My grandmother was killed in April 1943 at Sobibor. Most of my parents' families were killed there. Sobibor was where many of the trains that left the Netherlands for the East in 1943 went.

Two writers changed my life: Franz Kafka and Isaac Bashevis Singer. In Kafka, I recognised the fear of a world that could not be controlled, governed by unfamiliar and hostile laws. In Singer, I recognised the poor and vigorous and colourful Jews that my parents had once been. What these writers taught me was the intriguing notion that what I had seen and heard, the madness and misery and happiness I had witnessed, could be written down. 

After my father died, my mother reduced the four newspaper subscriptions to two, one local and one national. She continued to read them for the rest of her life. Those were the newspapers I grew up with: one Catholic and one conservative. Until I came to Amsterdam as a student and finally managed to escape the city in which I had felt like a stranger ever since I could remember, I had no idea that leftist newspapers and magazines existed. 

In Amsterdam, I read everything, Left, Right, conservative, progressive. I discovered Foucault and Popper, Naipaul and Updike. After a year in Amsterdam, I got my own phone, which inaugurated a telephonic mother-son relationship that carried on as long as she lived. My mother phoned every day, sometimes several times. Politics was usually the subject. She had only been to primary school, but she had a clear perspective: America could do no wrong, and she measured what was good or bad in the world according to whether it was good or bad for Jews. If she discovered that a famous person was Jewish, her satisfaction knew no bounds. She loved Israel, although she had never been until I paid for her to go there with my younger brother, by which time she was almost 80.

 The book about the generations of semi-literate Jews who wandered the southern Netherlands in search of odd jobs and deals that would tide them over for the next few days, about the life of crime some of them took up, about their energy and creativity and determination to survive, still lies unwritten on my desk. But I thought about my parents when Daniel Johnson, Standpoint's Editor, asked me to write a piece about why I and my wife and our children are currently living in America and why I decided to leave Europe. My upbringing was not a run-of-the-mill Dutch childhood with parents who had a farm or a grocery store or a bicycle or cheese business with one generation naturally and organically succeeding the other. Jews in the Netherlands don't have that kind of continuity. And of all the Jews now in the Netherlands, probably fewer than 30,000 in a country of 16 million (before 1940 there were around 120,000 Jews in Holland), there are not many with a similar background and roots in the pre-war Jewish working class — which was almost entirely eradicated by the Nazis with the aid of Dutch collaborators and the Dutch police force and the Dutch railways. 

I grew up knowing that Evil exists. My mother was not erudite; I never saw her read a book, though she liked magazines, and she never spoke in historical terms about the terrible things that had happened to her and her family. Sebastian Haffner and Joachim Fest were not names she knew. It was clear to me whom she had feared: the Dutch informers who were ready to report to the police where she and my father were hiding. These people were even more dangerous than the Nazis, who kept a greater distance than the Dutch Jew-hunters who roamed the country.