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.

Ten Tips for Sanity in the Time of Trump

Until this week, I kept my sanity reasonably well.  The Women’s March right after the Inauguration helped a lot:  singing and chanting with so many energetic, like-minded people from all over the country.  Since then, here’s what has worked for me:

Sign which says Achieving Our Full Selves by Fully Embracing Each Other.
  • Take action.  From learning about the Dutch resistance, I know that even small things really help, and that there’s a job for everyone.  I do what I’m good at and care the most deeply about, with people I like and respect, at reasonable hours.  Some of this isn’t fun, but at least I know I’m not colluding with the other side through despair or inaction.  My partner and I dig deeper into our household budget, prioritizing organizations who are suing the Administration, and those who are providing legal aid to migrants.  I like writing those checks and I know they add up.
  • Play with little children.  It reminds me why all these issues matter so much, and that there is hope for the world as long as kids are being instilled with love, creativity and caring.  Let them lead the way, at least to some extent.  Many of them have such programmed lives.  And be sure to read books to them, no matter how young they are.  Babies love books.
  • Read or re-read good books, alternating fine literature and my favorite form of trash.  It will take you away, at least for the moment. I’ve read some fine books that will stay with me, most recently Louella Bryant’s Cowboy Code, the story of a young white girl in the South who transgresses the color line. For trash, my personal taste is overseas literary mysteries, like Donna Leon’s mouth-watering books set in Venice.  It’s a great place to be for an hour before sleep. 
  • Create some sanctuary from news and technology every day.  I struggle with this one.  I wake up wanting to know what happened the night before, and it’s easy to get ensnared on the internet before bed. I try to have a couple of clear hours before turning out the light, or my sleep really suffers.  And I start the day with a few hours of love, poetry, exercise, and a delicious breakfast before I face the whole world. 
Yummy breakfast
  • Eat well and in good company.  What a good time for us to savor the momentary pleasures that delicious food can provide!  I have always lit candles and done dinner “properly” when friends come over, but now the importance of those gatherings feels so much greater.  These bonds make it possible for us to care for the world as well as each other. 
  • Get out in nature, especially in this gorgeous season.  It’s amazing how much ten minutes’ walk can help me put things in perspective.  When I can observe something new or different, that makes it all even more worthwhile (a flower coming into bloom, a different shape of cloud).  I try for one longer walk every day, but if all I do is three little ones, it still adds up.  I’m not a morning person, but I do try to mark the sunset in some way every day, and to be aware of the moon.
  • Remind yourself of the rich and varied history of humanity, which has included equivalent disasters and worse.  Subscribing to Archeology Magazine has been a real treat for me.  It reminds me that other civilizations have gone through hell before.  If the world survived Caligula, it can survive this insanity.  (Or I try to think so!)
  • Listen to BBC Radio 4, or another foreign radio station of your choice.  It not only shifts the perspective on world events, but provides an enormous range of cultural programming.  Right now I’m savoring a podcast of Margaret Atwood’s latest book, The Testaments not cheerful, but very interesting, and that too helps me cope.
Forgers at work in Amsterdam under the Nazis
  • Learn about the people who have resisted under far, far more difficult circumstances than ours.  That’s what struck me as I researched An Address in Amsterdam, my novel about a young Jewish woman who joins the resistance.  Although my heroine is a fictional character (based on many real ones), she accompanies me every day.  When I feel tired or want to opt out of an action, she reminds me that I have to keep on keeping on. 
  •   Give yourself a break sometimes.  Turn it all off and do something that will predictably give you joy.  The I Ching speaks of the importance of relining the well.  Otherwise, it cannot give fresh water indefinitely.  Let yourself stop and smell the flowers without remembering that the planet is in danger for that moment. 

These strategies worked for me until this week, when the Air Force is sending two F-35 nuclear bombers to the Burlington, Vermont airport.  It’s two miles from my house.  People have been opposing it for eight years, for peace, environmental, economic, and health reasons.  I guess I’d better stop grousing and write to the Airport Commission.  Then I might just settle down with a book.

Dutch Railway Offers Reparations for Deportation

Westerbork train with flowers

Westerbork train track with flowers laid along it on Remembrance Day

Only 77 years (almost to the day) after the first Dutch train hauled people to the extermination and concentration camps, the Dutch Railway has agreed to pay reparations to 500 remaining Jewish, Roma and Sinti survivors and their widows/ers or children.  The railway will also seek ways to honor those who didn’t come back and left no one. The Dutch Railway (NS) allowed the Nazis to buy their services unless it compromised their principles (whatever that would have meant), and the unions followed suit.  They made about 2.5 million euros in today’s currency.

Reparations are not offered now because of a sudden change of heart – after all, Dutch Railway apologized in 2005, sixty years after the end of the war.  Rather, it is thanks to the intervention of Mr Salo Muller, a Holocaust survivor and physical therapist to the Ajax soccer team, who pushed for monetary compensation comparable to that of the French Railway.  Rather than pursue legal action, the Dutch Railway established a committee under the leadership of former Amsterdam Mayor Job Cohen, himself a Jewish hidden child.  

