Tag Archives: An Address in Amsterdam

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.

My Hopes At Seventy

Mary as a baby with Dick and Becky

At seventy, I hope to go on being surprised by life. If another great calling comes to me, like the compulsion to write An Address in Amsterdam, I want to say yes. I hope to read and walk more, and drink more tea with my friends at odd hours. As the children in my life grow up, I always want to read them a book one more time. As long as my partner and I are still able, I want to stroll by the Lake with her, nag her to play the piano more often, and take her anywhere she wants to go. For my friends who are still in the more structured phase of life, I hope to provide respite, little islands of joy and peace. For those whose lives are less rigid — as I hope mine will be – I want to see art exhibits on weekdays, go to the movies in the afternoon, and cook food that takes too long to prepare in my old pressured life. In the community where I live, I hope to be someone others can rely on to be fully present when I’m here, using my skills to help everyone make good decisions we can all support.

In the world, I hope to go on being the elder: transmitting what I’ve learned in my own life, and what my 13 years of research about Nazi occupied Amsterdam taught me. We must act when we see the danger signs that are rife today. Everyone can find a way to resist, and that includes not allowing the evildoers to kill our joy in life.

Thus far, I’ve spent most of my time in service to my adult wants and duties and aspirations. In this decade, I hope to pay more attention to the child in me, to her wonder and openness to whatever is to come.

Mary at Age 3

So many of my dreams have come true: a great love, circles of friends who became my family, children I helped bring up, a vocation as a consultant, a calling as a writer, extensive travel, and participation in the vast causes of my time. Along the way, I achieved financial stability even as a single person, which was important to me as someone who grew up scraping by.

In the coming decade of my life, I hope to put my physical and legal affairs in order so that I and my beloveds are ready for my death in that sense. I also want to pull together my legacy of writing, my understanding of my life and what it has taught me, and portraits of the significant people in my life and how they have influenced me.

Joanna and Mary in orchard Frelighsburg

Even though I hope for many more years in good health with Joanna, in many ways my life feels complete. I could “rise like a queen from the table, with no further wants.” My relationship with Joanna is the great accomplishment of my life, as we honor each other’s beauties and endure our irritating habits, as we create new possibilities for each other and our friends in our home and embrace. I’ve told everyone I love how important they are to me, more than once. I fulfilled my duties to my own elders with love and grace, and brought flowers and stories and auntie indulgence into the lives of “my” children. I look back with pride on my years improving women’s work at the Environmental Protection Agency, bringing mentoring programs to women across government, and helping Vermont nonprofits make a better world right here, right now. I gave my whole heart to the task that was given to me in Amsterdam – not just writing An Address in Amsterdam to honor a young Jewish woman who joins the resistance, but giving talks far and wide to show how vital the book’s messages are in our own time. In a few words, “Do not stand idly by.”

I hope always to be as thankful as I am now.

Mary with Japanese Maple – Version 2

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.”

My best friend Eliane’s birthday

Today would have been my best friend’s 91^st birthday, and she would be mad at me for crying about it. But there’ll never be another Eliane Vogel Polsky, for me or anyone. I’ve even forgiven her for keeping a secret from me for 19 years.

I first admired Eliane as a professional mentor – a labor lawyer who devoted herself to the cause of women’s rights and won landmark cases in the EU, a distinguished law professor who oversaw all the EU-funded research to improve women’s employment in Europe. The first day we met in Brussels, I fell under her spell – an elegant, brilliant woman, not one to suffer fools gladly but with the warmth and generosity of a huge bonfire. There was no hint of what I would learn about her later.

An hour with Eliane was like a month with anyone else, so intense was her attention to any given moment. Taking a walk in Brussels, her home city, brought forth a stream of stories about the garret room her father reluctantly allowed her to rent so she could have some privacy before she married, about the cascades that used to rush from the fountains in the center of the city.

