The Heart Has Reasons (32 page)

Gill came up with another plan, quite involved. He asked me to go with the girl on the train to Amsterdam, and meet him in Amsterdam. So we got to the Amsterdam station, and he was there waiting for us. The three of us went across the street to a quiet café and he explained the false identity he’d concocted for her. He gave her the best false identification papers I’d ever seen, including papers for France, Germany, and all the things more. Then the two of us got on the train with her to France, because that’s where she wanted to go. But two other men from the Dutch Resistance got on the same train—that was Gill’s plan. When the train stopped at the Gare du Nord station, Gill and I stepped off the train with the girl. Those two friends of Gill’s pretended to be undercover Nazi agents. They walked up from behind and shouted, “Halt! Gestapo!” And that girl didn’t ask who, what, where—she ran!

That was the idea: that she would run away and never come back. She would figure that if we had been arrested, it wouldn’t be safe to ever return. And it worked.

But about six months later, I was talking to Siem, and I asked, “Whatever happened to The Singer?” I wondered if he had heard anything. He said to me, “Ted, you won’t believe it.” I asked, “What’s she done now?” He said, “She’s singing in a cabaret in Paris. She performs there every night, and is a big hit. Even the German officers like her.”

Ted broke into long laughter, and so did I. Still, there was a disturbing undercurrent
to his tale. How could this ambitious young singer have been so oblivious to the
war’s implications for her own people? I shook my head incredulously, and asked
him if anyone ever figured out that she was Jewish.

I don’t think so. We gave her such good papers that she could travel the whole world, you know? So you had good things and bad things. Have you ever heard a story like that? Well, we lived it. I was so happy that the girl was gone, but I was even happier when I learned how well she was doing in Paris. So I think that she survived the war. But I tell you once more: that girl was not stupid.
Less than a year before the war ended, Vos was captured. Vos was a Jewish man we should never forget: he was the brains behind the entire Resistance here. Because of him we had all those false papers, and those papers were very important, you know. If you didn’t have them you were in trouble—you couldn’t get food, and all the things more. Before Vos figured out how to counterfeit them, we used to have to rob the town halls where they were being stored. We stole many thousands of those papers, not in one place only but in many different town halls all over Holland.

This could only be done with help from the inside. You would break in, and the man inside would show you where the papers were. After that, you would tie him up, so that when the Germans came, he could say he was overpowered. The police were good; they worked with us. They had to patrol the building at night, and so, after we left, they would open the door and go inside, and would find the man who was all tied up. And then they would make a hell of a noise until the Germans came.

One time Vos took me to Delft and introduced me to a girl who worked in the town hall there. He said to her, “If this man comes to you, give him whatever he needs.” So later I went over there and said to her, “I need papers for a man, woman, and child.” She said, “What are their ages?” I told her, and she said, “Come back tomorrow.”

During that time she went into the files of the deceased, looking for people who had been born in those same years. She removed them from the “deceased” file and put them into the file of living persons. And when I returned, she gave me the papers for each person, and told me everything I needed to know about them: who their brothers and sisters were, and their mother and father, and all the things more. Then she would ask, “Where are they going to live?” I would tell her, and then she’d send the files to the town hall there. After two days, that Jewish man would come to the town hall to get those papers. They’d add the photo and fingerprints. And after that, his family was safe—there was no way you could trace them. Of course, we had to be careful not to send them to a place where they would run into the relatives of the dead people!

We took care of many Jewish people in that way. It gave them the best situation. Others you just had to keep hidden. I had about fifteen people that I hid away in my house. Nothing ever happened to any of them—they all came out all right.

Around the beginning of 1943, we learned that the Germans were
designing a new distribution card that would be very hard to counterfeit. But Vos, unbelievably, got his hands on one of them, and even before the new cards had been issued, he had printed perfect counterfeits. When people started using them, no one could tell the difference. That was the level of skill he had.

Vos was a very tight, closed man. He didn’t say much. We traveled together once from Heerlen to Amsterdam. I always stayed a few yards behind him. In Amsterdam he got off the train and was stopped by the Gestapo. He had papers saying he was a real estate agent, but he wasn’t doing no real estate, I can tell you that.

I went to the telephone at the station and immediately called Sonia. Sonia was the Jewish girl who worked very closely with him. She knew exactly what he was doing all the time. So I called Sonia and told her they had stopped Vos. “Hold on,” I said. And I waited to see what would happen. Two minutes passed, and I said, “They’ve released him.” I had to call her right away because if something happened to Vos, the whole Resistance in the southern part of Holland would go to pieces. But he had such good papers that no one could touch him.

