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MEIJER'S KOSHER BUTCHER AND SANDWICH SHOP WAS too new and uncluttered to have any kind of a look other than clean. It was in the Rivierenbuurt, one of those twentieth-century parts of Amsterdam where everything was built to show off a little extra space because it had been settled by people from the center in search of more room. Sal Meijer and his son complained of a declining business, but they were busy most of the time. It was a pleasant place to be—a place to meet other Jews, which was not that easy to do in Amsterdam anymore. “I come for the society, not the food,” Victor Waterman, now in his nineties, would say to annoy Sal. In 1975 he had retired from the kosher chicken business in New Jersey and moved back to Amsterdam with this advice: “When you are from Europe, you have to go to America when you are young, make a lot of money, and then get out. Don't die in America!”
For years, when Waterman ran into people whom he had not seen since he left, he had this little joke he would try. They would say, “Where have you been?”
“In New Jersey,” he would say, hoping they took the bait.
“What were you doing in New Jersey?”
He would lower his voice, turn his face sinister, and say, “I was a killer.”
“A killer!”
Quickly he would shoot an index finger straight up and lighten his tone, “But kosher.”
One of Waterman's sons had also moved back to Amsterdam and had a prosperous art dealership. The two were inseparable. But in 1991 the son died of a heart attack and Waterman quarreled with his grandchildren and was alone. He settled in the Rivier-enbuurt and was a regular, a kind of local character in the sandwich shop part of Sal Meijer's. He never talked about his son, just as he had avoided the distant memories of his murdered family.
Sal Meijer was also a well-loved local character. People didn't know that in the same long, narrow, bay-windowed apartment he had found after the war, his nights were spent screaming. In quiet Holland, where people control themselves and don't carry on, where the story of Anne Frank was endlessly promoted instead of discussing the Dutch record under occupation, where Resistance heros increased their ranks in the popular mythology every decade, but collaborationists and deportees were not to be mentioned, more and more survivors and children of survivors were beginning to scream.
The Rivierenbuurt had been settled in the 1920s. The neighborhood sprawled with low buildings of handsome wooden art deco details and wide streets that told Amsterdamers that here there would be space to waste. The old Jodenbreestraat neighborhood never became Jewish again. There were not enough Jews. The synagogues of the neighborhood, except the Esnoga, remained in ruins. To the Jewish Community, they were ugly reminders of missing Jews. The Community gladly would have torn them down, but the city regarded them as historical landmarks and to save them bought them from the Community. The survivor generation was not interested in synagogues. They wanted to preserve the Hol-landse Schouwburg, the theater that had been used to collect deportees. The Jewish Community fought furiously to prevent its being turned back into a theater. This was the past they wanted preserved.
The gutted old ghetto was torn down and replaced with tall new buildings on widened streets. Sal Meijer in 1964 had moved to Nieuwmarkt, an old commercial area near the Central Station. Enough Jews still lived in the center to support a kosher butcher, but in the 1960s a street life dominated by young people and drugs gradually drove Sal and most of his customers away. Ten years younger than Waterman, Sal no longer felt up to a full work schedule at the butcher shop, so his son and daughter-in-law ran the shop, making the third consecutive generation of kosher butchers. He still had the brass menorah on the wall that he had hidden during the war, and books and photos that he studied intensely. The screaming usually began at night, but he would be like that sometimes even during the day. Suddenly, in his eighties, he could no longer stay silent about the Holocaust and what had happened to his family. He also became obsessed with news, particularly focusing on wars. “God is busy!” he would angrily declare when the death toll from some distant conflict was reported on the television.
In recent years the Netherlands has seen a dramatic increase in World War II survivors of all kinds seeking psychiatric help. The 1940-1945 Foundation had been created in 1944 by Resistance members to help their people and Jewish survivors after the war. It was thought that the organization would disband sometime in the 1950s. But in the 1990s thousands still turned to it for help-Resistance veterans and camp survivors who were still trying to live secret lives, keeping their phone numbers unlisted, even trying to hoard unlicensed firearms.
