A meaningful silence
Remembrance, education: some policies
Introduction
‘Every day during the last fifty-five years I have thought at least once a day about those days in September 1944.’ These are the words of a man who as a (Dutch) civilian witnessed Operation Market Garden, the failed attempt to take the Rhine Bridge in Arnheim. He told us this when he was interviewed for the book ‘A meaningful silence – remembering in diversity’ which was published this year on the occasion of National Remembrance Day, May 4.
To many Dutch inhabitants who survived the war (about three million of them are still alive) the war is part of daily reality. It has had a lifelong impact on many of this generation, no matter what their experience was: as soldiers, as civilians who were bombed or who suffered from the famine in the final winter, as sailors in the merchant navy, as prisoners put into concentration camps because they were Jews or gypsies (Sinti or Roma), as active members of the resistance, or as soldiers or civilians who experienced the war in the Dutch East Indies, now Indonesia.
Most of this last group were in Japanese internment camps and later suffered
during the dangerous time of the Indonesian liberation struggle (1945 -1949)
and through forced migration to the Netherlands afterwards.
There are now in the Netherlands well over one hundred organizations in which people who share the same war experiences have organized themselves.
These organizations are important instruments to cope with war traumas by sharing experiences others did not have. They provide mutual aid and assistance and increasingly they act in questions of compensation. In short, they combine a social function – the public face of the war – with a psychological function.
The first part of my paper will deal with social issues: the importance of commemorating the war, and the shift in the practice of commemoration over the last fifty-five years. In the second part of this paper I will deal with the psychological consequences of the war for individuals today and what this means for educational policies about the war.
Many Dutch citizens, including almost two-thirds of the generations born
after 1945, think it is important to keep on remembering the Second World
War (the Netherlands managed to keep out of the First World War) and actively participate in some way or other – by keeping two minutes silence at 8 p.m.
on May 4, by showing the flag at half-mast or by participating in a
festival on the next day, May 5, Liberation Day. This large number of
people who set store by remembering the war seems to be in contrast to the almost ritual discussion that crops up every five years about the
advisability of continuing the commemoration of the war. The number of war memorials and monuments has grown considerably in the last decade. Visiting a war memorial on Remembrance Day is seen by many as useful:
‘I can just as well stay at home to remember and commemorate. But going some place gives extra concentration. Something happens when one walks there, talking softly while waiting for the two minutes silence, sharing
the moment together, the relief when singing the National Anthem, laying a
wreath or giving a speech. I have to swallow away my emotions. At that moment I re-experience what I and others have suffered.’
Collective reminisceing can be both healing and gratifying for individuals. The ritual of remembrance gives strength to those involved, especially for those for whom the recollections are emotional. The collective ritual situated at a special place – usually a monument – is primarily meant to honour the dead.
The more important such a monument is and the dead are in the hierarchy of the war, the more closely ideology and ritual adhere to the official
ideology about the war. At the same time, such a collective ritual
structures group memories and identities, and makes them more concrete, even when these group memories differ widely from the official version.
In the eyes of many, official celebrations leave too little room
for personal remembrance. People find these official occasions too massive or too ceremonial; especially when the occasion is dominated by too
many high officials or by the military, leaving no room for the ‘common man’. Many prefer a more intimate silence and contemplation. Interestingly, many also prefer to ‘commemorate by doing’: for example by telling young people about their experiences, by recording history, by organizing a trip
to the locations where events took place, by taking the initiative for a new monument. This kind of remembering serves a variety of functions: it helps in coping with traumatic memories, it gives recognition, a feeling of belonging; but it also ennobles, broadens one’s horizon, and does
justice to those who are no longer here.
Effect and impact of commemoration meetings on May 4 have changed since the end of the war. During the first decade after 1945
– as many people now realize – people hardly ever reminisced in a personal way. Personal suffering was hidden away behind the ideology of a heroic nation in resistance to the German occupier, a people engaged just as valiantly in the reconstruction of the country. What has changed most over the last fifty years is the balance between the collective and the
individual. This is true for members of new generations who join in with memorial activities, as well as for members of the war generation. This will be my theme in the first part of the paper.
National Remembrance Day.
