The Heart Has Reasons (16 page)

Gisela as an elder. Courtesy of the Department of the Righteous
Among the Nations, Yad Vashem, Jerusalem.

What are your feelings towards
Germans today?

If they are old, you have to wonder what they were doing during the war. But most of the people living today had nothing to do with it.

I’ve heard that some of the Dutch
young people still hate the Germans.

Perhaps they’ve never known a German.

It’s as if the hatred has been passed
along to younger generations.

Well, I don’t think my children have it.

Did you make an effort to raise them that way?

Well, we tried to teach them to think for themselves. And also to question everything, and not accept oversimplified answers.

Is that what went wrong in Germany?

Well, after the First World War, the Germans were poor and unhappy, and when Hitler came along they thought that here was a strong leader who would make everything all right. If they hadn’t been feeling so humiliated from the First World War, perhaps they wouldn’t have wanted a leader like that. Then he gave them jobs and built up the economy and directed their eyes to the shining rainbow of an Aryan utopia.

You know, their national anthem goes “Germany, Germany, über Alles”—Germany above all. With us here in Holland it was never, “Holland is the best in all the world”—no, not at all. And I think we are not so quick to follow a leader. Hitler convinced the people that
he was the superman who was going to make them a superpower. You didn’t need to wonder anymore whether something was right or wrong, because the Übermensch was taking care of everything. Hermann Goering, his second in command, used to say, “My conscience is named Adolf Hitler.” So a situation arose in Germany where people felt that their leader could do their thinking for them. That’s very dangerous.

Do you believe that the Germans still have that tendency?

Oh, no, no. . . . Did Hetty tell you that we went to Ravensbrück last year for the fiftieth anniversary of the liberation? I always said that I would never go back. But then we got a very sincere letter from the German government that spoke of forgiveness and conciliation. They said that they knew it would be difficult for us, but that they hoped we would return to Ravensbrück for a special program.

Well, we did. There were many speeches about what Germany has learned from its mistakes, and it was a reunion of sorts with people trying to find each other. There were college students who served as our guides. Such wonderful young people—they became real friends after only three days. On the last day, they took us to Berlin and showed us around. The whole program was excellent.

Do you still see Hetty?

I go to Amsterdam every three weeks to take a piano lesson, and then we visit together. Sometimes we sing together, too.

Pooh and Piglet, always together
. . .

We’re fortunate to have had such a long friendship. . . . And Ate and I have been married now for over fifty years, and have three children, and five grandchildren. Sometimes these days when I see a baby, I get a tender feeling, as if I’m yearning to be a great-grandmother.

I hope it happens.

After our interview, gisela insisted on walking me back to the bus stop, which was two blocks away. I reluctantly agreed, wishing she would stay inside and keep warm, as it was a cold, blustery day. After we reached the bus stop, she insisted on waiting there with me until the bus came. As an icy wind blew through my jacket, I said, “Gisela, you don’t have to do this.” Under her breath, she said, “Yes, I do.”

At that instant, I felt I had caught a glimpse of the moral discipline that, over fifty years earlier, had compelled her to save Jewish children. Her internal sense of what is right and decent is something she follows regardless of other people’s opinions—in this case, mine—or what is comfortable. So we stood there and chatted, and after ten chilly minutes, the bus arrived. After I’d gotten on, and when the bus was already halfway down the block, I looked back and there she was—still standing there, slowly waving goodbye.

FIVE
~ CLARA DIJKSTRA ~
DIVINE MOTHER

The whole worth
of a kind act is the love
that inspires it.

—The Talmud

It was a cold december day when i knocked on clara dijkstra’s door. As I stamped my feet on her welcome mat, strains of a Beethoven symphony came drifting out to me from inside her apartment. A moment later the door flew open, and Clara, a full-figured matron in a bright red blouse, greeted me with such gusto that I felt like some long-lost family member. Noticing the coldness of my skin during our handshake, she took both my hands in her two palms and rubbed them vigorously. She then led
me inside to her kitchen, where she set a kettle to boil for tea and cut a few slices of lemon. This was the first interview I conducted upon arriving in the Netherlands, and I was gung-ho about getting started.