Many Jewish survivors, recalling the compulsively efficient Dutch lists that had marked them for deportation, still shied away from official records, refusing to answer census questionnaires, asking Jewish organizations to use unmarked envelopes when sending them mail. Many Jews refused to state their religion when they checked into a hospital. Psychiatrists found many patients with problems from their childhood in hiding, including some who had been sexually abused by their protectors. Jitschak Storosum, a psychiatrist with a Jewish agency, said that he often had patients who were sexually abused while in hiding as children. Jewish social services reported that about three thousand people each year—10 percent of the Jewish population of the Netherlands—sought help from them, Most of those cases were war-related.
It is tempting to see this as a Dutch phenomenon, a product of a repressed society that, unlike France, never exploded the myth of a valiant Resistance. The emphasis in Holland was always on how the Anne Frank family had been hidden from the Nazis; the fact that they were also betrayed by Dutch collaborators—possibly for 7.5 guilders—was overlooked. No one wanted to hear the stories of deportees, and survivors kept their stories to themselves. The facts that Holland had its own neo-Nazi movement and that a racist, far-right political party had won legislative seats were ignored as aberrations without precedent. When these subjects were brought up, the usual response was, “It is shocking. This is very un-Dutch. We have always been a tolerant people.” Tolerant, which is the same word in the Dutch language, was an obsessively overworked term. The Dutch frequently spoke of their tolerance of minorities, as though Jews, blacks, and Asians were an unpleasant burden that they were able to bear because they, the Dutch, were a strong and stoic people.
But there was another factor. The Dutch health system encouraged people to seek psychiatric help. Someone who could show psychological problems as a result of wartime experiences was entitled to a special pension. Unfortunately, none of this had been available in the years immediately following the war, when these people could have been most helped by it. The mental health profession was strongly influenced in the 1970s and 1980s by the work done in America on traumatized Vietnam war veterans.
The noticeable increase in war-related traumas was frequently attributed to retirement. People who had kept busy all their lives were suddenly faced with inescapable free time. “They hold it down,” explained Jitschak Storosum, “but very suddenly something very specific, often very small, sets them off, and they can no longer cope. Sometimes it is just a normal illness, or a picture of Auschwitz on television. My mother could never look at a train without getting a flashback. Many don't sleep because they want to avoid the dreams they have. When they have a bad dream, it can take them weeks to recover.”
Seeing what had happened to others, some survivors, like Marian Turski in Warsaw, avoided retirement. Joseph de Groot was a tailor, and even in his late seventies he kept working out of his house. He smiled and laughed easily, he loved to gossip with his clients, and he pointed with pride to his well-fed pot belly. He also pointed with pride to the numbers tattooed on his forearm. An elderly widower with no children, he lived in his large-windowed, spacious home. A ring at the door, and he would leap to his feet, then painfully remember that his back hurt. Down the hall was the fitting room, and a helper worked in the basement. After one customer left, de Groot studied him through the window. “Ah, he is a millionaire. I'm going to make him pay. If you are poor, you pay very little If you are rich, I get you. That's how this operation works,” he said, chuckling.
He seemed a happy man. His face of deep-set eyes and strong nose bore a look of contentment, and he had bad dreams only about once every five months. “I have good work. When I want. I don't want. I have worked enough in my life. In the concentration camps. 1 am seventy-eight. On the weekends I have a lady friend, I have many people over, we drink coffee. I have a good life. I live well. I am in good health. I am content. But I do not look at concentration camp films. When there is a film about a concentration camp on television, I never watch it. I do not want to look back too much at the concentration camps. And that is good for me. I will talk about it a little bit. But I have friends who talk about the concentration camp every day. I say I don't want to think about the concentration camp every day. That is good. I live well.”
De Groot only recently started talking about his camp experiences. The story would come out in disjointed segments. He would often say that tailoring had saved his life at Auschwitz. But sometimes he would talk of how he did manual labor for I.G. Farben, the chemical manufacturer. Sometimes he would explain that tailoring hadn't really been his work there, but that he got food and money by making clothes for prisoners who attempted to escape. He also described how the prisoners would be forced to stand for hours in the cold, looking at the people in his clothes that the guards had hanged for trying to escape. Then his voice would break, and he would change the subject.