The official Commemoration day of WWII is May 5. After years of discussion this day, Liberation Day, was officially established in 1954. However, this was not the end of the discussion, for the question was not resolved (even until the present day) whether this should be an official national holiday or not. The representatives of the resistance argued in favour of a public holiday, but the government thought it economically unjustified to give everybody another day off just after the Queens birthday on April 30, especially on a day which was not the actual Liberation Day for most of the country. Only the Western provinces had been liberated on that day, the rest of the country had various different dates of liberation ranging from August to November (1944) for the Southern part and March and April for the Eastern and Northern part,
not to mention those who had been liberated while in concentration camps in Germany, Poland and elsewhere, and those in the East Indies, for whom August 15 was the day of liberation. Another problem was that there was no general agreement on what exactly was
to be celebrated. The government wanted to give some sort of meaning to the
events of the Second World War, but – within the context of
post-war political struggles – this could only lead to controversy. To
avoid this the government chose to put the emphasis on the commemoration of May 4. The discussion on the celebration of May 5 is typically Dutch (‘economics first’) but on the other hand demonstrates what is hardly ever
said aloud: that for the majority May 4 and remembering the dead is the more important of the two. May 5 sort of dangles in the air, perhaps because it
is so difficult to deal with an abstract idea such as ‘freedom’. The present solution for a day off on May 5 is a prime example of this prevarication:
since 1990 May 5 is an official holiday, but it is left to each employer to
decide whether to give his employees a day off.
The central monument
Remembering is carried out by rituals, a moment and/or a monument set
apart in time and space. In these places and times tradition thickens. Monuments are not neutral, they are not places of intimacy and rest, but
they are controversial as between groups, ideologies, texts
and dates. In the history of war monuments in the Netherlands there
have been many such controversies. It started with the main central monument itself, but it seems as though almost all newly erected monuments suffer from some form of controversy.
A Central Monument can be defined as one localized in a special place in the capital, it serves as the central spot for commemoration on Remembrance Day, it commemorates specific classes of the dead (often of a military kind) with (military) ritual and on the occasion of state visits by foreign heads of
state it serves as the focal point for honouring the dead .
The institution of the evening of May 4 as remembrance evening started immediately after the war, in 1946. By silent consent, people gathered in a number of cities. An important example was set by the ‘Silent Pilgrimage’
held by the inhabitants of The Hague to the place in the dunes, near the
sea, where the German SS had executed many resistance fighters. This simple
but very impressive monument (just a large bell on a pedistal) did not
develop to be the national monument, although it may be so in the hearts of many. The National Monument is located on Dam Square in Amsterdam. Shortly after the war, in 1947, a provisional monument was placed here. The
definitive monument was unveiled by H.M. the Queen on May 4, 1956. Since 1961 the national Commemorative Service takes place here, in the presence of the Queen and her husband, members of the cabinet and representatives of organizations for survivors of the war.
Although the monument on Dam Square is the National Monument, it is at the same time one of the most controversial monuments in the country. For a long time there were discussions on the proper balance between the military andthe civilian element. Those who died after 1945 were not included at first, in
the light of the political controversy about the deployment of Dutch troops
in the East Indies (1945-1949). This was finally resolved in 1961. The
location of the monument was another bone of contention. Although Dam Square might be regarded by many as representing a central point in the capital
and thus in the country, the place has no association with events
during the war. The five constituent parts of the monument and their lack of cohesion have been the object of many discussions. The
surrounding wall with its 12 urns filled with earth of places of execution reminded many of the blood-and-soil-theory of the nazis; the pillar was blatantly phallic, a fact noticed even during the chaste fifties; the
statues were seen by many as an artistic disaster; the rotunda led to Amsterdam citizens having their lunch on it and the text on the monument – part of a poem – was regarded as incomprehensible, or even worse, as atheistic. In short, the National Monument never was able to take up its rightful place in Dutch society, it remained ‘a prop in search of a play’.
It remained defenceless against Amsterdam big city life, especially when the representatives of international youth culture sought it out as a meeting
place in the late sixties. The discussion on form and function of the monument gained new impulse when in the early nineties it started to crumble away due to pollution. The mayor of Amsterdam
hopefully suggested that, with the wearing away of the remembrance of the war, the monument itself should be allowed to wear away as well. But it was not to be. In the late nineties the monument was restored to its former
glory, but the fact that only a German firm could furnish the right
technology to replenish the crumbling marble created a minor outrage. According to the booklet published to accompany the restoration, the monument ‘functions mainly as a focus of joint remembrance; it
is no longer about the war itself, but increasingly about remembering –
it is a moment of collective emotion in a society that no longer has
rituals.’
