is, of course, a favorite pastime of the elderly. But it is a necessity for us all. It is our fate to steer our lives, and even our societies, with our eyes on the rear-view mirror, looking backward. Viewing the past clearly and fully is not easy (the mirrors at our disposal are neither large nor undistorted) but, when all is said and done, it is the only resource we have to orient ourselves to the future – that is, to consider aright our present options.

Part I.

Departing the Old World:

1870s-1951.

Setting the Stage

WHERE TO BEGIN? An account of my family’s experience as immigrants to America should start with my parents’ lives in the ‘old country’, of course. But those lives were shaped by those of their own parents and their larger family circles. And those circles, in turn, drew their characters from even earlier generations. For a historian like me it is hard to draw a line. But perhaps, for most purposes, it will suffice to start with my grandparents.³ These were men and women born in the 1870-80s, raised in a material world in which electricity, telephones, automobiles, radio and much more had yet to make their practical appearances.

Jan and Jannetje

In 1907, at age 32, Jan de Vries, the fifth child of Jan de Vries and Rijkje Verhoef, farmers on the Amstel River in Nieuwer-Amstel, married Jannetje Verburg, aged 33. She was the third child of Hendrik Verburg and first child of Hendrik with his second wife Neeltje Oussoren, who farmed on the Amsterdamseweg, also in Nieuwer-Amstel (better known as Amstelveen). Both families had been dairy farmers in Ouder-Amstel, Nieuwer-Amstel and adjacent villages for many generations. Jan’s family can be traced to a Jan de Vries farming near Muiden c. 1600; Jannetje’s to mid-18th century Verburg farmers in Abcoude. Through the generations they had married with other such farming families, forming alliances that allowed their many offspring to remain on the land. A Verburg-de Vries alliance fit seamlessly into this long tradition, or strategy. Indeed, it appears that Jan had been taken on to work on and then manage the Verburg farm already in 1902 when the civil registration records show him as residing there. Thus, Jan’s proposal of marriage was hardly an impetuous one. At that point he had been helping run the Verburg family farm for at least five years.

The newly married couple at first continued managing Hendrik’s farm, which bore the name Zorgmeer. They now occupied the farmhouse, while Hendrik retired to a second house built on the property. Hendrik’s death in October 1909 appears to have been unexpected. The widower was then 69 years old yet left no will. Under the circumstances, his considerable assets were sold at auction and divided among his eight children. For Jan and Jannetje, the auction provided the opportunity – and the necessity – to start out on their own.

1. Jan de Vries and Jannetje Verburg, wedding photo, 1907.

In June 1910 Jan and Jannetje and the two children already born to them – and Jannetje’s younger sister Maria (then 22 years old) – moved the short distance to a new farm, Nooit Gedacht, in Duivendrecht, a village within the municipality of Ouder-Amstel, on the Rijksstraatweg 133, where four additional children were born. The farmstead itself was hardly new, having been constructed about a century earlier. The foundation was said to rest on cowhides, which offered stability on the peat soil and some protection from the polder dampness. At that same time the young artist Piet Mondriaan was wandering about the area painting its farmsteads – but not Nooit Gedacht.

2. Piet Mondriaan, Farm near Duivendrecht, 1916.

The Verburg family was strongly committed to the Calvinist separatist religious movement [de Afscheiding] and the church [de Christilijke Gereformeerde Kerk] that it produced. In the 1830s Jannetje’s grandfather, Abram, had hosted separatist church gatherings on his farm, when they were illegal, and had felt the consequences. Her father, Hendrik, was a pillar of the new – now legal – church, as were her numerous uncles and aunts. Indeed, her eldest brother, Abraham, was a pastor in the church, serving in far off Friesland. The De Vries family betrayed no evidence of such a commitment; all its members adhered to the established Hervormde Kerk. This would probably have rendered Jan ineligible as a suitor for Jannetje’s hand, but in the five years he worked for the family he must have convinced them that his embrace of Gereformeerd faith was sincere. And, indeed, once installed on their new farm, a few yards distant from a Hervormd chapel and residing in a village, Duivendrecht, thick with Roman Catholics, the family held high the banner of Calvinist orthodoxy. They faithfully made their way to the neighboring village of Diemen in order to attend an appropriate church – and appropriate schools.

In the 1920s the family had a farm and five growing children to help with the work. It was, on my father’s testimony, a modern, up-to-date farm, the first in the area to introduce electricity. Things must have looked good until 16 April 1929. That evening at 7.30, "des namiddags ten half acht ure" according to the police report, Jan, on his bicycle, died in a traffic accident in Amsterdam. This, together with the world economic crisis that soon followed, changed fundamentally the economic wellbeing of the family.