During those executions a band would be forced to play. When visitors go to Auschwitz, they can see a photograph of the band by the front gate. De Groof s friend Lex Van Weren played trumpet in that band. He survived and followed a trumpet career in Holland until he was too old to play. Then he also had to face retirement. A pension was available —not for camp survivors, but for Resistance veterans, and Van Weren had been in the Resistance. He had been originally arrested as a Resistance operative, not as a Jew. When he applied for his Resistance pension, he was required to see a psychiatrist, who told him that his habit of talking openly about his experiences was healthy. That was what he decided to do with his retirement, write books and articles and give talks on his experiences as “the trumpet player of Auschwitz.”
“I was always able to speak out about my memories,” Van Weren said. “People like Joopie de Groot, they have their memories and they can speak out with some acquaintances. But I have had the chance to speak out to people all over Holland. To millions, and that's good for a person. I am lucky that every thought inside has come out. I have had the opportunity to speak about it. That is the pity for all the hundreds and hundreds who are living now. They have had no chance to speak about it.”
He seemed very pleased with his life, in his flat modern house in the flat modern Buitenveldert in the expanding south, where many affluent Jews settled. He sat on his patio looking across his small lawn at the rosebushes that edged the canal. “This is a very expensive neighborhood. My neighbors are rich. I'm just a musician. It was hard for me to get the money. But every time I look out at my roses, I feel happy.”
Behind his blustery optimism was a voice of isolation like that often heard from camp survivors. “I don't trust people. I don't want to need anyone, but that is very difficult to achieve. You do need people. But I am ninety percent there. I don't believe in friends.”
Mauritz Auerhaan, who never married, retired to a Jewish home for the elderly and made a similar observation, “To make friends is very difficult. To make a real friend, I couldn't find one. Everybody looks after his own life and to make money without caring.”
Some remained fixated on their memories, like the woman who had a larger-than-life-size photo of her friend who had been with her in Auschwitz and had not survived. The photo was on the inside of the kitchen cabinet door, staring mournfully at her every time she opened the cabinet.
To de Groot, not thinking about the Holocaust was a prerequisite of living well. “I want to live. When you think about the concentration camp, you don't live. If I start thinking about my friends in the concentration camps, how they died—the more you see of the concentration camp on the television, the more it is in your dreams. I watch football. That is my hobby.”
Somewhere in the 1980s it started to get increasingly difficult for those who wanted to avoid reminders. Both television and publishing rained Holland with information about World War II and the Holocaust. Most of it was general. Sometimes it dealt with the Dutch past. Survivors found Auschwitz images coming into their peripheral vision regularly. Some survivors feared turning on the television, and random channel flipping was not to be risked.
THE GHOSTLY PRESENCE of World War II was part of Dutch life. Political careers were still being ruined by revelations of dubious wartime activities. The underground Resistance tabloids, notably Het Parool, had become the press establishment. In crowded, cosmopolitan Amsterdam, a city of northern Renaissance architecture along a maze of interconnecting canals, tourists could ask directions in any Western language but German. Most Amsterdamers were multilingual, but they always said that German, which has the same roots as Dutch, was too difficult. Amsterdamers deliberately gave German tourists wrong directions. Some would respond to a question from a lost German, “First give me back my bicycle,” as though the mass deportation of bicycles to Germany was the most remembered atrocity.
Even de Groot's hobby, soccer, was a reminder of the war. When the Netherlands’ soccer team played Germany, signs saying “Give me back my bicycle” were held up in the Dutch crowd. De Groot was a fan of the Ajax team, as many Jews had been before the war. In those days, when Holland still had a large Jewish population, a number of Jewish soccer stars played for Ajax. De Groot said, “I have three Jewish places: shul, the Jewish cemetery, and Ajax.” In modern times Ajax has Surinamers but not Jews on the team. But that does not stop people from referring to it as the Jodeclub, the Jewish team. Fans of opposing teams show up at Ajax games with swastikas and have at times chanted, “Jodeclub, sieg heil, gas them!” The Jewish community is assured that these are just tasteless, overzealous soccer fans. Soccer fans are notoriously excessive. The police have interrogated some of these fans who shout “Gas them” and reported that they appear to know nothing about World War II. Do they not watch television?
