Sunday, June 19, was the best weather day we had while visiting in Rotterdam. It was also a busy day. We started out by driving to Rotterdam Centraal, the main railway station, so we could park for our first adventure, climbing a giant staircase up the side of a building. I just had to stop and take a picture of the commuter bikes. There is nothing quite so Dutch. The question is: How do you ever find your own?
I had no idea what to expect when the staircase up the side of an office building was described to me. It was installed as part of a celebration of the city of Rotterdam, and June 19 was the last day before being torn down, so we couldn’t miss it.
The building it climbs is called the Groot Handels Gebouw, which means “Big Business Building”, or something like that. The building, one of the first ones built after World War II, helped bring post-war prosperity to the city after the center of Rotterdam was demolished by the Germans.
The wooden and steel staircase was eight stories tall, and everyone in Rotterdam wanted to climb it before it was gone. We got there just at 10:00 AM when it opened, and the crowds gathered quickly. Pretty soon, the staircase was filled with mobs of people happily climbing up and down.
The rooftop offered grand views of the city in every direction, with commemorative plaques about Rotterdam’s history installed around the perimeter. At the end of the loop was a film that celebrated Rotterdam from its rebuilding in the Forties up to the present day. I hope I got the gist, even though it was entirely in Dutch.
After leaving Rotterdam, we drove to visit Arjan’s friend Koos and his girlfriend, Yuk Ying, in Leiden. Koos is a Sinologist (translator and expert in Chinese) and has just successfully defended his dissertation and received his Ph.D. His dissertation concerns early Dutch translators of Chinese working in the Dutch East Indies. It is written in English, and I once helped to edit one of his chapters.
Koos obtained tickets for us to visit the German bunkers at the Atlantic Wall Museum at Noordwijk, on the North Sea. The museum consists of one command post and one gun bunker. The Germans built a system of such defenses along the entire coastline of France, Belgium, and Holland to prevent attacks by sea, most of which never came.
To view the museum, we joined a group with a guide and walked through the dark, cool, underground tunnels, with just enough light to see. It is frightening to see the tremendous effort the Germans expended to create the tunnels and build the gun bunkers. It took concentration not to get claustrophobic.
A team of 12 men was assigned to each gun, and they manned the guns in shifts 24/7. There were underground barracks and toilets and showers, and even a “swimming pool”. It must have been truly depressing to live below ground in these rat warrens. Today, they warned us that there are bats living there, but we didn’t see any.
The command post, where the officers lived, contains most of the museum information. The officers had bunk beds and much more room than the enlisted men below. One frightening detail in the museum was seeing a film of Dutch workers doing the work of building the bunkers and pouring the three meters of concrete for the walls and ceilings.
To finish the day, the four of us walked on the beach and across the dunes through a bird sanctuary, listening for nightingales. After that we had dinner at a Chinese restaurant along the seaside in Noordwijk before driving back to Leiden and then Rotterdam.
Photographs © 2016 P.J. Gardner. All rights reserved.