The Heart Has Reasons (33 page)

Tilla volunteered at the local hospital, and she started a project to teach the local women how to sew. The Red Cross gave her a donation of ten sewing machines, and later she was able to get fifteen more. The Catholic women used to all come to Tilla for communion dresses for their young girls, because whenever we went to Holland on vacation, she would bring back as many used dresses as she could round up from family and friends. She became like a mother to all the children in our corner of Nimba County, but we longed for a child of our own.

Then one day we came home to find a little Liberian boy sitting on our stoop. He said his parents had left him there. We talked with the family, and they said they would like us to adopt him because they didn’t have enough money to provide for him. To us, it was an answer to our prayers because we had wanted to start a family, but couldn’t have a child of our own.

John was a good boy, and he came to live with us. We took care of him and started him in school, but we always encouraged him to vis
it his family during school vacations, and to keep his family name and the religion he’d been brought up with. We raised him in Liberia and then sent him to medical school in the United States. Now he’s a physician in Kansas City with a wife and family of his own. He calls us every Sunday.

We’ve also remained close with Michael, the boy we hid in our house during the war. He went to college and studied chemistry, and later he became a headmaster at a polytechnic institute. He lives nearby with his wife, and we see a lot of him, especially now that his own parents have passed away.

So we have children, two children, and even some grandchildren. After John had grown up, I retired from my position as vice-president of the mining company, and we returned to the Netherlands.

There’s so much fighting in the world over religion. “How we hate one another for the love of God,” Cardinal Newman said. But when you sit down together, you find that we’re all praying to the same God. So all the fighting is just foolishness, isn’t it? I see every person I meet as a child of God. You know, during the war we once had a very bad fire in the mine. Six people were killed. The next day the priest came to me and asked, “Ted, are any of them
ours
?” I looked him in the eye and said, “Father, they’re all ours.” Should I care less about someone because they’re not Catholic? No, to me, the religion doesn’t matter; the pigmentation of the skin doesn’t matter. And if someone does something to me, I pray to God to forgive me my sins—

—as you forgive those who sin against you?

Yah. If someone does something to me, I never get mad.

Unless it’s Doris.

Well, that was something else, and I forgave her. I was very mad at her, but I wrote her a letter saying, “I forgive you, and if there’s anything I can do for you, just call me.” Because I wouldn’t have been able to live with myself if I didn’t do that. Whenever I have a problem with someone in my life, I fix it in that way.

I had trouble with a man not so long ago, a close friend of ours. His wife was good friends with Tilla, and we knew him very well. One day, af
ter his wife died, he started to raise hell with us. Two weeks later he phoned me and said, “I’m very sorryabout the way I acted.” I said, “Forget it. Do you want to come for lunch on Saturday?” And you know what? He comes here every Saturday,and Tilla likes to cook for him. We just handled it as if nothing had happened.

Ted Leenders as an elder.

What about the Germans? Have
you forgiven the Germans?

I have nothing against the younger Germans, for they weren’t there. The ones who did the terrible things are nearly all gone now. But even in that older generation, not every German was a Nazi. Tilla’s family was German. They were treated very rough because they wouldn’t join the Nazi party. It’s easy to lump people together, and then be prejudiced against them, but it’s better to think of each person as an individual.

Some years ago, we had a wave of immigrants come from all different countries to work here in the mines. In the beginning, everyone kept to themselves and they didn’t get to know each other. You have to watch out for that, because when people don’t know each other, misunderstandings occur and prejudices grow. But one day someone on the town council said, “Can’t we have a mixer to bring everybody together?” So we planned a big community feast with food and music from all their different countries. It was a great success, and got people talking to each other. And that led to meetings, and committees, and all the things more.

Later I helped build a community center that is used now by all the different groups. And now they all march together on the Queen’s Birthday. You should see it when all those people with their different fl ags go marching down the main street singing, “Hail to the queen!”

I asked Ted if I could see his Yad Vashem medal. He opened a cabinet and took out a
box containing not only the Yad Vashem award, but many other honors as well. Lifting
the gleaming disc from the pile, he placed it in my hand.

Yah, so this is what Yad Vashem gave to Tilla and me. They also made us honorary citizens of Israel. We’ve been back there many times. And here is the cross I was given for having been a member of the Dutch Resistance. This is something you get, but what do you do with it? Nobody wears it—if you did, you might get shot. [
chuckles
] And this ribbon is from Queen Beatrix when she made me a Knight in the Order of Orange Nassau Royal Family for what I did for the churches in Liberia. And I got this insignia from President Tubman of Liberia when he made me a Great Commander of the Order of the African Star. And here, you can see, Pope Paul VI also commended me for what I did in Liberia by making me a Grand Commander Gregorius the Great.

As a Catholic, that was a great honor, but if I get up there—I hope I do—but even if I make it to heaven, I wonder how many popes I’ll see up there. You know, at the end of the eleventh century, Pope Urban II spearheaded the First Crusade. He incited the Christians to storm Jerusalem, and that was the beginning of a centuries-long bloodbath. And later they canonized him. I tell you, there are not many true saints.

I’m going to make a statement that I’ve never before made to anybody: We talk about how the Germans killed the Jews, but it was the
Christians
who killed the Jews. All those Nazis, you know, and the NSBers who collaborated with them here in Holland, were Christians. They were baptized as Catholics and Protestants.