Lody van de Kamp grew up in a family that talked about the war. He learned about his father in Auschwitz, where his first family had been killed, and about his mother's life in hiding. In 1965, Lody went to school in England, and when he returned as a rabbi, to his surprise he was spending much of his time helping people with war-related problems. “When I came back in 1981 from England, I did not realize that in Holland there is such a thing as a war syndrome. Now I know differently. Some become depressed, some show a spirit of fighting and survival. Some people show an attitude toward children of overcaring and overprotection. There are things of guilt. Very often a wife dies, a husband dies, and then the I have to face not only the tragedy of what has just happened but the tragedy of years back.”
Every year that Lody was back, he found that people talked about the war more and more. But not all their problems were psychological. Scores still remained to be settled. In 1990, Van de Kamp organized a committee to try to get back property that had been stolen from deported Jews and that was still in the hands of Dutch Nazis or their children. The most bizarre case was in a small town named Winschoten, where there had been a synagogue before the war and a committee was formed to raise money to restore it. One of three surviving members of the prewar Winschoten Jewish community lived in Amsterdam, and while visiting his hometown to raise money for the restoration, he stumbled across something called the Siemens Foundation.
Willem Siemens was not a name that he would forget. Siemens had been a Dutch policeman in Winschoten who deported Jews to the death camps and then stole their property. He had personally placed 440 Jews on trains for Westerbork. Only nine survived, but those survivors told how he threatened them, forced them to give him their money, or sometimes took it in exchange for a promise to help them. In 1943, Siemens volunteered for the Waffen SS and fought on the Eastern Front. When he returned in 1945, he was arrested and served eight years in prison. Upon his release he returned to the same little town and lived in almost total seclusion. When he died in 1985, he left a large amount of money for an animal shelter that would bear his name. He loved animals. But when people learned that an animal shelter would be subsidized by the Siemens Foundation, since everyone in the area suspected how Siemens had gotten so much money, there was general opposition. The notary who was in charge of the Siemens money came up with another idea. Siemens's money could be used to quietly subsidize the cremation of pets. There was a nearby animal crematorium, and it was arranged that when a pet owner called to arrange the cremation of his dog, he would simply be told, “Oh, you get a fifty percent discount.”
THE BIEDERMANNS raised their two sons with a Jewish education. Sieg took them to the synagogue until they were bar mitzvahed, and then told them that they had to decide if they wanted to continue going or not. But after the second bar mitzvah, he himself never went again. His wife, Evelyne, would never talk about her camp experiences and had her tattooed numbers surgically removed. When Sieg's sons asked about the numbers on his arm, Sieg would always say he wrote his phone number there so he wouldn't forget it. On vacation at the beach the boys would notice that their father's back was covered with perfectly round scars, each the size of a very large com. “What's that?” they would always ask. But he wouldn't answer. Then one day, in an unemotional voice, he told them. There had been something missing, and the SS had decided to take three prisoners and hang them upside down by their feet. After they hung for about four hours, the SS stuck them repeatedly with rifle bayonets. They would stick the bayonet in and twist it around.
One of the sons, Barry, became a very aggressive child. He was a sturdy little boy, and he believed that the best response to any comment about Jews was a fist in the mouth. For several years Sieg was regularly paying for the repair of other children's teeth. On Barry's seventh birthday, Sieg and Evelyne gave him a cowboy outfit. He wore it to school, and the teacher pointed at the sheriff's badge and said, “There was a time when your parents had to wear those stars.” Having no idea what this could mean, he asked his parents and they explained about the stars. Barry stopped hitting people and grew up to be an active man in community affairs, but one thing never changed —he always hated that schoolteacher.
Sieg and Evelyne's goal was to build a normal life for their family, and they succeeded, even though neither of them ever regained their health. Barry could not remember a year of his childhood when at least one of his parents did not spend time in the hospital. When Sieg was 65, under pressure from his family, he reluctantly retired. The Biedermanns bought a house in Tel Aviv and moved back and forth trying to relax, enjoy life, and not think about the past. Two years later, Sieg died. Evelyne, who was eleven years younger, also died in her mid-sixties.
Once his mother died, Barry felt completely alone. He did not know how to deal with the loss of both his parents. He had never lost anyone. All his other relatives had been killed before he was born. It had always been just the four of them. His brother moved to New York, but Barry stayed in Amsterdam and married an Aruban Jew whose family had no Holocaust experiences. They had two children, whom they named after Barry's parents.
