There are not many photos of my father to show in this story. The reason for this is that they disappeared during the war. After his arrest by the SD, they were confiscated and probably stored in the Gestapo archives.
The photographs in this chapter were given to me by the son of one of his brothers, and there were also some copies of old newspaper photographs.
Intermezzo 1
The quality of those images leaves much to be desired, but they do give an impression of the man he must have been. On the one hand, he is a familiar face to me, but on the other hand, my memories of him are vague. The fact is, I never really got to know him very well.
From their stories, I know that my older brother and two sisters had a very different experience of their father. I think the age difference between us played a role in this. I am six years younger than the youngest of the three and my brother is nine years younger. I will come back to this later in this chapter.
During a visit to the NIOD, I discovered the following photograph in one of the archive files, which must have been taken during his stay in prison.
Yes, memories are a strange thing. Some people have lost absolutely everything about their childhood. Others claim to remember things from when they were two years old. How will it be later with our grandchildren? Will they remember anything from the days when their grandparents looked after them? If they have a memory like mine, it will probably be something like the sheet of paper that holds my memories up to the age of four. All I can remember from that period are fragments of events with no connection whatsoever.
My father’s youth
My father was born in Amsterdam on 28 March 1900. He was the youngest child, for whom the family had planned a different education than for his brothers. Like their father, they had trained as carpenters. Louis had to continue his education and therefore attended secondary school after primary school.
I do not know whether he was a good student or what his interests were. No documents from that time have been preserved that show what he did. No school reports. No diplomas from other courses he took. Perhaps he went to work in an office after secondary school.
The Population Register records show that he left home on 7 April 1920. The reason was simple. His mother had died and he had to find another place to live. He moved to Bussum and rented a room there. He lived at the following addresses in succession:
27 April 1920 Steven Slagt, Voormeulenlaan 107 and 1 October 1921, widow Tobi, de Landstraat 70. From 31 January 1924 to 8 February 1924, he had a postal address at a lodging house at NZVoorburgwal 18.
From 17 June 1924 to 19 March 1925, he lived at Van Vlietlaan 70 in Bussum. He then returned to Amsterdam, to Spilbergenstraat 128-2.
But why Bussum? What attracted him to that place? Was it a girlfriend he had met in Amsterdam? A nice job? Was he attracted by the work of Herman Gorter, who lived in Bussum? Known as a poet, but above all as an active and militant member of various socialist movements. It could be, were it not for the fact that Bussum had already left a few years earlier in 1920. In any case, he must have been in contact with an artist couple at the time. They gave him three wall plates, two of which have been preserved.
In 1925, he returned to Amsterdam, but not alone. At the beginning of 1924, he had met my mother. How and under what circumstances this happened is unknown. Her story has been researched by my eldest son and I will recount it in detail in the next chapter, The Family Tree. Together they went to live at 128II Van Spilbergenstraat.
They moved a few more times, first to Orteliusstraat 189 and then to Jan van Galenstraat 155, before moving to Mercatorstraat 155 II on 12 October 1932.
It is not entirely clear what his work consisted of at that time. I have heard from my brother and sisters that he had an office job. And that he was a travelling salesman. A well-known story in the family was that he visited restaurants and cafés in Amsterdam with Coca Cola to promote this then unknown drink.
In the 1930s, he helped his good friends from Betondorp, Jan and Mieke Minke, for a year. Jan had to spend a year in the sanatorium in Hilversum. During that period, my father took over Jan’s job at the Simplex bicycle factory in Amsterdam. I don’t know how that was arranged financially. I don’t suppose Simplex paid both of them.
Political Activities
Where did his interest in socialism and communism come from? The link to Gorter could be a clue. Another possibility is the Wall Street crash of 1929, which left hundreds of thousands of people unemployed in the Netherlands as well.
In his farewell letter, he writes that he always lived according to his convictions. His great love for the workers was always his guiding principle.
Back in Amsterdam, he actively participated in the CPH’s struggle from 1930 onwards and became section leader of Amsterdam West. Later, he became a member of the North Holland District Leadership, where he quickly became the leader when Amsterdam became an independent district.
From 1938 onwards, he was part of the daily leadership of the CPN.
In 1935, he became a municipal councillor for the CPN in Amsterdam. In the same year, he also became a member of the Provincial Council of North Holland.
As a result, I saw little of him during the week until the outbreak of the war, as he always left early and often came home late. On the few occasions when this was not the case and he was able to sleep in, he would have breakfast on his own in the living room. It is one of the memories that I can still picture clearly. He would sit there like a gentleman, eating his breakfast and letting my mother spoil him.
I was still too young to understand his work and motives. What I do know about it I have mostly heard from other family members, especially my youngest sister.
