Category Archives: Reflections

Reflections

Three questions have fascinated me most in the years I’ve been exploring what happened in Amsterdam in 1940-45:  what did people do at that time about the dilemmas they faced?  what would I have done?  and what does that mean I must do now?  The Reflections here will be a place for me to wrestle with these questions, probably just by asking even more.  According to Dutch writer Remco Campert, whose father wrote the iconic poem of the Dutch resistance, says, “Asking yourself a question, that’s how resistance begins. And then ask that very question to someone else.”

Fortunately, “Reflections” is a broad enough title that it will give me a space to share anything else that I hope will be of interest to other readers and writers.

Amsterdam’s Holocaust Names Monument: What’s in a Name?

Flashes of silver announce the presence of the Holocaust Names Monument, fought over for years but finally opened in September 2021 thanks to the Netherlands’ highest court (once headed by Mr. L. Visser,  whose colleagues voted to comply with the Nazi order to fire him because he was Jewish).

As we approach, a young couple stands in front of it, embracing. At first I think one is comforting the other, but they are simply in love and oblivious.  No harm in that. We cross the busy street and entered the sharp corners of the brick walls, where 102,000 names are inscribed, each on their own individual brick with their birthdate and age when they were mass murdered.

The bricks’ colors are in a range of sandy and ruddy shades, but uniform in size whether they are for an infant or an octogenarian, a famous person or someone who was unknown except to family and friends.  Once we enter the world that monument makes – “backward” at the letter Z, but it didn’t matter – it captures us completely. A wall of 1,000 blank bricks follows the Z listings, to allow for newly discovered victims, and those who remain unknown.

The walls are taller than we are, with the mirrors overhead bringing in the world of today, the modern building across the street, the trees which are the only adornment among the walls.

The traffic noise fades but is still prominent.  Joanna and I drift in different directions.  At first, the sheer numbers overpower me:  where will it end?  the walls seem to go on forever.  A young tree’s branches spread like an opening hand among the bricks.  Could I read the names one by one during this two-week visit? Only if I did almost nothing else.  Patterns begin to appear:  so many young people!  The youngest I see is eight months old, but there are many, many adults in their twenties and thirties.  Some names appear four or even five times with different ages, the intention of continuity in a family now torn like paper.  And some families must have lost everyone, or almost everyone.

Is it my imagination, or are the reflections in the mirrors distorted?  The visions of everyday life overhead seem a bit swirly, but at one point, I look straight up, and see myself and the names crystal clear, together.  From reading, I know that the mirrors seen from above spell out in Hebrew letters “In memory of”.  No embellishment or editorializing, simply that.

The monument from above

Among the tens of thousands, it’s irresistible to look for specific people who are as real to me as anyone I’ve ever met.  I find Miss Henriette Pimental first, the heroine who oversaw the saving of hundreds of children right under the nose of the Nazis, just a few blocks from the Monument.  Nearby are the Pais sister and brother whose photograph haunts me:  they have the broad, appealing smiles of a nine and eight year old, wearing their Nazi-inflicted stars.  Survivor Rudi Nussbaum had finally persuaded his parents to go into hiding, and arrived at their apartment to relocate them, only to find that they had just been deported the night before.  I look for their names, but there are too many Nussbaums of about the right age for me to figure it out without their first names.  This too brings the reality home.  Too many means too few.

Bringing the search into the present moment, I wonder about the M. Pels whose house we are staying in, the man whose business was partly ice cream.  There’s a restored business sign on the front of the building.  Bricks cite Marcus, Moritz or Maurits (yes, two spellings).  Is one of these our predecessor?  Or is he still alive somewhere, or comfortably buried in an actual grave, unlike 80% of Amsterdam’s Jewish population?

The line of white rocks at the foot of the brick walls have a pure quality because they are all such a stark color in contrast to the bricks themselves.  The shapes vary, however, unlike the bricks.  Not only do they have symbolic meaning as recognition of the dead, but they are also a relief to the eye in that place of straight lines and sharp angles.  Every time I go around a corner with its hard acute angles, I wince.  Joanna is talking with a younger woman who is dressed all in black.  We meet both her and her mother, who is my age; they come from the northern city of Groningen, and are engaged in creating an historical walk that will cover some of this history, but do so by walking and settling in a café and learning what can be seen from that place.  It will “go live” May 4/5, the times of remembering and liberation, too late for me on this trip but not, heaven willing, the next.  Joanna tells them all about my book. We smile and laugh together at the serendipity of our meeting.  “The ghosts are at work,” I say, gesturing at the walls.  Everyone nods and smiles, but nobody laughs.  I think it would please them to hear laughter, and the pale pink flowers on the nearby tree would delight them.  Only in one place have flowers been left.  Tomorrow I can change that.

The Holocaust Names Monument has already started its work on me, in part because the site is caught between two worlds. On one side is the constant roar of vehicle traffic, the lanes of bicycles with their insistent bells, and the chats and giggles of pedestrians.  On the other is a garden with carpets of purple and white crocus gathered at the feet of trees. One pale pink prunus peeks over the edge of the Memorial’s walls.  The garden can be entered directly; a sign welcomes you to bring a picnic.  On the other side stands the 1681 Amstelhof, once a retirement home for elderly women, now the Hermitage.  Six years earlier, the Sephardic Jews had already erected their magnificent nearby Portuguese Synagogue.  Amsterdam was a land of unique opportunity for them.  No one could have imagined how much the Jewish population would expand in the coming years, nor that 80% of them would be rounded up and murdered.  It still seems inconceivable.  While I’m here, I plan to visit every day, and see what can be learned there.  I’ll keep you posted.

