Category Archives: Parallels to Today

Remembering Resistance and Beyond

On this Holocaust Remembrance Day, I think of the hundreds of people of all ages whose photos I saw in the temporary National Holocaust Museum in Amsterdam (under development now). Here is a group of them celebrating Passover in hiding in Zwolle, which in itself was a form of resistance.

Passover in hiding

Some Dutch Jewish people lived through the war, but most – statistically 80% in Amsterdam, or 75% in the Netherlands as a whole — were mass murdered.

Only when I was in my fifties did I realize that many of them were rounded up in July 1942, the month when my parents were married in the small farming town of Sussex, New Brunswick on a sunny afternoon. The month that was so happy for my parents was among the worst for Jewish Amsterdam. The deportations were at their height. The trams were commandeered on six July nights between midnight and 2:00 or 3:00 a.m., operated by the regular crew (who were excused from curfew on these nights only).

Photographer: Charles Bönnekamp, Member of the Resistance.

Their job was to deliver Jewish people to Centraal Station so they could be transported to the Westerbork Transit Camp, and on to what many still believed were “work camps” from there. On only three nights, 962 people were sent to Westerbork – fewer than the Germans had demanded because the Jewish Council struck some lucky names off the list, and others failed to report. On July 31, SS-ObergruppenführerHanns Rauter reported with satisfaction that the transports had all gone “smoothly” and that no future difficulties were foreseen.

According to Jacob Presser in Ashes in the Wind, daytime was also dangerous, especially that fall of 1942: It “was best for getting hold of the most defenseless – sick people, invalids and children, and quite particularly children in orphanages. Old men and old women would henceforth be seen roaming the streets, afraid to stay at home. They strayed about, sitting on steps (park-benches were forbidden to them), trying to find out what was going on, and asking odd passers-by if everything was quiet their way. Then they would shuffle on, sooner or later to fall into the hands of their persecutors.”

Just as my parents’ happiness coincided with this immeasurable loss, today many of us continue our relatively comfortable lives while so many are in agonizing peril. The contrasts are dizzying. This photo was taken at the Ukrainian Embassy in Washington in March, where I went to lay flowers. Just a gesture, along with donations of course, yet it still felt important.

Ukraine is the crisis most in the headlines, but we still have tens of thousands of asylum seekers in limbo in Mexico, with almost 10,000 documented cases of rape, torture and other abuse there since January 2021 alone. Millions in Africa are on the verge of starvation, many of them children. How do we live with these incongruities?

One part of our duty to the ghosts of the Holocaust is surely resistance to what we know is wrong – whether that is human rights violations, environmental degradation, or the erosion of democratic rights. In their honor, however, we must also celebrate life. I remember how shocked I was when a photo of a Jewish couple marrying in Amsterdam under the Nazi occupation, wearing the hated stars but otherwise decked out for their wedding day. Even under the Nazis, the couple found beauty and connection, and continued to celebrate it.

Jewish wedding in Amsterdam in 1942

Many Jewish people and others kept on being generous even under the Nazis and tried to help people, both by resisting and otherwise. Dare we do less? In addition to remembering those who died in the Holocaust, Remembrance Day is a time to interrogate ourselves now.

Another part of the duty of remembrance beyond resistance is to build a world where we do not replicate the conditions which led to the Holocaust. If there were ever a time to instill in children the value of every single human life, it is now, with the right wing in the ascendant worldwide and human rights abuses commoner than ever. In addition, while today’s youth will have new resources at their command, unless they learn to love the earth enough to curb human greed, they and the planet are lost.

The time honored creations of humanity – our books, paintings, building tools – must be put into their hands. They need to know what we humans, including them, are capable of, in both the best and worst sense.

When we speak about the Holocaust, let’s not stop with the death camps. Let’s talk about what the people who were rounded up and murdered loved in life, what they created. The beautiful meals (shabbat or otherwise), the weddings and births. When we talk about Jewish Amsterdam, let’s speak of the synagogues they constructed, both the grand and the modest. Let’s remember the diamonds they cut and the union they organized, their creations in every aspect of the city’s life, the pots and pans they sold, the people they healed as doctors and nurses. Let’s talk about the humor of the patent medicine salesmen, the cabaret with its catchy tunes and mordant satire even at Westerbork, the elegant hotels they built.

Amstel Hotel, Amsterdam

Their deaths sit in our hearts, immutable, ever murmuring and reminding us of their and our sorrow. May those murmurs move us to act for peace and freedom in our own beleaguered time.

