In his book De eeuw van mijn vader (My Father’s Century), Geert Mak describes ‘the ship with money’ on which his mother pinned her hopes after the war of 1940-45, at a time when the family was not doing so well. She was referring to the salary that his father was owed by the Dutch State for the years he had spent as a prisoner of war in the former Dutch East Indies.
No money
However, these back wages were never paid after their repatriation to the Netherlands, initially due to bureaucratic sluggishness, and later because the Dutch government had transferred all assets, liabilities, claims and debts of the former KNIL to the newly formed republic when sovereignty was transferred to Indonesia.
According to The Hague standards, this was all perfectly acceptable. A senior civil servant stated that payment was not necessary because those interned by the Japanese at that time did not have to pay for their own food, did not pay rent, did not have to maintain staff, etc. They had not paid any taxes either.
After much wrangling, thirty-six years later, in 1981, compensation of 7,500 guilders was finally paid out. His father had been in hospital for some time by then, but at least it enabled his mother to pay for the many visits to the hospital.
We see an identical situation with the Jewish survivors who returned from Auschwitz and all the other extermination camps. In their case, too, there was hardly any financial compensation, and insofar as there was, it had to be repaid as quickly as possible.
Return of survivors
In 2001, a book was published about how Jewish Dutch people were received and cared for after their return from the extermination camps. When you read De kleine Sjoa (The Little Shoah) by I. Lipschits, your hair stands on end at the callousness with which this took place. In their case, it took until 2000 before the assets and property of Jewish Dutch people who had not survived the Final Solution and had been confiscated by banks and the government were repaid.
The relatives of resistance fighters did not have to wait that long. Not that the money came flooding in immediately, but I was able to ascertain from my mother’s papers that the resistance pension in particular was finally settled in 1949, four years after the end of the war.
I cannot verify how she received money before that time and during the last two years of the war.
So it took four years to discuss an arrangement. Considering how it came about in the above cases, I would hardly have been surprised if it had gone as follows.
“Your husband was a resistance fighter? And he decided to do so on his own initiative? Right, and he was in hiding too. Do I understand correctly that you did not pay any tax during those three years?”
Fortunately, the award was not made in this way. So how did it happen? For those who are curious, I have attached the 1949 decision. The starting point for calculating the pension was the deceased’s income at the outbreak of the war. For my mother, after adding a few allowances, this amounted to 4,025 guilders. Per year, that is. Rounded off, that was 335 guilders per month. You have to measure that amount against the average income at the time. In my memory, it did not mean luxury, but neither did it mean living on the edge of poverty. You also have to realise that it took five years after liberation for the pre-war level of prosperity to be reached again.
Over time, that pension was increased annually and, financially, my mother was able to live comfortably on it later on, when we were all independent.
Resistance damage
Another matter was the claim she submitted for compensation for damage suffered as a result of going into hiding during the resistance. It took some time to determine this, but in 1951 the Ministry of Finance finally issued its decision. The compensation amounted to three hundred and seventy guilders. No figures after the decimal point, unfortunately, but 371 instead of a rounded amount. Phew, how depressingly petty.