Mayor Job Cohen on bike

Mayor Job Cohen on bike

Their recommendation has just emerged, and they will be responsible for overseeing the disbursements. “It is not possible to name a reasonable and fitting amount of money that can compensate even a bit of the suffering of those involved,” Cohen said in a statement.  Each survivor who was transported will receive 15,000 euros ($17,000) each. Widows and widowers of victims are eligible to receive 7,500 euros ($8,500) and, if they are no longer alive, the surviving children of victims will receive 5,000 euros ($5,685).

What do we know about the role of the trains in the deportation?  Between midnight and three a.m., the Dutch Railway ran a special series of trains beginning in July 1942 from Amsterdam’s Centraal Station to a station near the Westerbork Transit Camp.  There was special provision for the train employees to be exempt from the curfew.  It’s important to remember that initially almost everyone believed that they were headed for labor camps, not their deaths.

Centraal Station Amsterdam

Centraal Station Amsterdam

The next train, however, was more sinister:  the classic cattle car strewn with filthy straw and occasionally a passenger carriage.  Once a week, on Tuesday, the train pulled out of the station (first nearby Hooghalen, then Westerbork itself once a spur had been added) with its load of victims, the number chalked on the side.  The process for deciding who would stay and go is barbaric, but not the responsibility of NS.  In the first six months (July 1942-January 1943), an astute medical orderly noticed that the car was always the same, and he created an inconspicuous hiding place where messages could be transmitted.  Moreover, he kept copies as well as transmitting the originals, and thanks to him we have an account of the conditions on the train.  One person wrote “When the door was shut, the smell was unbearable and the air oppressive; when the door was left open, there was a horrible draught. . . [overnight] two had died of cold and misery.  They were taken to the luggage section.”

last train from Westerbork

Last Train from Westerbork

The resistance fighter J.H. Scheps asked what the train employees felt when they heard the pleas and cries of their passengers:  “Don’t you understand what they are doing to these helpless Jews?  Don’t you know how they torture our Jewish comrades?  Have you bread and butter patriots never heard the voice of Rachel, she who mourns and will not be comforted for her children – the children you help to carry to their death?”  If only one could look back and find resistance to the deportations among the train management or workers.

From July 1942 until September 1944, ninety-eight trains rolled out on time.  Of the passengers, not a single one survived on 26 transports, and many others had one person alone.  Depending on which numbers you believe, the trains took away between 104,000 and 110,000 people from the Netherlands, and only 5,450 returned.

Westerbork monument representing lives lost

Westerbork monument representing lives lost

When, after the war, the Enquiry Commission confronted the Dutch Railway Board with its choices, the response was that the question of deportation had been raised, but no one had ever urged them to refuse cooperation.  Who could have done that?  The Board itself, the workers, the union leadership?  I hope that a person who reads this knows of that rare someone who did speak up, and will tell us about it.  And I hope someone else who is in a position to stop something they know is wrong will take this story as a warning.

What the Texas and Terezin Camps Have in Common

It chilled me to the bone when I heard Joel Rose on Morning Edition (June 27) report on his visit with other press reporters to the facility in Clint, Texas, a reaction to the appalling conditions reported by attorneys earlier in the week.  When Joel reported on how clean the facility was, with shelves of snacks, all I could think of was how the Nazis hoodwinked the International Red Cross at Terezin.  The IRC visit and report bolstered world confidence that things just couldn’t be that bad for the Jews in the camps, and made Hitler’s story credible.

Clint Texas Detention Center from above

Clint Texas Detention Center

 

Terezin from above

Terezin from above

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Border Patrol invited the press to Clint because of the horror stories that emerged when attorneys interviewed some of the more than 250 children in the facility.  They reported appalling conditions, then demanded court relief:  unsupervised children living in filth, hunger, no basic sanitary materials, sleeping on the floor.  A government attorney, Sarah Fabian, had earlier argued that beds, soap and toothbrushes were not necessary to provide safe and sanitary conditions for migrant children, which are required under an earlier court order.

Even after its director resigned, the Border Patrol had to fight back against all this bad publicity, and after a couple of days they opened the doors to the press—no cameras of course, and no access to the children.  Before NPR host Steve Inskeep put these remarks in context, here’s what reporter Joel Rose said:

“And what I saw is really totally different from the picture painted by these lawyers. The facility was clean. They did not let us talk to the kids, but they showed us the holding cells where more than 100 children are now staying. They showed us the pantry full of snacks – microwavable burritos and soup – and the supply room, where the agents keep toothbrushes and soap and clothes. And the Border Patrol says that these lawyers who visited the site last week did not see any of this, that they only interviewed the children in another room.”

Inskeep quickly reminded us of the lawyers’ testimony about actual conditions, and Rose interviewed Clara Long of Human Rights Watch, who said “You’re going to a facility that has been prepared for a tour. They’ve also moved out . . . children from the facility before you visited. And they didn’t give you access to speak directly with children so that they could tell you what was happening and what they had been through in detention.”  Here’s the full interview.

