Veendam (II) Historical

SS Veendam II was built at Harland & Wolff in Belfast in 1922, and she spent thirty-one years on the North Atlantic. She was not a ship built for glamour — 15,450 gross tons, a practical vessel for the Rotterdam-New York run that Holland America had been operating since 1872. She carried immigrants and tourists and returning travelers in the steady rhythm of the interwar years, when the Atlantic crossing still meant six days at sea and the world was still large enough to take that long to cross.

The war interrupted everything. Like most HAL ships, Veendam II was requisitioned in the early 1940s, repainted gray, and converted to troopship service. She survived the war, which not all her fleet sisters did.

When civil Atlantic crossings resumed in 1945 and 1946, the Veendam was part of the fleet that helped restart them — carrying displaced persons, emigrants, and eventually tourists back across waters that had been contested just years before. She was doing the same thing she had always done, on the same route, for the same reason: getting people where they needed to go.

By 1953, when she was sent to the breakers at Briton Ferry in Wales, the jets were still six years away, but the age of the ocean liner was already beginning its long decline. The Veendam II had made her last crossing in a world that had started its goodbye to the great ships. She lasted thirty-one years — not a record-breaker or a flagship, just a reliable Atlantic workhorse that outlasted a world war and came home to do the work she was built for.

— In the Wake editorial

I have a photograph taken on the promenade deck of the Veendam in July 1948. My parents are standing at the rail, and the harbor behind them is Rotterdam — or what remained of it. The center of the city was still rubble three years after the war. My father is wearing his good jacket. My mother has her hair done for the photograph.

They were going to America. Specifically, to an uncle in Michigan who had written to say there was work at a factory in Grand Rapids and a spare bedroom. They needed both.

My mother told me once that the six days on the Veendam were the only time she had between leaving everything she knew and arriving somewhere she didn't. On the ship, she said, she was neither from Rotterdam nor from America. She was just on the Atlantic, suspended between two lives. She spent most of the second and third day leaning on the rail — the same rail she's holding in the photograph — watching the water pass.

They were in Grand Rapids for sixty-two years. My father went back to Rotterdam twice, for funerals. My mother never went back. But she kept the photograph, and when she talked about the crossing she always called it the six days. Not the trip. Not the voyage. The six days — as if it were its own separate country she had passed through once and never visited again.

I found out years later what ship it was from the Rotterdam passenger manifest. The Veendam. By the time I was old enough to ask about it, the ship had already been scrapped for thirty years.

— Anneke H., Grand Rapids, written 2007