 

 

“The Sisters of Auschwitz” Is Really about a House in Holland

When I learned about “The Sisters of Auschwitz” by Roxane van Iperen, I was excited to discover that it was really about Amsterdam’s Brilleslijper sisters and the remarkable colony of artists and resisters they established. The sisters were real Jewish women in the resistance, a little older than the fictional heroine of An Address in Amsterdam but very much in the same predicament.  And the author engaged with their story in an unusual way.  She discovered hidden doorways under the carpet of her home as it was renovated, and came upon resistance newspapers and Yiddish sheet music.  The book was immensely popular in the Netherlands, staying in the top ten nonfiction sales for weeks as “The High Nest.”  Cover of Sisters of Auschwitz

When the text was translated this year, it was renamed “The Sisters of Auschwitz”. That led me to think that it would be a gut-wrenching story set in a concentration camp, and the latter part of the book is set there.  Like so many other memoirs and histories, it includes remarkable stories of defiance (like singing Yiddish songs and the Marseillaise even in the face of the gas chambers) and demonstrates the essential role of human connection.  “If they do not look after each other, everything is finished.”  How many learned that lesson in the hardest possible way!  We cannot have too many such stories. At the same time, for me the most priceless part of the book was its depiction of these two young women starting their families, and taking huge risks for the resistance.

Printing for the Resistance and Nursing at the Same Time

The vision of one of them printing an underground newspaper with a baby on her hip and a toddler nearby is unforgettable.  van Iperen writes in the present tense, giving her words the immediacy and breathlessness of this time.  She paints the scene so convincingly.  It took me right back to the events depicted in my own book, like the speech in which Prof. Cleveringa denounces the Nazis for firing his mentor, the Jewish authority Dr. Meijers, and the students rise up and sing the national anthem.

Janny Brilleslijper

Janny Brilleslijper

That unforgettable speech was followed some months later by the first roundup on a frigid February day, and the only general strike in Western Europe to protest it.  “The Sisters of Auschwitz” emphasizes the role of the communists in organizing the Strike, and the fact that their role is often suppressed or overlooked.  The book captures the darkening of the light, not only for the country and the city, but for the individuals.  It traces the Jewish community’s journey from gullibility to believing the worst.

The author owns up to the big scandal of this time:  the Belgians rounded up 30% of  Jewish people, the French 25%, and the Dutch 76%.  She also is willing to say out loud that, after a certain point, many non-Jews simply gave up, and became “traitors without a uniform.”  At the same time, many did resist, but they had less “skin in the game” than their Jewish counterparts.  In addition to the inspiration of seeing young mothers defy the Nazis, we get to witness something even more remarkable.

The High Nest:  A Center of Art, Music and Resistance

In February 1943, they managed to rent The High Nest (where van Iperen later lived), an isolated spot just outside Naarden, not far from Amsterdam.  They continued to make music and art, producing their own performances of major operas as well as the Yiddish songs which are Lien’s profession.  It’s a place where all kinds of endangered people are welcome, which is ultimately part of their undoing.  And it’s a place where toddlers and young children can play outside from dawn to dusk if they wish.

Lien Brilleslijper image

Lien Brilleslijper

Finally, The High Nest provides a hearth to which the adults can return after doing their resistance work elsewhere. This is that rare, rare Holocaust story which does have a happy ending, at least in part.  I won’t spoil it for you, but I do heartily recommend the book.  It’s a real contribution to the literature of this time.   My very best wishes to all of you who feel, as I do, that books are life.  Right now they are more central than ever, especially as we go into the winter.  This one will remind you of the actions and values that brought people through even harder times than these.

Reclaiming Our Capitol: It Did Happen Here

Warning: This is a rant! And I am including no pictures of the invasion of the US Capitol because I don’t want to add to the attention the terrorists are getting. We’ve all seen them.

Yesterday’s invasion of the U.S. Capitol feels very personal to me. Capitol Hill was my home for at least five years: I worked and lived there, in the shadow of that splendid dome, noticing the light atop it when Congress was in session. I was in and out of the Capitol building innumerable times, to watch various electrifying or boring moments in the chambers, or to see LBJ lie in state along with a mile-long line predominantly made up of African Americans. On July 4, I walked to the front of the Capitol steps and perched there, gazing all the way down the Mall to the Washington Monument bedecked with fireworks. Even though I was brought up by Canadian parents who cast a very jaundiced eye on U.S. politics, part of me believed in the idea of American democracy. No matter how undercut it was by racism, sexism and many other isms; no matter how founded it was in rapacious capitalism; there was still that idea of “by the people and for the people.”

Apart from my sentimental associations with the Capitol building, my years of study of the Nazi occupation of the Netherlands gave yesterday a particular horror. The mob run amuck is disturbing enough – or the sight of people breaking glass and climbing into the Capitol. But here’s what really chills my blood.

1. The terrorists took down a U.S. Flag at the Capitol and put up a Trump flag. To me, this symbolizes the fact that Trump’s base buys whatever he says, no matter how far-fetched. Even after 88 judges have ruled that the election was basically fair, the base doesn’t believe it. They will follow Trump wherever he tells them to go – in this case, up the Mall to violate the sanctity of the leading symbol of our democracy, the U.S. Capitol, during a session of Congress. These people will not simply go away. How will they, and the President and Republicans who enabled them, be held accountable?

2. Law enforcement did not prepare for this completely predictable event. Almost a dozen law enforcement agencies have the job of protecting our Capitol and our democracy. For weeks and weeks, Trump has been building toward this January 6, fueling his most base base and their fantasies that the election was stolen from them. It was no surprise to anyone that Trump assembled a mob on that day. How could it be? He’s done everything but take out ads to bring them to Washington. As President, he just tweets and the world watches, or the media cover whatever he says. And among all the public officials whose job it is to be paranoid, to think ahead about the worst possible case and prepare for it, not a single one thought the Capitol should be encircled with law enforcement that day? They didn’t even have the Capitol police in riot gear, as police have been for numerous peaceful Black Lives Matter protests.

keep calm and think ahead

3. Once the situation began unravelling, law enforcement was shockingly slow to respond. The Capitol Police called for help at 1:00 p.m. The National Guard didn’t show up until after 6:00. Others arrived earlier – like the Secret Service and the D.C. and Montgomery County Police. Overall, the scene was confusion. Even the FBI’s SWAT team responded slowly, and it’s just a ten minute walk from the FBI to the Capitol if you’re in a hurry. It took almost four hours (about 1:30-5:30) before the Capitol belonged to the American people and our representatives again. Only after much damage was done, not only to the statues and windows of the people’s house. It’s to our heart as a nation, our permanent memories of public events that we all witness. The minute Donald Trump told the mob to head for the Capitol, any public officials who hadn’t been paying attention should have woken up. Is it really possible that the mob moved faster than police forces could have, if they had been deployed promptly?

