Childhood Memories

Netherlands, a save place to live

Kruitberg was the name of the building we lived in, it was in Bijlmermeer, an urban neighborhood within Amsterdam, the capital of the Netherlands.  It was the segregated “colored” and “ethnic” neighborhood.  We lived in the Netherlands from 1977 till 1980.  The whole family moved there to join my father for his Master of Science studies in the triplet of Dermatology, Immunology and Venerology.  Yes, all three at once, because they all interrelate with each other.  A venereal disease manifesting through the immune system ending in skin outbreaks: where all three….-ologies are needed! First, we moved in with Grandma’s in Utrecht, then a small Dutch town Huizen and then we finally landed in Bijlmermeer.  We were the one of the many Surinamese East-Indian families next to our own native Surinamese-Blacks, Indonesian, Indians, Chinese, and the mixed race called “Douglas”.  Further, there were the Pakistanis, Turkish, Moroccans and a holocaust surviving elderly Jewish couple, and some of the lower-middle class white Dutch people with that thick Urban Dutch accent of theirs.

My childhood was safe, drug-free, and yet filled with adventurous moments.  I went to the elementary school there between age of ten and eleven in the fifth and some of sixth grade there.  We lived on the tenth floor, Mom, Dad, me, my brothers Rishi and Raju and my adopted toddler sister Sheetal. And our apartment was on the border of our building Kruitberg en the next named Groeneveen.  Twelve years later, on October 1992, an El Al Boeing 747 Israeli cargo plane crashed into that same spot.  People who have been occupying the apartment we have once lived in were instantly dead. 

We have long moved on, I have been back to Suriname with my family from 1981 till 1991 and then forward to the United States after that.  Even my aunt and cousins, who had lived close-by in a Groeneveen apartment, has moved back to Suriname years a couple of years after that.

I keep wondering about our neighbors: the nice elderly Jewish couple, whom we have frequented a lot with visits.  And when we left to go back to Suriname, we completely lost touch with them.  They could have died from old age before or in that plane crash.  We called them Oom (translation for uncle) Jan and Tante (translation for aunt) Marcella.  These people would tell us stories about their holocaust days. They managed to escape the trip to those gas chambers.  Years later, my aunt discloses to us in private that Tante Marcella survived a stab wound by a Nazi soldier in her younger years. Tante Marcella never spoke to us about it, because it would have been too much of a horror story for us kids to handle (I realize now). During our visits to them, we would watch the Holocaust TV series together and sobbed like crazy.  My two year old toddler sister Sheetal, religiously took her metal hairbrush with her to comb Oom Jan’s bald head: as painful as the combing process was for him, he lovingly bared the scratches she made on his scalp.  Sheetal was so attached to that brush and looked forward to that combing event every visit.   She had a screaming fit every time we tried to take the brush away or hide it before the visits.  My parents gradually managed to switch her to a gentle soft combing brush. 

I was too much of a child to realize how serious Oom Jan and Tante Marcella lived with these painful Holocaust memories. I could not ever imagine them living the lives as the TV characters in “Holocaust” did.  Clueless! This pain became very real to me as a grown-up when I heard about that plane crash.   They were the most loving people for a kid to hang out with. 

After the cargo plane crashed there, till the day of today, the surrounding residents still trying coping with post traumatic stress disorder, PTSD the Dutch call it.  Only 34 deaths were registered, but the number would have been higher, because illegal immigrants’ death went unregistered (mostly Pakistanis, Turkish and Moroccans).  A Surinamese mother I learned about through the National Geographic documentary lost both of her children there, while she was at work.  An investigation was done and terrorism was rule out.  It turns out to be that there was a cracked screw bold within the wing engine of the plane. Re-igniting my memory, a couple of months ago (April 2006), I saw a documentary about it on the National Geographic Channel.  In my memory, that building still stands.

We used to live on the tenth floor of Kruitberg, just one apartment shy from Groeneveen - exactly the spot where the Israeli Boeing crashed into. see more: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/El_Al_Flight_1862