The family
As mentioned at the beginning of this chapter, my youngest brother and I are a lot younger than the other three children in the family. There is a six-year age difference between me and my youngest sister, and my brother is three years younger than me. We were the late arrivals and were treated as such. We were part of the family, but we were still too young to understand the intricacies of all kinds of family events, to understand things that were second nature to the three oldest children. In a sense, that difference has always remained.
For example, it was only much later, after I turned 75, that I found out my father was not my real father. I can only guess at the reason for my mother’s indiscretion. She was an attractive woman in her thirties who often had to entertain herself at home. The men around her certainly noticed her. Her husband was often away on party business. They call it being married to the party. I was the result of a brief affair my mother had with another man, perhaps someone from the party apparatus. My father then lived at a different address for a few months but eventually returned to the family. Indirectly – after his death – I heard this story from my eldest brother, who also mentioned a name that was supposed to be my real father’s. What do you do in such a case? At first, nothing, but after I had gotten used to the idea a few months later, I consulted with my brother and had a DNA comparison test done. The conclusion of the test was that we did not have the same father. In his case, there were several indications, including the similarity that he was a real Jansen. His farewell letter contains a few lines that clearly show this. Since my mother had already passed away in 1997, I was unable to ask her who my real father was. It’s a pity, but I don’t become someone else with different characteristics when I am given a new name tag.
Regardless of the above, I would still like to try to say something about a number of specific characteristics of the man I had always assumed was my father.
Dad, as we called him, liked to live his life like a gentleman, if I am to believe the older members of the family. I vaguely remember that he often wore a dark blue suit with a faint pinstripe. Of course, he wore a hat when he left the house. When it rained, he wore rubber overshoes and a kind of gaiters over them. On his Sunday walks, he carried a walking stick, not because he had difficulty walking, but so he could wave it elegantly.
He was a man who was busy until the German invasion and, as a result, was often away from home. His work for the municipal council, the provincial council and the newspaper took up all his time. I once accompanied my mother to a meeting of some kind. I remember him addressing the crowd, but I don’t remember what it was about. It is quite possible that it was about elections.
That amount of work had grown steadily since he entered politics in 1930. I think that meant he had less time to spend with his youngest children than he had had with my eldest brother and sisters. And once the war broke out, he had other things on his mind.
A few things from the years leading up to 1940 have stuck with me. For example, he had a habit of bringing Droste biscuits home on Fridays, as a treat to go with tea or coffee. The gesture with which he conjured them out of his bag was more or less a ceremonial event in the family. I have already mentioned the annual day out to Zandvoort in an earlier chapter, and I also have a vague memory of an annual outing around Christmas. We would all go into town in the evening to look at the shops and the lights. Afterwards, we would visit one of the large restaurants in Kalverstraat to eat cake and have a drink. I only got to experience that a few times and loved it. Incidentally, all the restaurants from that era, with their dark brown interiors and stately waiters, have disappeared. But those were things that happened before the war.
The resistance
After the German invasion and the subsequent occupation, he was completely absorbed by his work in the resistance. Nevertheless, at the end of 1940, when we were temporarily living in Eerbeek, he brought home a tin model railway station as a St. Nicholas surprise. It was an expensive gift for that time. Shortly afterwards, probably at Christmas, he came home one evening with a large package containing a wind-up train with carriages and tracks. Looking back, it is remarkable that he found the time and opportunity to do this, despite the pressure he was under and the danger of being caught by the Germans.
How the exchange of mutual affection went, whether I threw my arms around him and things like that, has been erased from my memory. Perhaps it was so ordinary and such an everyday occurrence that I can no longer remember it. The two farewell letters from prison – I will come back to that later in the story – show a man who loved his children very much. The love radiates from them, as it were.
My youngest sister and I have often discussed what my father would have done after the war if he had stayed alive. How he would have reacted to all the events that took place after the war. Born in 1900, he would be 120 years old at the time of writing, but of course you can’t tell that from the photographs. And as I get older myself, it even seems as if he is getting younger.
Well, what would he have said about the abolition of the CPN and the collapse of the Soviet Union? And how would he have explained the crimes committed during Stalin’s reign? Would he have tried to justify the Wall between East and West Germany? Hungary? And how would he have reacted if, like a number of other leaders in the 1950s, he had been expelled from the party?
These are questions to which, with the best will in the world, I cannot find an answer. I know, for example, that he visited Russia once before the war as a member of a delegation. During that visit in 1935, he must have seen things that were not kosher. Perhaps at the time he considered them acceptable, under the motto that the end justifies the means.
Be that as it may, he was a man who cared about the fate of others. He also accepted the consequences of his choice and ultimately paid for it with his life. This was a way of acting and behaving that was rare among the vast majority of the Dutch population during those five years of war.
