Opening Liberation Route - Main contents
Donderdag 13 februari was ik gastheer in het Europees Parlement voor de start van de 'Liberation Route'. Van de opening is een mooi videoverslag gemaakt.
Lees hieronder de toespraak die ik hield.
Speech at Opening of Liberation Route exhibition
European Parliament, Feb.13, 2014 - Thijs Berman
Excellencies, distinguished guests, ladies and gentlemen, colleagues,
A very warm welcome to you all, at this start of the Liberation Route exhibition. It is a great initiative, a concise and impressive account of what has happened almost 70 years ago.
Yesterday, I called my father. He is 84 now, quietly living in the North of the Netherlands with his second wife. As a boy, he lived in Eindhoven, in the South of The Netherlands. His mother Clara was Jewish - although she would not easily have identified herself as such. She would say : I'm Dutch, or perhaps : I'm a citizen of the world. She was anti-religious. The Nazi ideology did not see much of this nuance, she had to wear the yellow star all the same. But, as she kept the pharmacy of her non-Jewish husband who was a doctor, she had been listed as irreplaceable by the city of Eindhoven. It saved her from deportation.
On the phone, I asked my father about his memories of the liberation of Eindhoven. One of the surprising things he told me was this:"It was at the 18th of September, 1944. We were so relieved. We invited some soldiers to our house. And one of these early Liberation days, we even had dinner with some Jewish soldiers, They were from Palestine, a British territory. They sang very melancholic songs for us."
Liberation Route has a meaning for our family. It is the difference between life and death. The fact that Eindhoven has been liberated before the last winter of the war probably saved my father's life, that of his mother and of his brothers and sister. These half-Jewish, mixed families would have been deported eventually, of course.
So, if I am standing here, it is thanks to these allied troops, Canadians, Brits, Americans, who set foot at the shores of Normandy at D-Day to fight their way to Germany, and passed by Eindhoven in September 1944. That is why it came as a deeply moving privilege when the organizers asked me to participate in the opening of this important exhibition.
Liberation Route, from Omaha Beach deep into Germany, is a set of intertwined trajectories, sometimes coming together, mostly meandering over Western Europe. These are footsteps filled with fear and frenzy, cruelty and courage. The real story has not often been told. For having witnessed a small bit of war myself, as a journalist, reporting in the Caucasus in the early 90's, I know the reality of war is difficult to hear, so you don't tell everything you saw. Sometimes, almost unvoluntarily, someone lifts the veil. General Eisenhower did in his book Crusade in Europe, when he described the battle near Falaise, in Normandy. He wrote:"It was literally possible to walk for hundreds of yards at a time, stepping on nothing but dead and decaying flesh." Of German soldiers.
We think of Liberation Route as a truly heroic episode of the War, and it certainly was. We like to think of the Liberation Route as the happy end. But for the soldiers who had to live on haunted by their memories, it was not. For many civilians, it wasn't either.
Soon after the War, my father had to learn that almost 40 cousins, and nieces and uncles and aunts, relatives of my grandmother, would never come back. For her and for my father, the sense of victory at the end of the War was shortlived, to become darkened by grief. Still today, 70 years later.
In Eastern Europe, the end of the Second World War had a different meaning. Of course, the organizers of the Liberation Route rightly intend to find ways to see similar initiatives along similar roads followed by the Soviet Army on its way to Berlin. But thìs Liberation was followed by decades of oppression. Polish resistants were deported and killed. Hungarian Jews saw a second wave of persecution, often even by the same people. For Eastern Europe, a second Liberation would come, but much later.
The Liberation, in short, meant a far more complex story than going from darkness into the light, for those who lost loved ones, for survivors, for veterans, and for whole peoples in the East and South of Europe. This urges us today to avoid easy interpretations, on equally important and equally moving historic changes. The risk of any one-sided victorious mythology is to overlook unhealed wounds, and even to breed new divides and ground for conflict.
What makes it so appropriate to start this journey of the Liberation Route exhibition here, in the European Parliament? This House owes its existence to people who understood that the only path away from war consists in dialogue and international cooperation. Many Members of the European Parliament have seen oppression and dictatorship. Some had to flee from Franco, some were active in Solidarnosc or other dissident movements. And this is actually the deeper reason they became Members of the European Parliament. Many of us here, today, stand up against discrimination and defend our freedoms, and often this stems from their own personal background. To the vast majority of us, building Europe means to strengthen the continental space for open democracies - and there is a lot to improve, including in the structure of the EU itself.
But here, perhaps more acutely than in many other places, we realize that international cooperation, apart from being simply necessary to tackle the real challenges of our times, finds its deepest value in itself: it brings peace. After the horrors of the 20th century, many of us, if you would look into our hearts, live with a modest, yet high ambition: avoid a new disaster. Regardless of our political differences, it is far from certain for any of us we will succeed, as inevitably we don't know what's in the blind spot of our vision. But if there's any chance, it is in open dialogue, along the many routes that have seen the Liberation coming, crossing European borders.
My father practised his secundary school English with the allied troops. Due to rather poor education in this language during the war, his pronounciation of German is far better. He loves E.M. Forster and Hemingway, but Rilke and Heine are other favorites, as Schubert's Winterreise. He is a pianist, and if anything transgresses borders, it is culture. But culture alone did not offer enough protection. We hope that institutions will - and that became the story of the EU.
It is our responsibility not to forget where we come from, how these soldiers have had to march, and how they fell, and how they made our parents survive for us to be here. Our freedoms are not a given, nor our democracies. A few hours of flying away from Europe, and even next door in Ukraine, people are taking risks to enjoy their universal rights, their freedoms. Their hopes, their eyes are on us.
Thank you very much.
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