And may we remember not just their gruesome deaths, but their human lives and achievements.

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 them. We 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.

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?

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

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
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

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

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

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?

Rounding up Children, Then and Now

Marian Pritchard with Erica Polak, a Jewish baby she was hiding, US HMM During 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.

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

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.

The Echoes of Kristallnacht

Synagogue in flames

Kristallnacht is significant because it was a moment of warning about what was to come. What appeared to be individual violence carried out by thugs was specifically sanctioned and incited by the state. What happened that night of November 9-10, 1938? As always, there was an excuse.

Thousands of Polish Jews had been expelled from Germany, and an enraged Jewish teenager shot a German diplomat as a result. The diplomat died about the same time as a big Nazi celebration, and Goebbels used the occasion to call for a rampage – but not officially. “The Führer has decided that … demonstrations should not be prepared or organized by the Party, but insofar as they erupt spontaneously, they are not to be hampered.” This was both a call and a license to vandalize Jewish homes, businesses, and synagogues. The word was passed down from party officials and the Security Police to their local outlets. Although the Nazis later tried to maintain the fiction that these events happened locally, it’s clear that they were orchestrated from Berlin.

The numbers tell one part of the story of the night of November 9-10: 91 people dead, 267 synagogues desecrated or destroyed, some of them burning through the night in full view of fire departments which were ordered to watch unless nearby buildings were threatened. More than 7500 Jewish businesses were destroyed and looted. But that’s only part of the story.

Kristallnacht was the moment when the German state first arrested people only because they were Jewish. They took 30,000 Jewish men, mostly young and vigorous per the orders from above, shipped them off to work and concentration camps. (The men below were marched through the streets and forced to watch as a synagogue burned.) Some died of the camp conditions, but many were released when they agreed to immigrate.

Men arrested during Kristallnacht

That’s where Kristallnacht and my own life’s work intersect. Kristallnacht sounded a warning that German Jews could not ignore. The Netherlands had been neutral in World War I, and there was a longstanding, well integrated Jewish community there. After Kristallnacht, it’s not surprising that more than 40,000 German Jews applied for a visa to enter the Netherlands, but only 7,000 got one, and even they were put in camps. In desperation, 2,000 more refugees snuck in, and at least the Dutch didn’t send them back, although they did incarcerate them. Is this an echo of the situation of refugees who try to enter the U.S. today? We’ll come back to that point.

Unfortunately, most of the German Jews who made it into the Netherlands were rounded up and murdered. Volumes have been written about how and why the Holocaust could have happened in as open and tolerant a society as the Netherlands. One factor was surely the superior systems the Dutch developed to identify who lived where, in an orderly population register which made it easy to check whether an identity card was genuine or not. It also greatly facilitated roundups by showing where the Jewish people were living. The Holocaust was also facilitated by the fact that the Dutch were and are traditionally a law-abiding people who basically trusted their government. There was no tradition of resistance there, as there was in countries like Belgium, France and Italy. Many other factors have been explored in response to the question, “How could the Holocaust happen in the Netherlands – and to such a devastating degree?”

Whatever scholars may differ about, the collusion of ordinary people was an absolutely key factor. Many minded their own business and tried to keep life going on as normally as they could, activities which would have been benign in a different time, but in this time made them colluders with the Nazis.

women in front of store with smashed windows Kristallnacht

Looking at the situation instead from the Dutch Jewish point of view, it seems strange that most of them simply did not believe that they would lose their homes, their businesses and professions, their freedom of movement and ultimately their lives. We cannot underestimate how safe they felt. Let’s hear from Dr. Jacob Presser on this point. Dr. Presser was a Jewish historian who himself survived the war by hiding, and he spent 12 years researching and writing the classic volume Ashes in the Wind: The Destruction of Dutch Jewry. Here’s how he depicts the mood of his Jewish countrymen at the beginning of 1942:

“Many pinned their hopes on the likelihood of Germany eventually losing the war, and consoled themselves with the knowledge that, however bad their position, it could have been much worse. Moreover, few Jews believed that the Germans would carry their policy to the limit. True, there had been raids and hundreds had died, but, thank God, most Dutch Jews had been allowed to remain in their old homes. True also, the Germans had sounded the ugly word of ’emigration,’ but had they not prefixed the comforting adjective ‘voluntary’ – and was the measure not directed at foreign rather than Dutch Jews?” That gives us a sense of why only about one Jewish person in seven hid.

woman emerging from underground hiding place

We’ve all heard of the Dutch resistance and revered it. Having studied it for 13 years as I researched and wrote An Address in Amsterdam, I honor what those people did, in fear of their lives – especially those who had the double jeopardy of being Jewish. That’s why I chose to write about a young Jewish woman who joins the resistance. But as much as we honor those resisters, we can never forget how few they were. Yes, historians say 24-25,000, and I think we can double that safely if we include people who only helped occasionally. But even so, we aren’t up to ONE PERCENT in a country of 8.7 million.

