For a Lost Soldier     by Rudi van Dantzig, Translated by Arnold J. Pomerans Original title: Voor een verloren soldaat Original language: Dutch Original year: 1986 Published by Millivres Prowler Group Pub. Date: 1996 Format: Paperback Dimensions: (in inches): 0.77 x 7.70 x 5.05 ISBN: 0854492372 Edition: REPRINT List Price: $14.95, £9.95 Buy online from Amazon.co.uk for £7.96 Buy online from Amazon.com for $10.47 Published by Bodley Head, London Pub. Date: 1991 Not available for ordering Published by The Gay Men's Press, Swaftham Pub. Date: 1996 Not available for ordering

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Rudi van Dantzig has achieved world fame as a choreographer and artistic director of the Netherlands National Ballet. His literary output is small. For a Lost Soldier, his first novel, first appeared in 1986, when he was in his fifties.


This is a war novel with a difference. The main action takes place in occupied Holland in the last year of the Second World War. Belgium and the southern part of the Netherlands had been liberated in the autumn of 1944, but the area north of the great rivers — the Rhine, the Maas and the Waal — remained under Nazi control until the following Spring. The winter of 1944-45 was bitterly cold, and the civilian population in Holland’s cities suffered dreadfully. Those who could, sent their children to stay with families in the countryside, where food was less scarce. That is where Van Dantzig’s novel takes its starting point.


Jeroen is eleven when his parents put him and a group of other children on a truck bound for the northern province of Friesland. Jeroen ends up with a large, generous and devout family of fishermen in Laaxum. Sensitive and clumsy, the boy from the city feels ill at ease at first, but soon adjusts to his new environment. His friend Jan, also from Amsterdam and stronger than Jerome, is staying on a nearby farm and initiates him in some homosexual rough play, which however leaves Jerome disoriented for reasons he cannot quite fathom.


After the winter, the Germans withdraw and the Americans put up their tents across the canal. Jeroen befriends one of the American soldiers, who rapes him. Although he is shocked and bewildered by the experience, Jeroen is drawn to seek out the American again. The relationship that develops between the man and the boy is intensely physical. Neither speaks the other’s language, and yet, increasingly and obsessively, Jeroen longs for the older man’s closeness and intimacy. It is a secret longing, since Jeroen instinctively realizes he cannot speak to anyone about his relationship with the soldier.


Then one day the tents are gone: the Americans have moved on. Stunned, Jeroen keeps looking, waiting, and eventually hoping against hope. The war ends, Jeroen’s mother comes to pick him up, they return home and celebrate the Liberation. Jeroen lives through it all in a daze, alone with his terrible secret and with his fears and hope. But all his searching remains in vain.


For a Lost Soldier can still shock, due to the directness of the physical descriptions. But it is not a sensationalist book. On the contrary, the psychological effects of the boy’s sexual awakening are rendered subtly and sympathetically. The overwhelming feeling is one of intense sadness. Jeroen never reproaches the American, he does not feel betrayed or exploited. He just wants to be close to him, again and again. The sense of loss at the end is as palpable as it is unrelieved.

‘Oh, heavens, it’s our war child.’ She looks me over from head to toe. ‘But we asked for a girl for our Pieke to play with.’ Her voice takes on an annoyed and threatening tone.

She stands up, filling the room with her bulk again, moving towards me: there is no escaping her.

‘Go and sit down there.’

I huddle into a chair by the window she points out to me.

Pasture-land outside, emptiness and wind. Inside it smells of food and burning wood. The man goes and sits down to talk at the table with the woman, conspirators speaking an incomprehensible language.

‘He goes to church, I take it?’ Suddenly the question is clearly comprehensible.

I say ‘yes’ quickly. A lie, but other wise they might throw me out straight away. I’ll hand over the registration card with the ration coupons now. Maybe that’ll make her think a bit better of me, I feel in my pockets: empty. Frantically I look through all my clothes: it can’t be, I can’t have lost them?

The man gets up and nt he kitchen. Maybe the woman is never going to come back into the room again. Silence. A clock ticks behind me. (p. 20-1; tr. Arnold Pomerans)