Other monuments
During the first decades after 1945 Remembrance Day was celebrated under the
aegis of national unity. The government wanted to promote a national consensus. They thought it would further the rapid rebuilding of a country devastated by the occupation. The advent of the Cold War gave an extra incentive to promote national unity. The emphasis was on the Netherlands as a nation in resistance against the Germans, to be remembered were those who had fallen while in resistance. The Netherlands had no military tradition and
therefore no tradition in erecting military monuments, therefore the monuments had to commemorate anonymous civilian people and situations.
As early as the autumn of 1945 the government tried to exercise control over
the erection of monuments by requiring planning permission for all monuments. Many painters and sculptors had been active in the resistance and after the war they – traditionally un(der)employed – were brought in to design war monuments. It was they who insisted that the monuments should adhere to
artistic standards and that no amateur monument should be erected – citing
the plethora of monuments commemorating the Great War in France and the DIY monuments put up by enthusiastic Dutch people who welded together pieces of
military equipment. One national committee and ten provincial committees
were installed to draw up rules on monuments. The national committee produced a list of those monuments to be erected as national Monuments.
Apart from the one in Amsterdam there were to be ten more, commemorating the
resistance, the
army, the royal navy and the merchant navy (also Allied armies), the murder
of the Jews and several stages of the struggle for Liberation. The committee
preferred a single uniform monument to be placed in all of these locations
but quite soon they abandoned this idea. It is notable that all of these
monuments referred to the war in Europe, there were none for the war in the
East Indies.
Apart from having to be artistic, the monuments had to send out a certain sentiment. In 1957 the commission vetoed a monument it considered showed ’too much self-pity’. According to the commission, a war-monument makes sense only if it has a meaningful message for future
generations, if it admonishes, if it commemorates people, victims and
not just suffering. If it gives thanks to its heroes, its dead.’
Countless discussions were held on the best possible way to express
abstract ideas such as freedom and resistance. These discussions centred around issues such as identification vs. artisticity, christian vs. humanist symbolism, nakedness (‘modern man in his most essential being’) vs. clothed (‘naked is indecent’). Many statues in the end were fitted out with a
pair of trousers or suddenly sported a flag around sensitive parts.
The activities of the monument committees reflected the idea that symbolism had to place suffering into a national framework demonstrating that the suffering had not been in vain. The experience of specific groups within Dutch society was subordinated to politics. This of course, could only lead to falsification of history, because what turned into remembrance at best was within the realm of state ideology. Experiences of groups that did not belong to the dominant culture were not recognized and, more generally, the heavy emphasis on resistance and unity did not leave much room for the victims themselves. This left out the experience of large parts of Dutch society, notably communists and the people from the East Indies in the first place, and victims such as Jews, gypsies and homosexuals in the second place.
The communists
The communists had played an important part in the resistance movement in the
Netherlands. But during the Cold War the communist contribution to the resistance had become suspect – communists were often thrown out of the organizations of the former resistance movement. The debate soon centred on the question who had been primarily responsible for the important strike
organized in February, 1941, against the deportation of Jews . Who had taken
the initiative for this ‘February-Strike’ : the City of Amsterdam or the
Communist Resistance Movement? The February-Strike was commemorated at the
impressive monument of the Dockworker, placed in 1952 at the heart of the
former Jewish quarter in Amsterdam. Until 1966 there were two separate commemorative meetings at this monument on February 25th. In the morning a gathering organized by the Amsterdam City Council, which had its own reasons for wanting Amsterdam to be seen as the great warm-hearted city that had protected its Jews during the war (this had led the then Queen, Wilhelmina,
to award it the epithets Valiant, Determined, Merciful). In their vision the strike was the expression of a spontaneous feeling of injustice. In the late afternoon another meeting took place organized by the memorial committee of the February-Strike, consisting of communists. They wanted to demonstrate that the February Strike was initiated by the People, as a sign of
resistance not only against the deportation of the Jews, but against the German Occupation as a whole. The Committee always tried to link
this resistance against injustice to political issues. In the late sixties
and early seventies an important issue was the government’s intention to release the last German war criminals still held in Dutch prisons, but there was also discussion on the arms race, trade union freedom and the war in Vietnam. It was not until the late sixties that the two separate gatherings could finally merge into a single commemoration. But even then ‘resistance’ remained the main theme, not the fate of the victims. These only started to come into the picture during the seventies. Until the present day the Dockworker has continued to function as a living monument, the focal point for resistance against all sorts of injustice.