Barry's wife came from a religious family and they took up a traditional Jewish life. He began to wear a yarmulke and a beard. They were one of an estimated three hundred kosher households in the Netherlands. Barry believed it was important to have a religious background. “If you have to get knowledge starting from the age of eighteen, you will never be at the top. It is a free choice in a way, but on the other hand it is not free choice because what you learn in your very first years, you can never make up later. You will never dovin in a natural way.”
Dovining—the bowing, bobbing, dipping, and other ecstatic moves of traditional Jewish prayer—was something he grew up seeing, but because he was not encouraged to participate, he was not sure that he completely fit in during prayer. He was not sure if he dovined in a natural way. “I can't shuvel in a natural way. You know, I can't be in a kdans. I can pretend to. But my three-year-old boy—it's not forced. He's just got it!”
If Barry Biedermann had one friend who he was certain would never dovin in a natural way, it was Theo Meijer. A small, fit-looking man with close-cropped hair and beard who almost always wore his rhinestone star of David neck chain, Theo, in his own way, was also a war victim. His mother was Catholic, and his father, as he suddenly discovered at age 14, had been Jewish. The father had survived in hiding. After the war he decided he was no longer Jewish and never discussed it again. Theo did not know exactly what had happened to his father during the war. He was not even sure if there were surviving relatives, except for a grandmother whom he met briefly on only two occasions. Living on a shady canal near the Nieuwmarkt, Theo was raised Catholic like his mother. Then one day a neighbor told him, in a not unpleasant way, that he was a Jew. To everyone but Theo, this was not surprising, since Meijer is often a Jewish name and the family lived in a somewhat Jewish neighborhood. It had been very Jewish before the war, and Theo could remember as a child how survivors would show up from time to time and claim a house and try to force the people there out, almost always leading to an angry legal battle. Someone came back from Russia and demanded the house next to theirs. Theo liked to joke with Sal Meijer, the butcher, about being a distant relative. Sal, whose shop was then nearby in the Nieuwmarkt, joked that Theo was from the wealthy side of the Meijer family, although no doubt Sal had more money than Theo's father, who was a ship rigger in the nearby docks.
Theo had grown up around Jews, and then he discovered that he was one. The only problem with this new idea that so struck Theo was that it was really not true. He wasn't a Jew—not by Jewish law, since his mother was not Jewish, and not by culture, since he knew nothing about Judaism. He was a generally well-adjusted man. But he became the reverse of his father, who had worked so hard at being a non-Jew—Theo tried hard to be a Jew, even though no one in the Jewish community thought of him as one. He tried to learn, but the Orthodox would not have him. The liberals were more accepting, but he didn't like liberal Judaism. It lacked that exotic other-world kind of feel. “It's all or nothing,” Theo would say.
Theo went his own way, insisting that he “felt Jewish” regardless oi what anyone said. “People say I am not Jewish, but I think I am.” On Jewish holidays he stubbornly went to the Esnoga. His father did not discuss Jewish issues except to object to his son's preference for German cars. Theo loved expensive cars and drove around in a Mercedes, always interrupting conversations to point out cars he admired. He would stop in midsentence and say, “Oh, nice Bent-ley.” When his father asked how he could drive a German car, Theo would point at the three-pronged hood insignia on his Mercedes and say, “That's the star the Germans have made ray generation wear,” and laugh.
Theo became a social worker of tremendous energy and talent, a man with an instinct for working with people and a genuine sense of dedication. In 1970 he started working at Wallenberg, a homeless shelter in his old neighborhood. He roamed the streets looking for people in trouble to take to the shelter, and he especially sought Jews.
He kept a pile of yarmulkes and Hebrew books in a corner of his office and tried to teach people of Jewish background and offer them Hanukkah and other Jewish holidays. If they died, he would say kaddish for them.
“Look at this,” he said, springing from behind his cluttered desk in his cramped Wallenberg office. “Hanukkah—I can do this part,” and he picked up a prayer book, opened it, and began reciting Hebrew and dovining, bending and nodding and swaying. It was exactly what his friend Barry Biedermann called “not dovining in a natural way.” Still, it was impressive that he could read Hebrew that well. He moved his finger along the page and occasionally stumbled over a word, but it was generally good reading.
“Naw,” he said with a big smile. “I memorized that passage from transliterated Dutch. I can't read Hebrew.”
