Patrol

"Attentie! Attentie! De Chemocar rijdt door uw straat..."

The sound of the loudspeaker sets me on edge. It doesn't matter that it's announcing the presence of friendly orange-vested municipal workers trolling through the neighborhood for chemical waste products. It doesn't matter that the announcement is delivered in the voice of a Dutch female telephone operator. It doesn't matter that each repetition of the announcement is preceded by a funky Middle-eastern melody, like some kind of ice cream truck in Damascus...

The sound of the loudspeaker sets me on edge because it's mounted to the top of a slow-moving truck, moving through my neighborhood, announcing its propaganda in a foreign (albeit recognizeable) language.

I know this sounds crazy -- but every time the Chemocar drives through our neighborhood (maybe once every three months or so), I think of the Holocaust. Maybe it's because I'm a foreigner myself... Or maybe it's because I live in a neighborhood that was highly populated (and depopulated) by Jews during the time of the Second World War... Or maybe it's because I'm developing a nasty case of paranoid schizophrenia... But whatever the reason, it seems that I can't help but feel like a Jew in hiding whenever the Chemocar comes around. My natural impulse is to freeze, to breathlessly listen to the endlessly recycled message blared through the loudspeakers, and above all else to keep the curtains closed.

I can't imagine what it actually would have felt like to have been a Jew in Amsterdam during the 1940s. I can't imagine what it would have been like to hear those words and those policies -- amplified for the neighborhood to hear -- against me and my people. The Verzetsmuseum, just a five minute bicycle ride from my house, is a good start to understanding that period of human history. The Anne Frank huis, on the Prinsengracht, is interesting and instructive. The Corrie Ten Boom huis, in Haarlem, offers a unique perspective.

But the Chemocar helps me to imagine it a little more fully. And I don't think that's such a bad thing -- as long as my overactive imagination doesn't get me hauled off in a straightjacket, into the back of a padded truck...