Ohm Yoap

This is a story about my father, my relationship with an old friend, my father’s relationship with an old friend, and how they connect. Sometimes the lessons you learn from your elders, their full resonance doesn’t come into focus until many years later.

My father was a remarkable man on a number of levels and had a positive and profound impact on my life. This tale revealed a lot about the nature of my father, and of the meaning of friendship and of forgiveness. I didn’t realize until much later that it also taught me much about humanity, mine and others.

Back in 2001, I received a call from my pal Anthony Veilleux.
“Hey I ran into an old friend of yours. One you haven’t seen in a very long time.”
This intrigued me.
“I’ll give you some hints. She visited your apartment on Ridout and joined the dark side.”
This intrigued me even more. I started to think back to all the women who ever crossed the threshold of that apartment in the six years I lived there. It quickly added up into the many dozens. Hundreds even. Friends, girlfriends, girlfriends of friends, friends of girlfriends, clients, neighbours, the list went on. And joined the dark side. Heck, if they ever spent any time around me, that could be all of them.
I gave up in short order.
“Carey K-------.”
I almost fell off my chair when he told me.
I hadn’t seen her in thirteen years.

In high school I was friends with Carey. We were the only two freaks in a school filled with mulleted dufuses in Ozzy T shirts and Iron Maiden jackets. We weren’t ever boyfriend and girlfriend per se but she was someone that I cared about a whole lot. When her parents turfed her out of the house for piercing the helix of her ear, I took her in for a few days. When she lived in a grotty little hole finishing high school on student welfare, I would bring her food, and help her out as best as I was able.

Carey was a pretty messed up kid in some ways, but all in all I knew she was a good soul with potential. I couldn’t help but like her. My mom thought she was a sweet heart. She couldn’t fathom why we looked like such weirdos, but she knew we were all right. She went through several phases, wavering between being a punk, then a goth, then a skinhead, then a goth again, and then she ended up getting right into the whole skinhead scene. I mean right into it. She got involved with the whole white supremacist scene in the late eighties, becoming totally immersed in it. Moved to Toronto and got involved in all the shit that was going on there at the time. She even went so far as to be pretty fully sleeved with an assortment of white power and neo-Nazi tattoos, including a portrait of George Lincoln Rockwell, the head of the American Nazi Party, Rudolf Hess and Adolf Hitler. Extremely well done portraits I might add, but portraits of some profoundly evil people.

Every time I visited Toronto I would look her up and see how she was. She would tell me all about going to Ernst Zundel’s birthday party, going to a White Aryan Resistance rally in the States, show me pictures of herself with some on the lam Aryan Nations guy. I would point out all of the reasons why she was a fool, but I wasn’t about to turn my back on her. As screwed up and repulsive as I thought it was, I knew that at some point she would come to her senses and change. I cared enough about her to not condemn her out of hand. I had a pretty good idea why she was involved. She was very impulsive and easily influenced , and I’m sure like lots of young women, a lack of self esteem probably contributed.

The last I heard from her, she was marrying a skinhead down in Tennessee, to prepare for “the coming race war”, and that was the last I saw of her. And I really honestly never expected to hear from her ever again.

Turns out that this guy was an abusive philanderer (what a surprise) that she had three boys with. After years of maltreatment, she waited for him to be away for a weekend, sold everything in the house, packed up her possessions, and took off with the kids back to Canada.
“Wow, so you re in contact with her?”
“Yeah there was a music festival at the market, and she came up to me and said “Hey you’re Anthony.” She looked familiar, but I couldn’t place her, and she said “I’m Carey, we went to Beal together.” Ahh. “So you’re a tattooist right?” She told me that she wanted to get all of her tattoos covered up ASAP. I had heard that she was covered in neo-Nazi tattoos. So we ended up sitting down and started talking, and we went somewhere private, and she revealed them all. Wow, that is going to be a lot of work, but it will be a fun challenge. That was on a Friday, she came in on Tuesday and Wednesday to have some work done.”
“That was fast.”
“Yeah she is anxious to have any trace of her past removed.”
“And I can see why.”
“She noticed all the pictures around my work station of my sculptures so she was asking me about them. I told her I lived just around the corner, she was welcome to come round for dinner, see all my work, and that way we could figure out how the hell I’m going to cover it all.
As we walked up to the building, she says, ‘hey I had a friend who lived in this building.’ 
‘His name wouldn’t be Thomas by any chance would it?’ 
‘Yeah, as a matter of fact, tall Thomas.’ ”

“She didn’t realize that I knew you and vice versa. She asked if I was in contact with you. When I told her that I was, she asked me if I could ask you whether you would be interested in seeing her again.”
“Oh totally dude! For sure. I’d love to see her again.”
Really cool to reconnect with her and pick up where we left off.