No one can review this history without a sense of apprehension. Yet there are so many differences between our situation now, and that in Germany or the Netherlands under the Nazis.

We live in a constitutional democracy
Our press is still speaking up to some extent
Violence against persecuted groups is still sporadic and occasional, and
We do have elections so we can correct the course.

And yet – who among us has not wondered

Are we sliding down the slope from civilization to barbarism? Because it is a slope, not a single moment of choice.
Is the American Jewish community not, like those in Germany and the Netherlands, deeply integrated into society at large? Yet the fact of assimilation did not protect them.

Kristallnacht broken windows

If we look back to the times that began with Kristallnacht for inspiration as well as horror, what can we find to guide us now? Kristallnacht was a time when many people woke up and realized that the Nazis were in earnest, that their hatred had turned to broken bones and windows, desecrated synagogues and 30,000 Jewish prisoners. Some of those people who woke up resisted, by fleeing or becoming active against the Nazis or both.

Can we make this anniversary of Kristallnacht our own moment of awakening?

When we hear code words for white nationalism and supremacy become acceptable in public discourse, can we speak up against them?

When we hear of hate crimes – whether they are in Charlottesville or Sacramento or Omaha – whether they are against peaceful protestors or African American men or someone who looked Muslim — can we respond with empathy and unity, as we did for Pittsburgh.

low candles lit

Can we say that whatever acts of hatred the U.S. government itself is committing must be stopped – and by us? To take a single example, think of children who are refugees and immigrants like my impoverished ancestors and perhaps yours. They are being stolen from their parents, just as they were at the gates of other camps. Can we claim those children, imprisoned in “tent cities,” that barbarous euphemism? Can we fight for them as strenuously as we would for our own children? Are they ours? If our tax dollars are paying for them to be kidnapped and imprisoned, are they not ours?

Let’s change gears and focus for a moment on the people who stayed home for Kristallnacht. They may have been quieter anti-Semites, or they may have been friendly to the Jewish people and disgusted by the violence in the streets. But they didn’t stop it. This is the story in the Netherlands, as well.

I wish I could offer you more words of comfort today. But all I can bring you is what your people have always done – to continue your hard work in the service of other persecuted people and yourselves. Work that everyone is morally and ethically required to do, whether or not we ever see the results. We are in a time when that spirit is more needed than ever.

Let’s not allow the 80^th anniversary of Kristallnacht and the murders in Pittsburgh to terrify and dishearten us. May they instead awaken us to be even more active on behalf of justice, and what used to be called “the human family.” As I need not remind you, “You are not obligated to complete the work, but neither are you free to desist from it.”

Untitled, by Barbara Chen

This talk was part of the Shabbat service at the Israel Congregation of Manchester, Vermont, on Friday, November 9, 2018. Many thanks to them for inviting me.

The February Strike, Resisting Then & Now

Almost everyone knows the story of Anne Frank, but far fewer are aware of the February Strike, the only general strike in Western Europe to protest the first roundup of Jewish people. Seventy-six years ago this week, an incredible 300,000 Dutch citizens poured into the streets of Amsterdam. Many remained there even after the Germans deployed the SS and the police. The Strike is commemorated every year with a few eloquent words and thousands of flowers at the foot of the Dockworker, the symbolic statue of the Strike. He stands right where the first roundup of 425 Jewish men took place. Because of my long stays in Amsterdam researching the Holocaust and resistance, I always write my friends on this date to remind them of the Strike anniversary.

This year, my gesture of remembrance feels different. The inspiring aspects of the story are still there: masses of largely non-Jewish people responded with outrage to the roundup of their fellow citizens. Organized by the communists, the Strike began at the docks and spread to the trams. Soon, all kinds of people were marching and singing. The Germans were astonished: they never expected their Aryan brothers to stand up for the Jews. Even when the Nazis threatened municipal workers with firing, many stayed on the streets. In Dutch fashion, the strikers did obey a newly imposed curfew, but were back the next day.

