Nieuw Amsterdam (II) Historical

SS Nieuw Amsterdam was launched on April 10, 1938, at the Rotterdam Dry Dock Company, named by Queen Wilhelmina in a ceremony that drew tens of thousands of spectators to the harbor. At 36,287 gross tons she was the largest and most beautiful ship the Dutch merchant fleet had ever built — a matter of considerable national pride in the years when Europe was watching its own stability come apart.

When Germany invaded the Netherlands in May 1940, the Nieuw Amsterdam was in New York. She did not return. Holland America made the decision to commit her to Allied service, and for the next five years she sailed as a troopship under the orange, white, and blue Dutch flag that no longer flew freely in the country that had built her. By the end of the war she had transported 378,361 troops and war workers across distances she had never been designed to cover. The Dutch knew about it. In the occupied cities, news that the Nieuw Amsterdam had completed another crossing circulated the way news circulates in occupied places — quietly, carefully, with gratitude.

After the war she came back — to Rotterdam, to the white linen tablecloths and the Dutch paintings and the Rotterdam-New York schedule she had been built to run. She sailed in peacetime for another twenty-eight years. In 1973, thirty-five years after Queen Wilhelmina had named her on the dock, Holland America retired her. She was scrapped in Taiwan in 1974. The Darling of the Dutch had given everything there was to give.

— In the Wake editorial

My uncle sailed on the Nieuw Amsterdam in 1962, New York to Rotterdam and back. He was not a man given to sentiment, which is why what he said about it has stayed with me.

He had grown up in Haarlem during the occupation. He was twelve when the Germans came and seventeen when they left. He didn't talk much about those years. After the war he emigrated to America and built a quiet life in New Jersey and went back to the Netherlands every few years to visit his mother and his sister. He had flown on his prior trips, which was faster. In 1962 he booked the ship instead.

He said he stood on the promenade deck when they cleared the harbor and looked at the funnel and said nothing for a long time. Then he went inside. I asked him once why he had taken the ship that year instead of flying, and he said it was because he had heard the Nieuw Amsterdam had sailed through the whole war and he wanted to be on her once, just to know what she felt like from the inside. He didn't say anything more than that.

He was not a sentimental man. But he sailed her both ways, New York to Rotterdam and Rotterdam to New York, and he never flew again when he had time enough to sail instead.

— Petra van H., writing about her uncle Hendrik