After a few weeks she asked, “So I’m curious why you don’t hate me for what I was involved in? I know you really hate skinheads and Nazis, but you’ve never been judgmental about it with me.”
“Well Carey, did I ever tell you the story about my dad’s friend Joop (yoap) ?”
“No, I don’t think so.”

So I proceeded to tell her a most fascinating tale.

Now, I grew up in a house where the word Duitser (German) was never said. My dad only spoke of vuile rot moffen (filthy rotten krauts) and when he spat out viese schorem (dirty scum) I didn’t have to ask who he was talking about. His hatred of Germans was visceral. I really couldn’t say, “gee dad, you’re such a bigot.” I fully understood where he was coming from. It wasn’t something completely baseless. It wasn’t “I hate those folks on the other side of the hill, who I ain’t never met, cause my pappy told me they were bad, and his pappy hated em, and his…”

I never fully fathomed when I was young, how traumatized he was by his experiences in the war. After he died my mom told me that he had nightmares about his experiences decades after the fact. We lived in a part of Amsterdam that before the war was predominantly Jewish. He grew up with and was friends with all the Jewish kids on the street. On Friday nights if he walked past their houses, they would ask him “Lukey, Lukey, can you switch the light on for us?” (I guess if a gentile did it, it was considered okay.) They would reward him with food. Given that it was in the midst of the depression, this generosity wasn’t taken lightly. I remember on several occasions we ate what I was told was Joodse eten (Jewish food). I don’t recall the dates, but I suspect now that those occasions fell on a significant date. I think I know now why we ate it.

One night the Germans came and rounded up all the Jews in the neighbourhood. My dad and his parents stood and watched from behind the curtains, helpless as their friends and neighbours were taken away. My dad watched the little sister of one of his friends get clubbed in the head with the butt of a rifle, and her unconscious body be tossed in the back of a truck. The next day his class of 28 was down to 11.

Living under the yoke of the Nazis was truly hellish. If an act of resistance was committed against them they would post ten random names, and those people would have to report for execution. They couldn’t care less if you were eighteen and had fallen in love for the first time, if you were a father to six kids, if you looked after your sick mother, you showed up, or they would shoot your brother, your son, whoever. Talk about a reign of terror.

The Nazis confiscated radios so that no one could listen to the BBC and find out what was really going on. By official decree you had to hand over your silverware and gold. State sanctioned theft. People were forced to go to Germany to work in factories (as my maternal grandfather was.) As the war drew to a close, any and all resources were expropriated by the Germans to fuel their war effort. Food, coal, medicines, anything. People froze to death and starved by the thousands. My dad told me of seeing people collapse on the street, and you just kept going because there was nothing you could do for them. And Holland didn’t have it nearly as bad as some places under the control of the Nazis.

Then he told me a story not too long before he died, that absolutely stunned me.

One day in the early sixties, my father and Joop were in Zandvoort, a beach resort on the North Sea. They had known one another about a decade at this point. It was a business trip of some sort, and when they had concluded their business, they went and relaxed at the beach for a while. It was a bright sunny day, and they sat and had something to eat at an outdoor café. They both rolled up their shirtsleeves, and had a drink and some lunch. My dad went off to find the washroom, and returned to the table. Joop was reclining back in his chair, hands folded behind his head, and had dozed off. As my dad walked up, he noticed that his rolled up shirt sleeves had slid back a little further and he saw something on his arm. When he got closer he received one of the biggest shocks of his life. There on his inner left upper arm was a tattoo. A small seemingly insignificant tattoo, but one that turned my dad’s world up side down. It was very simple: a letter and a symbol. It was Joop’s blood type.
The only people that my dad knew of who had their blood type tattooed on their inner left arm, were soldiers in the SS. My dad’s friend had been in the Waffen SS.

My dad was absolutely stunned. For what he hated even more than Germans, were people who had collaborated with the Germans. In Holland to this day, anyone who collaborated with the Germans has a big black mark beside their name. They are literally persona non grata.

When Joop awoke, my dad pretended he hadn’t seen anything, but I can just imagine the turmoil of emotion he must have been feeling.

So there he was facing the biggest dilemma of his life. He tossed and turned for several nights, agonizing over what to do or say. This man was his friend and yet he represented everything he despised. How could he remain on good terms with a man he essentially wanted to spit on. He thought about it, and thought about it some more.
Finally he went to talk to his wife. “So, what’s the deal?” he asked her.
“Yes he was in the SS,” she replied. “He’s wanted to tell you all this time, but he is afraid of what you’ll say. He knows how much you hate the Germans and especially what you think of collaborators.”

