Category Archives: People in Hiding

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.

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 Cut Out Girl: A Hidden Jewish Child and Her Rescuers

The ineptly titled “The Cut Out Girl: A Story of War and Family, Lost and Found” by Bart van Es is foremost the gripping and complex story of a Jewish girl hidden in plain sight in the bosom of the author’s grandparents’ family. Over her story is laid the equally complicated tale of this host family, and how little the author knows of what happened among them under the Nazi occupation. In the course of the book, the “cut out girl” Lien de Jong and the author Bart form a collaboration and friendship, and we see how the story is pieced together. Their conversations in her Amsterdam apartment interlace his journeys to her hiding places and various archives and experts. The two come to understand, at least to some extent, how the rift between Lien and the people who helped to save her could have happened in the 1980s.

Bart de Es does an admirable job of evoking moments, in a breathless, present tense style that shows how the potatoes are served at the family table, or how a ball rolls into the woods. He tells the reader that he has embellished the fragments Lien provides in their extended conversations, stirring in just enough egg to hold the dough of her memories together, and checking with her for accuracy. Although he left the Netherlands for England when he was only three years old, de Es spent many summers there and has a real feeling for the landscape, which he conveys in detail. However, he learns that it is actually full of hidden secrets which come closer and closer to his own people.

As background to the personal stories, de Es provides compact, well researched (although not footnoted) accounts of key events that will influence the fates of the characters: his speculation about why 75% of Dutch Jews were rounded up and murdered, the bombing of the countryside and the “bridge too far,” how the survivors were treated when they emerged from hiding or the camps, and more. Occasionally, the reader is in the same numbed and disoriented state Lien is experiencing, unsure what age she is, which village we are in, who that character is, and what’s happening in the bigger picture. But de Es usually gets the balance right, painting the background in with just enough strokes to make it visible. His lengthy descriptions of photographs sometimes feel excessive, but he nearly always points out details that all but the most studious reader would miss. Most are reproduced at such a small size that a glass would be needed to see what de Es has noticed.

Like any book on this theme, there are heart-wrenching moments, and they are never overplayed. I will never forget the letter Lien’s mother writes to the family who will hide her daughter. de Es gets it just right when he speaks of the tone of “measured sacrifice” as she expresses the wish that her hidden daughter think of her new family as her parents, and turn to them for comfort in “the moments of sadness that will come to her”. Although Lien’s mother closes with the wish that they will all be reunited one day, she is making other provisions.

Although skimpy in recounting his own emotional reactions – undoubtedly better than overdoing it as most American writers might have done – de Es deserves great credit for recounting Lien’s feelings in a way that seems accurate and honest to her. That shows particular bravery in the case of the sexual abuse she was subjected to, including inappropriate attention from the author’s grandmother. de Es finally is struck by the thunderbolt of connection between her life and his – not only the link with his grandparents who sheltered her, but between his biography and hers. Grappling with a rebellious teenaged daughter, he recognizes Lien’s “free fall” at the same age, and sees his strict grandmother in himself. He also discovers much more, which changes his view of his childhood and perhaps the Dutch identity: “My sense of the one village in the Netherlands that I thought I knew has changed.”

As someone who spent 13 years researching and writing about this place and time to produce An Address in Amsterdam, I empathized with de Es’s poignant question “What could I add?” as he scrutinized the piles of books about World War II. But add he has, at least in the English language. This book gives us an intricate picture of the “before, during and after” for a hidden child and those who both helped and hindered her. “The Cut Out Girl” records the profound damage to all the survivors (hidden, Jewish and others), and is a tribute to resilience and the ability to throw lines of connection across the wounds.

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.

Anne Frank’s Birthday: Fact and Fiction

Anne Frank 1940 school photo

No one knows exactly when Anne Frank died in 1945, but we do know she was born on June 12, 1929. Every year, I remember how close I felt to her as an eleven-year-old reading The Diary of a Young Girl in a small closet in North Carolina. Anne was an intimate friend at a time when I had very few. Like so many girls, I completely identified with her nascent romantic and sexual longings, her hatred of her mother, her deep humanitarian, and her aspirations as a writer.