One bit of video has stayed with me: an African American Capitol policeman in a narrow marble interior staircase, calling for help with one hand while trying to hold off terrorists with a baton in the other. They backed him up the stairs, and finally he had to retreat. They were in charge. I do not blame the individual for this, but the huge system of which he is part.

whose job is itSome will say that the law enforcement system was merely incompetent, or couldn’t believe that anybody would hurt our Capitol (criminally naïve), or were overly focused on the Inauguration. NPR reported that Mayor Bowser didn’t want to overdo the show of force because of the nightmares with Black Lives Matter protests. If that is correctly reported, surely someone else could have brought her to her senses. We have to conclude that the far right has enablers everywhere in government, even within the U.S. Capitol. Otherwise, this breach could never have taken place.

4. The smashing of press equipment and the necessity to move the booth three times. At some point last evening, a CNN reporter said in a controlled but highly stressed voice that the press booth had been attacked and moved on three separate occasions. The terrorists insulted her and other reporters, and video shows a pile of cameras and other equipment. The free press is our second line of defense in a democracy.

How can I not think of Amsterdam under the Nazis? How Hitler was worshipped as a god, whose orders caused ordinary people to block out every other reality? How the police colluded with every aspect of the roundups and the Holocaust? How the free press was replaced by Nazi mouthpieces, and people only got real information underground? And most of all, I think of the period when good people like me hoped for the best as their country was taken away from them.

Let's step up

In the present moment, how can we ordinary citizens show our horror in a way that will deactivate these deluded followers of a would-be dictator? At the least, we need to press Congress and our new Administration for extensive prosecution and aggressive investigation of all the individuals and groups who fed this situation. And that includes the Republican Senators who had to be evacuated because of the recklessness they have unleashed. We also need to subscribe to independent journalist outlets (like The Guardian, The Washington Post, The New Yorker, The New York Times) so that they can afford to pay investigative reporters to expose stories like these. And we need to re-assess the maxim “It can’t happen here.” It just did.

Capitol

Protecting the Vote Where I Grew Up

I’ve spent much of the last few weeks virtually “with” voters in North Carolina.  Some call into a hotline, some need to fix invalidated absentee ballots, and some need training to help track those folks down.  The absentee ballots could well swing the close election, and they are usually easily “cured.”  The voters’ accents and voices take me right back to 1956, when my Canadian parents and I moved there from Dayton, Ohio, driving over the Smoky Mountains with my cocker spaniel, Honey, in the back seat with eight-year-old me.  

It didn’t take long for us to discover that we were living in a totally new environment that we didn’t understand at all.  Why were drinking fountains and rest rooms reserved only for whites or “colored”?  My mother’s bad back prevented her from doing the “heavy housework.”  When she went to the state employment office to look for help, they were outraged that she insisted on paying the minimum wage, four times what they recommended (one dollar an hour rather than a quarter).  It was assumed that any domestic help would, of course, be black and female.  My father, newly Assistant Director of the Duke Gardens, soon advocated successfully for the all-black workforce, both to improve wages and provide for basic literacy.  

Although we did meet some middle class black families, especially when my mother taught at the local college, the people who influenced me most were more typical of North Carolina’s population.  Mrs. Lily Stearns helped out at home and took care of me when my mother was working.  She offered so much that my own mother could not:  an even, steady presence; a tolerance for human foibles; and a necessarily flexible attitude about coping with whatever life dished out.  A highly intelligent and well educated woman, she should have had far more opportunities.  When Daddy and I took Mrs. Stearns home, we witnessed the unpaved city streets with outhouses behind the dilapidated housing “on the other side of the tracks”.  Even more importantly, I learned how people living in these conditions could have strength and dignity, how they could spread love and make the world brighter and better.  How they could reach out to a lonely little girl from the North and make her feel right at home.  

Every Saturday, Daddy took me to work with him for the morning, and left me in the care of the foreman, Mr. Glasgow Bowie and his crew.  My favorites were Mr. Glasgow himself, James Garner and Hardy Saunders, all big, ample men who loved children.  It pains me that I have no photographs of them, but let this image of their work represent them.  

Duke Gardens in spring

Sarah P. Duke Gardens in Spring

They let me explore under the hemlocks or behind the big rhododendron bushes all I wanted, as long as I checked in from time to time.  When I brought them some marvel like a pine cone, they treated it like a treasure. I heard them singing spirituals as they worked:  “Old Father Abraham setting in his chair, I’se a-coming soon!”  “Nobody knows the trouble I’ve seen.”  They echoed Paul Robeson who was often playing in our home.  The fact that my father left me in their charge week after week made a bond between him and them that time and distance never severed.  He was in touch with them until the end of their lives, briefer even than his own.

Now, decades later and in a new century, I hear their voices once more.  These callers are the descendants of the generation of Mr. Glasgow and his crew, of Mrs. Stearns.  Of course I am not positive of which callers are black, but most probably are, just from the way they talk.  An elderly woman who is absolutely determined to vote writes down the address of her polling place one letter at a time.  A gentleman who could be her son reproves me when I suggest early voting:  “I’ve always voted on November the Third.”  A young fellow in the next generation is right on it when I tell him his ballot won’t be counted unless he fixes it.  He’s got the website and he is ready to go!  