The Fox News View:  Just as Grim

By the way, the Fox News reporter present on the same tour reported that:

  • 117 children are there now, down from about 250 when the lawyers visited.  This means that about 133 have been shipped off elsewhere.  The peak, according to Fox, was 700 two months ago, in a facility designed to hold 105 adults.

    Children being removed from Clint Center

    Children being removed from Clint Center

  • The children are eating only oatmeal for breakfast, ramen noodles for lunch, and burritos for dinner.  Anyone who knows anything about nutrition can understand why they are hungry.  There is no kitchen on site.
  • To serve those 117 children, there were seven Port-a-Potties outside and military-style showers. The picture below is of such showers at Fort Lee.  The full Fox story is here.

Military style showers at Fort Lee

Military style showers at Fort Lee

Parallels with Terezin

Now let’s go back to Terezin.  In that case, it took months to prepare, not just a few days.  To their credit, Danish leaders insisted that they wanted to interview the Danes who were interred at Terezin.  Finally, after much stalling, the German authorities agreed, and they set about preparing for the June 1943 visit.  This photo shows children greeting the Red Cross:

Terezin children greeting Red Cross

Terezin children greeting Red Cross

Here are the similarities:

  • The camp was cleaned up and “beautified,” in this case with Jewish women sweeping up streets with hairbrushes, and planting flowers throughout.  At Clint, all they had time for was cleaning.  I wouldn’t have liked to be on duty those few nights.
  • 7,503 inmates were sent to Auschwitz to reduce overcrowding.  In Texas, they transferred about half the kids elsewhere.
  • Special attention was given to fool the Red Cross into thinking that food supplies were adequate.  A chilling testimony by survivor Eva Erben tells us that the children were told to go to a certain corner, where they would receive bread and butter and sardines, as opposed to the usual starvation fare. Then, when the camp commander came by with the Red Cross officials, they were to say “Oh, Uncle Rom, not bread and sardines again!”

Children at Terezin during Red Cross visit

Children at Terezin during Red Cross visit

Not content with this performance, the Nazis prepared a propaganda film to reinforce for the world what only a few had seen – then deported and murdered the director and cast.

What now?

The Red Cross bought it, and so did the world.  Whom will we believe now– the children speaking through their lawyers, who say they are hungry, who were visibly dirty, had no beds or care or education – or the Border Patrol, who has staged this “visit” just as unscrupulously as the Nazis did at Terezin?

Through the German Invader’s Lens:  Their Photos of Holland in 1940

German Soldier and Dutch woman

“Nach Holland: The 1940 Invasion of the Netherlands through German Eyes” at Amsterdam’s Resistance Museum is a completely new take on the unexpected invasion of the Netherlands.  Interestingly, ten percent of Germans had a camera in 1939, and many who invaded the Netherlands brought them along.  The exhibit shows 150 of their photos, a collage of images that range from the delightfully ironic to the somber.

At first, the tone is a kind of lark for boy scouts.  The Germans are smiling, things are going swimmingly, and some of the Dutch populace is seen as welcoming their new neighbors.  There are even photos of German and Dutch soldiers together.  But a different and mixed picture soon emerges.  We see pictures of Dutch POWs forced to bury German casualties, or men cowering in trenches.  A stream of civilians fleeing their homes clarifies the stakes.

Civilians fleeing German invaders

It begins to look like a real war.  One small bit of comedy is that the Germans handily captured the Rotterdam airport, only to discover that the earth there was too mucky to hold up their heavily laden aircraft, so they ended up landing on the nearby beach.

Arnhem during invasionWith foreknowledge, it was poignant to see photos of the children of Arnhem gathered as the Germans arrived, with one soldier smiling broadly.  How many of those kids would survive one of the bloodiest battles of the war, “the bridge too far” which left 17,000 troops and an uncounted number of civilians dead?

 

In some areas, the Dutch retreated quickly, but in others they fought very hard and held their ground. Among the most impressive of these achievements was holding the Afsluitdijk, a 20 mile long dam and causeway which was built to divide the North Sea and the Ijsselmeer – not in our time, but in the 1920s and early 30s.  Ironically, the soldiers who had successfully defended it had to hand it over to the Germans at the time of the overall capitulation.  It must have been a bitter pill.

Overall, it only took a few days for the armed struggle for the Netherlands to be over, from the first attacks on May 10, 1940, until the capitulation on May 14.  A sad fact is that the Germans said they would allow the Dutch up to a certain time to accept or reject an ultimatum.  If it was rejected, they would bomb the city of Rotterdam.  When the Dutch received the physical document, it was not properly signed, and was sent back.  By the time it was returned with a signature, the bombers were on the way – two and a half hours before the ultimatum was supposed to expire.  In only 15 minutes, 25,479 houses were reduced to rubble; 78,700 were homeless; and 850 civilians were dead.  And yet, after all that, a photo was taken with civilians and Germans together.  Soldiers and Dutch civilians in Rotterdam

“Now it begins,” I couldn’t help thinking, as I saw the photograph of the Germans entering Amsterdam.  How fortunate that no one alive then could foresee exactly how terrible the next five years would be – worst for the 80% of Jewish people who were rounded up and murdered, and unimaginably hard for everyone else.