Adding to their troubles was a financial commitment made by Father Jan. In 1925 he had joined with his brother-in-law Bart Verburg to act as guarantors to a sizeable loan contracted by Hendrik Verburg, another of Jannetje’s brothers. At some point after Jan’s death Hendrik defaulted, and the lender, the Boerenleenbank of Amstelveen, demanded payment from Jannetje. Legal proceedings dragged on and a shadow hovered over the family through the 1930s until a settlement was reached in 1938 whereby the family brought their part of the dispute to an end by agreeing to pay a small portion of the nearly 7,000-guilder debt. The act of settlement (dading) stated that it was Cornelis, the youngest son, who paid the money owed and his name and signature is first among those of all the family members on the document.

3. The De Vries family, at their farmstead in Duivendrecht, c. 1922.

Is it possible that there is more to these stories than these bare facts? What sent Jan off on his bicycle into Amsterdam at that evening hour? Why had he pledged the family’s credit for the benefit of his brother-in-law? In short, what kind of man was our grandfather Jan? And why was it Cor, the youngest son, who took the lead in bringing the family’s legal problem to resolution? There is a story, told by my mother, that Jan had left the farm that fateful evening in a huff, having quarreled with Jannetje. As he bicycled in the darkness, heedless that his overcoat was flying loose behind him, a passing car caught onto the coattails and dragged him to his death. Perhaps this is a true story. The family photo, taken in 1922, shows a proud farmer and paterfamilias, but that is a pose that was almost obligatory if one went to the trouble of calling on the village photographer to take a family portrait. On the other hand, his wife Jannetje wore mourning clothing for the rest of her life and was always known locally as de weduwe De Vries. Beyond that, we have no additional stories, however simple, that speak to his character. As with so many other topics, the De Vries family members said little about their father. In fact, I cannot recall my own father ever speaking of him.

At Jan’s death in 1929 his sons were age 19 (Hendrik, or Henk), 18 (Jan), and 16 (Cornelis, or Cor), and operating the farm became their responsibility. A decade later, on the eve of the war, Jan had married and left the farm, leaving Henk and Cor on the farm with their widowed mother. Henk, the eldest son, managed the farm while Cor developed a milk delivery business.

Cornelis’s youth in Duivendrecht.

Cornelis’ youth, no less than that of his brothers, was one of uninterrupted work. There are only two photos of Cor that have been preserved from this time, and they may well be the only one’s taken before he married. One, the family portrait just mentioned, shows Cor, age about 10, seated in front. A second photo is a candid shot of Cor on his bicycle, about to leave the farm gate. He is dressed for work as a milk distributor, with a change purse hanging from his waist. He was then 16 or 17; the year must have been 1928-29, just before his father’s accidental death. It is hard to know what he was thinking.

4. Cornelis at the farm gate, circa 1928.

Cor’s youth and young adulthood revolved around the farm. The only thing I can say with any confidence about his schooling, which ended at age 14, is that he liked history and geography. Perhaps I inherited that from him. When, in later years, I told him of my travels to Friesland, he expressed great interest. What was it like up there? For him, even in the 1970s, the province was a distant place of wonder where Floris V, Count of Holland had fought to avenge the death of his father Willem II. Suddenly I heard Dad tell of the great hero’s exploits, including the struggle for power with Gijsbert van Amstel and Zweder van Abcoude, and Floris’ death after his removal from Muiderslot, a medieval castle just a few miles from Duivendrecht. These thirteenth-century events, many taking place in the very district where Cor was raised and where his ancestors had lived for centuries, seemed full of meaning to him.

We also spent some time with one of the few books he brought with him at the time of our emigration. It was the Bos Atlas he had used in school in the 1920s. The Bos Atlas is a Dutch institution. Unless digitalization has now brought the tradition to an end, all Dutch school children learn geography from successively updated editions of this atlas, which delves deeply into the physical, social, and economic geography of the Netherlands, its (former) colonies, and the rest of the world – in that order. Cor never got to see even Friesland, that land of mystery, but he had a special attachment to his atlas.

Beyond that I can only add that he enjoyed singing in his youth, in the church choir and in a men’s choral group as a young adult. And he spoke fondly of skating on the Amstel River. In later life he never sang in a choir again, but he brought his ice skates with him to the New World, and sometimes strapped them on to skate on frozen Minnesota ponds, presumably thinking of the real thing on the Amstel, where one could glide along for miles, give the girls a push to aid them on their way, and race the fellows to see who would get to Ouderkerk first.

