The Heart Has Reasons (27 page)

Well, you know, the majority of the police collaborated with the Germans during the war, and they were never punished. The courts went after the big war criminals, but some people were never. . . . I mean, in this very building a Jewish man was killed by the man who was hiding him. He hired a boat to try to dump the body in the river, but the Dutch police intercepted him. Years after the war, he was brought to trial. The man he killed was very wealthy, and he was accused of killing him for his money. What he said—and no one believed him—was that the man had threatened to betray him, and that he had been given permission to kill him by the Resistance. But he couldn’t name a single living Resistance person he had talked to about it. Half the people who know him don’t speak to him anymore. I don’t speak to him anymore.

I’ve heard that after the war people from the Resistance sometimes took vengeance
on those who had collaborated with the Germans—humiliating them, beating them,
sometimes even killing them.

Yah, but don’t forget there were many different kinds of people in the Resistance. There was a paramilitary part that I had no connection with—people with bayonets and so on. I didn’t like those people at all. And then there were the “September Resisters” who jumped on the Resistance bandwagon around September ’44, when Maastricht was liberated, and the Germans fled the country (but later came back again). They had the biggest mouths, but they did very little, and they were the ones who shouted the loudest against the NSBers after the war was over. But we didn’t. We had a humanitarian Resistance.

Are you a pacifist?

I don’t deny that sometimes armies are necessary. But I would never go into the active military service. I couldn’t—it’s not in my nature. I think the humanitarian side is far more important.

After the war ended, what happened to all the children that you had helped to save?

Many of them, of course, had become orphans.
The Commissie voor
Oorlogspleegkinderen
was set up by the Dutch government to figure out what to do. I worked with them for a few months because I felt a need to finish what I had started. I knew things that very few others knew. But I didn’t want to stay there because I could see what was coming: a big fight over the orphaned children. Should they stay with the foster families, or be raised by relatives? And if there were no relatives, should they stay here, or be sent to Israel to be raised by Jewish people? Let’s say there is an eight-year-old boy who has been hidden by a certain family since the time he was five. The parents don’t return, but instead you have a seventy-year-old uncle who comes and asks for him. What do you do? The liberal Jews felt that in certain cases it would be better for the child to remain with the foster parents; the Orthodox Jews felt that every child had to be placed in a Jewish home. Everyone had a different idea about what should be done. Who was I to be involved in such decisions? The war was over; there was no danger anymore. I had given it three years, and I felt that was enough.

My plan was to finish my education. But for three years I’d been independent of my parents, and I’d grown up a lot during that time. I didn’t want to return to my parents asking for money, or to depend on a government loan. So I had the idea of starting a business with my friends from the Resistance to help us pay our way through college. And what I wanted to do was to open a cinema.

During the war, the Nazis had made everyone feel so strictly defined; even as students, you were in this group or that group, this box or that box. I wanted to create a space where we could get out of our boxes, and the idea of a cooperatively run art cinema seemed perfect. That it had never been done before didn’t daunt us; we went looking for a good building, and, ironically, found a theater that had been used by the Nazis to show propaganda films. We got money from all kinds of people to “liberate” it—that multimillionaire, Dr. Wetzlar, paid for more than half of it, and a lot of other people were willing to be sponsors. Felix Halverstad was our treasurer for thirty years. So that’s one business that came straight out of the Resistance—yah, we all came together again to run the cinema.

I continued to run it all the way through law school, and that’s how I got into the business of managing theaters and, later, distributing films. And that’s the way it’s been all my life—I’m always working three jobs
at the same time. But that first theater, the
Kriterion
, is still open today, and it continues to be cooperatively owned and run. Later, we took over another theater, the
Uitkijk
, and I’m proud that those two theaters together currently employ about fifty students.

Any ideas as to how we prevent a situation like the one that happened in Germany
from recurring?

Information and education. That’s the only way. In the years leading up to the war, the people in Germany weren’t well informed. They didn’t have a free press. Albert Speer, Hitler’s armaments minister, later testified that through mass media propaganda 80 million Germans were subjected to the will of one man. And that’s what you always find in a dictatorship: independent thinking is stifled because all the information from the outside gets closed off. The German people only heard what the government wanted them to hear, and they went along with it. You find people like that everywhere—there are as many here in Holland as there are in Germany.

What I mean is that what happened in Germany could have happened in Holland, too. And though the Germans were somewhat responsible, the Dutch were also responsible for allowing so many Jews to be deported. We had exactly the same responsibility, yet we didn’t do anything. So who are we to look upon the Germans as the contemptible people of Europe? That’s ridiculous. We need to look at ourselves.

Why do you think the Holocaust originated in Germany?

I’ve never had an explanation for that. Germany was at the vanguard of theater, film, literature, and music, and was also producing the greatest scientists—men like Einstein and Planck. The Germans were the most sophisticated, intelligent, intellectual people of Europe—unbelievable!

You know, after the war I met a Dr. Hüneke, who had been a doctor in the German army. He was one of the greatest men of conscience I have ever met. He took the entire weight of what happened onto his shoulders, and he atoned for it all his life. He really took responsibility for all that his country had done, and he worked on restitution, reparations, and so on. By the way, he had nothing to do with the medical experiments, but that they were done was partly what he was so distressed about. He was acutely aware that members of his profession—perhaps his fellow classmates—had done those terrible things.

