Tag Archives: Jewish Amsterdam

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.

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.

A First Visit Back to Amsterdam’s Dockworker

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

The Echoes of Kristallnacht

Synagogue in flames

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

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

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

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

Men arrested during Kristallnacht

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

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

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

women in front of store with smashed windows Kristallnacht

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

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

woman emerging from underground hiding place

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

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

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

And yet – who among us has not wondered

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

Kristallnacht broken windows

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

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

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

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

low candles lit

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

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

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

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

Untitled, by Barbara Chen

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

Anne Frank’s Birthday: Fact and Fiction

Anne Frank 1940 school photo

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

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

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

Resistance Courier at Amsterdam Verzetsmuseum

Resistance Courier at Verzetsmuseum, Amsterdam

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

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

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

Anne Frank’s Birthday: What Do We Say?

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

Anne Frank smiling

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

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

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

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

Amsterdam’s Silent March

A few words preceded the Silent March, following exquisite music by the Mirando Orchestra, the descendants of a Roma group which began playing before the war. (Today, I learned from a friend that they survived because they were given jobs in the circus, and the Germans liked to attend it). Several personal testimonies followed, but they were brief in the cold wind off the Amstel River.

Everyone needed to get moving. The trams had been stopped all along the route, which was scheduled to last an hour and required brisk walking to ensure that the March reached Dam Square in time for the ceremony there.

A woman and man on horseback led the crowd, followed by drums who kept up a somber, repetitive beat. A mass of school children of all colors followed, each carrying a white tulip. At the very beginning, there was a little chatter among the adults (not the kids!) but it soon fell away. The drum, the shuffling feet, the occasional nearby vehicle were the only sounds. First we marched to the Jewish Historical Museum, once four lively synagogues which have now been combined. Turning right onto what is now a big thoroughfare, we saw the remains of the Jonas Daniel Meijerplein where the hefty Dockworker statue stands. He is the symbolic figure of the February Strike, the only such event in western Europe to protest the first roundup of Jewish people – a roundup that took place right there. Beyond him stands the immense Portuguese Synagogue, thankfully still in use, and not an electric light in the whole establishment, only candles.
We crossed the bridge and turned right. Eerily, the warning sounds that the bridge was about to be lifted bleeted loudly. This is the same bridge the Nazis raised to isolate the Jonas Daniel Meijerplein for the first roundup. Walking along the Nieuwe Keizersgracht, a small residential canal, we saw the markers at our feet which show the name and age of each person who used to live in the house opposite us. All had been rounded up and murdered. Every few feet, someone quietly read the names.

The March turned to cross the bridge which lay between us and the broad Amstel River. The clomping of the horses’ feet and the drums sounded louder, and those still reading the plaques could see the crowd advance over the bridge. We passed near the Carré Theater where numberless Jewish people performed, and crossed The Skinny Bridge, looking back up the River to the plaza where we had begun. It was once a medieval Jewish neighborhood, torn down over great protest to build the City Hall/Opera House.

Through the narrow streets we kept marching. People stood on their balconies for a few minutes to acknowledge us, but few stayed out. It was too cold. The flags were all at half mast.

At Utrechtestraat, I left the March so that I could participate in our old neighborhood’s commemoration, a much smaller and more modest affair than the one at the Dam. It was hard to leave, but I knew that, wherever I am, in whatever country, I will always be walking in their footsteps.

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 Hidden Jewish Child’s Story Meets Mine

In the 13 years it took to research and write my historical novel An Address in Amsterdam, I could not have imagined the meeting which took place in Philadelphia on Sunday evening, with a man who had been a hidden Jewish child. The setting was a reader’s paradise: the Big Blue Marble Bookstore, a community institution which has shelves to the rafters and loads of activities for everyone in the neighborhood. Just before my event, a group had been making Valentines on the large mezzanine which overlooks the main floor of the store.

Mr. Vega hidden with his “brother” 1944

I’m standing at the top of the steep staircase to greet people as they arrive. An older man comes up first, followed by a woman about his age and a younger couple. When I apologize for the sharp incline, the younger man chuckles and says, “These steps are nothing to the Dutch.” He cocks his head toward the older man, who turns out to be his father-in-law, Lex Vega.

I take Mr. Vega’s warm hand. His eyes are vibrant and liquid, his gaze almost affectionate, his smile glowing and contagious. Because of an illness, he has difficulty speaking, but we are in immediate and real communication even so. The son-in-law continues, “He comes from Ouderkerk, near Amsterdam.”

“Of course!” I say. “The beautiful Sephardic Jewish cemetery is there.” It’s a place I love, and an important scene in my novel took place there.