Over the years, we became ever closer – especially after Eliane retired, and was free to come to the U.S. every year. Our conversations had, I thought, covered everything. Then I spent a week with her before my first long stay in Amsterdam in 2001, and she told me something she had never revealed before. As a Jewish teenager, Eliane had been hidden in plain sight in a convent school in Liege. She took me to that classically beautiful city, a river town. This time, her stories seared rather than delighted me. We saw the train station where she was almost caught without her false papers. The bridge where the Nazis had made “une piege a soucieres – you know what it is? A mouse trap.” The convent itself.

If Eliane had told me that she’d been kidnapped by pirates, I couldn’t have been more astonished. I had simply never done the arithmetic to realize that of course she would have had to hide. For the first time, I felt the truncheon of Nazism crash down on my head. They would have killed my best friend, a woman of endless accomplishment and dearer to me than I can ever express.

So when I went to Amsterdam the next week for a long stay, I was open to learning about the Nazi occupation as never before. After discovering that we were living inside the Jewish Quarter, I began to research it in earnest. Over the coming 13 years as we came and went from Amsterdam, Eliane visited often from Brussels. Our 2002 flat was under an attic where Jewish people had been hidden. I was so haunted that I had to learn more about their world and write about it for others. Rachel Klein, the heroine of An Address in Amsterdam, and her parents began to appear to me, not in the supernatural sense but in some ethereal way that characters come to writers.

Eliane played a crucial role in developing the book – not only because I was so disturbed by her own relatively narrow escape, but because she told me many more stories about that time. For example, she recounted the reluctance of her father, a decorated World War I veteran, to believe that their family could possibly be vulnerable; or how it felt to be a 15 year old keeping a huge, terrible secret from absolutely everyone except the Mother Superior in the convent school. Her sensibility, her sense of her predicament, her fear and courage are all woven into An Address. As I wrote, Eliane read my work to see whether it “rang true,” and read the revisions until they did. She accompanied me to exhibits and sites even though they disturbed her and gave her bad dreams.

In our very last conversation, she asked me about the book, and I promised that it was coming. It was, but she died a year before An Address in Amsterdam was published – the story of a young woman with Eliane’s spunk and love of life, who never lets fear stop her.

When Eliane died the death of the just, surrounded by her children and grandchildren, even I could accept that it was time. Most days, but not today.

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 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.

A Writer in the World, or at least N.M.

Socorro mountains The last few days fulfilled my longtime dreams of what I might do as a writer in the world. Being with two groups in New Mexico to discuss the importance and possibility of resistance gave me a sliver of hope, even ten days before Donald Trump’s inauguration. If there are 35 people in a red state in two locations who are receptive to that message, we need not despair for our country. Around the talks, I got to visit with dear old friends, see countryside utterly different from my usual haunts, appreciate the marvels of sandhill cranes for the first time, and learn from the Pueblo Native Cultural Center in Albuquerque.

Because of my astronomer partner, I knew I was going to be in Socorro, New Mexico, and tried to think about who might be interested in a book talk about An Address in Amsterdam, my historical novel about a young Jewish woman who joins the anti-Nazi underground. With a little research, I tracked down a small Unitarian congregation which was willing to take a chance on a talk called “Resistance Then and Now.” Richard Sonnenfeld, the kind man who’d said yes and done the promotion, welcomed me to the sunny social hall of the local Episcopal church where the UUs meet on Sunday afternoons. We chatted about the latest outrages on the news as we arranged chairs. My partner had invited some astronomers to join us, and all in all about twenty of us collected.

Warm welcome from Richard Sonnenfeld

After an organ prelude – unique in my decades of speaking to groups – I began the conversation by talking about the way the Dutch faced the choices of collusion, collaboration and resistance. There were so many ways to resist, from the low key ones like reading an underground newspaper, to the much riskier endeavors of delivering such papers (as my book’s heroine does) or hosting Jewish families or others who needed to hide. When we began the discussion, we talked about the possibilities for resistance now in a number of contexts: finding and sharing information that is increasingly unavailable, standing beside or sheltering persecuted people, and protesting or taking other direct action. It was impressive to hear the number of local initiatives which had already begun. To that list we added the intention to reach out to the local mosque and find out what support they might welcome. I felt cheered by the time we parted company.