Four decades later, I had the joy of living in Amsterdam for six months, and discovered a distressing truth about that tolerant city: 80% of its Jewish people were rounded up and murdered. My child’s view that no one on earth could have suffered more than Anne was so wrong. She was much luckier than most. The Franks’ hiding place was ready in advance, they were all hidden together for 25 months, they had more room and comfort than most people (small as it was), and the quality of support from Miep Gies and others was extraordinary.

In 2002, while staying a few blocks from Anne Frank’s hiding place, I discovered that Jewish people had also been hidden in the attic above our apartment. When I learned that they were last seen fleeing over the rooftops as the Nazis shot at them, I had to learn more about the larger story of which Anne’s was only a part. I began imagining who those people were, and an historical novel began to take shape. For thirteen years, I read histories and memoirs; visited museums, archives, and libraries; listened to people who would talk with me; and wandered the canals looking for unmarked addresses where important events took place. That’s one of many reasons my book is called An Address in Amsterdam.

Resistance Courier at Amsterdam Verzetsmuseum

Resistance Courier at Verzetsmuseum, Amsterdam

As much as I regarded Anne with a child’s adoring eyes, and admired her with an adult’s greater discernment, I also realized that she was confined by her parents’ choices as well as the Nazi Occupation. She was not quite 11 when the Germans invaded the neutral Netherlands. If Anne Frank had been a few years older, it’s hard to imagine that she wouldn’t have found a way to help the resistance.

While I knew that my book would have a young Jewish woman as a heroine, I wanted to write about someone who was old enough to make her own decisions, but young enough that she would have to grow up fast in order to do so. How did an ordinary young woman decide to risk her life as a resister? What would she actually do, and how? As Rachel Klein, my heroine, formed in my imagination, I didn’t see her as an older Anne Frank, but as her own person, with different needs and ambitions than Anne. However, to be sure that I wasn’t unduly influenced, I avoided reading the Diary again until An Address in Amsterdam was done and in press.

As I re-read the Revised Critical Edition which compares all the versions of the Diary, I found my old friend Anne Frank still there – vulnerable, smart, fearful. Perhaps because the times had changed so much, I also heard more clearly than ever the warnings in her work, and her injunction to us now. Today, I’m not so much moved by the girl who wrote “I still believe that people are good at heart,” as the one who speaks to us now: “How wonderful it is that no one need wait a single moment before trying to improve the world.”

Anne Frank’s Birthday: What Do We Say?

The birthday of Anne Frank was June 12, 1929, which means she was just eleven years old when the Nazis invaded Amsterdam, the “safe” place to which she and her family had fled. Understandably, her parents made the decisions about when and how the family went into hiding. In contrast, when I began imagining the heroine of An Address in Amsterdam, I wanted her to be old enough to create her own life, even under the Nazis. At 18, she could make an independent choice to join the underground. During the 13 years it took me to research and write the book, I avoided re-reading Anne’s Diary because I didn’t want to be unduly influenced by it. But I remembered our first meeting vividly, even so.

Anne Frank smiling

When I was ten or eleven years old, I took The Diary of a Young Girl to my favorite place to read in our tiny duplex apartment in Durham, North Carolina. It was a hall closet which lost half its space to the hot water heater, but that meant it was always warm. I’d found a bathmat to put on the floor and brought an extra pillow with me. Although the light wasn’t excellent, it gave me solitude and an environment so neutral that I could journey deeply into my book.