The De Vries children go their own ways.

The long decade that followed, 1939-51, would be a fateful one for the farming family with roots in Duivendrecht and the region going back centuries.

Jan and Jannetje’s first child, Rijkje (1908), never married. She was, by family testimony, an excellent pianist. This compliment carried with it the implicit complaint that she did not carry her weight with farm and household work, yet a life of labor was to be her fate. In the 1930s she entered domestic service, working for well-to-do families in Wassenaar. She later found work of the same sort in The Hague, where she lived, as a lonely and penurious maiden lady, until her death in 1998.

Hendrik (Henk) (1910), married in 1943 with Maria Nagtegaal (1916) from neighboring Diemen. They lived on the farm with Henk’s widowed mother, worked the farm, and began to raise a family: The first of their five children, Jan (1944) and Marretje (1946) were born in Duivendrecht.

Jan (1911) married in 1937 with Lijsje (Lies) den Hartog (1917) from Duivendrecht. Her parents, Klaas den Hartog and Jannetje Fokker, were also from Nieuwer- and Ouder-Amstel. After their marriage, Jan and Lies moved to Betondorp. Literally Concrete Village, Betondorp was an experimental residential district of Amsterdam built in the 1920s. It was within the city limits of Amsterdam, but actually some distance from the rest of the built city of the time and directly adjacent to Duivendrecht. There Jan became a melkboer, that is he began a business delivering and selling milk and dairy products, much as Cor was doing in Duivendrecht. Within a few years Jan and Lies had expanded the business into a large, modern kruidenierswinkel, a grocery store known for its cheese and delicatessen selections. Their two sons were born there as well: Jan (1943) and Edwin (1945). Shortly thereafter Johan Cruijff – perhaps, after Rembrandt, the most famous Netherlander ever – was born around the corner from Oom Jan’s house. The Cruijff family were greengrocers, and, according to Cousin Jan, his brother Edwin and the football/soccer legend played the sport together on Betondorp youth teams.

Cornelis (1912) worked on the family farm with his brother Henk and delivered milk in Duivendrecht. His schooling ended when he was 14, but in 1938, he succeeded in acquiring a "Middenstandsdiploma" which qualified him to engage in retail trade. When he married in 1942, he left the farm, moving across the street, quite literally, to a house he bought with a shop on the ground floor. His new wife, Elly, managed the store, selling dairy products, while Cor worked on the farm and delivered milk to customers. While working in this way, Elly gave birth to Jan (1943) and, shortly after the end of the war, to Elly (Elsie), in 1945.

5-8. Cornelis had this folder made, probably in 1939-40, to advertise the fresh, hygienic milk available direct from the family farm, Nooit Gedacht. Farm-to-table, before it became the fashion.

Jan and Jannetje had another daughter, Neeltje Maria (1915), who died at birth. Two years later their last child was born, also Neeltje Maria (1917). In 1940 she married Jaap Venema, born in Drenthe and then working on the development of the Amsterdamsche Bos, a large park on the edge of the city. After living in Amstelveen (Nieuwer-Amstel), they moved to Maartensdijk, Utrecht, in the vicinity of estates on which Jaap worked as a gameskeeper/forester (boswacher). They had five children, (the first, another Jan, born in 1941) all of whom married and produced, all told, 15 children of their own.

Growing up, Cornelis and his siblings must have become familiar with their uncles and aunts – they had 35 of them! – and at least 13 of the 17 uncles (and uncles by marriage) were farmers in the vicinity. A fourteenth was farming in Iowa; one was a clergyman in Friesland; one was a butcher; and one – by far the richest – was the owner of a canning factory in North Holland. Those uncles and aunts supplied them with over fifty first cousins, and if they looked to more distant relatives – branches of the De Vries and Verburg families and families with which they had been "verzwagerd" (twinned via multiple generations of marriage) such as Verhoef, Oussoren, Griffioen, Stam, Meijers, Roos, Niessen – they could count dozens of farmsteads throughout Nieuwer- and Ouder-Amstel and neighboring villages that were occupied by more or less distant relations.

They lived, as did nearly all these people, within walking distance of Amsterdam. It was important to them – it was the market for their milk and cheese – but hardly any of them moved to the city, took up an urban occupation, or sought a spouse in the city. The only exception I could find was an Amsterdam milk distributor, but he was himself an extension of a dairy farming family out in the polders. When Cornelis married, he had never been further from home than Barneveld (a center of poultry production) in Gelderland, about 50 km away. He travelled there by motorcycle with his brother Henk to collect an overdue debt. He had paid more frequent visits to Purmerend, a market town in North Holland, to attend the cattle markets. To get there one needed to make one’s way through the heart of Amsterdam. Yet, to my father, Purmerend was quite the place! You could really enjoy yourself there. In some respects the big city was like the hole of the donut that represented the world of these farming families.