But the point is that this doctor was better than 99 percent of the Dutch people. In recent years I have met other very sincere German intellectuals. Some of them still suffer over what happened during the war. These are wonderful people, much more wonderful than 80 or 90 percent of the Dutch people of that generation who all say they were in the Resistance when very few of them actually were. So what’s it all about? German or Dutch, there’s always a big mass of people who follow the crowd, and only a small number who really think about what’s going on and take responsibility. It has nothing to do with being German, Dutch, or French.

The French! Look at what’s going on in France at the moment. Fifteen percent for Mr. Le Pen! That’s far too much—I mean, he is absolutely a fascist. His National Front Party wants to drive all the immigrants out of the country. And in Germany—maybe a fraction of a percent are in the extreme right. They have laws to prevent radical splinter groups from gaining seats in their parliament. So what have the French to boast about? They are the ones we have to watch out for these days. I lived in the south of France for fifteen years, and I can tell you, half the people there are for Le Pen—maybe even a majority. It’s a beautiful country, I like it, but I see a danger in the French mentality. A people as nationalistic as the French are already dangerous.

So that’s why I can’t stand to hear people vilify the Germans. Because who are they to talk? The young Germans today had nothing to do with the war. They can’t help it if their parents or grandparents did the wrong thing. Right now, I think Germany is the most democratic country in Europe.

So it seems clear that your negative feelings towards Germany are all in the past.

Yah, but I admit, I won’t take a vacation in Germany.

The past associations are too strong?

Yah, and I won’t buy a German car. Which is emotional, not rational.

It seems like your mind is in one place and your heart is in another.

Isn’t it so with everyone?

Looking back, do you see things differently than you did at the time of the war?

You know, there was only one good thing about the war: everything was black and white. You absolutely knew you stood on the right side—there was no question about it. That has never again happened in my life.

Piet’s blunt criticisms of the jewish council have come to be shared by many historians. It seems that, from its inception, the Jewish Council functioned as a kind of ventriloquist act in which the Germans would talk and the words would come out of the mouths of the Council staff. Even during the war, some of the Jews called it the
Joodse
Verraad
—Jewish Betrayal—instead of
Joodse Raad
—Jewish Council.

The role of the Jewish Council, especially that of its leadership, has been the subject of heated controversy in the post–World War II Netherlands. At the height of its operations, as many as 17,500 Jews were on the Council Staff, and each of them received an exemption. Regarding these exemptions, A. J. Herzberg, commented, “At best, they gave the odd fugitive time to go underground; at worst, they lulled many people into a false sense of security and prevented them from deserting their posts.” He knows of what he speaks: Herzberg resigned early on from the editorial board of the Council’s weekly newspaper. Many did not have the moral strength to make such choices, including the diarist Etty Hillesum, who accepted a position at the Council but likened it to “crowding on to a small piece of wood adrift on an endless ocean after a shipwreck, and then saving oneself by pushing others into the water and watching them drown.”

The Nazis created such Jewish Councils not only in the Netherlands but throughout occupied Europe. Their strategy to subvert Jewish leadership in this way was far from original—Jewish history is mottled with other such instances. During the time of Jesus, all the high priests who served the Jewish community—including Caiphas, who presided over the Sanhedrin—were appointed by the Romans and beholden to Roman interests, lest they lose their positions and, possibly, their lives. But never before had Jewish leadership been employed in a plan to obliterate the entire Jewish people. This strategy was in keeping with the overall Nazi aim to make the Jews accomplices in their own annihilation and thus destroy them spiritually as well as physically.

Every opportunity was taken in the councils and concentration camps to pit Jew against Jew, typically by granting special privileges to
a few. By manipulating their victims’ instinct for self-preservation, the Nazis sought to eliminate any possibility that the Jews might rise up as a united force to resist them. Guided by their notions of eugenics and social Darwinism, their plan was to create a competition in which the weak lost out to the strong. Once the losers had been done away with, they would then take special care to eliminate the winners, because, to quote Reinhardt Heydrich, these survivors “will represent a natural selection and in the event of release would be the germ cell for the resuscitation of Judaism.”

As the Jewish renewal that the Nazis so much wanted to obviate has arisen in the world, younger generations of Jews must take a hard look at the choices some of their grandparents and great-grandparents made in connection with such institutions as the Jewish councils. Though it can be argued that they made these choices because, as Browning puts it,“they couldn’t even conceive of the program of systematic mass extermination awaiting them,” the realization that some Jews were involved in the destruction of their own people remains deeply disturbing. It is not “blaming the victim” to take from this disastrous chapter in Jewish history an indelible lesson about the perils of placing personal privilege over the collective good.

....

By the end of 1942, Walter Suskind had become an expert at rescuing Jews, not only by sneaking children out of the Creche and adults out of the Schouwburg detention center but through a number of other dicey stunts. When someone discovered that the key to the men’s locker room in an Amsterdam bathhouse fit the padlocks being used on the railway cars to Westerbork, Suskind and his associates showed up when a train stopped in the freightyards of the Polderweg and freed its occupants. Back at the Schouwburg, he destroyed all records about the passengers so that, on paper, they ceased to exist.