Anne Frank gives little description of Amsterdam, and in any case I couldn’t have imagined a city with canals instead of streets, and the vocabulary of its rows of centuries-old, handcrafted houses was still unknown to me. But, as I burrowed into my closet, I entered every other aspect of her world: the hideous Mrs. van Dam, the wondrous beauty of Peter, the cruel shrew who was her mother, her kind and virtuous father. I recognized her parents particularly, bifurcated into the contemptible female and the saintly male, and my heart bled for her. To be confined that way! To have to tiptoe, not be able to flush the toilet during the day, to live with constant fear of discovery. Anne felt like prey. One day, I would understand that, too.

The more I read, the more I couldn’t bear to lose Anne. Her story couldn’t end badly, could it? Anne Frank was too bright, too witty, too good a writer, too wise beyond her years, to die. She’d escape out a back window with a handsome Gentile boy even nicer than Peter who’d always admired her, wouldn’t she? I was used to fiction, not history, and I probably didn’t know about the Holocaust until after I finished the Diary. When I got to the end and learned that Anne had died at Auschwitz, I was devastated. None of my peers in the human world meant nearly as much to me as she did. Anne was like me: she felt things deeply, she adored her father as much as she hated her mother, she was already passionately attached to Peter, and books and writing were her mainstays.

It was the first time I loved a ghost, but not the last.

The Dutch thought it couldn’t happen there, too

Marcher places flowers at Amsterdam’s Auschwitz memorial

The New York Times reports that the Dutch are constructing a memorial wall and Holocaust museum in Amsterdam’s old Jewish Quarter because memory is fading or inaccurate – despite the worldwide readership of The Diary of Anne Frank. There is so much more to the story than one brilliant child writer’s account, despite her humanitarianism and universal appeal.

Historians have grappled endlessly with the question of how and why one of the most tolerant nations in the world allowed almost three-quarters of its Jewish population to be murdered. It’s especially ironic since the Netherlands was a refuge for Jewish people since the Spanish Inquisition.

While the answers to “Why?” are many and complex, a primary one is that the Dutch believed it couldn’t happen there, even after the Nazi invasion. The Jewish people had been assimilated for centuries, in professions from symphony conductors to medicine and art, shopkeeping, peddling, diamond cutting and trading. The head of the Dutch Supreme Court was Jewish. It was preposterous to think that people so integral to society at every level could be isolated and shipped off somewhere. Much less murdered. No matter what the Germans were doing in their own country, it couldn’t happen in the Netherlands. Dutch people wouldn’t allow that.

Hiding was the best policy

Nor was it only the Dutch Gentiles who believed this. In doing the research for my historical novel, An Address in Amsterdam, I learned that many Jewish people themselves refused to believe that persecution would turn into isolation, much less deportation and mass murder. At each step – registration, identity cards, restricted travel and business, stars, even deportation – some people continued to rationalize the Nazis’ actions. Others, like my fictional heroine, resisted. Only one Jew in seven hid, which turned out to be the best way to survive the war other than pre-emptive escape. Dutch Jewish citizens felt a misplaced confidence in their country and countrymen – much like the confidence many in the U.S. are feeling now, as we complacently believe that Donald Trump can’t win. Instead, we hear more and more hate rhetoric aimed at Muslims, refugees, and undocumented workers and their families. What can we do to provide them with the protection which the Dutch failed to give the Jewish part of their people?

What are we refusing to believe in 2016?

Donald Trump says we should bar members of one religion, Muslims, from entering our country, targeting them in a way that violates the core American value of religious freedom. He wants to build a wall to keep out the citizens of a particular nation, again singling out a group of people rather than judging them as individuals. This is directly contrary to the lessons of the Holocaust.

Fortunately, one of these is that resistance can have some effectiveness, even in the very worst situation – especially when it happens broadly and quickly as a unified action (as in Denmark). We live in a democracy where we can work to ensure that Trump does not get into office. Even if Hillary Clinton were a far less progressive candidate than she is, we should still work as hard as we can to elect her – persuading not only the lukewarm voters, but those who, like me, supported Bernie Sanders. If we believe not just in him as an individual, but in what he stands for, we have no choice but to learn the lessons of history. Let’s stand beside him and work for Hillary.