The following story does not really have much to do with the war, and yet it does. It is about the strange ways of coincidence. About things that – apparently? – happen by chance.
You have probably experienced something like this yourself. You are walking through the city with your partner and for some reason you think of someone you haven’t seen in years.
A postscript about Mr Simons’ life has been added to this chapter
Intermezzo 4
Who do you bump into at that moment? Exactly, the person who is playing a role in your thoughts.
“Wow,” you say, surprised. “What a coincidence. I was just thinking about you.”
This story is about a chance encounter with consequences for both parties.
The story about Mr Simons took place around 1947, just after the war.
At the time, I was in the first year of the Spinoza MULO secondary school in Amsterdam Zuid.
Mr Simons joined the school around November because our class teacher, Mr , had been sidelined for a long time due to a heart attack.
He was a man of about 45, and I can still remember him entering my classroom with the headmaster. He seemed a little uncertain, not entirely at ease. As a child, you immediately sense that the newcomer cannot maintain order, has no authority and lacks control over his class. Someone like that radiates that, as it were. And a period begins for him or her that can best be described as hell on earth.
This was also the case for Mr Simons. The man lacked that aura that certain teachers possess and regularly burst into fits of rage when his pupils were naughty. He was sometimes so upset that he lost control of his speech and, with foam at the mouth, could only utter fragments of sentences.
It is with some embarrassment that I look back on this period. Because of our behaviour in class and the fun we had when the man lost his temper again. Children can be horrible monsters in these situations.
How is it possible that someone like that was appointed as a teacher, you think in hindsight. You can’t do that to a person, can you? Indeed, and on top of that, he was a great man who, in the periods when he was feeling a little better, could tell fascinating stories about the Dutch East Indies. Or Indonesia, as we call it now. Because what was the situation? The Simons family, husband, wife and daughter, had just been repatriated from the Dutch East Indies, where they had been interned in a camp by the Japanese during the war. Simons’ nerves had been severely tested there because, during his time in the camp, he had allegedly shown insufficient respect to the Japanese guards on a number of occasions. This resulted in scars on his head from beatings with sticks and an arm that no longer functioned properly.
Staying with a host family
Actually, I’m getting ahead of myself, because by chance (there you go) I only found out about this about three months after he joined our school. That requires a little explanation.
After the war, I stayed with a host family several times for about a month at a time while my mother was on holiday with the 40-45 Foundation. I stayed with a family whose husband had also not survived the war because of his activities in the resistance.
So it happened that in the spring of 1947, I spent five weeks with Mrs van Parreiren. She was a monumental woman with an equally monumental son, who was a few years older than me, and a very beautiful and slender daughter in her twenties, who no longer lived at home.
The Van Parreiren family lived in a large three-storey house in Amsterdam Zuid.
As a result of the housing shortage, which had erupted with full force in those years, they had, with a little help from the government, temporarily made one floor available to a family for whom no other accommodation was available at the time.
So, at some point, I arrived there with my suitcase full of belongings and, after settling into a small room, the moment came when Mrs Parreiren introduced me to the family who were temporarily living with her.
“Let me show you around the house first, and then we’ll meet our residents,” I can still hear Mrs Parreiren saying. “They are very nice people. They come from the Dutch East Indies and have had a difficult time there.”
No sooner said than done, and after I had found out where the toilet and bathroom were, we went upstairs. There was a staircase inside the house leading to the first floor, and the master of the house, if I may call him that in this case, was already waiting upstairs to greet us.
I’ll let you guess who was waiting for us there, smiling.
Mr Simons. With his Indonesian wife and daughter.
“What a surprise,” he said. And then I was welcomed with a warmth that Indian people seem to have a patent on.
“You already know each other?” said Mrs Parreiren, surprised.
Well, of course we knew each other.
And because I was definitely not entirely squeaky clean when it came to my behaviour towards Mr Simons in class, you can probably imagine that I felt quite awkward.
But my teacher didn’t let on and didn’t mention a word about what had happened at school.
What a classy man he was to take me in like that, I realise in hindsight.
That first night in the strange bed, I couldn’t sleep and lay awake worrying about how I would deal with the new situation with Mr Simons at school the next day.
One thing was clear. Something had to change in the classroom, even if it was just my own behaviour.
In hindsight, it turned out to be very simple because I told the story to my friends in class. In this way, in the weeks that followed, they also heard about the experiences of the Simons family in the Japanese camp. His wife told me about it when I was with her because of our shared stamp collecting hobby.
From that moment on, respect for the man grew in the class and lessons proceeded normally.
I don’t know what happened to the Simons family after that.
In any case, he left the school at the end of the school year and contact with the Parreiren family also faded after a few years. Oh well, that’s just how it goes.
Finally, the question with which I began this story remains. About coincidence.
Was it a coincidence that the paths of the Simons family and mine crossed? Or did chance choose me to act as an intermediary between these people and my class?
Well, you’ll have to come up with the answer yourself.
Postscript
Meneer Simons d.d. 1-7-2019
The residents of Haringvlietstraat 55
“Why don’t you find out who those people were that you lived with for a few months after the war?” my wife had asked me several times. It was a question I had put off answering for all sorts of reasons, but she persisted, and a few months ago I decided I couldn’t put it off any longer and immersed myself in the Parreiren family. But where do you start in such a case?