Driving from Socorro to Albuquerque a few days later meant huge vistas rimmed by mountains, and desert vegetation broken by occasional settlements. Thanks to the wonders of GPS, I navigated smoothly through the city streets of a place I’ve never been. Instead of a stuffy, set-apart museum building, I found a handsome Art Deco storefront that drew people in just like a store, with a sandwich board on the pavement and interesting stuff in the windows. Variegated turquoise tiles across the whole façade livened the whole place up, with a bright sign across the full width for the “Holocaust and Intolerance Museum of New Mexico.”

Holocaust & Intolerance Museum

After greeting the staff and volunteers who keep the place alive, I passed uneasily under the replica of the gate into Auschwitz: Freedom through Work. To my left were a series of exhibits about the Holocaust, mostly presenting material that was familiar to me in a way that was easy to access, with lots of pictures as well as text. On the other side were hard-hitting exhibits about hatred and where it can lead – the Orlando shootings, the Armenian genocide, the Rwandan genocide, and how propaganda works to manipulate our perceptions. I was saddened to hear that the Museum lost funding from a major Jewish organization because of the broader topics they cover. To honor the Holocaust of the Jews and to recognize its hideous uniqueness is not, in my view, to say that no other genocides count.

Like any book lover, I soon went downstairs to the library and study center where I eventually gave my talk. The collection was as comprehensive as the exhibits. I was delighted to find my bible for my own book, Jacob Presser’s Ashes in the Wind: The Destruction of Dutch Jewry, like finding an old friend among strangers.

Board Chair Jennie Negin & Mary

The Museum kindly arranged for a delicious cold cuts luncheon on proper rye bread, and soon we had a dozen people munching and chatting. By the time we went downstairs, about fifteen people had gathered, thanks in part to Board Chair Jennie Negin’s decision to close the Museum for an hour so all the volunteers could attend. I felt honored to be among them: a couple of high school students, an historian, a retired opthamologist, a supporter of the Southern Poverty Law Center, an African American woman married for decades to a Jewish man, her mother, a capable librarian and others, all drawn there to support the Museum’s work. I talked with them about my own background, what drew me to the story of the Holocaust and Resistance in the Netherlands, and gave them some highlights of what I’ve learned and how it applies to us all now.

Questions and comments poured in, including a painful one about the role of Jewish people who collaborated in some way. We talked about the Jewish Council and its very ambiguous role in representing the Nazi demands to the community, and negotiating on its behalf but often futilely. We heard about the dollhouse in the Museum collection, which was hidden in a neighbor’s attic and survived the war, unlike its original owner. One man honored me by saying he would place me among the righteous Gentiles. This gesture feels like an anointment – and a charge to continue to get this message out into the world. Not just the memory, as important as that is, but the message of the courage of the resistance and how necessary it is now.

Two Heroines: One Syrian, One Dutch

As someone who is always fascinated by women in the resistance, I was curious about Raghda Hassan, the revolutionary heroine in Sean McAllister’s award- winning documentary, “A Syrian Love Story.” Every fall, the Vermont International Film Festival shows social action films which bring the world to our doorstep. I wondered how Raghda would compare to Rachel, the fictional heroine of An Address in Amsterdam who joins the underground against the Nazis. The film is the heartbreaking chronicle of the oppression of the Syrian people, and the dissolution of the marriage, as well as the calamity of the family having to leave first their neighborhood, then their city and country. Poster for A Syrian Love Story

Early in the film, Raghda’s Palestinian then-husband, Amer Daoud says, “She’s a very strong woman, and I am a very weak man.” At that point, she was in prison, but she is eventually reunited with her husband and sons. Even to the naked eye she is deeply traumatized both physically and otherwise. The film focuses more on Amer, in part because his English is better. We never learn enough about Raghda and why she made the decisions she made.

