The Tomb of the Unseen Patient

Out of sight, out of mind.

Cloaked in early morning darkness, German paratroopers dropped from the heavens like murderous locusts, their stealthy descent betrayed by the roar of the Luftwaffe airplanes that had disgorged them over the Dutch landscape.

It was May 10, 1940. Contemptuous of the Netherlands’ desperate efforts to remain neutral in the rapidly expanding war in Europe, the German blitzkrieg swept into the country.

Four days later it was over. Hopelessly outmanned and outgunned, with 2,300 soldiers and more than 3,000 Dutch civilians dead, and with Rotterdam in smoking ruins, the Dutch High Command surrendered to the Nazis.

The blitzkrieg was complete.

But the brutality of German occupation was just beginning. By the time the Netherlands was liberated five years later, the death toll stood at more than 200,000 — including more than 100,000 Jews (more than three quarters of the entire Jewish population of Holland).

My father was thirteen years old when that horror began. He grew up in Oude Tonge, a small village barely 45 kilometers southwest of Rotterdam.

He wasn’t old enough to fight. But he was old enough to appreciate the depth of suffering and the scale of the murderous inhumanity displayed all around him.