THE NETHERLANDS: Woman in the House

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A year ago, when the filthy tide washed back, it was hard to tell what was left of Europe. Would the detritus of Nazi conquest bury a civilization, leaving its survivors in a confused struggle among the ruins? A year later it was still too soon to know. Many glimpses of Europe yielded gloomy answers. But for a scene full of hope that Europe was in truth rising again, the world could turn to Vught, in southern Holland, on May 3, 1946.

The sun shone so brightly on the lake, the pines and oaks stood so peacefully in the quiet parkland of Vught, it was hard to believe that during the war this was one of the worst of the German concentration camps.

“The torture rooms were over there.”

“A scaffold stood just here.”

“I see the lime pit has been filled in.”

The people who walked quietly in the park last week remembered Vught, for many had spent months behind its electrified wire fence. They stopped walking and talking—but they did not stop remembering—when an automobile drew up and a dumpy old woman got out.

Undaunted. She wore a plain black coat, a soft felt hat with black and green ribbons. But to the thousands gathered at Vught, in the soft light of the Dutch evening she did not seem just a plain old woman. In dead silence she walked 500 yards along the firing range where the Nazis used to practice. The last 25 yards of her way she had to struggle with a laurel wreath almost as tall as she. Among the lilies and tulips at the base of a 15-ft. cross commemorating those who died at Vught, Wilhelmina of The Netherlands laid her wreath.

For two minutes she stood silently facing the wooden cross, then walked to a microphone. “We are looking forward to a better world to come.” The words were clear and steady. “May the same unselfish and unflinching spirit of those who fell here prevail in the rebuilding of The Netherlands.”

A choir began singing the Te Deum. Two boy scouts, bearing a chair, approached the old woman. Firmly, almost indignantly, she motioned the chair away. She stood through the hymn of jubilation and through the national anthem, William of Nassau. “A Prince I am, undaunted, of Orange, ever free. . . . Let no despair betray you, my subjects true and good.”

Then Wilhelmina walked the 500 yards back to her car and rode, through a countryside that bloomed again as no other in postwar Europe, to her summer home at Apeldoorn.

Like Pieter de Hooch. The spirit which a Princess of Orange called for in her people has already done wonders in their land. Six years have passed since the white parachutes and bombs first fell from a mild May sky. One year has passed since the invaders were routed, leaving The Netherlands’ cities in ruins and nearly 10% of her fields flooded. In that year the brine-soaked polders (fields reclaimed from the sea) have been drained, and some are again growing grass for Holland’s dairy herds and grain for Holland’s bread. The sandy flats along the North Sea are ablaze again with tulips and hyacinth and narcissus. Broken windows are neatly patched, the cities’ rubble cleaned up. Everywhere men are painting doors and balconies and polishing the brass door knobs. On shattered, flooded Walcheren Island, thrifty Hollanders are rooting up German antiglider traps to use for kindling, and to brace the rebuilt dikes. Holland again looks almost as neat and orderly as a Pieter de Hooch interior.

Life in The Netherlands a year after V-E day is not easy. People are shabbily dressed, but plans to revive and expand the textile industry are moving forward. People have almost enough to eat (1,900 calories a day) but many of the precious Dutch delicacies are missing; almost all the cheese is being exported to get foreign exchange. Food is still too scarce to make up for the starvation years. In the last agonizing months under the Nazis, Dutchmen ate only 400 calories a day; they are still unwontedly thin and pale.

Fuel is still scarce. Wilhelmina, like her subjects, got only half a ton of coal last winter. But production in the Limburg mines is coming back; in 1947 it should reach seven-ninths of the prewar output, and be almost normal by 1948.

Despite their shortages, the Dutch public will not tolerate a black market, though there is some illegal traffic in cigarets (the legal weekly ration is 40). Dealers in the “poison market,” as it is labeled by the Government, are sent to Veenhuizen prison to make shoes, one of Holland’s scarcest commodities.

Of Beer & Bicycles. Confidence in Holland’s future pervades the moist spring air. The Royal Dutch Airlines is resuming biweekly flights to New York in a few weeks. Trains between Amsterdam and The Hague, which last year took seven hours to make a trip, are back on their old schedules and running every hour. The famed Heineken Brewery at Amsterdam is opening again. Philips, Europe’s greatest exporters of electric bulbs and radio equipment, is operating at 60% of capacity, expects to hit 100% soon. The Dutch, who use bicycles as Americans use autos, may have to wait until 1950 for new ones, and meanwhile will bump along on solid tires over unrepaired streets.