Thus, it is not surprising that Jan and Henk married girls from local families with ties to the land. All of their ancestors had done the same. But this would not be the course taken by Cornelis. He married a city girl, born and raised in Amsterdam to parents who also were city people going back many generations.

Pieter and Wilhelmina

Pieter van Konijnenburg was the fourth child and second son of Pieter van Konijnenburg and Johanna Maria Amiabel. Father Pieter was from a family that had lived in and around Rotterdam since at least the fifteenth century, working in various manual trades; Johanna was also born and raised in Rotterdam, but her family was from The Hague, where it, too, had deep roots, stretching back centuries. The original Amiabel came from France in the sixteenth century, perhaps after the Saint Bartholomew’s Day massacre. Johanna died in childbirth, bearing her eighth child, shortly before Pieter’s tenth birthday. Father Pieter soon remarried, had two additional children with his new wife, Gertruida Sterkman, and somehow found room for the five children that Gertruida, herself a widow, brought to the marriage.

Father Pieter was chief machinist at one of Rotterdam’s docks, the Spoorweghaven, and the family lived on the site. Young Pieter extricated himself from this new blended family and an uncongenial stepmother at his first opportunity; he began work in a machine shop at age 14. In 1903, age 19, he signed on as Fifth Machinist with the Rotterdam Lloyd, a large shipping line that served the Netherlands East Indies. For the next thirteen years he sailed between Rotterdam and Batavia (Jakarta) working his way up the ranks in the engine rooms of the company’s ships. In this period he also served in the Royal Netherlands Naval Reserve, where he earned technical qualifications in steam engine technology.

In 1911, at age 27, Pieter married Wilhelmina Alida Staudenmaijer, age 23, who then worked as a pharmacist’s assistant (apothekersbediende), having received a certificate of competence in this field in 1906. She had lived in Rotterdam since the age of seven, when her parents moved there from her birthplace, Leeuwarden, Friesland. Father Louis had worked in the ‘hospitality’ sector, what the Dutch call the Horeca (Hotel—Restaurant—Café) sector, as had his father before him. His wife Dingena Alida Tuinenburg, had the same background, her father having managed hotels in The Hague and Gouda. Louis had managed Leeuwarden’s Harmonie, a gentlemens’ club and theater, but moved the family to Rotterdam when he was offered (perhaps by a gentleman lodging at the club?) a position with the Rotterdam Handelsinrichting, which would grow to become the city’s harbor authority.

It is not hard to understand how Pieter and Wilhelmina might have met. Pieter’s father was chief machinist at one of the Rotterdam docks under the supervision of the Municipal Handelsinrichting, the organization that employed Wilhelmina’s father. Indeed, the Van Konijnenburg family address was: Handelsinrichting D.

How well did Pieter know Wilhelmina’s family? He was from a family that had lived in Rotterdam for centuries, but he selected for his wife a woman whose family had for generations been restlessly moving, marrying, and keeping an eye out for the main chance. Since the immigration of Wilhelmina’s great grandfather from Stuttgart, Germany in 1820-21, family members had moved constantly, and several made remarkable marriage matches. At the time of Wilhelmina’s marriage, she had a married older sister, Sijtje, residing in Rotterdam, but also a younger sister, Maria Clasina, who had just married a journalist and aspiring novelist of well-to-do family residing in Antwerp, and an older brother, Louis, pursuing a military carrier in the East Indies, who was about to return briefly in order to marry his German-Jewish fiancée. Pieter’s new wife also had an aunt in Amsterdam with four illegitimate children, Wilhelmina’s cousins; an uncle, living at the time in Constantinople, serving (it was rumored) in the French Foreign Legion, who had earlier sought to become a Trappist monk, thought better of it, and written a scandalous exposé of monastic life; and a ‘respectable’ aunt married to a Zaandam pharmacist. Further back, one could find notable painters and medical men among the Staudenmaijer marriage partners. One wonders what Pieter’s parents and siblings, and the universe of uncles, aunts and cousins, all concentrated in Rotterdam and mostly pursuing manual and technical work, made of this match.