East Indies
Also not included in the culture of remembrance were those of European,
indo-european or Indonesian descent, who experienced the war in the Dutch
East Indies. After the proclamation of Indonesian Independence in 1945 more
than 300,000 people were repatriated to the Netherlands. Many of them remained a visible relic of the former empire. But no attention was paid to their war experience, which was overshadowed by the memory of a lost war and by decolonization. During the Cold War, the relationship with Japan also stood in the way. The former occupying power was now an important ally. As we have mentioned the provisional National Monument on Dam Square contained eleven urns with earth from places of execution. Added to this there was supposed to be a twelfth urn with earth from military cemeteries in Indonesia, but this became a bone of contention. While the colonial war was still going on, an Indonesian urn could hardly symbolize the unity of the realm. And there was the risk that the urn might contain earth taken from graves of those who served during the post-1945 war and not graves of soldiers who had died during the Second World War. Only after the situation had become more stabilized in the early fifties an urn arrived in Amsterdam and was formally placed in the wall behind the provisional monument. By that time only insiders realized that the urn also contained earth from cemeteries holding bodies of soldiers who died in the colonial war.
Jews and other victims
In the sixties Dutch society started to change and with it the view people
held of the war. The national image of the Dutch as a nation firm in resistance against the Germans was adjusted. This was a consequence of the
coming-of-age of a younger generation not prepared to accept blindly the
images of war as transferred by their elders. There is a paradox here. On
the one hand, the heroic image of the parents was something the young had to rebel against, on the other hand the younger generation looked back on the valiant deeds of the ‘real’ resistance as an example of steadfast politics.
This in contrast to petty bourgeois who had behaved more in their own self-interest than as valiant resisters.
Interest in victims of the war was stimulated mainly by television paying attention to personal experiences during the war and their consequences.The extensive coverage in 1961 of the Eichmann trial in Jerusalem showed for the first time the extent of the Shoah in all its details. The director of the
State Institute for the Documentation of the War (RIOD), dr Lou de Jong, presented a widely-viewed television series The Occupation (1960-1962). The documentary Do you understand why I am crying? made by Louis van Gasteren in 1969 demonstrated for the first time the concentration camp syndrome to a
wide audience. The fact that the main historiography of the war was written
by Jewish historians also contributed to a new interpretation of the Shoah.
Apart from De Jong, I refer notably to Presser with his impressive study on
the persecution of the Jews: Destruction (Ondergang), which was published in 1966.
Democratization, freer expression of emotions and the right of self-determination after the ‘revolution’ of 1968 have all contribut led to
a shift of attention towards the victims. The experience of ordinary people was seen as just as valid as that of high politics. The protest movement and resistance against the establishment, it all led to increasing protest whenever political issues concerning the consequences of the war came into view, such as the proposed release of German war criminals in 1972 and the proposed state visit by the Japanese emperor in 1971. Due to the personal commitment of a very popular cabaret performer (himself an ex-prisoner of the Japanese), the state visit led to a mass protest. Interestingly enough, the two groups that had little in common with each other – those who experienced the war in Europe and those who had been in the East Indies – started protesting more or less at the same time. In a psychological sense, this no doubt was a consequence of the fact that, as people grow older, they have more time to reflect and feel the need to do so more acutely. Yet
it became clear that there was no unity of experience: a person’s
experiences was coloured to a great extent by the group to which
he had belonged during the war. An example of this is the Monument, erected
in 1971, for the Women Prisoners in Japanese Camps. The traditional
sculptural expression of Heroic Motherhood could not conceal the fact that
this was a monument for a specific group (women) placed within a specific
period (1941-1945).
Even so, for a long time local councils adhered to the image of
heroic resistance. Amsterdam forms a prime example. Although Amsterdam undoubtedly was the heart of the pre-war Jewish community in the Netherlands, at first the city showed great reluctance to accept the Jews as victims of war. We have seen this in the case of the Dockworker,
but it was also shown in the first monument dedicated to the Jews, erected in the fifties. Its theme was a ’thanksgiving’ to the city, not the fate of the Jews. The Memorial in the Hollandsche Schouwburg, a theatre in the Jewish quarter from which the deportations took place, at first had a text that concealed the fact that it was Jews who were deported, not just any Dutch national. Since the eighties more monuments have been erected commemorating the plight of the Jews. An important monument, because it puts an end to the image of the Jews as passive victims, is the one dedicated to Jewish resistance, which was erected in 1988. Most of the concentration camps now have their own monument – on the spot for camps in the Netherlands, or in Amsterdam for those abroad.
Not until 1978 has a monument been erected – it is in Amsterdam – to commemorate the murder of the gypsies. Recognition of Sinti and Roma as victims of war was long in the making.