Mr. Vega’s eyebrows shoot up, and he speaks. His wife and daughter help me understand. “I was born in the house right beside the cemetery, and lived there until I had to go into hiding.”

“But I know the house! I know exactly where you mean.” I could see it, just on the edge of the cemetery grounds. Nearby, the large blue stone gravestones incised with Hebrew letters have stood for centuries.

The son-in-law added, “The family lived openly as Jews well into the war, because his father was the guardian and buried the bodies. But eventually they had to hide.”

Mr. Vega interjected, and this time I thought I understood. “Someone warned you?”

He nodded. Soon Mrs. Vega was by our side, saying she’d read the book. I asked her what she thought of it, and she said, “Of course we know the story.” She paused. “The book was real.”

Even though I had to focus on the reading, I was remembering a spring day, probably in 2002, when I, like my heroine Rachel Klein, needed a break. Day after day, I had been studying how the Nazis carried out their diabolical work in the Netherlands. The horror of it was in my body and mind like a fever, and I had to get away from it. Because I love walking by rivers, I decided to follow the Amstel in the direction of Ouderkerk. Maybe I’d get there, maybe not.

The Jewish Cemetery by Jacob Isaacksz van Ruisdael

My mood lightened as I slipped out of the city, and buildings gave way to freshly mown pastures. Dots of yellow flowers poked up here and there. The river glittered in the surprisingly consistent sun. I stopped for an old cheese sandwich in an ancient café, and paid homage to a gigantic statue of Rembrandt. By late afternoon, I arrived in Ouderkerk, a picturesque village built right up to the water. Wandering along its lanes, I spotted a cemetery with an iron fence around it. The large flat stones seemed to call me in. A sign told me where I was: the Sephardic Jewish cemetery. It took my breath away. No matter where I went, the stories of the Jewish people of Amsterdam would find me. Whatever was guiding me into those stories was gently sending me back to my job. What was that force? Something within me, some long buried truths that needed to emerge? The spirits of the dead, or what the indigenous people call Great Heart? I don’t know how to name that force, but some people call it G-d.

All this came into my mind as I spoke with Mr. Vega. The next day, he sent me his story, able to communicate much more fully by e-mail. It turns out that his parents made no proactive effort to evade deportation. Instead, a woman who worked with the Resistance, Mrs. Catherina Klumper, pushed them to let her hide first Mr. Vega’s grandmother, then himself at age five and his younger sister, and ultimately the rest of the family. Mr. Vega was placed with a loving Catholic couple, first in Arnhem and then in Friesland after the battle of the “bridge too far.”

I could still see the kindness of Theo and Bets van Heukelom in Mr. Vega’s open face. He called them Aunt and Uncle, and enjoyed the company of an older “brother” Theo as well. Unusually, Mr. Vega stayed with the same family throughout the war – and even more unusually, his entire nuclear family survived, and they were reunited. The whole town welcomed them back, and returned all the goods which were in safekeeping. The Vegas were literally the only Jewish family in Ouderkerk, and were liked and respected.

After a few visits following the war and Uncle’s death in 1946, the families lost touch. It always bothered Mr. Vega, and in 2013 his wife persuaded him to make a real effort to find whatever remained of his war family. More than sixty years had passed. Here’s what he writes:

I began to call everybody in the Dutch phonebook with Uncle’s name, “van Heukelom” or Aunt’s family name “Bindels.” Every time, after I had introduced myself, they told me that they did not know what I was talking about. But after fifteen calls, I got Theo on the line. How did I know that it was him? He reacted spontaneously with an immediate answer: “Oh, my little brother in the war!” This was one of the most heart-warming experiences I ever had. Not only had I now rediscovered the family of Uncle and Aunt, but he called me his brother! So it was really true that I belonged to their family!

The once hidden Mr. Vega and his “brother” Theo in 2015

Not only did they reestablish contact, but Mr. Vega went through all the necessary processes to give his Aunt and Uncle the Yad Vashem honor for Righteous Gentiles. The ceremony was held in Ouderkerk last year, and he was able to acknowledge them publicly and say, “I was very well taken care of with affection and with respect for my Jewish identity.” If only it had been that way for every hidden child.

So here’s where Mr. Vega’s story and mine intersected, as we stood at the head of the stairs together. For reasons I’ll never fully understand, it became my task and honor to remember and write about the Jewish people of Amsterdam. His duty was to loop back after decades and to acknowledge the kindness of his war family. And perhaps to let me know that, even though I was born after the war, even though I’m neither Jewish nor Dutch, my book somehow holds some of the stories. Especially of those who will never rest in the beautiful cemetery in Ouderkerk, or any other.