Hiding and hauntings

Hans Keilson is 101 years old. For many years he practised as a psychiatrist in Amsterdam, particularly among orphans whose parents had been deported and killed—as his own had been. He qualified as a doctor in Berlin but after 1936 was forbidden to practise, because he was Jewish, and so he moved to the Netherlands. His degree was not recognised there, so he became a sports and music teacher. During the Nazi occupation he was hidden by a couple, and after the war he requalified in Holland.

He published his first novel in 1933, but it was banned in 1934. He has published a clinical study of the repeated traumatisation of children orphaned in the war and another of Freud’s view of art. His novella, Comedy in a Minor Key, was first published in 1947 and has recently been republished in England.

This was dedicated to the couple who hid him during the war. In the story a young married couple, Wim and Marie, consent to hide a Jewish man, Nico, during the occupation. They are, of course, frightened, having had no experience of leading a double life or of having to conceal things from their neighbours (who may, of course, equally be concealing things from them).

Unfortunately Nico dies of natural causes, if contributory debilitation by hunger can be called a natural cause. This dashes Marie’s dream of proudly walking in the street with Nico after the war to the amazement of the neighbours. The problem that now faces the Dutch couple, however, is how to dispose of the body without being observed. A doctor, Dr Nelis, helps Wim remove the body, by now very stiff, under cover of night to the nearby park, where they put it under a bench. It is found the next morning and becomes the subject of a police inquiry. The couple also have to remove any traces of his having lived in their house.

Then the young couple realise that they have made a terrible mistake, their first such mistake in all the months of their vigil. Just before he died they dressed Nico in Wim’s monogrammed pyjamas, which have on them a laundry label by which they can easily be traced. They themselves have to go into hiding. Later they learn that the policeman in charge of the case is “good”—that is to say a passive resister who destroys the evidence against them—and they are able to return to their house. But their house has changed for them.

As it happens, an old woman in Paris whom I know quite well recounted to me how she was travelling in a bus there 60 years after the end of the occupation and started to speak to a woman of her own age. They became friendly, and the other woman asked the first where she lived. She gave firstly the address and then the number of the flat in that building. When she heard the answer, the second woman burst into tears. It was the very flat, opposite the local commander’s office, in which she had spent the whole of the occupation, hiding in terror, never appearing anywhere near a window.

Ghosts certainly come back to haunt us—if they ever really go away.