Homosexuals, too, had never been recognized as special victims within Dutch war history, although hundreds of them had been arrested by the nazis during the occupation. Following the Gay Liberation Movement, members of an Amsterdam gay organization tried to lay a wreath at the national Monument in 1971, but were arrested by the police. The following years participation in
the national Commemoration was allowed, but increasing violence to the
wreaths led to the wish for a special monument. In 1987 the Homomonument was erected both as commemoration for the past and as a reminder for the
persecuted now. It is in a symbolic place, within a triangle formed by
the National Monument, the Anne Frank house and the headquarters of the
Dutch Homosexuals’ organization COC. The emphasis laid on present day persecution actually ties in with increasing efforts to connect the ideology
behind fascism and nazism with current forms of oppression. In the same
vein, the National Committee 4 and 5 May, founded in 1987, saw youth education as one of its main tasks (apart from organizing the celebrations
on May 4 and 5).
Increasing attention paid to victims has shifted attention away from the resistance movement. Whenever possible the resistance and the victims of persecution are commemorated together within a monument, such as in the National East Indies monument, erected in 1988 in The Hague, the main centre of the repatriates.
In 1980, when the compilation ‘Sta een ogenblik stil’ (Pause a while) was published, over 1500 war memorials were counted, and hundreds more have been erected since. In the complex world created by internationalization and globalization, people long for local knowledge and recognition. Attention is
paid to the experience of small groups or even individuals during the war,
and people make an effort to reflect such experience in monuments. It is not
only experience that is commemorated, but individuals as well. Increasingly victims are brought back to life by giving them a name, a context, a
history. New organizations of people who shared an experience during the war are still being founded, although many of the existing organizations suffer
from the fact that their members are old or die. ‘Forgotten’ victims are
being commemorated in monuments that mention their names. An example:
several municipalities have recently named streets after women resistance
fighters, a traditionally under-represented group in the macho world of the
resistance.
Naming the victims is especially important within the Jewish community, as
the preservation of a name is an important element in the Jewish religious
tradition. The monument for the Jewish Children’s Transportation unveiled at
the Vught Concentration Camp last year, mentions the names of over 1000 children who were deported to Auschwitz in June, 1943. There is a plan to construct a Web Memorial to the lost Jewish Community of the Netherlands, showing data on family, income, work and the daily life of the 100,000 Jews who did not return.
This plan is criticized by some, as it conflicts with present-day views on privacy. Even today, monuments and memorials may be controversial places, judged against present-day political issues. The proposed site for a
monument for Dachau Concentration Camp, in the middle of the Vondelpark in Amsterdam, met with great local resistance, not only from those who objected to an unvoluntary confrontation with a monument reminding one of a concentration camp, but also from those with more modern arguments: the proposed box-hedge would attract junkies and whores. The monument was eventually realized in a more secluded spot away from the city.
The political discussion on the impact of the Japanese occupation and the colonial war is not yet over. In 1995 August 15 was adopted as an
official Commemoration Day for the end of the War in East Asia (without being an official holiday). Every new monument for the East Indies – and at present several are erected each year – runs the risk of a cross-fire of
disputes about the past. A recent example is a local monument proposed to commemorate soldiers who died in Indonesia after 1945. The Utrecht City Council was only prepared to help finance the monument if the dead on the Indonesian side were also mentioned, but in the end they agreed to a more neutral description, in the wake of fierce opposition from the powerful veterans’ organization.
Individual perspectives
With the publication of the book ‘A meaningful silence’ a written tribute
has been paid to individual views on remembrance. It consists of over
fifty interviews with people who remember the war from different
perspectives. Most of them experienced the war themselves, others belong to the post-war generation.
Most of the contributors focus on a specific moment or monument to remember, although this need not be on May 4. This ties in with their personal
experience and feelings. For this reason large-scale official commemoration services are not very popular. Many think that officials receive more
attention than the people who lived through the war. The Dutch do not have a strong military tradition and the presence of the military at many commemorations is felt by many as annoying, especially as the military are sometimes regarded as perpetrators rather than as casualties. One of the interviewees remarks: ‘I have a problem with official memorial services.
What is said never covers the cargo. And there are always groups that are
left out. The wreaths for the dead never compensate for the years of
suffering of forgotten victims of war’.
Private memorials seldom mesh with public memorials. Public opinion erects its own favourite memorial places, where people can take their children and in general can be themselves instead of just being props.
Many people remember by undertaking some sort of activity.