It was more important that the Dutch concentrate on getting back their prewar share of the world’s ocean trade, because that would bring foreign exchange to buy raw materials to reconstruct, expand. The U.S. loan negotiations had gone smoothly —$200,000,000, half of it from Washington, half from private U.S. banks. The interest rate, 2¼%, expressed U.S. confidence in The Netherlands’ future.

And the tulips—they are important, too, in this rising of the Dutch spirit. First, they are a symbol of beauty and dignity to a people which has produced much that is beautiful and has lived with dignity; then, they are a reminder of the years of indignity when the Dutch grew tulips rather than grow turnips for the Nazis. In those days the starving Dutch ate tulip bulbs. (Many got sick from the bulbs, and some died.) Lastly and practically (for the Dutch are ever practical) the tulips are an important item of export.

Since war’s end Holland has sold abroad (mostly in Great Britain) $12 million worth of bulbs as against $20 million worth in the peak year of 1930. To capture the U.S. market, where Dutch bulbs compete with native breeds, the Hollanders have produced a “predated” bulb, which will bloom on a desired date, depending on controlled temperatures and selected soil. New blooms were developed this spring. The President Truman is a satin-pink tulip; the Joseph Stalin (unveiled in Moscow on May Day), a fiery red, fringe-edged “parrot tulip” selling at $10 a bulb, twice as much as the Truman; the General Eisenhower, a rich purple hyacinth; the Field Marshal Montgomery, a tulip with red and white blotches.

Planning—with Freedom. The Dutch drive to regain their prewar prosperity through beer and Blue Delft, through electric bulbs and flower bulbs and gin and cheese, is not a haphazard effort. It is planned by a Government that contains few brilliant men but possesses one brilliant idea—that in The Netherlands it is possible for free enterprise and a planned economy to go hand in hand. The Dutch Government does not coerce Dutch businessmen for two good reasons: 1) it couldn’t if it tried, and 2) it doesn’t have to. Dutch business goes along with Government plans because it realizes the necessity of planning in the reconstruction period and because the plans themselves make sense.

The Cabinet is young, hardheaded, practical (although four of the 15 mem bers are academic men who had little practical prewar business or political experience). All but two of them came out of the resistance movement.

New Faces. The Prime Minister, Willem (“Wim”) Schermerhorn, former professor of agrarian economy at the University of Delft, established his political reputation in St. Michielsgestel concentration camp.

The Finance Minister, Pieter Lieftinck, is a brilliant mathematician who sleeps little and often. He drowses at will in Cabinet meetings, always snaps wide awake when the discussion returns to finance.

Homely Hendrik Vos, Commerce Minister, is the chief planner. Some businessmen kanker (grumble) against his blueprints, but Vos does not stop for kankerers.

Quiet Socialist Drees, Minister for Social Affairs, was a companion of Schermerhorn at St. Michielsgestel. Wilhelmiaa used to hold herself strictly aloof from Socialists; now Drees is her favorite Cabinet member.

Not new but still remarkable is the face of Minister Eelco van Kleffens, the one important holdover from the Cabinet in Exile. Those who call him a skillful negotiator pay him an accurate but trivial compliment. He is also a man of heart and humor and profound wisdom, one of the few great contemporary Europeans.

Five of the “new” men are members of the new Socialist Party of Labor, which will get its first test May 17 when the people vote for members of the lower house of the States-General. Before the war, there were three major religious parties in Holland—one Catholic, two Protestant. The left wings of these parties joined the Socialists in February to form the Party of Labor (headed by Schermerhorn), which expects to win 35% of the votes in the coming elections. The Catholic People’s Party can count on about 30%. Communists will not likely get more than 10% of the vote. The traditional Protestant parties will share the rest of the seats with minor groups.

Why the Dutch? Good as they unquestionably are, the men who now govern The Netherlands cannot alone account for The Netherlands’ extraordinary recovery. Why do the Dutch work together while the rest of Europe either sinks back into apathy or tears itself apart over contending theories of how society can be organized?

Men who really know The Netherlands explain the last twelve months in terms of the last three centuries of Dutch history. When they hear the word “tolerance” used in connection with Holland, they make an insistent distinction: tolerance in The Netherlands is not the tolerance of indifference. They point to the fact that until the war the basic organization of Dutch politics was along religious lines; men felt so keenly about their religious beliefs that they rarely formed political associations outside the framework of their faiths. The religious difference was intensified by the fact that Dutch nationhood was born in the course of a largely Protestant struggle against Spanish domination of the Low Countries.

