The Occupied Garden is a remarkable book and may just have a ready-made audience. There are those with some Dutch blood (like me); those who've nurtured for decades our special Second World War bond with Holland (as the authors point out, "Canadian soldiers helped rebuild houses, town halls, dikes, and bridges, and the bond between liberator and liberated tightened," and more than 7,000 are buried there); those who're simply very interested in the war; and, finally, those who've visited Holland and returned impressed, intrigued, smitten. And then there are those who just like a good story.
Sisters Kristen den Hartog (a well-known Canadian novelist) and Tracy Kasaboski have authored a personal, unsentimental, intensely compelling "memoir" of a working-class, small-town family surviving the horrific Nazi occupation of the Netherlands and, in the early 1950s, emigrating to Canada. They've done so with fine writing and exhaustive research, and with much delight in and, clearly, much love for the family. That's because it's theirs.
The Occupied Garden: Recovering the Story of a Family in the War-Torn Netherlands
, by Kristen den Hartog and Tracy Kasaboski, McClelland & Stewart, 326 pages, $29.99
The central characters are Gerrit and Cor den Hartog, "Opa" and "Oma," the sisters' grandparents. We first encounter them at the age of 18 in 1927, on a frozen canal, where Gerrit turns "languid figure eights" skating backward, and Cor watches from the side sipping hot anise milk - and their eyes meet. The engagement lasts eight years because of money and parent troubles. They marry in May, 1935, move upstairs into his parents' modest two-storey brick house in Leidschendam, a town east of The Hague with roots in the 14th century (the book would benefit from maps).
They've both been working full-time since the age of 12, and Cor, especially, is deeply religious, "fierce in belief, rather than calmly faithful, like Gerrit." As his father does, Gerrit first puts in the 18-hour days of a market gardener's hired hand, then he acquires his own 2½ acres, "an expanse of black soil to which they entrust their future."
The first child, a girl, Rige, arrives in 1937. As the deadly tensions rise in Europe, as Germany threatens and attacks, as Holland is invaded and slowly sucked under in the occupation's ever-deepening misery, we follow their lives close-up as the gardener and his wife have four more children, all boys, the last in 1944. Gerrit listens to his hidden radio and looks up "regions in his atlas ... gaining a new awareness of his place in the larger world." Later this awareness will make the enormous displacement of a move to Canada imaginable.
The tiny, mundane details of these very ordinary lives are brilliantly interwoven with the colossal events and backwash of all-out war that move the story relentlessly, sometimes breathlessly, forward. (A third component, cleverly running parallel to the den Hartog adventures, is the chronicle of Holland's much-loved royals, led by stout, commanding Queen Wilhelmina. The family escapes to England, and then-princess Juliana and her daughters make their way to Rockcliffe Park, Ottawa, where Prime Minister Mackenzie King duly notes their activities in his fulsome diaries.)
As in a painting by Seurat, the masses ("dots") of information, meticulously build up, slowly, vividly, revealing the many personalities and the devastating times: the ceaseless roundups of Jews (Leidschendam's 26 Jewish citizens never return), the ever-shrinking freedom, the collaboration of some with the Nazis, the intensifying fear and hunger and humiliation and, that so debilitating aspect of war, tedium. And with it all, never diminished, there is the tenacious Dutch resolve to resist, to fight on.