Every time I approach the Verzetsmuseum, I am carried back to my early visits there in 2001.  A friend used to say, “You went in one door and came out another.”  While my obsession with the Holocaust and Resistance here has many sources, a crucial experience was realizing that 1940-45 wasn’t just a steamroller.  There were so many small actions both by the Nazis and by their opponents, and there was a dignity in resistance – even at its most “insignificant” – that I had never understood before.  I think of the woman who knitted together the fingers in the gloves she was forced to make for the German soldiers.  Walking through the Museum on my way to the temporary exhibit of German invaders’ photos that was my goal, I remembered so much.  Watching a film with my beloved Eliane Vogel Polsky, who was hidden in plain sight as a teenager, about a family with their happy children the night before deportation.  She couldn’t stand it, even though she’d tolerated so much else:  “We don’t have to see that.”  Hearing the sound of the underground presses and seeing the machines that were put together, then taken apart, which I’ve talked about so many times since to various audiences.

Listening to the recording of a woman responding to a request to hide in her house with a closed door:  “We don’t have room,” and its variations.  Learning about the 1944-45 Hunger Winter, and my complete shock that Amsterdam lost more than 2,000 people to starvation.  As is so often the case here, I felt as though I was walking over my own footsteps since 2001, a kind of archeology of my slowly growing understanding of this place and time, and how it relates all too vividly to our own.Resistance Museum Door

 

The First London Bus to the National Gallery

 

London BusLondon’s riches are so numerous that I decided to take the first bus in either direction and see where I ended up.  Because my walking is limited right now, I stay off the Tube with its endless corridors and stairways.  The bus holds many compensations, however.  First, there’s the novelty of the double decker, although for the moment I’m staying downstairs.  Then there are the other passengers, mostly older people like me who are often chatty, and mothers with children in buggies who often look exhausted but respond to anyone who plays peek-a-boo with their offspring.  In the evening, there’s even a free newspaper to read with the latest bad news about Brexit, the B-word which most of our friends here can’t bear to hear, and no wonder.  And that’s in addition to the joys of looking out at the pubs, the houses, the millions of little independent shops, and the gardens.

I hopped (sort of) onto Bus 88 headed for Camden Town, expecting that we would head north immediately on Horseferry Road.  We didn’t; the driver turned right, and soon we were in a traffic jam worthy of any city in the world, barely crawling.  Soon my elderly neighbors were muttering about the taxi drivers’ strike which was snarling up the whole of Parliament Square.  After half an hour or so, we made it to Lambeth Bridge, and had wonderful views of the Houses of Parliament as we crawled across.  So fraught was the traffic that we had to go all the way to London Bridge before crossing back – again with views to appreciate, so who’s complaining.  Our trip down the Strand proceeded in a stately fashion, and finally the driver told us the bus was quitting at Trafalgar Square, only a little over an hour from my point of departure.  But it did make my choice easy.

Only yesterday I’d regretted that we didn’t get to see any art on my father’s birthday, despite many other activities which evoked his spirit.  A block away was one of the great museums in the whole world, the National Gallery.  Call it fate, or providence, or quote Vonnegut:  “Peculiar travel suggestions are dancing lessons from God.”  For whatever reason, there I was, and soon I was passing through the delights of Trafalgar Square, the performers who seem to stand on air, the singers who could profit from professional instruction, and the masses of visitors like me.  I took a chance and came through the nearby group entrance rather than traipsing an additional block, and was punished for my sins by the din of masses of school children from all across Europe – French, Spanish, and other languages I’m too ignorant to recognize.  The lift was my deliverance, and I decided to take whatever came, much as I had with the bus.

The grandeur of those old galleries is amazing – the vast height of the ceilings, the number of arches, the gilt here and there, the ornamental woodwork, the silk wallpaper, even the stuffed leather benches and couches (could they be horsehair still?).  It feels fresh and cared for, not old and fusty as it easily might.  And the paintings!  I sat first in a room that was all Venice – Canaletto showing us the splendors of the most special day of the year there, with the Doge’s immense barge ready to be boarded and scads of smaller boats filling the waters; then the more everyday scenes which are in many ways just as beautiful.  Soon a delightful baby and her father sat with me, and we had a nice chat about his six-month sojourn here thanks to his wife’s job.  I told him about the Thames Walk, and thought what that would be like carrying a baby, and how it might shape their lives. He too traveled by bus, and liked the idea of the bus to anywhere.

Queen CharlotteNext I ran into Queen Charlotte as rendered by Sir Thomas Lawrence, the German princess who was unfortunate enough to be married to George III, a lovely woman in a wispy gown looking into the distance.  No wonder she seems sober, because he had just had his first attack of what was then called insanity.  The landscape in the background is of Eton, quintessentially English.  I remembered walking across the playing fields there on the Thames Path and seeing the view of Windsor Castle, where this poor lady must have lived.

