Second post from the Netherlands

 
Susan and I went to visit the Anne Frank house today. She’d been there before, of course, during her first trip to the Netherlands as a teenager. For me, it was a new experience.

During my leave in Germany, I took a tour of Dachau. You would expect a place like that to have evil soaked into its walls, to taste it with every breath you drew … but it was just a place. The evil came from what was done there, from the acts of evil people, and we always have to watch out for those.

The Anne Frank house made a different impression on me. It was personalized, centered on a young girl and her family and friends, only one of whom survived the actions of the Reich. That these decent, inoffensive people, wanting only to live, should have been rooted out and destroyed by a system whose name has become synonymous with inhumanity … it filled me with a fury I hadn’t expected. Nor was there anything abstract or philosophical about the emotion: I wanted to find and kill every last one of the Nazi bastards. (Impossible, of course. There may be a very few of them still alive, somewhere; if so, they’ll have hidden so carefully that there’s no real likelihood of their ever facing justice on this earth. Hell is patient, however; it will wait as long as necessary.)

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I already knew from various sources that the Netherlands — and Amsterdam in particular — have a significant Muslim population. I did not anticipate, though, that they’d be literally everywhere; in many places, they constituted a majority of the people visible at the time. During our tram journey downtown, I saw two young woman wearing hijabs, sitting with a space between them in the back. Several young Muslim men were standing about, and I noted without surprise that none of them moved to fill the gap. Then a middle-aged woman of Indonesian appearance sat in the empty space, prompting a verbal exchange between her and the woman on her right. I don’t know what they were saying, but the conversation became increasingly emphatic; and, when the hijab-wearers got off at the next stop, the one who’d been arguing shot the Indonesian woman the finger.

No idea what that was about, or what it meant.

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This morning’s breakfast at the hotel was all I had hoped for. It was so substantial, in fact, that it essentially carried me the entire day, and Susan as well. I still want to draw some more money from our accounts (or maybe I’ll use our debit cards to pay part of the hotel bill), but at least our limited funds aren’t being prohibitively depleted by food costs.

The nursing conference itself begins tomorrow, and ends Friday. We check out of this hotel Saturday, after which we’ll begin some free-form exploration. Susan has places she wants to see, but nothing specifically scheduled, so our itinerary has yet to be determined.

As is usually the case, we’ll play things as they come.