The Heart Has Reasons (2 page)

By the early 1990s, however, the U.S. had changed in ways that I couldn’t have imagined, and so had I. I see my personal changes as a sobering lesson in the power of society to affect and mold an individual. Like Anne Frank, I’d always thought that people were basically good, but being a studio guitarist in Hollywood during the ’80s had eroded my capacity to believe even that. This was a dangerous development, for once you stop expecting people to be good, you’d be surprised at what they begin to show you.

How do you continue to care about others when they only seem to care about themselves? That was a question I found myself increasingly unable to answer. Then, in 1992, someone set fire to my neighbor’s car in the middle of the night; I awoke to the sound of the windshield exploding. The next day I learned that the perpetrator also set fire to a homeless person sleeping in a nearby alley. What lack of human connection could have resulted in such horror, right at my doorstep?

One year later, I was living in Ithaca, New York, attending college for the first time, having left the music business after the L.A. riots. At Cornell, the answer to Rodney King’s question, “Can we all get along?” seemed a resounding
yes
, but I knew I was in a rarefied environment, far from the drive-by shootings, brutal policemen, and the world-class greed of my former home. Life in Ithaca, a small university town, is strongly influenced by both the idealism of many of its inhabitants and the rugged beauty of the natural world that surrounds it. I remember thinking, as I wandered amid its waterfalls and gorges, that here I might actually get back my peace of mind.

While at Cornell, I applied for the Conger Wood Fellowship for Research in Europe, mainly, I admit, because it would mean a trip to Europe. But when I started brainstorming about what, exactly, I wanted to research, my thoughts swerved in a serious direction: I would interview people who had rescued Jewish children during the Holocaust. Immediately the project occupied some large psychic space, but I didn’t yet recognize that the rescuers might have—or be—the answer to the crisis of meaning and purpose that had overtaken me in L.A. Rather, I was drawn by the peculiar attraction and repulsion I had to my family history, a history that now seemed a bit more imaginable whenever I pictured that homeless person on fire.

I’ll never forget how anxious I made my grandmother when, as a child, I unknowingly drew a design that resembled a swastika. My mother, seeing my bewilderment over this unexpected reaction, explained to me that my drawing reminded Grandma of something terrible. At that age, I couldn’t understand how a mere set of lines on a page could make her so upset. Later, I learned that my mother’s side of the family had nearly all been killed in Hungary; I never got the details, but I do know that my maternal grandfather, the practical, business-minded son, emi-grated to New York in 1936 seeking new opportunity while his parents and ten brothers—all in Yeshiva studying to become rabbis—remained behind and perished.

My father, at the age of eleven, was on the last boat out of Poland. On August 25, 1939, he and his two brothers, one sister, and his parents, boarded an ocean liner bound for New York. One week later the Nazis invaded, and all sea travel became
verboten
. My father’s mother, Lillian Klempner, once sat me on her lap and, turning the pages of photo albums from the old country, showed me wedding pictures, sepia-toned young couples, smiling women, and plump children in their little white shoes. “Hitler took them all,” she said.

And so I am among those people in their 30s and 40s who, as writer Daniel Mendelsohn has noted, are the last generation to be directly touched by the Holocaust. “There is, in our relationship to the event,” he writes, “a strange interweaving of tantalizing proximity and unbridgeable distance . . . the dead are close enough to touch, yet frustratingly out of reach.” As with many members of this “hinge generation,” the Holocaust was not spoken of in my home, but, rather, was conveyed by strained silences and disconnected emotions.

Psychologists note that children of survivors often feel compelled to express the suppressed feelings of parents and grandparents, having inherited the original trauma as a “wound without memory.” This has been true of me. I grew up in a well-lit world of modern conveniences, TV dinners, and expectations of upward mobility that were realized when my family moved from the Bronx to Schenectady, New York, when I was eleven. In a split-level house with a neatly trimmed lawn, over a hundred miles from our relatives in Brooklyn and Queens, the past had been left behind and assimilation was in full swing.

But the shadow of the Holocaust is long. That overarching emptiness seemed to hold the key to the legacy of woundedness I felt in my family. Whenever I tried to open the door, though, some kind of emotional force field stood in my way. I would get hold of a book on the subject, but then one glance at a picture from the death camps would send me back to my “normal” life. Still, I couldn’t stay away forever.

Only after I undertook this project did I realize that interviewing people who risked their lives to save the lives of others, those who radiated hope during that time, rather than fear, might be a way to finally face the void rather than be driven away by it. I also found myself looking to the project for answers to my own moral quandaries. I had watched myself grow more angry and suspicious while living in Los Angeles; how was it that the unbelievably harrowing ordeal of the Nazi occupation had unleashed such altruism and courage in the rescuers?

Upon receiving the grant from the Cornell Institute for European Studies, I wrote to Yad Vashem, the institution established by the state of Israel whose mission includes locating and honoring those people who selflessly aided Jews during the Nazi years. I asked Mordecai Paldiel, the director of the Righteous Among the Nations program, if he could supply me with names and addresses of the Dutch “righteous.” From a list of eighty rescuers, approximately half agreed to be interviewed; these, in turn, often directed me to friends who had also been rescuers.

Many people associate Holland with rescue attempts after reading the diary of Anne Frank. I soon learned, however, that the Jewish survival rate in the Netherlands was the worst in Western Europe: different estimates by historians place it between 11 and 36 percent, as compared to about 60 percent in Belgium, and 75 percent in France.