 Turner-The-Fighting-TemeraireI jumped ahead to the nineteenth century, and drank in the Turners.  Even as a teenager, I loved the swirling mists of color in his paintings, and later began to know enough history to appreciate his depiction of the transitions of his time.  How sad to see a great old sailing ship tugged by an impatient steam-powered boat to be broken up in the shipyard for timber!  And it had been “The Fighting Temeraire” once upon a time, playing a key role in the Battle of Trafalgar.  But that was 1805, and the painting was made in 1839.  The ship was towed to Rotherhithe, just a mile or two from Gallery.  No wonder history feels so real here.

Ulysses deriding PolyphemuFortunately for me, a seat opened by a painting I didn’t remember, the spectacular “Ulysses Deriding Polyphemus”, with the Greek hero and his crew sailing away after blinding the cruel giant who ate some of their friends and would have consumed them all.  It seems like many paintings in one:  the dark mountains and the silhouette of the monster, the gloriously rising sun with the faint traces of Apollo and his chariot bringing the dawn, the splashes of gold on the sea, the incredibly complicated sky with its intimations of blue and clouds of all colors, and the prominent ship with translucent mermaids playing by the prow.

Just a quick break from this writing to say how contented I am at this moment – in a dear friend’s 1930s flat, lying on a couch with my sprained ankle up and iced, looking at William Morris wallpaper and a stuffed bookcase, with a stunning modern abstract painting in sight as well as a vase full of orange and gold roses and Peruvian lilies which match its hues to perfection.

Back to the National Gallery.  After drifting through the Cézannes, I found myself in front of a Monet I didn’t recognize.  Could I really have forgotten?  I thought I knew this collection reasonably well from my time living in London in the 80s.  It was spectacular, but it didn’t ring a bell.  Ah, donated in 2006, that would explain it!  Here is one of the most beautiful water lily paintings of all, seen as a reflection at sunset.  As with the Turner, the coloration is so complex, and one has to almost drown in the painting to decipher and appreciate it fully.  The glow of the sunset melts from the top of the painting to the bottom, where the blue is already fading away.  The wisps of grass in the foreground orient us a bit, then the floating water lilies, and the reflection of the weeping willows overhead.  As spectators, we construct the scene along with the artist, much as the great Dutch still lives with their reflections in pewter and glass.

Water Lilies, Setting Sun Monet

Of course, one could spend weeks in the National Gallery, but this painting seemed like exactly the right place to stop, much like a wonderful dessert at the end of a great meal.  It was the memory I wanted to have most clearly:  the artist in his garden painting at the height of his powers, showing my favorite time of day.

Amsterdam’s New Holocaust Museum in the Making

Amsterdam Holocaust Museum entranceAlthough the new Holocaust Museum is in a building which will be extensively renovated, even now it offers the visitor considerable insight. It’s well worth the visit along with the other sites in the Jewish Cultural Quarter. Across the street from the Schouwberg Theater which was the assembly point for deportation, the Museum is located in the school next door to the child care center where the kids were taken care of (a fine institution that did a humane and kind job). The head of the school cooperated with the resistance within the center to save 600 children by smuggling them out. So the building has a distinguished history which adds richness to the Museum site.

As you enter, a small room to your left beckons, with the stories of a dozen or so of the 17,000 children who were rounded up and murdered. Each has a small case of mementos and photos, and in some cases a supplementary video interview with a person who knew the child. While any of these stories would be more than worth telling, the one that touched me most was that of two cousins, one of whom survived, one not. The survivor, Liesje de Hond , was a three year old who worshipped her seven year old cousin “Deddie.” His actual name was David Zak, but he couldn’t pronounce it. His father was worried that he’d get lost between the two houses on his bicycle, so he had a metal identity card made fro Deddie to wear around his neck. Here they are together.Two lovely children together

Liesje was one of the lucky ones who was saved from the day care center. Deddie instead died at Sobibor, and a few years ago archeologists there found his metal identity tag. Although Liesje was invited to visit the camp with a Dutch delegation, they would not allow her to have the tag, or even to hold it for a moment. Instead, she has a replica which is on loan to the Museum – all that is left of her beloved cousin. “I think about it every day, a lot. I still miss him.”

In addition to the individual stories like these, the faces of more than 4,000 children appear in an ongoing slide show. Some are shining portraits like the above which make you cringe, while others are blurry images that are harder to relate to.Image of child

Even with all I know, it’s hard to take in the fact that each one of these children was deliberately murdered, taking away a whole world when they died. Just across the hall is a room with a huge wall covered with names from the Jewish Digital Monument, which are constantly changing. The encouraging part is that, in one corner, a box indicates “researcher looking for (name) from the Netherlands,” or Australia, or the U.S. or wherever. It does show that these 104,000 people who were murdered are not forgotten. They are still being looked for all these years later.