As I monitor the questions on the hotline, I shudder at the past and present obvious voter suppression:  the friendly Trump supporter with the hunting knife, the right wing radio blasted loud enough to hear inside the polling place, the woman who is told she can’t vote early to “cure” her absentee ballot (of course she can!).  I saw how some of my white classmates treated the people I knew and had come to love, and who loved me.  Nothing I hear on the phone surprises me.  

Elevating such issues so they can be dealt with is fulfilling, but even answering the most mundane question brings me joy.  I love hearing the voices of the people who gave me so much, and I hope my parents are watching me.  

Anne Frank’s Amsterdam? Or Theirs?

A conversation can bring a whole world back to life. Thanks to technology, two eyewitnesses and a writer recently gathered to re-examine what many would call Anne Frank’s Amsterdam.  Our intention was to amplify the view of the city that emerges from the Diary, through our three books and the experiences and research that underlay themWe represented three decades of human life: scholar and activist Laureen Nussbaum in her nineties, trauma therapist and speaker Hendrika de Vries in her eighties, and I, an author, activist and speaker in my seventies.  We spanned the country, in Seattle, Santa Barbara, and Vermont.  As we talked, the distinctions among us became clearer as well as the commonalities.  

On July 6, 1942, the Franks walked across the city from the newly built Amsterdam Zuid to their hiding place in the Jordaan.  Near their original home, teenager Laureen Nussbaum and her family were their neighbors and friends, but knew only that the Franks had disappeared as many people did in those days.  Both families had immigrated from Frankfurt, where they belonged to the same congregation, and helped found a new one in Amsterdam. 

Laureen (then Hannelore Klein) and her family anxiously awaited the outcome of their legal case to secure an exemption from deportation.  They had to prove with credible but false documentation that one grandmother was not Jewish. Their lawyer assured them that they had a good chance, and he was proved right when the German official Hans Calmeyer ruled in their favor.  Calmeyer is the main subject of Laureen’s 2019 book, Shedding Our Stars:  The Story of Hans Calmeyer and How He Saved Thousands of Families Like Mine, which also tells her own family story.

On the other side of the city, near the Franks’ hiding place, lived little Hendrika de Vries, just four years old, whose secure “only child” world had changed on the way to visit her Jewish “uncles.”  Hendrika saw a little girl just like her being dragged to a truck while she screamed for the rag doll she’d dropped in the street.  Soon, Hendrika’s father would be locked away in a German labor camp as a prisoner of war, and the young child and her mother would be left to cope on their own.  They would hide a Jewish teenager known only as Nel, who became an older sister to the lonely child – until Nel was captured and taken away.  Hendrika’s 2019 memoir shows a little girl awakening to the perils of hatred and the possibilities of human goodness, When the Toy Dog Became a Wolf and the Moon Broke Curfew.

A few weeks after the Franks went into hiding, my parents were married on July 25, 1942, in Sussex, New Brunswick, Canada.  The joy on their photographed faces still radiates almost eighty years later.  My father had flat feet, so he was exempt from the draft, and Amsterdam must have seemed far away.  I was their only child, born in 1948.  Although I visited the city as a tourist in 1982 and was charmed by it, the Holocaust in the Netherlands didn’t grip me until a long stay in 2001, and it still hasn’t let me go.  For thirteen years, I was absorbed in researching and writing An Address in Amsterdam, the story of a young Jewish woman who joins the resistance, and I have been speaking widely on related topics ever since:  “Anne Frank’s Neighbors:  What Did They Do?” and “Remember and Resist:  Learning from the Dutch.”

 

As Laureen and Hendrika recounted their experiences, the world they described was intimately familiar to me, although I hadn’t lived it literally, only in a construct of the mind, imagination and heart.  Empathy can only take us so far.  Then respect must cause us to pull back and bow to the reality of the people who were actually there, and hear what they suffered, enjoyed and experienced.  It was not, in the end, I whose Jewish uncles disappeared, nor I who trekked far into the countryside in the desperate search for food.  I wanted to learn directly from these two women what they had lived through and what had kept them going, and how they were coping in the complex world we are living in now.  

Listening to them speak, I heard a communion between them, divided as they were by age (15 and 4), and classification by the state (daughter of a “mixed marriage”, and a Gentile).  Even so, their experiences converged:  the disappearances of people they loved, the complexities of helping people in hiding, the joyous times despite all the awful ones, eating tulip bulbs during the Hunger Winter.  Then there were the contrasts between them.  On the one hand, the once happy little female household of Nel, Hendrika and her brave mother was rent asunder when they were betrayed.  On the other hand, imagine the immense relief of Laureen’s family when Calmeyer ruled in their favor, and the girls could shed their stars and return to “regular” school from the Jewish school they had been forced to attend. 

 

Looking from one woman to the other, and reading the full transcript of our conversation again and again as I edited it, I reflected on the two lives they brought to light.  Even in the ten or so years I’ve known her, Laureen has done so much for the world, traveling even in her nineties to Germany to help launch the 2019 version of Anne Frank’s Diary, speaking tirelessly to distinguished audiences and schoolchildren, committing herself to the historical accuracy and literary quality of my book and who knows how many others.  In her late eighties, she didn’t take no for an answer from the publishing world when her translated biography of Calmeyer didn’t find a home.  Instead, she rewove the story to include her personal experience as well as his, found a new publisher, and promoted the book.  And yet Laureen feels that she hasn’t done enough, like Calmeyer who wrote “Too little!  Too little!” of his own efforts.  Perhaps that is the fate of everyone who was relatively free and of at least teen age during the Holocaust.  