9. Wedding photo of Pieter and Wilhelmina, 1911.

The Staudenmaijer restlessness soon asserted itself in the new marriage. In 1914 Pieter and Wilhelmina left Rotterdam, moving to The Hague, from where Pieter continued his work on the Rotterdam Lloyd ships. But in 1916, just as he had attained the rank of Machinist First Class, Wilhelmina persuaded him to end his career at sea – which he very much enjoyed – and find a job on land. He applied for a position with the City of Amsterdam’s office in charge of the municipal bathhouses, the Dienst der Bad- en Waschinrichtingen, where he became chief inspector (hoofdopzichter) of the stationary steam boilers that heated the city’s public baths and swimming pools.

What possessed Pieter to apply for work with the municipality of Amsterdam, where neither he nor Wilhelmina had ever lived? I have no definite answer to this question, but it might be explained by Wilhelmina’s relatives already living in the city, to which we will turn below. It was a fateful move for Pieter’s family. Not only was his solicitation successful, but soon after taking up his new position in 1917, he smoothed the path for his older brother Hendrik Carolus Nicolaas, then working as a carpenter for the municipality of Rotterdam, to be offered a position as inspector for Amsterdam’s municipal housing service (inspecteur der gemeentelijke woningsdienst). In addition, Pieter and HCN’s sister, Helena, also moved with her husband Pieter Hess to the Amsterdam area at about this same time. Suddenly, three members of the Van Konijnenburg family, which had lived in Rotterdam for centuries, found themselves in Amsterdam.

Pieter and Wilhelmina moved to Amsterdam, taking a flat in the recently built Transvaalbuurt, at Krugerplein 14, and it is here where their only child, Elly, was born in 1920. Later, in 1928, they moved a short distance to a house in the newly developing Watergraafsmeer district, to Galileïplantsoen 23 and in 1936 to the nearby Pythagorasstraat 128. Until her marriage, Elly lived in houses and flats all within a few minutes’ walk of each other in Amsterdam Oost.

10. Pieter van Konijnenburg as seafarer, c. 1910.

Elly’s youth in Amsterdam

Elly attended public schools up to the age of 16, the end of instruction at the Huishoudschool, which emphasized home management skills for girls. Amsterdam’s large Jewish population was concentrated in her part of the city, and that population grew visibly during the 1930s as German Jews began to take precautions and move to what they hoped would be a safe haven. She must have seen and heard quite a bit about the unfolding drama. But what was all around her was not really part of her own life. Apart from her several Jewish teachers, she never mentioned having Jewish friends or acquaintances.

She was baptized and confirmed in the Hervormd Church and in her youth Elly regularly received books intended for her Christian instruction, inscribed with appropriate bible verses. But neither of her parents involved themselves much with the church. Pieter seems to have adopted his family’s stance of quiet indifference. Wilhelmina, on the other hand, was an intensely ‘spiritual’ person, but it was not the organized church that spoke to her.

The many photos taken by her father, an avid photographer, provide the best evidence we have of Elly’s childhood and youth. They show her at leisure with other children and on family vacations at the seashore – Huisduinen was their go-to spot – and even, once, in the Alps. She was a city girl, familiar with Amsterdam’s cafes and entertainments at the Rembrandtsplein and always ready for a bicycling outing to Zandvoort, at the sea. The music of Louis Davids, a celebrated cabaret singer of her youth, could form a fine soundtrack for her younger years. His songs of typical Amsterdam social types, of everyday pleasures, and – some of them – songs hinting at social class tensions came back to her, years later, long after Davids’ death, when a friend sent her a record of his music. She could sing along effortlessly; she still knew the lyrics by heart.

Naar de bollen, naar de prachtige bollen,

Waar je spraakeloos geniet van de kleur die je ziet.

Naar de bollen, naar de heerljke bollen,

Want die zie je maar een keer per jaar.

Dit is de kleine man, de kleine burger man,

De doodgewone man met z’n confectiepakkie aan.

De man die niks verdragen kan blijft altijd onderaan,

Zo’n hongerleijer, zeenuwleijer van een kleine man.

She also had a number of relatives, some of whom she saw often. There was her childless Uncle Louis, the military officer, with his considerably younger Swiss wife (his second wife), Tante Solange. Louis was the proverbial ‘Dutch uncle’, ever ready to dispense unsolicited advice concerning her upbringing (and later, concerning that of her children). Of her mother’s two sisters, only one had children, but these came to be nearly brothers and sisters to her, for they lived at her home for two years. One, Jan, was nine years older than Elly, but Olga Amena and Freddy Willy were approximately her own age.⁴ The latter two were actually the children of the (third) husband of her aunt Maria Clasina, born to his (presumably deceased) wife in the East Indies.

She also had aunts and uncles on her father’s side, most residing in Rotterdam. One of them, as we soon will see, would be very important to her adult life. But the chief impression given by the available evidence is that