In the Museum courtyard where the children at the school must have played, three timelines are shown, one above the other: events in Europe, in the Netherlands, and right there in the neighborhood. Illustrated with photographs, the chronology helps make the connections – beginning with persecution in Germany and the influx into the Netherlands, and finishing with the Holocaust itself. The signature exhibit, The Persecution of the Jews in Photographs, is in a large gallery across the courtyard. Taken together, they are an accessible education for anyone who isn’t familiar with the Holocaust in the Netherlands and how it was carried out. Having studied the photos of this period in so many times and places, I was familiar with many of the images, but some gave new insight. For example, the curators collected all the recordings of the first roundup in the J.D. Meijerplain, a scene which I reconstructed in An Address in Amsterdam. But one of the few photos I’d never seen gave a new and dynamic sense of the brutality of that moment. First roundup violence

 

The way the men are almost crawling, the two soldiers hovering over them, the rifle butt and its proximity to the head of one man – you can almost smell the terrible danger. Or smoke that is to come. The calamity of it all came back to me again, full force. I was reminded that 427 men were rounded up that first day, sent to a Dutch camp (after being held at what is now the Lloyd Hotel), and then on to Mauthausen. Only two survived the war.

As I researched An Address in Amsterdam, one of the big surprises was that people – even and Nurses smilingespecially Jewish people – had fun and enjoyed themselves even at the worst of times. This photograph of a group of Jewish nurses shows their good humor, even under the Nazi re-named street sign (Jewish Street), and probably after the point where they were only allowed to work with patients who were co-religionists.

 

Similarly, these two naughty young women have blacked out the “not” in a “Jews not wanted” sign:Jews wanted

 

 

 

 

 

For the first time, I saw an image of someone I have admired ever since I read about him, Rabbi Philip Frank. Rabbi Phillip Frank executed 1943 in Bloemendaal as hostageThe night before he and a whole group of Jewish people were to be executed, some asked him for words of comfort in that appalling situation. His response as I recall was “These are little people. They can only kill us. They can never destroy what we believe in and what we represent.” They all died as hostages in the dunes at Bloemendaal in 1943. It’s one of anecdotes that stuck with me, and which I cite when people ask me how I could stand so much focus on the grimness of the Holocaust for those 13 years of research and writing.

 

On the other hand, I was chilled by the Museum’s photograph of the Card Catalogue of the Jewish Council, which was used to make the roundups possible. The employees we see in this photograph were almost surely murdered after May 1943 when the Germans revoked the exemptions from deportation for 7,000 of the Council’s 14,000 exemptions. One of the scenes that was purged from An Address in the effort to make the length more manageable was Rachel’s encounter with a former neighbor who has gone to work for the Council in this very department. In the scene I wrote, she’s become a supervisor, has a brand new suit and looks and sounds better than ever. She even encourages Rachel to apply for a job so she’d be safer. This photograph shows what would have been her workplace.

Card Catalog Jewish Council

 

This photograph of six week old Henriette van der Hal a few minutes before she was taken into hiding separately from her parents has a far, far happier ending than most. They were actually reunited after the war (although many such reunions were far from smooth, especially when an infant had formed a bond with the host family and vice versa.)

Farewell photo Henriette van der Hal, five minutes before going into hiding at age six weeks Oct 1942

 

In terms of my own work, the following photograph is the one which will push me the hardest. It shows two cups of tea on the nearby windowsill, as if you and I had just finished drinking it together. Below us is a group of our Jewish neighbors from the Lekstraat in Amsterdam who have been forced out of their homes, and are about to be deported. Other Gentile people like us are sitting in their window opposite, just watching, as we are just watching. If I were writing another book, this could be the cover.’

Bystanders with cups of tea on windowsill Lekstraat

In a separate space in the Museum basement, you’ll find a project in honor of the 80th anniversary of Amsterdam’s First Montessori School which was instituted by Dutch American artist Willem Volkersz in 2016. He wanted to commemorate the lives of the 182 graduates who did not survive the war, 179 of whom were Jewish and three of whom were resistance workers. The result is a wooden suitcase for each person, with their name, birth year, and death year and place. When the suitcases arrived in Amsterdam, they went to the school, not the museum, and current students took responsibility for walking them to their new home together. When they arrived, the students decided how to stack and order the suitcases around a neon sculpture of a single person which is also part of the exhibit. Now, other schools are invited to come and do the same, and to research the individuals using the Digital Monument. It’s a simple idea but it was affecting to experience it, especially the film of the kids walking the suitcases by the Dockworker.

Overall, the Museum is full of interest and insight, and it does find the balance between the horrifying and the inspiring – or perhaps more accurately, it throws a lot of both at you, and somehow you have to make your peace with it. It will be fascinating to see how they develop the space into more exhibits.