Laureen Nussbaum sitting at table
Prof. Laureen Nussbaum at Portland State University

In contrast, Hendrika was a child, and therefore exempt from the feeling that she should have done more at the time.  Despite the shattering of her childhood world, she had an admirable model in her mother, whose seven (!) older brothers had made sure she could box and take care of herself.  She also had the broadest view of our collective investment in each other’s freedom, which Hendrika absorbed.  When her mother was challenged for risking the life of her own child to save another, the response was ““No child is safe unless all children are safe.”  Because Hendrika suffered trauma after trauma, she had to find her own path as an adult through analysis and depth psychology, and then turned back to show others the way.  After seeing the neo-Nazis in Charlottesville, she knew she had to tell her own story and speak up against hatred. 

Portrait of Hendrika de Vries
Hendrika de Vries

Listening to these two remarkable women, I felt somewhat as Hendrika describes feeling as an only child when Nel entered her life:  as though I’d been given older sisters to guide me, older sisters who had lived what I merely researched.  Laureen has been a priceless friend and resource for years.  It fell to me to bring her and Hendrika together, and to help show how their two books make a new map of Amsterdam – as experienced by a determined Jewish teenager with an exemption from deportation, and by a Gentile little girl who had lost her daddy but gained a Jewish older sister, at least for a while.  

When our interview is published, I’ll put the link here.  

A Different Remembrance Day 2020

This time, I’d like to send a more personal letter than usual, in keeping with the contemplative nature of “sheltering in place.”  As one of my friends wrote me, “We are all given this once in a lifetime opportunity to reassess how we use our time on earth.”  I miss meeting people in person to reflect on the complexities of Amsterdam in 1940-45, and what we can learn from those times, especially the resistance.  Thank you for being one of the people who has shared that experience with me and made it possible.

May 4 is particularly a time of reflection, because it is the Day of Remembrance in the Netherlands.  It is meant to honor everyone who died in World War II, including particularly the 104,000 Jewish people and others who were murdered in the Holocaust.  I’ve been to many deeply moving commemorations over the years:  an art ritual in a park surrounded by streets once full of Jewish people (http://maryfillmore.com/tag/art-ritual/), a neighborhood event beside a small memorial to local citizens who were randomly executed, even the huge crowd with the Queen (at that time, now the King) at Dam Square.  Here is the scene as it was this year:

 

What has always affected me most is the two minutes of silence at eight o’clock in the evening, still broad daylight in Amsterdam with its gardens burgeoning with late tulips, the canals lined with elms in their new-leafed finery.  The trams, the bicycles, the cars, even the people come to a halt.  Even the legendarily prompt Dutch trains stop running.  My dearest friend Eliane Vogel Polsky, herself hidden in plain sight as a Jewish teenager, was once traveling from Brussels to Amsterdam to visit us on May 4.  The conductor announced the two minutes of silence and asked people’s cooperation.  To Eliane’s astonishment, even the teenagers playing cards at a nearby table stopped and sat quietly.  She was in tears when she told us about it.  To her, it was an affirmation that the great suffering of that time had not been forgotten.

“These are little people. They can only kill us.” Rabbi Frank


Now that she, my best friend, is gone, I feel that I must use those two minutes of silence well.  My years of study of the Holocaust and resistance gave me both a darker view of what people are capable of, and a vision of how, even in the most terrible times and under extreme pressures, human generosity and even valor break through.  Think of Rabbi Frank who told his imprisoned and terrified congregants, “These are little people.  They can only kill us.”  Or of the ten Boom family and so many others like them, hiding their neighbors in peril of their own lives.  When the Nazis threatened Corrie’s father with execution, he replied “It would be an honor to give my life for God’s ancient people.”

Reorienting Ourselves
What can we do to be worthy inheritors of those we remember on May 4?  We are living in a moment when the noble thing to do is stay home, wash our hands, wear a mask when we go out, and support others at a distance.  It doesn’t sound like much beside the Dutch Resistance, does it?  And yet it is what our times call for – that, and reorientation from our busy-busy, overconsuming lives that are literally costing us the earth.  That difficult task, and resisting the political insanity of our times, is worthy of our gifts.  At the most intimate level, I am acutely aware that these days may give me my last chance to be kind to a neighbor I don’t especially enjoy, to tell and show the people I love how important they are to me, and particularly to leave an impression in the hearts of the children who might not know me when they are older.  But I also must be thinking in the most long term sense, how to extend the reprieve we have given the earth by not driving and extracting and smashing, so that both humans and all the other creatures can flourish differently.  What would that reprieve mean for me, as an individual, for my country and the world?  That’s where I need the courage the Dutch resisters had. 

This year, a double hush falls at this moment: the calm the pandemic has demanded of us, and the remembrance the dead deserve from us.  Each of us can find the way toward right action at this time.  Will we have shone light for others?  Can we find ways, as so many people in hiding (Jewish and Gentile) did, to make a life of purpose and dignity in confinement?  Can we address the desperation of those who need food and rent and succor?  So much is at stake.  We are in the kind of predicament that can topple even strong democracies. 

Let’s find strength in ourselves, in the dead, and in each other.  Somehow, as they did, we will find a path.  Thanks for staying in touch with me and be well,

Mary

P.S.  The New York Times had a wonderful article recently about bringing Dutch wartime diaries out of the archives where they were buried thanks to volunteers:  https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/04/15/arts/dutch-war-diaries.html

I reacted to it by writing about “Listening to Dutch Ghosts as We Shelter in Place” below, at http://maryfillmore.com/listening-to-dutch-ghosts-as-we-shelter-in-place/.

Listening to Dutch Ghosts as We “Shelter in Place”

Photo of Anne Frank and her Diary
Anne Frank and her Diary

For the last several weeks, I’ve been asking myself what people in Amsterdam 1940-45 would say to us now, in the time of coronavirus.  Yesterday, the New York Times published “The Lost Diaries of War,” with the subtitle “Volunteers are helping forgotten Dutch diarists of WWII to speak at last. Their voices, filled with anxiety, isolation and uncertainty, resonate powerfully today.”  So the ghosts are speaking directly to us.  It was so synchronistic that I wanted to share my thoughts with you immediately.