The photo below was taken in 1943. My cousin, who gave me the photo, told me that it is a copy of the photo on his identity card, edited by a photographer. The moustache he wore during the war to avoid detection has been retouched.
Compared to the earlier photos, I think his face clearly shows the traces of the constant tension under which he must have lived. In ‘Partij in het verzet’ (Party in the Resistance), the book by Hansje Galesloot and Susan Legêne about the CPN during the Second World War, the following is written about this.
“Jo and Elske de Smit – friends of the family – remember that when they were in Zandvoort with him and his wife in June 1940, Lou Jansen said that they were still able to move freely thanks to the pact between Germany and the Soviet Union.”
“From October 1940 onwards, Lou Jansen stayed at Jo and Elske de Smit’s house on Westlandgracht in Amsterdam every week from Thursday to Monday.
Elske recalls that Lou was always very tired after these meetings. They were intense discussions. He would say to me: ‘I’ve filled them up again.’ He cheered them up, encouraged them and then felt drained. He would just collapse.”
After the February strike, Jansen did not return to the address on Westlandgracht. He probably maintained contact with Amsterdam from Deventer at that time.
Jo and Elske de Smit told us that they were shocked when Lou Jansen suddenly returned to them on Westlandgracht in the spring of 1943, after the arrests in the newspaper industry. Elske de Smit: ‘It wasn’t so much his appearance, his disguise, that shocked them, but more the change in his personality. He was agitated and terribly frightened. He also couldn’t cope with staying in the woods; it made him feel oppressed. We also became a little anxious. Not anxious for ourselves, but we were very concerned about him. We had the feeling that this was an important political figure who was in danger of being destroyed by his life in hiding.
Jo: ‘Then his liaison officer arrived and said: “No way. How did he end up with you? There are so many people who know he was here. You can’t do that, it’s irresponsible.” Elske: ‘But we didn’t have the courage to throw him out of the house. Partly because he was a friend, partly because you felt sorry for him, and there was little you could do for him.”
Opgepakt door de Duitsers
After he was arrested by the SD in 1943, I never saw him again. My brother and I went with my mother once when she visited the prison in Scheveningen (the so-called Oranjehotel). She wanted to try to take us inside, but she wasn’t allowed to. So we had to stay outside.
Across the road from the prison, we sat in the sand for half an hour, waiting for her to come back.
It was warm and sunny, and I remember not knowing what to do with myself. Every now and then, I would glance at the large arched door across the street, secretly hoping that she would come out to get us. But that didn’t happen.
We never saw him again, and on 9 October 1943, he was executed by firing squad on the Waalsdorpervlakte, together with Jan Dieters, his fellow member of the CPN’s underground leadership.
My mother told my youngest brother and me a few weeks later. It must have been difficult for her , because my father had written in a previous letter dated 26 August that she should only tell Loekie and Rudie later in their lives that Jan Dieters and he had been sentenced to death. “Let them forget me completely first.”
I remember well how she came to sit on my little brother’s and my bed that evening and told us in tears that Daddy was dead and would never come back.
I can hardly have been surprised. In fact, I probably already knew.
It intrigues me now how – or from whom – I heard that at the time. In any case, it was not because of a funeral attended by the family, as these did not take place in such cases. The Germans secretly buried the victims in mass graves and the bereaved families were only informed afterwards with a short message about the execution of the sentence. The most obvious explanation is that I read the farewell letter he wrote on the morning of his death. It arrived a few days later and lay on the mantelpiece for a while.
Or that I read the news of his death in the newspaper. Although it is quite possible that this was kept from me and my little brother. However, through the Delpher archive, I was able to verify that the news of the sentence against Jansen and Dieters and the execution of the death penalty on 9 October was extensively reported on the front page of all newspapers on 16 October.
How we dealt with his death in the last two years of the war has been erased from my memory. Perhaps certain events involving my father were not discussed in the presence of the two youngest children.
Ultimately, I think that each member of the family processed his death for themselves and accepted it as an event that could not be reversed. It was only ten to twenty years after the end of the war that this changed.
I will return to the loss of a father in chapter 18.
The Farewell Letter
To conclude this chapter, here is my father’s farewell letter, which he was allowed to write on the morning of his execution.
It seems to have been written in some haste. The letter is on a lined, folded sheet of A5 paper. In pencil.
Over the years, it has become less legible, but with some effort it is still easy to follow. With a few crossings-out here and there, he conveyed his message in his final hours. To his wife and children, family, friends and acquaintances. To the people he had worked for.
The farewell letter is followed by two letters he wrote on 26 August and 30 September. These were written on paper from the prison in Scheveningen (the Oranjehotel).
De letters from de ‘Oranje Hotel’
