Tag Archives: Holocaust in the Netherlands

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The monument from above

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

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

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

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

Remembering Resistance and Beyond

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

Passover in hiding

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

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

Photographer: Charles Bönnekamp, Member of the Resistance.

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

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

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

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

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

Jewish wedding in Amsterdam in 1942

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

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

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

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

Amstel Hotel, Amsterdam

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

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

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

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

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

Printing for the Resistance and Nursing at the Same Time

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

Janny Brilleslijper

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

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

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

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

Lien Brilleslijper image

Lien Brilleslijper

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

Always Remember: Amsterdam’s February Strike 1941-2021

On this date every year, I tell two stories: the February Strike in Amsterdam which is still little known outside the Netherlands, and how my life changed when I attended the 60^th commemoration of that Strike in 2001. As with Passover and Christmas, the stories don’t change much, but every year they have different insights to offer. New facts and memories always appear if I pause and look for them. This year is the eightieth anniversary, and given the pandemic it will have only a virtual celebration and broadcast, so it’s even more important to write and remember.

The February 25 Strike in Amsterdam, 1941

On the historical side, I try to learn something unfamiliar about the Strike every year, as well as reminding myself and everybody else of why and how it happened. When the word spread that 425 Jewish men had been rounded up in the Jonas Daniel Meijerplein, the communists and trade unions reacted first. Without the internet to help them, they immediately organized a meeting at the Noorderkerk in the Jordaan, the workers’ quarter.

Overnight, they produced a mimeographed sheet: “Strike! Strike! Strike!” to protest the roundup. Was it the dockworkers who struck first on February 25, or the tram workers? It doesn’t really matter. My new fact for this year is that workers on bicycles pedaled through the city went and knocked on doors to bring people into the streets. They were wildly successful, with 300,000 people participating. Those who have read An Address in Amsterdam may recall that my heroine Rachel attends the Strike, and it’s her first link to the resistance. That scene was re-created from historical accounts and photos, so I feel as if I was there myself.

The Noorderkerk, where the Strike was organized

People decided to strike in a context that would dishearten almost anyone. The Nazis had been in power since the prior May 1940. The Aryan attestation had been inflicted on all government employees, which meant many had been fired for being considered Jewish – people like the musicians in the Concertgebouw orchestra, professors at the universities, civil servants at all levels. The press was under the German thumb, so people were already depending on underground papers which would multiply later. The economic hardship of war had begun, and people needed their jobs more than ever. They lived in a society where being law-abiding was a cardinal virtue. And yet they decided to strike. Not because their uncles and brothers had been rounded up, but because their Jewish fellow citizens and comrades were under attack.

Many Jewish people were largely assimilated into the middle class, and somewhat in the working class. One theory about why the Dutch protested the first roundup when others did not is the personal connections among workers, since in many industries Jews and Gentiles worked side by side. Another factor is that the Netherlands was a far more open and tolerant society than many around it – a secular, commercially based country with a high regard for human rights. And yet another is that many Dutch hated the Germans and the Occupation, and the Strike expressed that.

Source: Dutch National Archive

The measure of their actions is not effectiveness in a practical sense. They didn’t stop the Germans; in fact, the reprisals were severe, beginning with bloodshed on the streets and ending with executions of 18 of the organizers. What they created, however, is this: a beacon that is still shining on us, enjoining us to speak up for what we know is right. That moment of solidarity still illumines our lives and changes our reality. What is the challenge to us, when we read about the example of people who saw a moral outrage committed, and immediately organized to make a widespread and public protest? Today, when we see a great wrong being committed, we know it is our duty to act.

My first moment of understanding all that was exactly twenty years ago. Come back with me. It is a frigid day, grey like many Amsterdam winter days, with a pervasive chill. My partner Joanna and I stand as close together as we can, held back by a fence. We are in the Jonas Daniel Meijerplein, named for the Netherlands’ first Jewish lawyer. The immense 17^th century Portuguese Synagogue looms over us, its windows providing the only illumination within. Behind us are the four small Ashkenazi Synagogues, skillfully merged into today’s Jewish Historical Museum. I’d never heard of the February Strike until I visited there the week before. “Does anything special happen on the 25th?” I’d asked.

The guard pointed out the glass doors. “Yes, right by the statue of The Dockworker over there. He’s the symbolic figure of the Strike. Come at 5:00.”

The Dockworker, by resister Mari Andriessen

Joanna and I did, as a gesture of respect for the strikers who made a futile but courageous and beautiful effort. We arrived at 5:02, but the event was already in process. We’d expected hours of speeches and a modest crowd, but instead the square is absolutely crammed. Within ten minutes silence falls, and here we are. A few people at a time are allowed to step forward (from an orderly line, of course) and lay flowers at the feet of the beefy Dockworker. Although the crowd is mixed in age and otherwise, the first people permitted to approach are the oldest, their white hair shining against their dark coats, some utterly upright and others bent or needing a wheelchair.

A man in a wheelchair preparing to lay flowers

Someone who remembers

The woman behind us whispers that these are the living strikers, and their families and friends. Their faces are somber. No one looks proud or pleased with themselves; the ghosts of the Jewish people who were rounded up are too close for that. The Strike isn’t mere history that happened before I was born in 1948. These people, their very bodies, had been there, and now we are in the same place and time, connected. They had been there. And “there” is here, where the roundup had actually happened, where the strikers had surged past, hundreds of thousands of them. The story knocks me on the head like a bat. These people are all here to remember, and their story has become mine. Mine to reckon with, be tormented by, and find some way to tell. It isn’t just something in a book; the people who had been rounded up in this square had almost all been murdered, and so had the strike organizers.

Only the flowers make it bearable at all.

Almost everyone except us has brought them: everything from small batches of forced forsythia cut at home to immense formal displays. The procession to the Dockworker moves very slowly: first the strikers, then synagogues, Jewish organizations, labor unions and churches, then countries, and finally individuals. Each one bends over to lay their flowers among the others, choosing their spot, then straightening up and pausing to remember, perhaps to pray. They move along, and the handful of people follows. The whole event takes on a meditative pace. If we weren’t shivering, time would hardly seem to pass at all.

Grandmothers hold hands with little ones and probably tell the story that must never be forgotten, a few people of color watch quietly until it’s their turn, and oblivious toddlers ride on their father’s tall shoulders. The sun is going down somewhere behind the clouds, and the darkness thickens. Still the people keep coming to the feet of the Dockworker, still pile flowers by the flowers that were already heaped, arranging them so nothing is hidden.
At last, at 6:30, it is our turn. We waited until the very end, as outsiders with nothing to offer but ourselves.

We kneel. We are close enough to see the flowers now. A note in spidery handwriting is attached to a bunch of white snowdrops, held together with aluminum foil. Hebrew letters embossed in gold on broad ribbons flow around an arrangement of cascading scarlet tulips. The printed words from the “people and government of Sweden” bedeck a sumptuous wreath of red roses and white lilies. The fragrance is euphoric, mingling spring and summer on that dark, cold day. It gives the dead back to us, makes us feel their courage and the terrible loss. It gives us the stories to tell as long as we live.

Anne Frank’s Amsterdam? Or Theirs?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Portrait of Hendrika de Vries — Hendrika de Vries

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

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

A Different Remembrance Day 2020

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Mary

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

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

Listening to Dutch Ghosts as We “Shelter in Place”

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

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

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

Learning from the People who Hid

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

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

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

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

Beyond Survival

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

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

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

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

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

It couldn’t happen there, either

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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