Even though An Address in Amsterdam was published more than three years ago, and I finished writing it a year before that, its characters still speak to me every day.  For the first few years, they pushed me to be even more of an activist, to speak out about the perils of our times.  More than anything, they told me, “Act now, before it’s too late. In this time of plague, I’ve again been looking to those ghosts for guidance.  The resisters would probably counsel us to watch out for sleight of hand by those in power, to be aware of what they can do with one hand while our eyes are on the other.  I think particularly of the suspension of environmental regulations and laws.

Learning from the People who Hid

But it’s not just the resisters who have something to offer us now.  When I first began learning about 1940-45 in Amsterdam, I was shocked by a photo of bathing beauties stretched out langorously on lounge chairs – while in hiding from the Nazis.  They were smiling and laughing, fashionably exposing their perhaps too thin figures.  How could they possibly be enjoying themselves, I wondered; but they clearly were.  Another picture showed two little kids, Jansje and Benjamin Pais, grinning and wearing their best clothes, perhaps for the first day of school.  Someone had sewn the Stars of David on, not pinned them which was prohibited. (Jewish people were actually charged for the stars, so this increased the profits.)

Photo of two children smiling with Stars of David on their clothes
Jansje and Benjamin Pais, from the Jewish HIstorical Museum

The mystery of how these people could be happy in their appalling circumstances compelled me to dig more deeply into their collective stories.  The more I learned, the more grateful I was for the many privileges of my own place and time – my access to food, my freedom of movement, my ability to be in touch with people I love.  

In the time of coronavirus, I am again learning from them: to taste the sweets of the moment, whatever they may be.  To be sure love flows out of me and my house every day.  To notice every individual crocus and daffodil that breaks the soil in our garden, and everyone else’s.  To let no small desire on my partner’s part – for raisins, for calm, for Chopin – go unfulfilled.  To remember the people in detention and prison who are so much worse off than I am, and try to help them. To wash our hands as a sacrament, the way the Muslims do five times a day before their prayers.  With the children in my life, I try to remember that this is their childhood, right now.  It can never be replaced or deferred.  They must play and have all the joy they can.  Human creativity being what it is, they will find ways to make stories and sense even of the plague.  They are wondrous beings who can pull us adults into the moment.  

two children running outside having fun

Beyond Survival

I’m sure the bathing beauties tried to keep each other’s spirits up, using whatever materials were at hand.  If anyone faltered in security precautions or broke down, everyone would suffer or worse.  For us in our much easier situation, our first duty is maintaining our good health and good humor.  After reading many accounts of these circumstances as I researched An Address in Amsterdam, I did my best to re-create the life of the fictional Klein family in hiding.  They, and the real people whom they represent, had to occupy themselves in a way that upheld their sanity and their health.  Surviving until a better day was their first priority.  How did they live with the fear?  Not by saturating themselves with information, which was only available through their hosts.  

All they could usually do to make themselves safer was stay quiet, so they distracted themselves.  People who could read, read.  The artists drew, and musicians found ingenious ways to practice (like Rose Klein with her piano keyboard handmade of paper).  They played endless games.  Some, like Anne Frank or the diarists the Times reports on, found solace in writing. 

Anne Frank's Diary showing the outside, which is red plaid
Anne Frank’s Diary, from the Anne Frank House

People had conversations which probably would never have happened in normal circumstances.  And they dealt with endless moments of terror when someone stepped the wrong way on a floorboard.  Writing the part of An Address in Amsterdam when Rachel and her family are hidden was even scarier than writing the earlier chapters when she was on the street facing the Nazis.  

The ghosts were living with far worse fear than we are, and a situation that seemed endless.  Every action we take these days is a kind of Russian roulette, especially in my age group.  But I find that the same things that helped the ghosts in their far more difficult predicament help me:  love, a belief in justice, an appreciation of beauty, and the sense of being connected to others.  Even years after I first met them in Amsterdam, the ghosts are still guiding me.  

It couldn’t happen there, either

The February 1941 Strike brought 300,000 Amsterdammers into the street to protest the first roundup of Jewish people, the only such strike in Western Europe. Every February 25, thousands still gather and lay flowers at the foot of the Dockworker, the statue who symbolizes this mass action. The strikers participated despite the presence of German soldiers and police throughout the city. For the Jewish people, it was a significant moment of affirmation by their fellow citizens.


  
Statue of symbolic figure of the February strike with flowers at his feet
The Dockworker Statue in Amsterdam on February 25

 

The Strike challenges progressive Americans. When the word spread that 425 Jewish men had been rounded up and shipped off, the Strike was organized almost overnight. What would it take to bring us into the streets in comparable numbers (almost 40% of the city in that case)? Children in cages? Turning away prospective refugees as the U.S. did in the 1930s when Jews were fleeing Hitler? Slashing food stamps to the bone? The slaughter of school children with assault weapons?

And yet, how much would a strike like Amsterdam’s really accomplish? Although it was a courageous gesture and lifted spirits for a few days, the February Strike sputtered out. The Germans were astonished that the other Dutch would stand up for their Jewish neighbors, so the ensuing crackdown was delayed – but vicious. Only a tiny sliver of people actually resisted from that time forward. Most hunkered down, shook their heads, complied, and tried to survive.

In reflecting on what such people “should” have done, it’s all too easy to make snap judgements and condemn those who were barely surviving on many levels. When the Nazi Occupation began, the Germans carefully started small in attacking the Jewish people and others whom they hated. Initially, the invaders simply turned the other way when local anti-Semites started beating Jewish people up and breaking windows. That set the tone for what was to follow, an air of permissiveness. Slowly but surely, the Nazi propaganda worked. Attacks intensified, depicting Jewish people as barely human, with ugly language to match.

