(Haarlem, the Netherlands)
Our original plans for this trip were to spend a number of days in Amsterdam. Neither one of us had ever been here (other than at Schiphol Airport) and most Dutch travel guides devote a huge amount of space to the city. It didn’t take much research for us to discover that Amsterdam is both crowded and expensive in the summer, so we decided to stay in a nearby city and commute into Amsterdam instead.
Haarlem was our choice. It is only 15 minutes away by train and has a substantial population of 150,000, so there are plenty of things to see and do. Some consider it to be Amsterdam in miniature…but without the oppressive crowds that plague the capital in summer. And yes, this is where the name for New York’s Harlem comes from. New York City was originally known as New Amsterdam and many of the boroughs and neighbourhoods have Dutch names (Brooklyn, Coney Island, the Bronx, Yonkers, etc.).
Our first major stop was at the Corrie ten Boom House, also known as “the Hiding Place”. This house, located behind a jeweller’s store (still operating today), was used as both a meeting place and a hiding place during the Nazi occupation of the Netherlands in World War II. While only 4-6 people would be hiding there at any one time, the ten Boom House was often used as a temporary sanctuary until a safe house could be found in the rural areas surrounding Haarlem.
During the tour, we learned about the various codes that were used to avoid detection by the Nazis. We also saw the clever extra brick wall that was built in Corrie ten Boom’s bedroom. The linen closet had a hidden door just above the floor that would permit access to the narrow (60 cm deep) space behind the extra wall. Because the wall was made of bricks, three days of Nazi searching failed to uncover the hiding spot that they believed was in the ten Boom house.
The ten Boom family protected both Dutch resistors and Jews who were wanted by the Nazis. It is estimated that somewhere between 80 and 800 lives were saved because of the Corrie ten Boom House: it is not possible to be more precise because it would have been extremely risky to keep records detailing who had been helped. The ten Booms were eventually betrayed by an informant, however, and in 1944 they were sent off to camps in Germany. Three family members died but Corrie ten Boom managed to survive the ordeal. She later became an author and public speaker, focusing on a message of reconciliation instead of revenge.
We’ll be in Haarlem for a few days before returning home to Canada, so I will be posting some more about both Haarlem and Amsterdam shortly.
You may be wondering about the cover photo at the very top of this post. This is my cousin’s Labrador Retriever named Bente (for short) and the photo was taken while we were driving through the countryside north of Groningen. Bente was sitting on the floor by the front passenger seat and sleepily looked at me in the back seat. While travelling is great fun, it is also nice to have reminders of a more settled life. Bente and her Dachshund friend Frits did a great job making us feel like we were at home in Groningen.