Active remembering helps people to cope with their war experience. Psychological research suggests that for people reaching old age,
looking back on their life and making some sense of it, is an important process in reaching ‘ego-integrity’, a necessity for the old.
‘Looking back in contentment’ is an important factor in reaching ego-integrity, realizing that your life made sense and no regrets for missed chances. But there is no obvious meaning that can be given to the Holocaust and the question of individual survival is impossible to answer.
‘Late onset’ of traumatic war memories can be regarded as a
consequence of old age. Many people only started suffering from war memories long after the end of the war. Some had never had complaints
before, others had had complaints immediately after the war which then disappeared for a long time. Literature suggests several reasons for this
late onset of war problems. The prime reason – it is suggested – may be
the priority given to the post-war reconstruction of the Netherlands and the rebuilding of personal lives and careers. This left no time for
self-reflection. Only when retirement from work draws near, people can start
to reflect. The sense of loss of control that follows retirement
brings back the loss of control felt during the war years, and creates possibilities for the return of traumatic memories. Through a change in one’s personal situation (retirement and subsequent loss of social control and
social contacts, widowhood and loneliness) people suffer from
reactivation of symptoms. So, the late onset of war memories is probably caused by a change in perspective on one’s course of life rather than by biological changes, although the onset of Alzheimer’s disease may worsen the symptoms (loss of the short-term memory makes people much more susceptible to the recollections of the long-term memory which taps into war-related memories of youth).
Many of those symptoms are non-specific: not only war victims experience them in old age, but war victims have a perception of these symptoms which
is different from that of other elderly people. The literature does not
suggest that with the onset of old age the faculty for coping necessarily
lessens, but it does suggest that the decline of physical abilities may be reflected in a sense of loss of control (e.g. being unable to walk quickly –
being unable to flee).
Clinical literature of the last decades suggests that Post-Traumatic
Stress Disorder (PTSD) is the main outcome of traumatic war experience. Large surveys among a non-clinical population, however, suggest that people
who suffer from the consequences of war often show a broad range of psychological and psychosomatic symptoms and disorders. Many people suffer more or less from the same symptoms: depression, ‘vital exhaustion’,
symptoms of avoidance and re-experience (especially in the form of sleep disturbances – repetitive dreams and nightmares), various forms of arousal (irritation, feelings of guilt, hallucinations, concentration problems and
feeling grim about the future), various chronic pain syndromes and chronic anxiety.
Although the symptomatology of elder war victims is closely related to post-traumatic stress syndrome, there tend to be more symptoms involved, and many people suffer from one or two symptoms only, e.g. ‘vital exhaustion’, dissociation, depression, in combination with symptoms of avoidance and nightmares. Co-morbidity in the form of substance abuse (alcohol and medicines) often occurs. Extreme stress can also be a risk factor in
the development of a number of somatic diseases.
Among a non-clinical sample of elderly resistance veterans (all of whom have been ‘recognized’ as war survivors) only 4 percent were found never to have suffered from any of these symptoms, while 56 percent suffered from current PTSD.
We do not know whether different categories of war victims suffer from the same set of symptoms, but there are indications that the amount of stressful
war experience is an important indicator of later traumatization. So is the theatre of war people have been involved in. Experience in concentration
camps in Europe and Asia leads to the highest amount of stress symptoms, as was discovered in a large random sample in a survey made by Bramsen in 1995. Extrapolation from Bramsen’s random sample together with data from various institutions for care and compensation for war victims leads us to believe
that at present there are still close to a million people who can be
regarded as ‘war victims’ in the broad sense of the word. Politicians in the Netherlands predict that there will be a sharp decline in the number of
elderly war survivors over the next decade due to demographic factors, but close examination of demographic data reveals that the group which is most vulnerable at present, the war children born between 1929 and 1945,
will in fact hardly decrease at all until 2005, and only by 25 percent by 2015.
In 2015 there will still be 230.000 persons who suffer to a certain extent
from the consequences of the war, in the sense that they show at least one symptom.
It is clear that this number is many times larger than the 47.000 people
who at present receive some form of war compensation in the Netherlands. The range of psychological consequences of the war is more extensive than PTSD and affects more people than the officially ‘recognized’ war victims. It
affects many people’s health, daily life and relationship with others. The interviews in the book make this abundantly clear. After the war many people had to cope with dysfunctional families, with broken health and broken relationships. The consequences are not widely understood, however, not
within society in general, and not among the people concerned themselves. A book such as ‘A meaningful Silence’ may be used for educational purposes,
not only for young people, but in adult (psycho)education as well.