The Heart Has Reasons (17 page)

Let me tell you how Nettie came into my life. One spring day in ’42, I went to visit some friends, and there was a woman there named Sylvia Bloch. She was very shaken up because early the next morning, she and her husband had to report to the Zentralstelle, the big Nazi office on the Adama van Scheltemaplein, to go to work in Germany. They had been given a chance to dive under, but the people who had offered to hide them wouldn’t let them bring their little daughter. “Why don’t you give her to me?” I said. “I’ll take care of her.” She looked at me with redrimmed eyes. “What can I pay you to do this?” she asked. “Nothing,” I said. “Nothing at all.”

She’d been almost hysterical, but now she calmed down. She left right away, saying she would bring her child to my place as soon as she could. A little while later she appeared at my front door with two-year-old Nettie. She had brought her stroller and all her clothes. When Sylvia was leaving, the child was crying “Mamma! Mamma!” But after a while she settled down, and took a nap.

When my husband came home, he looked at Nettie asleep in the stroller, and said, “What’s this?” “She’s ours,” I said cheerfully. He was a little shocked, and not very happy about it. I said, “I’ll take care of her, I’ll handle everything. If the Germans come, just let me do the talking.” My mother wasn’t happy either. She said, “Don’t do it! Don’t do it! You worry me so!” But I told her, “Mother, I love you, but it’s already done. We have a child, a Jewish child.” Then she said, “Good for you.”

Later, when my parents would come and visit, Nettie would call them
Oma
and
Oompa
—Grandma and Grampa. After a couple of weeks,
the child started to call
me
Mamma. I let her think of me as her mother because it was a lot safer that way. Young children didn’t need to have identity cards, so as long as the Germans thought she was my own child, there would be fewer problems.

A few months later, I was pushing Nettie in her stroller when a German officer stopped me and asked to see my papers. After he inspected them, he looked at Nettie and said in German, “A Jewish child, no?” Nettie looked up at me and, not understanding German, asked, “What did he say, Mamma?” I said to the officer, “See? You’re crazy. She’s my child.” He must have believed me, because I kept on walking and he didn’t come after us.

Before things got really bad, I used to take her everywhere. One spring day we went to the Rembrandtsplein to listen to the orchestra play, and have some ice cream and lemonade. Returning home, there was only one trolley back to our neighborhood. A big crowd had gathered, and people started elbowing their way on. Suddenly, a German officer nearby shouted, “Halt!” Everyone froze. In the sudden silence, he walked right over to Nettie and me. My heart leaped into my mouth; I squeezed her hand, preparing for the worst. He turned to the crowd and said in a shrill voice, “You must board the trolley in an orderly manner.” Then he made a little bow in our direction, and, stretching out his arm towards the trolley, said, “Women and children first.” I scooped up Nettie, and sauntered up the steps.

After a while the Nazis began to make raids—not only to pick up Jews, but to get Dutch men, too. They picked up my husband, and, later, my younger brother. If you were not Jewish, they would send you to Germany to work in their factories; if you were Jewish—well, you know what happened then.

Once I was coming home from the greengrocer when I got caught in a
razzia
. The SS barricaded the block and moved in from all sides. Sirens wailed, and the sound of Nazis screaming their commands filled the air:
Raus! Schnell!
Dogs were barking, and children were crying. Hundreds of people rushed through the streets dodging kicks and blows. While this was happening, I saw the big doors to the hospital open. The hospital offered some safety because the Germans were afraid that if they went inside they would catch typhus or some other disease. Many young men went running towards the hospital trying to escape. Suddenly I saw my husband zigzagging in that direction, but he was seized by a couple of broad-shouldered SS and dragged away. I watched as they used the butts of their rifles to push him into a van.

