Frits slowly started to tell me about his life. He told me that his father had died of myasthenia gravis in 1942. He missed the loving letters that his dad regularly sent him while he was sick, always ending with the request to look after his little brother, Jean Jean, as their dad called him. 

It was only after several weeks that Frits was told that his father had died. He was buried in a cemetery in the Hague. That was all Frits knew. He had never visited his father’s grave and wanted to.

His mother could not give him much information, only that he was buried in a pauper’s grave that may not exist anymore. Those graves were geschud (shaken) every ten years (cleared of bones), to make place for new graves.

The cemetery found the section and number of the grave. The only problem was that there were three graves on top of each other. We did not know which was the grave of Frederik Evenblij: bottom, middle or top. 

When we got there, armed with flowers and daffodil bulbs, the graves in that section were still there. Frits just stood and looked. I don’t know what went through his mind. He had loved his father so. 

Life in the children’s home in Driebergen had been very difficult, especially during the war when the home hid about 17 Jewish children. Three were his cousins and one was Keetie van Zanten, a girl who had asked Frits to hide her when the German soldiers tried to take the Jewish children away. Frits, being only 10 years old, could not think of a hiding place that moment, when the Sister came and sent the children to different rooms. 

Standing at his father’s grave after all those years, he cried. I laid the flowers in the middle of the grave. Before leaving, I wanted to plant the daffodils at the head of the grave, even though it was not certain that the gravesite would still be there next Spring. I carefully walked over the grave, which seemed the best way to the place where I wanted to plant the bulbs.

Suddenly the ground gave way underneath me and my feet slipped through splintering wood into somebody’s chest! It was horrible, horrible. I did not want to hurt a body, especially the body of Frits’ father. My left foot was stuck. Frits helped me out of the rib cage. I had nightmares for a long time.

The following year the grave was no more. A wooden fence was erected around a large part of the cemetery. There was a deep hole in the center of the hidden part, and it was filled with bones, all thrown together.