RIGHT OUTSIDE Arlington Cemetery in Virginia, overlooking Washington DC, stands the Netherlands Carillon. Over 120 feet tall, with 53 bells. They strike every hour, and twice daily they play something pretty. The carillon is a gift “from the people of the Netherlands,” in gratitude for the liberation in 1945. It has been there for seventy years. Every May 5, Liberation Day in Holland, the carillonneur gives a special concert.
Just about every American school library has a copy of Anne Frank’s diary. Children learn early on about the fate of Holland’s most famous girl and hold classroom talks about the Secret Annex and the betrayal that resulted in Anne’s death. They know that she listened to the bells in the Wester Church bell tower. They recognize something from her words, “Especially at night, it is something so comforting.”
Comforting sounds. For many rural children, that’s a train in the distance, and trains in the US often still have bells. General Eisenhower, whose mother read Dutch, was born by the railroad and liberated Europe from his own train, with stops at Geldrop, Utrecht, The Hague. Mother only half approved. She was passionately pacifist and hated war and generals.
Students at the Eisenhower School in Chicago not too long ago performed a play based on Anne’s diary. Beforehand, they visited an exhibit about the Frank family; their parents accompanied them. Listening to the sound of the Wester bells helped. At the end of the performance, the audience was in tears.
In 2019, the originally fifty, 60,000-lbs bells were removed from the Netherlands Carillon and loaded into a train car. They returned for maintenance to Brabant in the Netherlands, the country where carillons were originally invented and where most American concert bells come from. With three additional bells now added, they returned a year later, this time, because of “more than 50 bells,” officially as a grand carillon. On May 5, they will be played by Julianne Vanden Wyngaard of Grand Rapids, Michigan. She is a descendant from the Van den Wijngaard family of Brabant.