Poster of Nazi propaganda against Jewish people
Poster for the Dutch version of “The Eternal Jew,” a Nazi propaganda film

Following the Strike, the other Dutch people were being conditioned not to look, not to notice, much as we are today. The reporting on family separation of refugee families, for example, is a rarity, so that the anguish of children placed with unknown foster families or in institutions is erased. The threats to Vermont’s migrant dairy workers are escalating, but only the workers themselves and close allies hear about it regularly. New prisons are called “detention centers” and are buried in rural areas where legal help is almost non-existent. Our country, 97% immigrants and refugees, is closing the door to asylum seekers. How quickly what is patently wrong becomes normalized.

The miracle in the 1940s is that a few Dutch people didn’t buy the Nazi propaganda. Their minds kept working after the Strike, and they resisted wherever they were, however they could. They transcribed illegal BBC broadcasts, they produced and distributed underground newspapers, they hid their Jewish neighbors or strangers, they forged identity cards and more, they cleaned hideaways for airmen, they smuggled Jewish children to the countryside and much more. They risked their lives and their peace of mind, and that of their families. Historians say about 25,000 people resisted, and it could be many more, but it still is far less than 1% of the population.

 

Woman with a group of children she tried to save from the Nazis
Miss Henriette Pimental in her child care center, which smuggled Jewish children to safety

Most Dutch people believed “It can’t happen here,” and tried to get on with normal life as much as possible. They believed the Germans wouldn’t dare go too far in their anti-Jewish program. The Netherlands had been the safest place in Europe for religious minorities since the Inquisition. Both Dutch Jews and Gentiles believed Hitler wouldn’t dare do in Amsterdam what he did in Berlin. Tragically, 75% of the Jewish people in the Netherlands were rounded up and murdered, 80% in Amsterdam. The Germans made rules about keeping the blinds closed during roundups. Toward the end, they came to the neighborhood of a resister and shot people at random, whether or not they were involved in any way. The poisonous atmosphere daunted people and twisted their thinking. Even when their neighbors were taken away under their noses, they did nothing. Some were the same people who roared into action for the February Strike.

What is happening to us, and what are we going to do about it?

 

Your First Visit to an ICE Detention Center

When I decided to visit an ICE detention center and meet some of the people who were held there, I didn’t expect to be afraid when the time came, but I was.  

A woman visiting a man in jail, they are talking over phones and touching each others hands through the glass. Credit: Concerned Visitors at CSP Solano in Vacaville, CA

Maybe it was the ICE detention center’s location down a narrow road surrounded by thick Florida Everglades vegetation.  Maybe it was all the security precautions at the gate, where my spouse and I were checked off a list and issued photo name badges.  It surely wasn’t the staff, who were almost invariably not just professional but welcoming.  Maybe it was being divested of almost everything material I usually keep safe and close – like the phone that connects me to everyone I love, my purse with the means of buying my way out of trouble.  Both were locked in the trunk.  All I was allowed to take inside was my driver’s license and the car key, and the car key had to be locked up once we got into the lobby.  We didn’t have the quarter for the locker, so the guard said “Just put it in there.  I’m right here so nobody’s going to take anything.”

Brrrrr….

Part of what scared me was the chill.  It was freezing and blowing, just as we hear it is for the children and adults we read about.  The lobby was spacious and bright, with windows all along one side.  It was immaculately clean.  The furnishings were relatively humane, with chairs in slightly curved groupings rather than straight lines.  I’ve been through more intimidating security at the airport.  But viscerally, it unsettled me.  I learned to walk up and down to stay a little warmer, and discovered a portrait of Trump with a self-satisfied smirk on his face.  It did not reassure me.  The Friends of Miami-Dade Detainees, who kindly arranged our visits, had done a great job of briefing us, so we knew what to expect at the ICE detention center.  But the dread I felt was deeper than all those rational reassurances.

Friends of Miami-Dade Detainees Picture taken at the first volunteer information session in September 2013 (Photo Credit- Rommy Torrico)

Even though we were accompanied by a friendly female guard when our names were called, I felt closed in when we came into a small anteroom where the door to the lobby behind us was locked, and the door to the corridor ahead of us was unlocked.  A long walk down that corridor, in single file.  Another locked door, another corridor, and then a row of badly lit booths stretched off to our left.  The guard showed me where to sit, opposite a guy in an orange uniform with earnest dark eyes.  Dirty glass sliced the space between us, and we each picked up an ancient black telephone receiver.  We each said our names.

All of a sudden, I relaxed.  Here was the man I’d been wanting to meet:  not a statistic, not a news headline, not a “detainee,” but another human being who wanted to talk with me as much as I wanted to talk with him.  Immediately, I warmed to him.  His face was uneasy but open as he taught me to say his name correctly at my request.  “I wish we’d met in other circumstances,” I said, “It would have been nice to just sit and have a cup of coffee together.  But I guess we can’t do that today.”  We both laughed ruefully.  Then he began talking, and more or less didn’t stop until the guard told us the hour was up.  I learned about what brought him to the U.S. as a child, what he faced in school, and how he “made a mistake” that brought him to the ICE detention center.  And I learned about his aspirations for the future, if he could just go home to the state where he was brought up.  

Our Surprising Conversations

Over the next three days, as I visited seven other English speakers, I spent most of my time waiting in the chilly lobby, and thinking about what I had heard.  Some stories were as terrible as I had feared.  I kept my composure, but seeing the tears of one man who didn’t have the money for a video call with his young child almost undid me.  Fortunately, thanks to the fundraising of the Friends of Miami-Dade Detainees, I could offer a solution for that.  A few men were almost crushed by fear and despair, and no wonder.  But the majority, to my astonishment, were still able to smile and engage with a stranger.  They were curious about the world (“Is the climate really changing?”) and engaged in reading (mostly self help books and literature), with some writing poems and memoirs.  Nearly all had goals and dreams for the future, and almost all had deep ties to family and friends to whom they longed to return from the ICE detention center.  

Why were they there?