“Theo,” said Barry, “is a perfect example of why, if you have a mixed marriage, you should make clear to the children that they are not Jewish. It's just confusion.”
WALLENBERG WAS LOCATED near the tight ancient waterways on the east side of Amsterdam's center city—a picturesque area so cramped that the stairways in houses had to be as steep as in a ship cabin.
The Dutch don't like the word homeless or the word shelter. Probably none of the people living on the streets of Amsterdam lacked an alternative, because the government guaranteed all citizens an income and, if necessary, a home. The Wallenberg shelter was a government program consisting of two houses and a series of additional apartments, which in total gave private rooms to six hundred people who did not fit into society. There were no dangerous barracks with rows of beds. Seasoned drifters preferred Wallenberg because of the private rooms, whereas in the other Amsterdam homes you might be assigned a roommate. The state subsidized the home by charging residents $420 monthly from the social pensions paid them by the state. This still left them with spending money and enough extra for the annual May vacation at off-season rates in Palma de Mallorca, Spain, a package-tour spot popular with the Dutch.
On his rounds Theo found Aaron, sleeping in the Central Station. It took several visits to gain his confidence, but Aaron eventually moved to Wallenberg and lived there for years. A small man with pronounced Semitic features, he was nervous and given to unprovoked fits of laughter, and like many of the residents, he had strong emotional ties to Theo. According to Theo, “He is a very nice man, but he will steal anything/’
Aaron was a kleptomaniac. His elderly mother said he started stealing and acting oddly at age 12. When Aaron was one year old, she was deported to a concentration camp and saved her son by throwing him off the train. One thing that life in Wallenberg had in common with “normal” life in the rest of Amsterdam was that the society was still haunted by World War II.
“There are many people here who still have problems with the war,” said Theo Meijer. “I have one who is Jewish but denies it. If you say, ‘You are Jewish/he says no. His problem is that he thinks the troubles might come back and that he won't be recognized.” This man lived a secret life, rarely talking to anyone except when the horror of his dreams awakened him and Theo spent the night comforting him. In those long late-night sessions he told Theo that he had been in the camps, but he never explained the long thick scars that covered his body.
Another Wallenberg resident could not find his way in society because he bore the psychological burden that his father was a well-known Dutch Nazi. And there were others who themselves held been Nazis or collaborators. In Holland, once you are labeled as having been “wrong in the war,” you are an outcast. Of the several Nazis he had looked after, Meijer could recall only one who expressed remorse. Most of them were simply unhappy with their sense of isolation. “But I take care of them, too,” said Meijer. “It's my job.”
Barry Biedermann and Lody van de Kamp helped Theo celebrate holidays. For Hanukkah in 1991 the three were having a dinner in Theo's office with four Wallenberg Jews wearing the yairmulkes that Theo distributed. Van de Kamp blessed the wine, said another blessing, lit the menorah, and while they were sipping the wine, a pleasant man with a childlike openness named Bobby de Vries started telling Van de Kamp that he couldn't get circumcised because he had been born during the war. The troubled people of Wallenberg tend to have these disjointed conversations, stringing together nonsequiturs while normal people smile and nod politely, which was what Van de Kamp did. The conversation moved on, but then Bobby repeated his statement about being circumcised and added, “I was born during the war. My twin was sick, so we both had to be in an incubator.”
The conversation moved on again, but Bobby persisted, asking the rabbi, “Do you think you could do it?” Van de Kamp realized that Bobby meant what he was saying. The rabbi frequently got requests for circumcisions from people who had been born during the war. He explained to Bobby how it was done in a hospital in the presence of a surgeon. “It would round things off,” Bobby said, and then became embarrassed at the inadvertent pun.
De Vries was circumcised at an Amsterdam hospital by a surgeon with a local anesthetic, supervised by Van de Kamp and with the good-natured but slightly nutty crowd from Wallenberg enthusiastically attending the ceremony. These were De Vries's friends, and Wallenberg was their home. In fact, Bobby called Wallenberg the only real home he had ever had. When his parents were deported to the camps, they had managed to find hiding places for their sons. Suddenly the small child Bobby had been underground and alone. Only his father survived, and the children seemed an unwelcome reminder to him. Both Bobby and his twin brother had spent most of their lives in a kind of homeless limbo, never marrying, never holding down jobs for long. Asked why he and his brother were that way, he said, “I think it was from the war. We never saw my mother. Three years in hiding.” His brother died in a fluke biking accident, and Bobby lived alone in a sunny, one-room Wallenberg apartment with a view of a canal. His only early childhood memory was of living in a basement. If he thought hard about it, he could remember this one thing: “‘Playing outside. Happiness outside from other children. But that's all I can remember.”
