World War II in One Second

A man is sitting at a small table in a tiny room the size of a closet. He is holding a dark blue color pencil. He is drawing a swastika, the Nazi symbol. The year is 1942. A few months earlier a friend had visited him showing him photos of Jewish men and women the Nazis had killed. It worked. He was in. Despite knowing all too well what would happen to him, his wife and his daughter if the Germans found out.

That man was my father. In Haarlem, the Netherlands, the city where I was born. The underground resistance had somehow gotten their hands on blank IDs. My father’s job was to draw the stamps from an example they had given him. The fake ID would make it possible for whoever needed to get away to make their way to England.

Up to that point my old man enjoyed drawing landscapes, portraits, you name it. The artistry, the beauty, that had been the goal. Even though he was only 21, years of practice had given him the skills. Then the goal changed. Someone was going to look at that ID. Someone with a gun. The drawing was no longer about “that’s really pretty”. Now it was “let’s make sure nobody gets killed”.

So how do you make sure nobody second guesses a fake stamp? My father explained to me that just perfectly copying it wasn’t enough. He also drew the bounce.

When you’re kind of absentmindedly putting a stamp on something it bounces. That bounce ends up being a faint echo of the actual stamp. So that’s what he drew with the only tool he used: the humble color pencil.

The artist that once drew landscapes with dreamy horizons was now doing battle on a few square centimeters. No room for error. When I look at his very early works before the war and then see those he made afterwards I do see a clearer line. Especially in his etchings. Every practice leaves its marks and so did this.

I asked if any of his fakes were ever found out. He hesitated, still remembering his promise not to talk about it. Then with a solemn face: “I never heard of any being found out, but then we probably would never hear about it.”

When I was about eleven, we did a project in school about WWII. I really got into it. We had a wall exhibit. I cut out a large swastika and used some of my father’s charcoal to make it black. Then, following proper artist protocol, I sprayed it with fixative. I put the swastika away because it’s a symbol that can bring a lot of memories back. To me it was a logo from an old enemy, to my parents it was five years of struggle.

To my horror the fixative had left a swastika outline on the carpet. I had absentmindedly left an echo of it. Right at that moment my father came to see what I was doing. I turned around and saw him blinking his eyes, like he was making sure he didn’t imagine it. I saw anger, sadness and a lot more flash by on his face in one second. He walked over to the kitchen to my mother to share his bewilderment. She would understand and I didn’t. I had unintentionally opened an old wound.

The echo of a world war on a face still reverberates after many decades.