My dad went home and spent a few more agonizing nights tossing and turning. Finally he went to see him, and told him that he had seen his tattoo. Joop knew the jig was up at this point, and laid his cards on the table.

“Yes I was in the SS, and I will live with the shame and regret for the rest of my life.” He then proceeded to tell my dad the whole story. It was early 1944, and he was 16. His home life was pretty bad, his father was an alcoholic. The only readily available media during this time of course, was Nazi propaganda. Much of it contained exhortations for people to join the SS to fight the Bolshevik hordes. They did a pretty incredible job of making it look like a glamorous undertaking, that promised a snappy uniform, three square meals a day, adventure, and the adoration of beautiful teutonic maidens. Goebbels and his spin doctors also did an even more incredible job of keeping the truth from people, namely that the war was turning into a total catastrophe for the Axis powers.

Food was in short supply by this point, his father was an abusive drunk, and when a friend talked him into enlisting in the SS with him, it sounded like a pretty good idea at the time. Having been fed a steady diet of Nazi lies for four years, he had no idea what it was he was getting himself into.

He received some fairly rudimentary training, and was sent as a reinforcement to the 12th SS Panzer Division (HitlerJugend) in Normandy. Five days later the Allies hit the beaches, and two days later he was captured by units of American paratroopers, apparently having never fired a shot. He was shipped to a prison camp in Virginia and spent almost three years working on farms or road crews with a ball and chain around his ankle. When he was repatriated back to the Netherlands, to say that he was a pariah is an understatement. (And strangely, he was actually fairly lucky in some ways. The SS had tens of thousands of foreign volunteers. There were entire divisions of just Dutch, Belgian, Danish, Norwegian, Croatian, you name it. Most of these units were completely and utterly annihilated. They knew that they were not going to be welcomed back in their homelands as brave heroes, so they fought to the death against the onslaught of Stalin’s armies.)

My dad had always wondered why he worked as a chemical engineer in Germany. That explained it. No one would give him a job in Holland. He lived in Amsterdam, but he would spend the week in Germany working.

And my father forgave him. My serious, stern, obstinate old man, forgave him. I didn’t know what sent my head spinning more, the fact that a man I regarded as an uncle had been a soldier in the SS, or that my father forgave him. That really altered my perceptions of my dad. He figured that the man he knew for all those years, that was him. Not the stupid, scared, hungry teenager who made the mistake of a lifetime. And I thought that was incredibly big of him. He forgave what he hated more than anything else in the whole world, and continued to be his friend right up until the point he died. He figured that whatever punishment he deserved, he had gotten in a prison camp, and would continue to receive at the hands of Dutch society. But he didn’t think that terminating a friendship with someone that he really genuinely liked would do either one of them any good. He was contrite and remorseful about his past. Joop was filled with the most profound regret about what he had done. And I am truly amazed to this very day that my father, despite all that he had been through, all the pain that he had suffered, could still find enough love in his heart to forgive what he hated the most.

I always knew him as Oom (ohm {uncle}) Joop. He was a frequent visitor at our home, and he and my dad did all sorts of stuff together. They remained friends right up until the day my dad died, and Joop remained a friend to my mom until the day he died.

“So you know Carey, if my dad can forgive a guy who as a teenager was stupid enough to be bamboozled into joining the SS, I think I can forgive you for your teenage indiscretion and being stupid enough to associate with skinheads. I know you well enough to know how impulsive and impressionable you are, and that you were a follower and not a leader. I know you well enough to know that you weren’t initiating anything. And I just figure that turning my back on you isn’t going to do you much good. I most definitely disapprove of what you were involved in, but hating you for it now, won’t make either one of us a better person.”

I still to this day am awe struck at the magnanimous and forgiving nature of my father. Some might think him weak, lacking in resolve, that he should have turned his friend away. I am inclined to think that he was really strong for doing so, and that the value of a friendship meant more to him than harbouring a grudge for the rest of his life.

And it was one of those perfect circle things when I was faced with a similar scenario. Gee dad, thanks for planting a seed of enlightenment in me all those years ago. Sure my friend had screwed up. But I figured I could do more to effect positive change in her life, by being a part of her life than I could by pointing my finger and telling her what a loser she had been.

I don’t know if forgiveness is always the right course of action, but I reckon there are times when it is.

Thanks Dad for a whole lot of things.