When I was growing up in the Dutch town of Leiden in the 1970s and 80s, everything looked placid yet it felt as if the second world war was still all around us. A colleague of my dad was the sole survivor of a wartime raid by his Resistance group. Our Jewish next-door neighbour had discovered only as a teenager that her father lost his first family in the gas chambers. My sixtysomething history teacher had come to Leiden as a young man, reportedly because he had to leave his hometown after having been fout (meaning “wrong”, a collaborator) under German occupation.
上世紀(jì)七八十年代，我在荷蘭萊頓小鎮(zhèn)長(zhǎng)大。表面上一切平靜，但仿佛二戰(zhàn)的陰影依然無處不在。我父親的一位同事，是他所在抵抗組織在戰(zhàn)爭(zhēng)時(shí)期一次突襲中的唯一幸存者。我們猶太裔的隔壁鄰居，直到十幾歲時(shí)才得知，她的父親的第一個(gè)家庭在毒氣室中遇難。我的歷史老師六十多歲，年輕時(shí)來到萊頓，據(jù)說是因?yàn)樗诘聡?guó)占領(lǐng)期間被視為“fout”（意為“錯(cuò)誤”，通敵者），不得不離開家鄉(xiāng)。