Here’s the catch: the February Strike was only a great moment. Just 20% of Amsterdam’s Jewish people survived the war – even though many had been there for centuries, and were fully assimilated into Dutch society, or so they thought. Some survivors look back at the Strike as the one time they felt fully supported. But the German reaction was so severe with the police and the SS that it warned the general population never to try anything like the Strike again. A handful of people began underground activities to resist the Nazis anyway, like the woman pictured in the Resistance Museum below, or the fictional heroine of An Address in Amsterdam. However, with hindsight we see how tiny that group was compared to those who minded their own business, or who actively collaborated.

Despite the differences between our times and Amsterdam in 1941, the parallels are disheartening. Refugees and minorities (religious and otherwise) are being targeted for both state-sponsored persecution and for individual bullying and worse. Permission is in the air, justified because “they” are a threat to “us.” The press is under attack as an enemy of the people. Obvious lies spurt daily from the White House. The most obvious parallel between 1941 and now is the quandary of people who disagree with the government: do we keep our heads down and thus collude? Do we collaborate and profit as we can? Or do we resist – and what exactly does that mean?

Like the February strikers, many gathered strength from Women’s Marches around the country – from the sheer numbers, the witty pink hats, the creative signs and the cheerful determination. Now, fortunately, we are in a very different position than the 1941 strikers. No one has invaded our country. The Marches were peaceful, and no one is in jail or deported as a result. Only 22% of eligible voters elected our current President. A plurality went for Clinton. Mid-term elections are coming up in only two years. If the people who let Trump be elected the first time work to get out the vote, we can get the balance of power between Congress and the President working again.

In the meantime, we can organize locally for causes we believe in. Those who are able can donate to organizations fighting the Administration in the courts and elsewhere. We can take to the streets at the right moments, to bolster our spirits and remind ourselves how numerous and persistent we are. Perhaps most importantly, we can meet hatred with peace, beginning with our own speech and actions. As tempting as it is to demonize people with whom we disagree profoundly, it is the path of Hitler, of Stalin, of slave owners and tyrants since time immemorial.

We can gum up the works, calling and writing and making outrageous art and being visible. We can spread factual facts through social and other media. We can align ourselves with vulnerable people, asking how we can walk beside them. Most of all, we have to keep our spirits up. Some of us have given decades of our lives to certain causes, and it’s depressing to see them undermined or worse. The erosion of the most fundamental American values and political practices is disheartening at best. But our years of struggle taught us how to fight, and we haven’t forgotten.

This year, the February Strike reminds us that it’s always possible to be just as brave as the strikers were. We can resist for more than a moment. To return to the story everyone knows, Anne Frank has the last word: “How wonderful it is that nobody need wait a single moment before starting to improve the world.” Now it’s our turn.

Collaboration, Even on a Protest March

Hundreds of people showed up Tuesday night in our small “city” of Burlington, Vermont to support the rights of refugees and immigrants. Because of our open-mindedness, Burlington has been a refugee resettlement area for years, so we have a lot at stake as a community – not just the refugees themselves, but the businesses they buy from and where they are employed, and the citizens of a city made so much more culturally diverse than it would be otherwise.
March on Church St.

The crowd was mostly young and red hot, with some headscarves and brilliant African fabrics scattered through the crowd. After listening to the speakers as we shivered in the chill, we finally got to march toward the top of our historic Church Street, then back to City Hall. The pace was brisk and the chants surged from one end of the blocks-long march to the other.

A tall, harsh-voiced teenager shrieked “S—w Donald Trump!” and the crowd joined right in. I recoiled – not because I am less angry than they are, but because I’ve studied the Nazi occupation of Amsterdam too long. Hatred gets us nowhere – or, rather, it sets us on a dangerous path that we have seen before. As soon as we begin to denigrate other people and see them as less than human, there’s no limit to the evil we feel entitled to do to them.

I knew the chant was wrong, but I did what too many people did during the Holocaust: I kept silent. I made excuses: I’m too old, they’d never listen to me. In other words, I collaborated with what I knew was wrong.

On the edge of the crowd, a lanky man in his forties spoke up, not shouting but speaking loudly enough to be heard. “We shouldn’t chant that,” he said. “It’s an awful thing to say.”

The teenager asked, “What do you want us to say instead?”

A moment later, we were all shouting “Love trumps hate.” The man who spoke up made a difference. Next time, I want it to be me.

“We could have saved her.”