Westerdam (I) Historical

Holland America nearly ceased to exist during the Second World War. The German occupation of the Netherlands in May 1940 meant that most of HAL's fleet was either seized, sunk, or serving as troopships under Allied command. By 1945 the company was rebuilding from nearly nothing, reconstructing a fleet to serve a transatlantic route that still mattered and still had passengers who needed to cross.

SS Westerdam entered service in 1946 as part of that reconstruction — one of the postwar ships HAL commissioned to restore the Rotterdam-New York service that had been the company's reason for existing since 1873. She sailed in the years between the war's end and the jets' arrival, a window that was shorter than anyone expected at the time. In 1958 BOAC flew the first commercial transatlantic jet service. Within a decade the ocean crossing by ship had changed from a necessity to a luxury, and the economics of running transatlantic liners changed with it.

Westerdam sailed that window and did her part in it. For a generation of postwar passengers — returning veterans, emigrants starting again in America, Dutch families visiting children who had settled abroad — she was simply the ship that made the crossing possible. The transatlantic liner era is gone now, and its last years are forgotten by most people, but those who traveled them remember the size of the ocean and the time it took to cross it. The Westerdam was there for some of those crossings.

— In the Wake editorial

My grandmother came to America on the Westerdam in 1952. She never said much about the crossing, except that it took six days, that the sea was rough for the first two, and that she ate everything put in front of her because the food was better than anything she had eaten in four years.

She had grown up in Zeeland during the occupation. The hunger winter of 1944 was not an abstraction in her house — it was something she carried in her body for the rest of her life, a hesitation before wasting food, a reflex of saving. She was twenty-three when she booked passage in Tourist Class on the Westerdam to join her brother in Michigan. She spoke almost no English. She had one suitcase.

She told me once, near the end of her life, that she had stood on deck the morning they arrived in New York and watched the harbor come into view and felt two things simultaneously: tremendous fear and something she could not name, which was relief. Not at America specifically, but at the fact that the water was behind her now and the shore was in front. Six days of ocean and she was on the other side of it.

She lived in Michigan for sixty-one years. She died at eighty-four having never crossed the Atlantic again. She didn't need to. Once was what was required.

— Joanna H., writing about her grandmother Lieselotte