I found myself impatient with filmmaker McAllister at times despite his laudable commitment to this film. He says that he had the same experience as Raghda when he was picked up and jailed by Assad’s security forces. By definition, a man is not subject to the same torture as a woman, and no British citizen with an embassy and press corps behind him is in the same position as a Syrian – particularly a known revolutionary. Moreover, because of the film in his captured camera, Raghda and her family had to flee their country for Lebanon.

In the end, Amer and the children are settled in France, but Raghda is in Turkey working in a high position as an advisor to the Syrian opposition government. For the first time, we see her as she must have been before she went to prison, with the composed face of someone doing what she truly wants. She has lost her husband and children but is glad that they are safe. She’s been tortured, moved endlessly, been forced to live away from the home she passionately loves. She has seen Assad triumph again and again, slaughtering his own people.

Raghda smiles. “I still have hope for humanity and freedom and my country.” She is a heroine in the old fashioned sense. Rachel is just as brave when she faces soldiers and police on the street, with illegal documents in her pocket. But she does reach a breaking point, where saving herself and her family becomes paramount. She is not a flame that will burn itself out to the limit like Raghda. She’s an ordinary teenager who turns into an activist and does the right thing – not the one in a million superwoman who is Raghda. I admire her greatly, but she wasn’t my subject.

I pray that Raghda has enough notoriety through this film to protect her, and that her faith has not been utterly destroyed by the continued massacre in Syria.

The Magic of a Book Launch to Die for

Launch at Phoenix Books Burlington

Words I never thought I’d hear: a call from Phoenix Books to say “Your book launch is sold out. We can do standing room, but the 100 seats are sold.” Not to mention “Your makeup person stopped by to wish you luck.” I never had a makeup person before. But I’d been working toward this night for 13 years, and I didn’t want the video to look amateurish. As I slipped on my carefully chosen ivory silk shirt (over the most expensive bra I’d ever bought) and the mauve velvet jacket, I wondered if I could get through the evening without losing my voice to tears. It had been a long haul.

As the friend who introduced me said, An Address in Amsterdam wasn’t a book that wrote itself. Apart from facing the pain of the Holocaust and resistance in the Netherlands, an enormous amount of research was needed, first to understand the backdrop of the story, then to ensure that the plot and characters were realistic to the time, then to refine the details. For example, what people ate was determined by supply, and by their access to ration coupons and the black market. Even something as simple as a walk in the park was complicated for Jewish characters, who were banned from public spaces after a certain point.

When people started to arrive for the launch, my longtime partner and greatest supporter, Joanna, greeted them with an orange rose for the women (the Dutch color) and a white carnation for the men (the flower of resistance). They descended the long open staircase to find me at the bottom, grinning so hard that my face ached. Hug after hug followed. All kinds of people came: my old friend from Washington in the seventies, my faithful writing group, the mother of our fairy goddaughter, the indispensable editor from Our Bodies Ourselves, my hairdresser and her daughter, my full moon circle, colleagues, clients and former clients, neighbors, and most of all our friends from every walk of life.

Everything was in place and ready to be recorded by the first-class videographer Kenric Kite, who had worked with me before on “Anne Frank’s Neighbors: What Did They Do?” and the brilliant photographer Karen Pike, who had done the author photograph I love. Two stunning bouquets were on either side of the podium and book display: bells of Ireland, snapdragons, lilies, delphinium, all in resplendent corals and golds and azure and green. The room was abuzz, almost like a flock of birds on the lake during migration, everyone in communication. Looking out over the crowd, I couldn’t believe what I saw: chairs all the way to the edges of the room, with every visible seat filled except a few places in the front row, and all the way to the back. People were standing and sitting on the stairs. As the last details were ironed out, I chatted with the crowd a bit about the significance of the flowers. When the bookstore manager signaled that we could start, I asked “Could someone please go and get Joanna?” and everyone laughed. Hostess to the end, she was standing by her post.