As the occupation went on, the Germans made life worse and worse for everyone, especially, of course, the Jews. One cold gray dawn the sirens again began to wail, and a black van with a loudspeaker drove through the neighborhood blaring:
All Jewish people must come out of their
houses and board the tram. All Jewish people must come out of their houses and board
the tram.
In the park were many, many trams that were going to take all the Jewish people away. They pushed them in with everything they had: clothes, jewelry, suitcases.

Late that night, the German police came, looking for any Jews who were still there. We were woken up by their shouts:
“Steh auf!”
They had their green vans parked outside with the motors running, and five or six of them came running up the stairs to demand our papers. Nettie was quiet in her crib, and fortunately they didn’t ask about her. Afterwards, they went into other apartments and took more people away. You felt terribly helpless. There was nothing you could do.

The next day a German officer with medals all over his uniform came to my door. “You have Jewish people?”
“Nein.”
“Jewish children?” I looked him in the eye: “Definitely not.” Then he said, “You have very pretty eyes. I think I’ll relax here for a while and then report that I searched and found nothing.” I felt nauseous just having him in the apartment, but I fixed him some ersatz coffee and finally he left.

Afterwards, my neighbors were very anxious about my continuing to keep a Jewish child. They were far too nosy. I knew that people sometimes got arrested because their neighbors talked too much, so I just kept repeating, “I do
not
have a Jewish child.” I couldn’t tell them that she was my child, because they knew she wasn’t. So I said, “Her mother is in the hospital, and her father works in Germany.”

The worst search came one night when we were awakened by the sound of heavy boots on the stairs. I heard yelling in the hall, and had hardly gotten out of bed before the Germans were kicking the door.
Bam! Bam! Bam!
These men were part of a special death squad that made its own attacks on the Jews. When I opened the door, I had to cover my eyes—the phosphorus lanterns they carried were so bright. One man looked at my papers, while the others stomped through the apartment searching for onderduikers. Nettie had been sleeping, but the noise had woken her up, and now she was crying. I was afraid that these Jew-hunters would see her dark hair and eyes and assume she was a Jew.

One of the men pushed me aside and burst into Nettie’s room. I rushed in after him. “When is her birthday?” he asked. “December 28, 1939.” He held the lantern by her, but, because of the phosphorus, it
made her look like a blondie! He stared at me, then back at her, then again at me, and said, “She looks like you.” I was thinking, oh thank you, God, thank you. Then he startled me by saying, “She’s beautiful.” That was it—he left.

As I stood there listening to those brutes go down the stairs, I was laughing and crying at the same time, saying, “It’s a miracle. God’s miracle. Thank you, God.” I went to tuck Nettie in, and she just lay there like an angel—so innocent, so trusting.

The next day, the neighbors couldn’t believe their eyes. They thought surely these Jew-hunters had taken Nettie to the
Creche
—that’s the building where they put the Jewish children before they were deported. And they wondered how I had managed to not get shot. The ones who helped Jews they would shoot in public to teach a lesson to the neighbors.

Meanwhile, I was in touch with the Resistance a little bit. I taught at the Rosh Pinash Schule—a Jewish day school in the neighborhood where many of the children were refugees from Germany. One day a man asked me if I would take one of the children on my bicycle to a certain address. I knew that it must be the address of a hiding place, but I didn’t ask any questions. I did this for about twenty children—one by one I would take them on my bicycle. Sometimes the addresses were far in
the south, so I had to stop at a certain point, and hand the child over to someone else. How I hoped things would work out for those children!

A Jewish child from Amsterdam who was taken by members of a rescue group to a rural area in Southern Holland
where he was placed with the caretaker pictured here. Courtesy of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.

Nettie understood very little about the danger both of us were in. I tried as best I could to give her a normal life. Once things got bad, I kept her inside as much as possible. During the war, I would sometimes write to the Blochs at an address I had for them. I would tell them how everything was going, how Nettie was growing up and learning to talk. But I never heard back.