THE ESNOGA remained Amsterdam's most famous synagogue, but on the five hundredth anniversary of the Spanish expulsion, the Sephardic community was down to only five hundred Jews, and the younger ones were rapidly intermarrying with Ashkenazim. None of Leo Palache's three children married a Sephardi. But Palache and others worked hard to preserve their traditions. Sephardim still wore top hats in the Esnoga, but the front row was no longer their proud and exclusive reserve. They were now happy to have any Jew who would learn and follow their rites. There were Iraqis, Turks, Surinamers from the Sephardic community in Paramaribo, even a Russian Jew from an atheist background who learned of Judaism after emigrating to Amsterdam. Some of the Moroccan families who went to Israel instead of France and sent back unfavorable reports later emigrated to Amsterdam and were active in the Esnoga. Originally, the old-line Sephardim were very upset about this influx, fearing that North African rituals would overtake their traditions, as has happened to the Salonikans in Paris. But in time they learned that if they were conscientious enough, their own tradition would prevail. If someone made an error while chanting in a service, others would immediately correct him. Palache searched his memory for tunes and chants from his childhood to reintroduce to the service. Everything had to be conserved.
A Turkish Jew who grew up in Amsterdam was training thirteen boys to take over as the next generation. One of these young men, wearing his top hat, was showing Israeli visitors around the synagogue. He mentioned that he had learned some of the rites from Israelis. “See,” said one of the Israelis, “the only future for Judaism is Israel.” The comment seemed to lie there for an instant like an hors d'oeuvre that had just dropped onto someone's shoe. Then the young man said, “But I was born in Israel.” The Israelis did not want to discuss this phenomenon of people leaving Israel to return to Europe.
Amsterdam, like Antwerp and Paris, had an ever-increasing Israeli population. Like Moishe Waks and Ron Zuriel, these were people who found that material life was better in Europe than in Israel. But what was more embarrassing to Israelis, some of these new emigrants were not even European-born. They were Israelis or North Africans who had chosen to forget the Zionist dream and live in Europe, where they could earn a good living. In Amsterdam they often opened little carry-out restaurants featuring falafel and other Middle Eastern specialties. As in other European cities, most of the Israelis in Amsterdam were neither religious nor involved with the Jewish Community.
Leo Palache worked for Israel for forty years as the Dutch director of the United Israel Appeal. He noted, not with unhappiness, that Holland had one of the highest percentages of Jews who emigrated to Israel. He called the ones who had left “the best of us/’ But in all those years he never was tempted to make the move himself. “It's very interesting. I worked forty years for Israel. I have visited Israel privately and in my job many many times. I have traveled up and down. I have a lot of friends. Israelis are my life. But looking at my background and my roots, my social contacts arid my friends are in Holland and the language and the climate and the food, and the total picture. Living there is a different story, I think, if you are very young.”
ISAAC LIPSCHITS'S brother Alex, for whom Isaac had taken so many risks to get to Israel, stayed there, changed his name to David, became a civil servant living near Haifa, and had three children and grandchildren in Israel. But every now and then, Isaac still had a recurring nightmare that he was in Israel and something had happened to his brother. Most of Isaac's friends from the orphanage did not stay in Israel and ended up living in many different countries. They remained a family to each other and continued to visit each other regularly.
Isaac became a noted Jewish historian, married, and raised two children in Groningen. The synagogue there had been converted into a dry cleaner after the war, then an Episcopal church. In the 1970s it was restored as a synagogue, only to lack enough Jews to fill it. So it was rented out for lectures and exhibitions.
Isaac did not give his children a religious upbringing, but he did give them a Jewish identity. And he seemed almost driven to assert that he was no longer in hiding: “I am known as a Jew throughout the Netherlands. Fm on TV as a Jew. I'm writing in the newspaper as a Jew. Fm always writing on Jewish problems. Fm a Jew.”