Photo by Karen Pike

Tod Gross, Phoenix Books’ manager, welcomed everyone, followed by Cheryl Herrick, who introduced me and mentioned a crucial moment in my early life. I was standing in the schoolyard of Carr Junior High School in Durham, North Carolina on the day when the first African American student was to enter the school. She was by herself, being jeered and taunted. Would I collude with the others by minding my own business? Would I add to their noise or tell them to stop? Or would I stand beside her? These are the same questions that An Address in Amsterdam explores, in a different place and time.

Maybe that’s what made me feel at home in Amsterdam, and in the terrible world of 1940-45: the combination of great beauty and great suffering, and dilemmas where absolutely nothing is black and white, where there are often few good choices, and the examples of courage are rare but utterly remarkable. As I spent hours in archives and museums and wandering the canals to find significant addresses on five long visits, the world of that time became clearer and clearer to me. When I saw a photograph of trees whose limbs had all been amputated, for example, I said “Oh, it must have been during the Hunger Winter.” Sure enough, the date was the terrible winter of 1944-45, when more than two thousand Amsterdammers starved to death, and there was no fuel to heat their homes.

As I read and spoke at the book launch, I tried to give people the feel of both aspects of An Address in Amsterdam: the suffering of the characters and the city itself, but also their courage and resolve, their refusing to let themselves be completely robbed of love and beauty in their lives. The heroine, Rachel, begins as a naïve 18 year old who doesn’t understand that she’s falling in love, but a year later she is already working for the underground and grows up very fast. Although only a handful of people resisted as Rachel did, they deserve our respect for the risks they took, and their persistence even in the worst of circumstances.

Photo by Karen Pike

In my research, I learned about more and more individuals who had been murdered: 80% of Jewish people in the city of Amsterdam, plus the resisters and others whom the Nazis hated. I began to miss them. I began to imagine them here and there, their fish stalls and doctor’s offices and cabarets and galleries and orchestras. Part of my work was bringing them back to life, not just at the moment of deportation and death, but before that, when they were still struggling and loving and enjoying life.

The launch audience asked serious questions: about the woman on the cover of the book, when I realized that it wasn’t enough to portray the suffering and mass murder, how I constructed scenes by getting “into” the characters, what it was like for me as a Gentile to write about a Jewish character, how people in the Netherlands might react to the book. I answered for a while, then thanked everyone and asked them to please spread the word. Every book had a flyer in it to suggest how to do that, as well as a stamped post card. I closed with some thanks, and it was only then that I broke down, remembering my great friend Eliane Vogel Polsky, who was hidden in plain sight as a Belgian teenager, and was the midwife for this book. She asked about it in our final conversation a year ago.

Mary and Eliane in Amsterdam, photo by Karen Pike

Upstairs, the line for book signing snaked along for what seemed like miles. How I loved composing those inscriptions! As I saw that I needed to speed up, I said “Someday I’ll just write ‘Best wishes’, but tonight I’m going to do it right. These are my friends.” Several people said “This is for my aunt,” “This is for my friend who’s in the hospital,” “This is for my daughter.” I loved the feeling of the book going out and away in so many directions that I couldn’t even imagine. Rachel, who represents so many young Jewish women who were killed, is alive and traveling.

The icing on the cake: Tod, the bookstore manager, asked me how many books I thought we’d sold. “Forty,” I said optimistically. “Ninety seven,” he said, “almost a book a person. Some people bought multiple copies, but even so. We never see that. 25% is what we expect, 50% is really good.”

I come from the maritime people of eastern Canada, so the metaphor of the launch appeals to me. I’ll never go back to the shore of being a writer rather than an author. Now I’m afloat, and so is my ship. It has been built, plank by plank, from pieces gathered in many times and places. The ship has slipped down the pathway made for it, and has splashed into the water, where it is swaying and eager for the sea. Where it may go is a mystery. My best hope is that the book will be taken seriously both as a good, deep story about a brave young Jewish woman, and as a warning about how quickly an open, liberal city can change. When hatred and violence threaten, An Address in Amsterdam shows that anyone can take courageous action, in our own place and time.