At least I knew the street where they lived. It was Haringvlietstraat, and their house was located about halfway down the next side street from Wielingenstraat. Using Google Maps, I was able to estimate the house number.
The name Parreiren did not yield any clues via Google, but with the help of the city archives, we set to work. We started about halfway down the street and then looked at the house cards to see if we could find that name. It was a nice way to spend an evening when there was nothing on TV. Names, names, names passed before my eyes. And doubt crept in as we got closer and closer to the corner of the street but didn’t come across a name that even resembled Parreiren. Just as I was wondering whether I had remembered the right name, house number 55 provided the solution. The widow Pareren and the Simons family lived there.
So not van Parreiren, but van Pareren Meij. Didn’t she have a son and a daughter? That was correct. Josina Franciska Meij, born in 1902, married Dirk van Pareren, also born in 1902, in 1926.
The couple had two children: a son, Adrianus, born in 1933, and a daughter (still to be verified, Anna Maria Loulna, born in 1930).
Dirk was the director of an unnamed company, which did not prevent him from participating in the resistance against the German occupiers. In the spring of 1944, he was arrested by the SD for the latter activities and transported to the Dachau concentration camp on 26 May 1944. He died there on 15 February 1945.
Mrs van Pareren died on 12 April 1986 in Haarlem.
I don’t remember much about the time I spent with the Parerens. Their daughter had already left home. I think she was studying. And Adriaan, their son, was a quiet boy who attended the technical school. He was at least a head taller than me and heavily built. That meant there was little glory for me in our wrestling matches. He wasn’t a bookworm, as far as I can remember, but he was technically skilled. For example, he had built a crystal radio receiver that could pick up Hilversum 1 and 2. It had headphones, though, so listening to music together for an hour wasn’t possible.
During the weeks I was there, there was no talk of the war or their father. Nor was there any mention of my father’s resistance activities and our time in hiding.
The Simons family came to live at their address as a result of a measure taken by the municipality of Amsterdam to combat the growing housing shortage at the time. Residents who had surplus living space were obliged to rent out part of it.
Since I was already busy, I then went in search of the history of Mr Simons, my teacher. At first, I found nothing about him on the internet until I discovered him more or less by chance in a genealogical overview of the Gosewisch family.
It turned out that a Jan Simons had married Christina Victorina, daughter of the Gosewich family, on 25 March 1921. She was born on 19 September 1904 in Garontale, a town on Celebes, one of the islands in the Dutch East Indies.
Jan Simons was said to have been born on 10 July 1896 in the Frisian town of Aengworden.
The genealogical overview also mentioned the following about him: BSakte 53, KNIL soldier, physical education teacher, physical education inspector in the Dutch East Indies. During the Second World War, Jan served as a reserve soldier (1stLt. Inf) in the Ist afd. Bandoeng Landstorm unit and was later interned in the Japanese military camp Tjilatjap.
The combination of teacher and KNIL strikes me as odd. Could he have trained as a teacher after secondary school in Friesland and then signed up as a volunteer to serve in the KNIL in the Dutch East Indies? That was a possibility in the years around 1900, with the option of a 2, 5 or 6-year contract period. He was probably stationed in Garontale on Celebes, where he met his future wife.
Another possibility, of course, is that he was unable to find work after secondary school and immediately signed up as a volunteer. After training in Nijmegen, he left for the Dutch East Indies to serve there.
The KNIL was a professional army that until 1909 consisted largely of Belgians, French deserters from the Foreign Legion, Germans and Dutch fortune seekers. They were trained in Harderwijk, which earned the nickname ‘the sewer of Europe’ because the aspiring KNIL soldiers were particularly notable for the record time in which they spent their pay in the local pubs and brothels.
After 1909, only Dutch nationals were accepted and the training was moved to Nijmegen.
The Gosewisch family originally came from Germany. Willem Hubertus Charles Gosewisch was a merchant in the town of Garontale. His wife, Anna, Catharina Rosenboom, was reported to have been a teacher’s assistant for five years at the first public primary school in Makassar.
It is quite possible that Jan Simons came into contact with Anna Catharina and her daughter through education after his KNIL contract ended.
After the birth of three children, the couple moved from Gorontale to Surabaya around 1925 and then to Batavia, where two more children were born.
As already mentioned, after the defeat by Japan, he ended up in a military camp.
After liberation, they left Semarang with their youngest daughter and moved to the Netherlands. The older children, three of whom were of legal age, preferred to remain in the Dutch East Indies.
The Simons family was allocated part of a house and moved into a house at 1eHelmersstraat in Amsterdam on 27 June 1946. From that address, they moved to Haringvlietstraat 55 on 20 September 1947, where they continued to live until 15 March 1949.
Rooseveltlaan 160 III became their next address. They lived there for a few years until 2 January 1953, when they moved to Dacostastraat 1A3.
On 11 June 1960, this crusade through Amsterdam came to an end and Jan moved to Molukkenstraat. Alone. His wife Christine had already passed away on 8 September 1955 at the age of fifty.
I do not know whether Jan remained in education after SpinozaMULO. He was still too young, 49, to retire.
Jan Simons died on 4 September 1961, aged 65.
Together with his wife, he was one of the millions of victims of a derailed period in history.