Chim: the Polish Jewish Photojournalist Who Made All Children His

Amsterdam’s Jewish Historical Museum has mounted a brilliant exhibit about “Chim,” or David Seymour as he was later known. He was an early photojournalists and founder of Magnum, a man who suffered the torments of his century and circumstances, and made the suffering of others, especially children, real to the comfortable. Born Jewish in Poland in 1911, he studied science at the Sorbonne and began taking pictures more or less by accident. His depictions of the Spanish Civil War are riveting, including and especially his portrait of Dolores Ibarruri, La Pasionaria, one of the founders and leaders of Spain’s communist party who famously declared “They shall not pass,” a phrase we still hear at demonstrations today.

Because of the Nazi threat, Chim left Paris in 1939 with a shipload of Spanish refugees on their way to Mexico. His photo of a refugee woman writing a letter on top of her suitcase is as haunting as that of a little girl with her two dolls, her face a study in insecurity. Chim joined the U.S. Army and was stationed in England to decipher aerial photos for the duration of the war, but his great moment came afterward. The newly formed UNESCO commissioned him to do a series on “Children of Europe,” which at that time included 12 million war orphans. In six months, Chim captured classic image after classic image. There’s an extra poignancy to them because everyone in his family in Poland was rounded up and murdered, and because he never had children of his own. This didn’t stop him from “adopting” many along the way, often staying in touch for years. So the “Children of Europe” literally became his family. He moved from that project to document the early years of Israel as well as doing some portrait photography, but was killed in 1956 by Egyptian machine gun fire four days after the Suez Crisis was supposedly resolved.

As we toured the exhibit, I recognized some photographs I remembered from my childhood reading of “The Family of Man”. I pored over it often, and asked my parents to explain specific images to me. The book collected the photos in the 1955 exhibit at MOMA, which aimed to show the commonality of all human beings despite our obvious and apparent differences – showing us at play, in marriage and death, at work, and so on, with quotations from all around the world. Some are still with me: “She is the tree of life to them.” “If I did not work, these worlds would perish.” “Beauty before me, beauty behind me, beauty all around me.” And so are some of the images – including one that Chim took of an old man making the letter A. My mother spent a long time explaining to me that some people are illiterate, and that it is never, never too late to learn something new. In the exhibit, I also recognized a photo of a vibrant young woman dressed in white playing the violin and leading a line of similarly attired toddlers who are hanging on to each other. There is a gaiety to it that belies the fact that they were victims of war being fed by a charity. Again and again, Chim reaffirms the human spirit.

A First Visit Back to Amsterdam’s Dockworker


As soon as I arrived in Amsterdam, I wanted to pay my respects to the Dockworker, the symbolic figure of the February Strike, the only general strike in Western Europe to protest the first roundup of Jewish people. I was sad not to get here a week earlier for the commemoration on February 25, but the flowers laid at that time were still there. As impressive as the big official wreaths are, personally I am always most moved by the little bunches of tulips laid right by his feet. And you wonder who has brought each one, and exactly why – because of a grandparent, someone who knew someone, a friend? Because of the kind of connection I have, which is not genetic or even circumstantial, but something else? I was so glad to go and stand by the Dockworker again. It is a ritual that I must complete every time I’m here, a touchstone. Attending the commemoration the first time gripped me emotionally in a way that has never let me go. I know so much more than I did that day in 2001, and feel so much more sorrow now that I understand more of the extent of the Holocaust here and how it devastated the city. I know that only a small percentage of the 300,000 people who went on strike that day actually engaged in further resistance. But I still honor them for that day. The strikers push and prod me to do the right thing in my own time, and I feel their presence wherever I am, especially at this time of year.  If you’d like to know more about the Strike, it’s here.

An Audacious Singer at Amsterdam’s Most Eccentric Museum

What told singer Mattanja van den Bos, a mere mortal who can’t be more than thirty years old if that, that she could attempt to sing Schubert’s great last work, the Winter Songs? It’s usually done by a baritone, especially given that it is a desolate series about a lost female love and wandering around in the cold. People make whole careers out of the piano accompaniment alone. But van den Bos decided she could do both, and how right she was! She strode out in a hiker’s cap carrying a heavy wooden staff, explained her intentions in Dutch, put down her paraphernalia and went to work on the Winter Songs. Apart from singing and playing simultaneously, she even turned the pages herself. It was a tour de force. Every single song – and there is a wide variety, from determined striding to heartbreaking self-scourging and beyond – was rendered with such feeling, but never too much. I learned later that this was Schubert’s very last work, composed when he was dying of syphilis. Editing it was his final task. Cheerful, no, but it did take us into the depths of a certain kind of winter, and in such company! If you’d like to have a taste of just how superb it was, here you are.

The concert was held a venue that to me has always been some quintessence of Amsterdam – the Pianola Museum in the Jordaan. I had known only of the classic “player piano” and thought of it as a somewhat honky-tonk instrument – but in fact they were also used for recording performances, particularly of women performers and composers whose names are generally lost to us now. The Museum is packed with treasures: not only the instruments themselves but also 30,000 long paper rolls of recordings in their cardboard cases. It’s an Amsterdam institution which is kept alive by a tenacious group of obsessed volunteers. Your first stop after the ticket booth is a tiny, dark wood bar, with the elegant performance space beyond. Of course you are welcome to take in your glass of wine or coffee. Your first impression is of a shadowy, rich space with a high red velvet curtain portioning off part of the space and riches all around you in the form of display cases and instruments at different levels. The footprint of the room is probably only about 15 x 35, but it is a full storey and a half high, with the upper reaches accessible by a winding staircase. Up there are the thousands of paper rolls in specially made cabinets. Don’t miss it if you come to Amsterdam!