Apart from the specifics of each person’s situation, these visits were a stark reminder for me about what it means to be a brown or black male in the United States, and how racism plays out in individual lives.  The meager choices.  The pressure to join any group that gives any coherence or protection.  The appeal of the escape of alcohol or other drugs.  The assumption that you are or will be a criminal.  The expectation that you will never go to college or make something of yourself.  Some had succumbed to the temptations or necessities (depending on one’s world view) presented by their status in a racist society.  Some had not; they were wrongfully convicted, or took plea deals for crimes they didn’t commit rather than risk a jury trial.  Others were there by accident:  a negligent or malicious family member had not done the proper paperwork at the proper time, for example.  One was too law-abiding, rounded up and sent to the ICE detention center when he reported for a check-in instead of disappearing as he could so easily have done.  Some were interested in me and my life; others just needed to talk.  

After my first visit, I can’t say that my queasiness about the whole situation went away, but I wasn’t afraid any more.  After all, I had a friend inside.  

Actions you and I can take:

Please donate to the Friends of Miami-Dade Detainees here. FOMDD uses the funds to provide phone cards so the people inside can talk to their families and friends, and to send a book of the person’s choice.  They also organize pro bono lawyers to help assess each person’s situation and find the appropriate longer term representation.

Locate your nearest ICE detention center or equivalent. Many people in immigration detention are held in local facilities, even hospitals.  Scroll down to “Active ICE Facilities” on this page

See if there is already a visitation program that you can hook up with here. 

If there isn’t, start one; here’s a complete guide to how you can proceed.  Any community group is entitled to ask. 

Don’t let the people in immigration detention disappear.  Think about them, talk about them, write to them, remind our politicians of them, and visit them.

Yes, You Can Publish Poetry after 60!

As a writer who began publishing poetry later in life, I was delighted to learn that Grey Hen Press was founded in England specifically to publish the work of older women in themed anthologies.  Most of the poets have already been published, and some of those are very well known and established poets. But many are are at the early stages of their poetic careers, or even being published for the the first time. I cackled my way through A Twist of Malice:  Uncomfortable Poems by Older Women, and have enjoyed both contributing to and reading Grey Hen’s books ever since.  Interviewing Joy Howard, the energetic visionary behind the Press, reminded me of how much one’s life can blossom after retirement – and how many others one can take along for the ride.  Do look at Grey Hen’s wonderful listings here.  Postage from England isn’t that expensive, and you’ll love the poetry.

Joy Howard in her garden in Kendal, Cumbria, England

An Interview with Joy Howard, Grey Hen Press

I had written a poem here and there throughout my life, but I didn’t really start until I came out when I was 40.  It was as if a tap was turned on, and I was given permission to pour out everything I’d held back.  I was published first in the 1980s by Lillian Mohin at Onlywomen Press and just kept writing.

When did you begin writing poetry yourself?

When I moved up North and began my 23 year relationship with Barbara Burford I also started a new and interesting job,and between that involving work life and relationship, the tap turned off again. 

How did Grey Hen begin?

After I retired in 2006, I had a second coming as a poet, and began writing prolifically again. When I began to look for ways to get my work published, I discovered that the poetry world had changed, depending much more on qualifications in creative writing, having a CV of magazine publications and competition awards.  At my age, I realised I wasn’t going to get all that overnight, and guessed there must be lots of other women like me, making a late start. So that’s how I got the idea for Grey Hen.

What kind of books do you publish?

I started by publishing a pamphlet, with my own and a couple of poet friends work – this was the first steep learning curve. Then I hit on the idea of themed anthologies rather than individual collections. The first title arrived in my head from I don’t quite know where –  A Twist of Malice:  Uncomfortable Poems by Older Women.I read extensively, found excellent poems that fitted the bill, contacted the poets, asked for recommendations. The book came out in 2008, It really resonated with women and sold extremely well. I was on my way. (Even after 12 years, that first book is still selling). The themed anthologies have proved to be a very successful format. Most of the ideas have been mine though sometimes suggestion from others have fired me up. For example, a poet who is a sailor thought the sea would be a wonderful theme, and Running Before the Wind was the result.   

My watchwords are ‘accessible, affordable, relevant’. I’ve not raised the prices even after all these years, yet I’ve managed to break even financially. I want the poems to be read, not sitting in unopened splendor in my storeroom.  .  

Joy and the Grey Hens reading

I like to do books that cross over audiences, so that for example the anthology about birds, No Space But Their Ownmight introduce birding to people who read poetry, and poetry to those who love birds.  

How has the Grey Hen community grown? The community of Grey Hens, as we sometimes call ourselves, has grown enormously, and now includes more than 180 poets. The network keeps expanding. In every anthology you’ll find both newcomers and a few really well known poets, who have been unfailingly generous.

The Grey Hens support the press and each other in many ways, introducing me to new writers, putting on readings, and making the press new friends. They tell me that they feel part of a community of poets.

What’s unique about Grey Hen?

Grey Hen uniquely publishes only older women, and specializes in themed anthologies. We’re also unlike other publishers in that we work with poets to create readings nationwide, so that they can read in their own regions, not just in London.  We’ve done close to 100 readings now, including in Amsterdam and Ireland as well as around the country, literally from Penzance to Wick. Grey Hen also makes a donation to a relevant organization whenever possible, as for example to the British Beekeepers Association from The Price of Goldpoems about the honey bee or to the Rainforest Foundation (Extraordinary Formssome wonders of the natural world).

Our imprint, Hen Run, produces occasional chapbooks for women who have listeners and a body of work, but are unlikely to find another publisher at this stage of life without a step up on the ladder, and for those It gives a CV boost and something material to take to readings. Many have gone on to establish themselves and become known to a wider audience. Hen Run also performs a service to women who already have a publishing history but want the chance to  work on a smaller and specific project. 

Thanks again to Joy for her splendid work for older women’s poetry, for a wonderful day when I was in the Lake District when I was there, and for chatting with me via Skype.

Up a steep path with Joy in 2018 when I visited the Lake District