Pope Pius XII didn’t talk about what was going on. He reigned from 1939 to 1958, and before that he was the papal nuncio in, of all places, Germany. He knew very well what was brewing in Germany. If he had opened his mouth and said, “Anyone who lays a finger on a Jewish person will be excommunicated,” that would have been a great help to us. But he kept his mouth shut. As a result, many people joined the Nazi party, especially in the occupied countries, and some of them became more dangerous than the German Nazis.

At this point Ted said that he had something personal to ask me. I asked him if he
would like me to turn off the tape recorder, and he gave a slight nod.

Mark, do you forgive me for what my people have done to your people?

A tear slid down Ted’s wrinkled cheek as I sat there awestruck. He was asking
my forgiveness for something he had refused to take part in, something he had put his
life on the line to resist. I could see he was in earnest, and it left me speechless.

I thought of Primo Levi, who, having survived Auschwitz, was haunted by the
reality of what human beings are capable of doing to one another. Levi felt implicated
and ashamed, just by being a member of the human race, despite the fact that he
had been a victim not a perpetrator. Perhaps Ted had some of these same feelings.
Though a maverick, he was also a devout Catholic and had to live with the fact that
many others professing his faith had been on the wrong side of history.

I looked at him, fragile and drawn, hanging on the air for my response. Who was
I to forgive anti-Semitism in the Roman Catholic Church? That would be up to the
victims. But in Ted’s presence, it was easy to act from the heart.

“Of course,” I said. “I forgive you, Ted.”

He put his shaking hand on mine, and his face broke out in a broad smile.
Everything felt lighter as we sank back into our armchairs.

Turning the tape recorder back on, I reminded him that he had just been saying that
it was the Christians who killed the Jews during World War II.

That’s a hard statement I made. If you publish it, maybe they’re going to kill
me
now. [
chuckles
] So you see, Pius XII’s sin of omission played a big part in it, you know? But don’t think that because he stood silently by, those under him did also. Here in Limburg, Bishop Lemmens helped the Resistance to save Jewish people. And many monks and nuns took their Jewish brothers and sisters into the monasteries and convents—wherever they could hide them, they did.

The pope that we have now, John Paul II, has apologized to the Jewish people—he has said, “You are our brothers, because all of us have come out of the Jewish people.” Even the previous Pius, Pius XI, made a beautiful statement in 1938, a year before he left office: “Anti-semitism is not permitted; we are spiritually Jews through Christ, and in Christ, we are all the children of Abraham.”

So how do we move on from here?

You’ve heard the quote by Santayana that those who do not remember the past may be doomed to repeat it. That’s true. But we must not be prejudiced by the past. Sometimes it can be good to put aside the past if it doesn’t help us solve the problems of today. Sometimes we need a fresh approach.

Take our situation here in Europe. There’s no question that the guilt of Germany in the twentieth century can never be erased. But some people dig their heels into the past just so they can keep feeling angry. In that case, I say, put an end to it! You know, now we are working
on coming together with the Germans. Close to the Dutch-German border, we have towns in both countries pursuing joint ventures. We have to get beyond the old ways of thinking. Because if we don’t, it’s just stupid.

The war was already a stupid thing. You send your son to get killed because of the madness of some fanatical leader. To reheat the old hate is not going to get us anywhere. We who remember the Nazi occupation have to master the feelings of resentment and humiliation that those memories stir up in us. Then we’ll be able to move forward into a brighter future.

Now that you’re in your eighties, how do you feel about the way elders are treated?

I told you before about Africa. That is where we really saw respect for the elders. In Liberia, when the people were going to eat and an old man was sitting there, nobody would eat, nobody would touch the food, until the old man had eaten. When I was growing up in Holland, we respected old people. We’d go out of our way to help them. You don’t see much of that nowadays.

As for me, I accept life as I have it now. I live very modestly; you can see that for yourself. I have money in the bank, but I don’t need it. They’re studying me at the hospital down the street to see why I am so healthy for such an old man.

After all you’ve been through, are you surprised that you’ve lasted this long?

Well, you know, there have been eight times in my life when I absolutely could have been dead. I told you about that fire in the coal mine? Well, that was one of them. Each day I had to write down in a log where I would be. So one morning I put down where I was going, and I went back to my desk to get something. I turned to leave, but decided to stay and do office work. An hour later an alarm went off, and it made a hell of a sound. I ran outside because I was part of the rescue squad. My boss shouted, “Let’s go. A mineshaft is on fire.” I said, “Which one?” It was the place I had just written down in the log.

Another time—this is after the war—I had to catch a plane, but I got a flat tire on the way to the airport. I arrived at the gate just in time to see the plane flying away. That flight crashed, and everybody on it died. So nowadays, when I miss a train or a bus, I never feel bad about it. There was a reason I missed it. I’ve come to believe that
nothing happens in this world by chance. There’s something deeper behind it.

God’s will being done?

Yes, I am sure of that now, but don’t take it away from me. I always wonder whether one day I will meet someone who will make me doubt my beliefs. So I pray to God every night that He keeps things the way they are.

Why did God allow the Holocaust?

That is what I don’t understand. I’ve struggled with it for many years, but I’ve never gotten anywhere. I’ve said to Him, “All right, you’ve given us free will, even to be monsters. But what about the free will of the victims? What about their will to live, to love, to love You?” I’ve cried to Him about it, raised the devil with Him, too. But I don’t have an answer for you on that one.