Rounding up Children, Then and Now

Marian Pritchard with Erica Polak, a Jewish baby she was hiding, US HMMDuring my 13 years researching and writing An Address in Amsterdam, I often tried to imagine how I would have felt as a Gentile as the Nazis rounded up my Jewish neighbors – especially the children.

We know of at least one young woman, Marian Pritchard, who just couldn’t bear it when she saw Nazis storming a home for Jewish children and tossing them into trucks.  Although she was only 19, Pritchard became a staunch resistance worker who kidnapped, stole, lied, deceived and even killed by the end of the war, protecting 150 Jewish lives in the process.  Here she is in 1944 with Erika Pritchard, one of the Jewish babies she hid (photo from the US Holocaust Memorial Museum).

Far more people looked away from the roundups, or walked past the groups being marched through the city, or wished the war was over already.  Their indifference and collusion were a factor in the mass murder of 80% of Amsterdam’s Jewish population of 75,000.

Now, when I see stories about the children we are incarcerating at the border, I understand the position of the Dutch in 1940-45 so much better.  Something terrible is happening in my country, and I have a share of responsibility for it – more than the Dutch did, because they were occupied by a foreign power.  In this case, my money is paying for it.  My elected officials are allowing inhumane policies unless they are out front and center opposing and organizing against it.  How should I respond when I see photographs of young kids sleeping under mylar blankets and nothing else?  “Basic child welfare standards do not apply,” according to the Huffington Post.

Children in cages in U.S. custody

File photo provided by U.S. Customs and Border Protection’s Rio Grande Valley Sector via AP

I have read that no one is allowed to touch or comfort them.  Hundreds have been separated from everyone they love, and many have little hope of reunification.  Toddlers are taken into court hearings with representation that is a complete charade. In fact, 12,800 children were in custody in September 2018.  Two have actually died under our roof, 8-year-old Felipe Gómez Alonzo and 7-year-old Jakelin Caal Maquin.

The prison (called a “tent city”) in Tornillo, Texas has been releasing some children for the last few weeks, and is slated to close – but this is no guarantee that the situation is better.  According to WLRN in Miami, “With the recent releases of children, migrant advocates are cautiously hopeful. But they question why more of the 12,400 children who remain in the HHS shelter system have not been released. And they wonder why the government is closing Tornillo, but expanding another unlicensed emergency shelter in South Florida?”

Immigrant children now housed in a tent encampment under the new “zero tolerance” policy by the Trump administration are shown walking in single file at the facility near the Mexican border in Tornillo, Texas, U.S. June 19, 2018. REUTERS/Mike Blake

It’s so easy to feel sickened by all this and turn away, to agree with those who say “It’s just too depressing” or “I can’t stand it, so I try not to think about it.”  Those are understandable reactions.  But they don’t help the kids.  How can we take personal responsibility to stop the cruelty we are engaging in as a nation?

Maintain the pressure on our Senators and Representatives.  Praise those who are taking action, such as California Rep. Ted Lieu (D), and those who are starting investigations in the House of Representatives.  If your Congresspeople are not among those who are leading the charge, goad them until they do, or ensure that they are hearing the full range of their constituents’ views.

Write or speak directly to those who perpetrate these crimes against humanity – the President, Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen, and Commissioner of U.S. Customs and Border Protection Kevin K. McAleenan.  Write them, but also call their staffs.  These people are paid to listen to you – except right now they aren’t, because of the government shut down.  They’ll be back one day.

Get together with others to take creative action to protest and resist.  Link up with the peace and justice organizations in your community to see what’s possible as a group.  Depending on where you are, children and adults are being held in multiple locations.  Just as in Amsterdam under the Nazis, the invisibility of these prisons makes it possible for the outrages to continue.

People protest against U.S. immigration policies on the American side, right, of the Mexico-America border near Tijuana on Dec. 10, 2018. RNS photo by Jair Cabrera Torres

People protest against U.S. immigration policies on the American side, right, of the Mexico-America border near Tijuana on Dec. 10, 2018. RNS photo by Jair Cabrera Torres

Support the organizations which are providing humanitarian and legal aid to these persecuted people, both adults and children.  No one will help them but you and me.  Many groups are worthy, but for whatever it’s worth these are my choices:

Keep the stories alive.  Pass them along.  Don’t let these children be forgotten – or their parents.   Talk about them at home and in your places of worship, write and post about them on your social media.  Tell your kids and grandkids what is going on.  Get them involved in trying to communicate why their country shouldn’t treat anybody this way, much less another child.  If we involve children now, maybe we can face them when they grow up.