Missing the people who have made up our lives

One rainy afternoon, allowing myself a trip down memory lane in my lounge chair, I am astonished by the parade of actors on the stage of my life and the countless others

I seem to have reached that stage in life when thoughts turn to the past and I find myself wondering what happened to all the people who were once important to me.

Whatever became of Arl, my high school sweetheart in Holland? During the Occupation we used to hide in the attic of his house to listen to the forbidden BBC broadcasts on the little crystal set he had rigged up after the Nazis confiscated all our radios. We were close for many years and happily celebrated after I came back from my year as a mother’s helper in London to learn English. But then I decided to go to Paris, and we somehow lost touch. I don’t know how it happened and when I think of him it is with mixed emotions of nostalgia, regret and remorse.

Also disappeared in the mist of time are London trolley driver Patrick and his wife Kathleen who befriended me — a lonely, homesick youngster. They opened their home and their hearts to me and I spent many Sundays-off with them and their two little boys. I especially fondly recall professorial 5-year-old Malcolm with his thick corrective myopia glasses. I think of him taking a bite out of a plum, holding it, dripping, out to me and saying, “Look, Elisabeth, didn’t the Lord make this plum beautifully?”

My first independent living quarters in Paris were in a sixstory-high studio apartment building where I got to know many people, including Norman and Max. Until I met them I had only been vaguely aware of the existence of homosexuality, but since they became such caring friends I was never in danger of developing the prejudice so prevalent later, especially in America during the McCarthy era.

Just like a traditional couple of the early 50s, Norman, a journalist from England, was the breadwinner. He had a marvelous grasp of current events and politics which a bunch of us liked to discuss until dawn on weekend nights. Max, Australian, kept house. He cleaned, cooked, marketed and grew amazing exotic plants. When I developed a severe case of intestinal distress— not surprising since two toilets and one shower served 12 studios — Max nursed me back to health and, sitting at the foot of my bed, made sure I finished his delicious chicken broth. I seem to remember that Norman had to return to England for professional reasons and I wonder what became of them. And what happened to that other couple, German artist Kurt, whose Jewish wife had ended her life in a Nazi gas chamber, and Olga, a White Russian refugee? They took arts-starved me under their wing and introduced me to the treasures in the Louvre and the beauty of music.

Where is now the British nurse who turned into a close friend after confessing that, at first, she did not want to meet me because I was Dutch? She knew Dutch fishermen had saved many downed pilots; why could they not have saved her husband when he was shot down near the coast? Or what became of the young woman who adopted the grave of an American G.I. and brings her little son to help tend to the grave at Margraten, the American cemetery in Limburg province in southern Holland? She mailed me copies of correspondence with relatives of “her soldier” for use in my memoir.

One rainy afternoon, allowing myself a trip down memory lane in my lounge chair, I am astonished by the parade of actors on the stage of my life and the countless others — colleagues at work, fellow board members at organizations, neighbors — where did they all go?

I wish I could let everyone know how much I value their friendship. Each one of them has helped making me the person I have become. I am so grateful to them and I feel guilty for allowing them to disappear beyond my horizon.

Getty Images Tourists take pictures near the pyramid at the Louvre Museum in Paris.