Yet as I sat in Clara’s cozy kitchen and gazed through a corner of the steamed-up window at the street below, I found myself musing on Lillian, my effusive, Yiddish-speaking paternal grandmother—how she would dash down the hall squealing with excitement whenever we rang her doorbell. It was no coincidence that being in Clara’s presence had evoked her memory; Clara had picked up more than a little
Yiddishkeit
from having grown up in what was at one time the quintessential Jewish neighborhood of Amsterdam.

A popular song by Kees Manders captures how the Amsterdammers recall that now-vanished center of Dutch Jewry:

When father looks through his photographs,
we are amazed by the stories he tells
of the Weesperstraat, and the Jodenhoek.
He tells how the day started: the trade and the business,
the humor and the wit that was woven into life then.
And if one day you didn’t have much luck,
you could go to the Tip Top in the evening
and forget your troubles.
Sometimes, late at night, you could still hear the call:
‘lovely onions, pickled onions!’
Amsterdam weeps where once it laughed.
Amsterdam weeps—it still feels the pain.

As Clara began to recount the destruction of that Jewish community, I was plunged into a world of such sad intensity that, after twenty minutes, I was staring at the table instead of at her, and had the strong sensation of wanting to run out of the room. Sensing what was happening, she again took my hand, and, giving it a squeeze, said, “Together we’ll get through this.”

Here this women who had
lived
the war for five years was comforting
me
on account of the pain she could see I was feeling at having to listen to her stories. Such is the empathy of the rescuers.

I did indeed get through the interview, helped along not only by Clara’s warmth, but by her indomitable sense of humor. As she recounted some of her outrageous encounters with the Nazis—so close to being tragic—her laughter was infectious. Like the biblical Sarah, who is said
to have laughed when God told her she’d have a child in her old age, and laughed again when she actually did, Clara was often gleeful about her destiny. She seemed more surprised than anyone that Yad Vashem would give her a medal, and that someone like me would show up at her doorstep more than fifty years later.

No one hearing her stories would be surprised by Yad Vashem’s decision, however; Clara Dijkstra’s heart was far too large to be circumscribed by the Nazi agenda or governed by their rules and regulations, and it remains a heart that covers, that shelters, that understands.

I was born in Amsterdam in the middle of the Jewish people. As a little child, I attended a school on Weesperstraat—the old street that led into the Jewish Quarter. There were many Jewish shops all along the way to the school, and the children in the school were all Jewish, except for a few of us. But at that time, you didn’t think too much about it. We were all just Dutch.

I got married in 1940, when I was twenty-one. We moved into an apartment house at 210 Oosterpark Street. There was a big Catholic hospital on the next block, but it was still a Jewish neighborhood. And then the Germans invaded in May, and the streets were full of Germans soldiers and their Dutch buddies, the NSBers. At first they didn’t seem so bad, but I had a couple of run-ins with them early on that showed me their true colors.

One morning I went out walking with a one-guilder coin on my coat. You see, on our one-guilder coin was an image of the Queen. Soon the Germans changed that, but I had taken one such coin and made a pin out of it. As I walked, it caught the eye of a German officer, a stocky man with a barrel chest. “Why do you wear that?” he asked.“Because I want to,” I answered. His face got very red and he yelled, “Show me your papers!” I said, “No, I don’t have to.” It is the law in the Netherlands that you only have to show your papers if you are suspected of having committed a crime. “This is deliberately damaging Dutch money!” he shouted. “What if everyone did this?” I thought he was going to burst the buttons off his uniform. He took me by the arm, and dragged me into a building full of Nazis. They all screamed at me, and I screamed back at them. After about twenty minutes, they kicked me in the butt and threw me out the door. I was back on the street, but they’d ripped off my pin, and I had a sore butt.

On June 29 it was Prince Bernhard’s birthday and I wore a fresh white carnation. All Dutch knew that the prince always wore a white carnation in the buttonhole of his lapel. I was walking near the Muntplein when an ugly man with a bony head stopped me; I think he was a detective for the NSB for he was wearing the wolf trap insignia.

“What a lovely bloom,” he said. Then he ripped it off, and stomped on it. He, too, knew about the prince and his white carnation. “Take three steps back,” he commanded. He reached into his pocket and took out a gun. My knees started trembling—I didn’t know what he was going to do. Just then a big truck full of German soldiers careened around the corner, heading straight for us. I ran, ran for my life! I could run very fast in those days. I ducked under a gate, and then I was safe. But my heart was racing like a runaway train. I guess I’m not meant to die yet, I thought.