Isaac was a successful and well-adjusted man. The great irony of his life was that if his world had not been torn up by a Holocaust, he would have spent his life selling bananas in the Rotterdam market. When he turned 50, he completely broke down and sought psychiatric help. “You start looking back. I have reached things my parents couldn't dream of. My father was a poor man working in the market. My brothers worked in the market. All my uncles, as far as I know, worked in the market. Without a war I would have, too. Without any doubt. I worked so hard that I became a professor. I studied so hard. I was from such poor surroundings that I would never have gone to a secondary school. But I worked so hard, when I came home at quarter past five and I asked my wife when we would have dinner and she would say ten minutes, I would go to my study and work for ten minutes. Later, with the help of a psychiatrist, I found out that I didn't want to give myself the leisure to think. To sit and think, to sit and listen to music. I was frightened. If you are fifty, you can't stand it anymore. You have to sit down and think over what you have done in your life. And then the war comes. The memories. The problems.”
THE PAIN did not vanish. It passed to another generation. Barry Biedermann contemplated how he had grown up with no surviving relatives but his parents, and how hard it had been for him when they died. And he often reflected on the fact that it would be much the same for his children. Because the camps had ruined his parents’ health and they had died young, the Holocaust that deprived him of grandparents had also deprived his two children of them. They, too, had no extended family and had a sense of being raised in isolation, with the sometimes-spoken subject always looming somewhere. “I wonder when it ends?” he asked.
Most survivors said they saw little future for Jews except in Israel. But whatever they said, they were still Dutch, and Holland was their home, and many of them never left. In the 1970s their children started taking over the Community. To this new generation there was more than the Holocaust to Dutch history. They wanted to preserve the Jodenbreestraat synagogues in Amsterdam and turned the four that had been saved by the government into an elaborate museum of Dutch Jewish history.
The old generation with its terrible memories was dying off. Mauritz Auerhaan retired from business and was alone. He moved into the Jewish home for the elderly in the south. As Amsterdam moved farther south, the architecture became more stripped down and less ornate. Far in the south it was just blocks of apartments and shopping centers. Beth Shalom, where Auerhaan lived, seemed to be the latest in homes-for-the-elderly, the optimal artificial environment that maintained the perfect temperature and healthiest air for elderly people —the human parallel to Dutch computerized greenhouses with their six-foot-tall hydroponic tomato vines. At Beth Shalom a central patio with comfortable chairs had a glass roof that assured that it was at once light, airy, and warm. In the hallways the elderly sat in silence. Auerhaan's room was not unpleasant, with its balcony arid little kitchenette, but neither was it quite up to what Bobby de Vries had in Wallenberg.
Auerhaan looked around his small tidy room. “If you are young, you are young, and you see all from your young eyes, and you don't believe that one day you will live here. No. You can't believe it.” He held out his arm. “Do you see the number? That is the only proof that I have been there. Sometimes I think it was a bad dream. I can't believe it.”
AMONG YOUNGER DUTCH JEWS, as in Paris, there was a trend toward more Orthodox practices. This, too, had its roots in the Holocaust—the conviction that assimilation did not work. One Orthodox rabbi said, “In my own family, directly after the war I had an uncle who said the only solution was to assimilate. But this was not true. Even Jews who were baptized—they found them.”
Jewish culture remained ingrained in Dutch life, especially in Amsterdam, where Yiddish words belong to the popular slang in much the same way as they do in New York. Mazzel is luck, a crowd or gang is a miesjpoge, they speak of shlmeils. Amsterdam ended up with ten working synagogues and even four shtibls. Most of them had to struggle for a minyan, because so many of the Jews had moved to the flatland in the south and were no longer within walking distance for the Sabbath. Even the Esnoga began experimenting with offering a service in the south once a month.
The five-hundred-year history of Dutch Jewry was not over. In the 1990s only thirty thousand Jews remained in all of Holland— just slightly more than the population immediately after the survivors returned in the late 1940s. Survivors wanted the past to be remembered by others, but they did not want to look back on it themselves. Leo Palache said about watching television, “If I know there is something about the war, I switch off because I don't want to test myself. Where is the limit of what I can stand? I don't want to test myself. And I say if I want to know about the war, the concentration camps, I just close my eyes.”