In almost any other country this deep cleavage would spell intolerance; but the Dutch character is affected by another factor: for centuries the Dutch have lived in the shadow of calamity. They work together because men who live behind dikes know that they must work together, no matter how profound the differences in their convictions, if they are to keep out the sea. All Dutch communities are orderly, but those that lie at low altitudes are almost invariably cleaner and tidier than those above sea level.

The seaborne Dutch insistence on order and cooperation between all elements is traditionally symbolized by the House of Orange. Its rule is not merely that of a “stabilizing element” which all monarchists claim for all monarchies, no matter how unstable. The House of Orange is the spokesman for the people—for all elements of the people. The Netherlands’ three million Catholics are as enthusiastically loyal to the intensely Protestant House of Orange as the three and a half million Dutch Protestants; the Catholics understand that the Throne stands for respect of the people’s beliefs. Even Dutch Communist Editor A. J. Koeje-mans recently told an American press conference that, while he did not believe in monarchy, the House of Orange-Nassau was an exception that had his allegiance and approval.

Little Lily. All her life Wilhelmina has admirably filled the role of a Princess of Orange-Nassau. In 1880, fearing that the line would die out and the crown would pass to some alien German princeling, the Dutch waited anxiously to see if the aging King William III would produce a child of his old age. With wild jubilation, they greeted the announcement that a royal daughter had been born.

When she was ten years old her father, having done his royal duty, died, and Wilhelmina became Queen of The Netherlands. She had a lonely time of it. Denied the companionship of other children, she lavished affection and attention on her dolls—scolded them, pampered them, admonished them that “if you are naughty I shall make you into a princess and then you won’t have any other little children to play with.”

An imperious girl (“Do all these people belong to me?”), she was also slim, proud, and pretty. The French dramatist Edmond Rostand called her “The little lily queen who rules over the kingdom of tulips.”

Bad Luck & Good. Queen Wilhelmina’s choice of a consort was Henry Wladimir, youngest son of the Grand Duke of Mecklenburg-Schwerin. Henry was a taxidermist’s dream of a German princeling, a beady-eyed, mean-spirited fellow, of whom the best that can be said is that he learned his place (considerably below the throne) and that, after eight years of marriage, he fathered Princess Juliana.

Juliana had better marital luck than her mother. Bernhard of Lippe-Biesterfeld was another German princeling, and vaguely suspected of Nazi sympathies to boot. But his record of intense loyalty to his Queen and adopted country during the war has made Prince Bernhard the most popular man in Holland today. In the last year of the war, he served as head of the Dutch resistance movement, later organized relief of stricken areas. .

Bernhard, who pilots his own plane, recently toured Scandinavia with Juliana (“Lula” to him) to thank the ruling houses for the relief sent Holland. The Danes gave Bernhard and Juliana the prized Order of the Elephant. Grateful but rueful, Bernhard commented privately: “There are two kinds of decorations—those for valor and those for banqueting; I get all the eating decorations.” Wilhelmina, who used to disapprove of Bernhard’s prewar frivolity (he even drank cocktails on Sunday) now thinks so much of him that she lets him smoke in her dining room.

As the People Change. The Queen has changed her mind about many other people and things. Before the war she was as conservative a monarch as could be found in Europe; she then expressed the character of a highly conservative people. But the Dutch changed under the Nazi occupation. Wilhelmina in London sensed the change, and, like a good daughter of the House of Orange, changed with them. When Cabinet members submitted programs she often said: “This is merely what you gentleman want. What would the Dutch people want?”

On her first state appearance after liberation, the once regally gowned Wilhelmina turned up in an old coat and a pair of green woolen gloves. The once socially aloof Wilhelmina invited a Miss Marianne Tellegen to be head of her personal cabinet. Miss Tellegen had no social standing whatever; she had merely been a heroine of the Dutch resistance, living for four years next door to Gestapo headquarters in Utrecht.

Wilhelmina gets around these days more than she ever did. She talks to coal miners and politicians and sailors and wounded resistance men. Every member of her Cabinet knows that she knows more about the Dutch people than he does. One subject defended Wilhelmina with a nationally typical understatement: “She is good to the sick and costs no more than a president.”

The Dutch know that they have a hard road ahead. Viewing their Indonesian empire more as businessmen than as politicians, they are quite willing to give it political independence, assuming that the Indonesians will not disturb heavy Dutch investments (prewar estimate: nearly $2 billion). They feel keenly that they cannot be isolated or made immune from the ideological and economic storms that trouble the world. But the Dutch also remember that they have faced danger for centuries—the danger of the sea and the danger of a land divided by intense religious differences. They count on Wilhelmina to help them through, smiling in the midst of present want and inconveniences as they tell themselves: “When there is a good woman in the house, joy laughs from the window.”