The physical terrain, the strong Nazi presence, and the gradual, covert way the Nazis went about implementing the Final Solution in the Netherlands proved to be particularly deadly when compounded with the Dutch inclination to seek consensus and accept compromise. The vast majority of Dutch people cooperated with their Nazi occupiers and complied with the avalanche of Nazi regulations, paving the way for the eventual murder of their Jewish co-citizens. As lawyers, legislators and judges stood by and the mass of Dutch citizens remained silent, the Nazis ran roughshod over the country’s constitution, trampling all the protections and privileges that Jews in Holland had enjoyed for centuries.

Those who decided to help their Jewish neighbors had to be willing to disobey the Nazi measures and resist the Nazi machinations to relegate Jews to subhuman status. They had to cross the line from being law-abiding citizens to enemies of the state.

Who was willing to do it? The women and men who speak in the pages of this book. They are never boastful, but proud in some quiet way. Their explanations of their actions often make it sound as if what they did was the most natural thing in the world. Most of them continued to be morally engaged after the war as well, offering through their example a luminous alternative to the empty materialism and superficial values in which so many of us have become enmeshed.

Spending time with the rescuers was, for me, a transformative experience. They welcomed me into their homes as though I were someone special—a characteristic inversion—and showered me with hospitality and kindness. I soon was looking at them not only as people who had made history, but also as people who could teach me a different way to live. I’ve come to think of them as the radiant specks around the black hole of the Holocaust.

BACKGROUND

A talent is formed in stillness;
a character, in the world’s torrent.

—Goethe

Most of holland’s nine million citizens were bystanders to the Nazi persecution of the Jews. Though millions wanted to do something, and hundreds of thousands gave assistance to those who were doing something, only about 55,000—less than 1 percent—stood up to the Nazi injustices by active resistance. Of that number, only a small fraction—perhaps a tenth—dared to actually rescue Jews. So that’s less than one-tenth of 1 percent of the population shouldering the task of saving 140,000 innocent people.

How did the rescuers come to make the choices they did? What choices were available to them, and to the Jews, during the Nazi occupation? Though the narratives of the rescuers directly engage these questions, it’s helpful to know more about the circumstances that were the backdrop for the rescuers’ choices. By surveying that vanished historical and cultural landscape, it becomes easier to understand why so many sympathetic Dutch citizens did nothing, and it also puts the heroic actions of the rescuers into sharper relief.

....

The night before Germany attacked the Netherlands, Adolf Hitler came on the radio and gave his solemn pledge that Holland’s neutrality would be respected. Twenty-five years earlier, the Dutch had managed to stay out of the First World War; many hoped that they would be able to stay out of this one, as well. On May 10, 1940, however, people all over the country were awakened in the early morning hours by the drone of fighter planes, punctuated by the sounds of anti-aircraft flak. The Dutch
army fought desperately with heavy losses, but their defenses were easily overrun by the panzer divisions of the invading Wehrmacht. Through the use of paratroopers, the Germans were able to seize every important airfield and most of the strategic bridges by dawn.

Three days later, when the Nazis announced that they were planning to bomb Rotterdam by air, the Dutch command stationed there expressed willingness to surrender the city. The offer was ignored. Hours later, a formation of Stuka dive bombers set out on an air strike that left one of Holland’s oldest cities in charred ruins. The firebombing of Rotterdam, the first large-scale airborne attack in history, is remembered firsthand by survivor Herbert Boucher:

I saw the planes still diving and releasing hundreds of bombs. Flames and black smoke were now visible over the center of the city. . . . The fires grew steadily worse and by evening the whole center of town was one vast sea of flames, so huge that young trees in front of our house were bent by the strong winds sucked in by the fire. This continued into the night and all of the next day.

Closer to ground zero, the firestorm reached hurricane velocities, ripping doors and windows from their frames, flinging burning rafters into the air, and razing buildings and factories. Amid the fiery chaos, hundreds of civilians were killed, thousands more wounded, and tens of thousands were left homeless.

Within five days, the Dutch High Command officially capitulated, and Queen Wilhelmina and most of her cabinet fled to England. Many Dutch felt betrayed by her departure as hundreds of German troops goose-stepped into the Netherlands, their jackboots, equipped with steel taps, making a thunderous clicking as they approached. As days stretched into weeks, however, it became clear that the queen was better off in exile than imprisoned in her own castle, as King Leopold of Belgium was in his. During her hasty escape, Wilhelmina had also had enough presence of mind to take the entire national treasury with her. Safe in her London headquarters, she began to issue stirring addresses on the BBC-broadcast Radio Orange, urging the Dutch people to stand strong.

The Germans, even before having arrived on land, had airdropped leaflets declaring: We the German people have come to liberate you. Most Dutch were offended by such propaganda, but the Germans hoped to win them over with a show of civility and by appeals to a shared “Aryan blood.” The prospect of the Dutch being among the winners, through
the very real possibility of a German victory, and according to their high ranking in the Nazi racial hierarchy, did draw a small number of them into the Nazi fold. Most, however, wanted nothing to do with their occupiers, though they also wanted to avoid antagonizing them. There were some among the Jews, of course, especially the recently arrived German-Jewish émigrés, who guessed correctly where all this was leading.