Bevrijdingsdag

Liberation day. In The Netherlands it is celebrated on May 5. This is the day of the capitulation of the German army here, a day that has now become one of celebration and honored memory. One minute of silence will be the peak of the day, when everyone can secretely thank every single hero of the past for our life of freedom. The bells will ring and their echo will be carried far away today since the strong northern wind is blowing.

It so happens that I finished reading just some time ago a book I briefly spoke about in this blog: The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie, by Marie Ann Shaffer & Annie Barrows. The epistolary novel starts with a letter written on January 8, 1946. And to celebrate Bevrijdingsdag my way, here are a few excerpts that fall right into the picture, bringing also hope (in writing, for example), much needed in times of remembrance and shameless forgetfulness, unfortunately:

"Even the living looked like corpses, and the corpses were lying where they'd dropped. I didn't know why they were bothering to bury them. The fact was, the Russians were coming from the east, and the Allies were coming from the west - and the Germas were terrified of what they'd see when they got there."

"I read in the newspaper that they've put up a war refugee camp in its place now. It gives me the shivers to think of new barracks being built there, even for a good purpose. To my mind, that land should be a blank for ever."

"In the face of this institutional amnesia, she writes, the only thing that helps is to talk to fellow survivors. They know what life in the camps was. You speak, and they can speak back. They talk, they rail, they cry, they tell one story after another - some tragic, some absurd. Sometimes they can even laugh together."

"There's so much to tell you. I've been in Guernsey only twenty hours, but each one has been so full of new faces and ideas that I've got reams to write. You see how conducive to writing island life is?"

Have a beautiful Liberation day!