Ballade van het wonderorgel

If you get an old Rotterdammer
Once he starts talking
Then you have a good chance of hearing the story
About the organ in that cinema
On Hoogstraat
Almost everyone knows it
It was a wonder
Special

Two Jewish emigrants
Worked on it for over a year
Before that thing made a sound, properly
But then, you couldn't believe what you heard
You felt hot and cold
You floated, you climaxed, got goosebumps

So sultry, so captivating
Enthralling

Because that organ had a soul
That sang 'from thick wood, one saws planks'
Tears came to your eyes
And you didn't know if it came
From crying
From laughter
Or sometimes from the feeling of the national anthem
But you knew
You would definitely
Give your life
For any noble cause
The organ resounded with heroism
Murder and fire and blood

As hordes of uncultivated
Indians galloped
To hunt for Tom Mix's scalp
As Harry Piel dove into the bushes with Asta Nielsen
You could hear that honeysuckle, and even smell it
That organ stood for nothing

The organ resounded with heroism
Love, sex, and blood

You got a jungle, where the wild
Beasts roared, screeched, screamed
Mooed, hissed, chirped like hell
The Niagara Falls, the Orient Express
A battlefield from the World War and a jazz orchestra
A monastery carillon

The organ resounded with heroism
Piety, disasters, blood

A whole city in flames
Seaside castles going to the sharks
Well, then the stops were pulled open
The flames shot out of your head
And many a person sometimes believed
That they had drowned themselves in 'On Hope of Blessings'

The organ resounded with heroism
Murder and fire and blood

Yet the worst horror film
Did not come on the screen of the house
From the magic lantern. No. That came
From a blue sky full
Of bombers with a swastika
Straight down on the heart of Rotterdam

That was condemned
As an example

First the explosions
Then the fire - A hellish chaos of fire
The miller at Oostplein did
What they have been doing since the Middle Ages
In case of fire
Let the sails turn
Then the sparks blow away

His mill was spared
But people, houses, churches, factories
Shops, theaters
Don't have sails

That cinema ignited
And slowly collapsed
Stage. Balcony. The walls. The ceiling
The wonder organ got the debris
On its keyboard
It groaned, audible outside

Chilling
Agonizing

Because that organ had a soul
That betrayed fear and terror and pain
At first pianissimo
A prayer for mercy
But with all the thunder
Of the bombs
This escaped God
So no wonder
That no pilot
Understood it
The helpless prayer was lost
And it turned into a curse

In Oppert lay a boy very still
On the sidewalk of what had been his house
His watch showed ten to half past one
The moment of the first direct hit
Who knows, he may have been luckier than hundreds of others
For whom death only became definitive hours later

Your clothes flew outside
From the heat to the flames
In Pannekoekstraat a barkeeper
Closed the hatch in front of the window
By drunkenly babbling, praying
Sixty people
Until they were buried by the fire

Let's hope
Totally drunk

Three maids from the Old Catholic Church
On Torenstraat thought
In the vault, you're safe from the bombs
That was true
But with a collapsed church on top
You can't open the safe door afterwards
And then came the fire
When later the debris removers opened the vault
They found a melted mass at the bottom

The man who left his family
Safe and sound in the morning
Found half of Jonker Fransstraat flattened
And roared at the sky
'I damn well won't take this!'
Never has God's name been misused
With such justification

For such murders
There are no words

At Douwe Egberts
There was a warehouse full of coffee beans
They were roasted for the second time
Then the extinguishing water came over them
Which boiled
That's why the city center smelled for days
Not only of burning garbage dumps
But also poignantly cozy of a strong cup of comfort
Bitter, meager comfort

On Noordsingel the prison got a direct hit
So they opened the doors
And in the old zoo
The bloodthirsty animals were shot dead
And the remaining cages were opened
So monkeys and parrots
In the trees along Westersingel
Kangaroos on Kruiskade
Ostriches in Zwaanshals
Zwart Janstraat

And in the brackish
Canal along Molenwaterweg
A sea lion. And giraffes on Hofplein
But the most treacherous animals
Flew far away again
Returning home to their dens in Berlin

To report
As heroes

In the empty cinema
They heard the organ sigh
Fruitlessly it tried
With its kicking horses
To flee
Roaring it threw
Its whole waterfall
Towards fire and flame
Dying, it then
Sounded the death knell
For Rotterdam
A false chord of heroism
Murder and fire and blood
And the wonder organ fell silent
Forever