My ration of bread was only half a loaf per week, not enough for both Nettie and me, but I managed to get some more from the baker across the street. He was a Catholic man with eleven children. He had seen me with Nettie and must have known the child was not mine, since when we moved there I had just gotten married, and then, suddenly, I was walking around with a two-year-old. One day as I was passing him in the street, he gave a nod, as if he wanted to talk to me. He knit his bushy brows and whispered, “Tomorrow morning while it’s still dark, come around to the back door of the bakery.” Oh, what a relief! I knew he was going to give me something. And he was very generous: from then on, every Wednesday morning before dawn he would leave a loaf of bread for me in the milk can by his back door. You have to understand: at that time, a loaf of freshly baked bread was as close as you could get to heaven.

The last eight months, from September ’44 to May ’45, were the worst. No coal, no gas, no electricity—which meant no heat and no light. And the food supply was dwindling. Everything was ersatz: chicory instead of coffee, sugar beets—which are pig fodder—instead of sugar. And the Germans, who were the cause of it all, threatened us! They said, “If we leave, all you’ll have left to eat will be grass.”

The child needed food, but I had almost nothing to feed her. So I would leave Nettie with my parents and walk with a cart to where the farms were in the north. Sometimes the weather cooperated and we had some sun and warmth, but when the icy winds came, my feet would turn to wood.

When you finally reached the farmers, they would take your jewelry and linen, and give you beans and vegetables in exchange. They even charged one-and-a-half guilders to spend the night! Where did I sleep? In the barn with the cows. That was not so bad because it was warm. But there was no toilet, nothing. Sometimes a hundred people at a time, staying over on one farm. Then the next morning, we would all have to walk back to Amsterdam.

One day during this “hunger winter” I noticed the date: December
5, 1944. This is Sinterklaas in the Netherlands, when all the children get presents and everything is supposed to be fun. But we were all poor, hungry, and unhappy. No one even remembered that it was Sinterklaas. An icy wind was blowing, but I went out for a walk. I crossed a field where a freight train had stopped. When I looked inside one of the boxcars, what do you think I saw? Apples, potatoes, and onions! I said to myself, “It’s Sinterklaas, and the children are going to eat.” I stuffed my bag full of produce, and headed for home. It was only three or four in the afternoon, but, because it was winter, the sun was already setting. I’ll never forget how happy I felt, walking back under the low hanging clouds. As the sky grew dark, I went around the neighborhood inviting all the children to come with me to a Sinterklaas Party. Twenty-five or thirty of the little waifs crowded into my apartment. I got busy preparing the food. The aroma of the potatoes and onions cooking was like heaven itself!

The neighbor downstairs brought up his accordion, and we all sang Sinterklaas songs. Our other neighbors handed out some white Sinterklaas candy that they had been hoarding somewhere. It was so nice, but the children, oh!, they were so badly off. Their clothes were threadbare and patched, and their legs and arms were so thin. Their shoes were falling apart, and some didn’t even
have
shoes.

The food supply didn’t start to come back until just before the war ended. My elderly neighbor used to always say, “When the white bread comes, there will be peace.” In the Netherlands, white bread is a symbol for peace and happiness; when couples are first married, we call it “the white bread weeks.” We couldn’t get white bread at all during the war, but shortly before the Allies came, the Red Cross brought in delicious white bread from Sweden. People would stand on line for hours for it. When my neighbor got her slice, she said “There is peace.”

And she was right: on May 5, 1945 the Germans surrendered! Everyone ran out into the street, and we were all hugging and kissing. Flags were everywhere, and the children pinned little strips of orange cloth onto their shirts and blouses. Adults wore orange armbands or ribbons, and we sang the national anthem in public for the first time since the occupation began. I went to Dam Square, which is the place we Dutch like to go to celebrate, and found it a heaving sea of singing, dancing people. You had your arms around people you had never seen before. I picked a yellow star up off of the ground, and pinned it on Nettie’s behind! I wanted everyone to see that she
was
a Jewish child.