Around that time, the Germans killed a man who was at the top of the Resistance. That was a shock for all of us. Vos went into hiding, and Sonia was the only one who knew where he was. We had contact with Sonia, and we’d ask her this and that, and she would say, “Well, I can’t give you that because I’m out of contact with Vos.” If we pressed her, she would say, “It’s too dangerous. Leave him alone.” After three weeks, our whole operation came to a halt; we couldn’t help anyone anymore. So we went to Sonia and said, “Look, you’ve got to go to Vos. Tell him he has to come back.” And so she did, and he listened to her.

In the summer of ’44, the Allies landed in Normandy and our hopes were up that soon we’d be liberated. But then we received the sad news that the Gestapo had caught Vos in Amsterdam.

A big meeting of the Resistance was being planned in the south. The Gestapo had found out about it, but they didn’t know the location. After Vos was arrested, they began to torture him very badly to tell them where it would be. Nothing worked; his mouth was shut like a steel trap. But then they brought a Jewish baby before him, and said, “If you don’t tell us where the meeting is, you won’t like to see what we do to this baby.” He still wouldn’t tell them, and then they broke one of the baby’s legs. Then he kind of collapsed.

After that he was like putty in their hands. They got the meeting place out of him: a certain monastery in Weert, which is here
in Limburg. When the day came, they got him drunk and took him with them. They arrested about a dozen people in that raid, including some monks and priests. There was only one man who escaped being caught by hiding behind some curtains.

By Fall ’44, it seemed like the war would soon be over: U.S. troops from the 30th Division liberated Mesch, just a little ways from here, on September 12. That same “Old Hickory” division liberated Maastricht the next day, and the Germans started calling them “Roosevelt’s SS.”

But things were not going well in the north: Operation Market Garden, the largest airborne attack until then, was a defeat for the Allies, and the Battle of Arnem wiped out most of the British 1st Airborne Division. I was sitting at the kitchen table with Tilla reading the headlines when a canvas-covered German military truck pulled up in front of our house. Tilla said, “Ted, there he is.” I didn’t ask who-what-where, didn’t even look—I ran out the back door. By the fear in her voice, I knew that Commandant Müller had come back.

He chased me into a field, but what he didn’t know was that there was a paramilitary unit that had been following him. They had been planning to ambush him and free the Jews and political prisoners that he and his men had crammed into the back of that truck. And so these paramilitary men ran out there too, and shot him right there in the field. He was coming to get me, but they got
him
. We opened the back of that truck, and helped all those people down. Now they could all go home again.

All of Limburg had been liberated before the cold weather came, but other provinces remained under German control and had to suffer through that last terrible winter. The Germans didn’t accept defeat until after Adolf Hitler committed suicide the following April. They surrendered to Field Marshall Montgomery on May 4, 1945.

Not long after the war ended, I opened the paper and read that Vos had been arrested as a collaborator! I saw his picture and almost fainted. That one man who had escaped the raid on the monastery had reported that Vos had been there with the Germans, drinking and carrying on with them.

He was sentenced to two years in prison, but the verdict was appealed, and his case was eventually sent to the highest court in The Hague. I attended the trial and was called to the stand as a character witness. For
the first time, I learned his full story, and what his real name was: Danïel Jesse, or Bob Jesse.

For much of the trial, he wasn’t present. Then finally he came in—he had his arms around the shoulders of the two guards because he could barely walk. The judge said, “You can’t stand up, Mr. Jesse?” He shook his head no. “What happened to you?” He said, “Well, I have been in a Dutch jail for six months.” They had beaten the hell out of him in that jail. The prosecutor said, “Because of him, eleven people were betrayed. And he only served half a year in jail.” “Yes,” the defense attorney said, “but he saved the lives of hundreds.” In the end he was acquitted, and the judge ordered that he be set free immediately.

After the verdict was delivered, he remained in the dock, and I went over and sat down next to him. “Hell, man, look at how you’ve been treated.” “I understand why they have done this to me,” he said. “But you must understand, too, why I did the things I did.” I put my hand on his shoulder and said, “Don’t you worry. I’ll always remember you. Compared with what you did for the Resistance, this is nothing.” He said, “During the war, the Nazis treated all Jewish people like this. So now I have been treated like this, too—by men who hate the Nazis and thought I was one of them.” And that is the price he paid.

What was your life like after the war?

We had paid a price too, Tilla and I. We were still reeling from what the Germans had done, but felt disillusioned with Dutch society as well. The exiled government came back, and most of the Resistance people were shunted aside while bureaucrats who had been lockstep with the Germans were kept on in their positions. And the trial of Vos . . . well, I’ve never been so upset by anything in my life.

I returned to the mines and was now chief geological engineer. But when I saw in the paper that the Liberian Mining Company of Bomi Hills was looking for an engineer, I applied for the position. At that time, there was nothing I wanted more than to leave the Netherlands.

You wouldn’t believe all the killing that is going on in Liberia now—streets strewn with bodies, a brutal civil war. But they’re such an easygoing people that it’s hard for me to understand what it’s all about. When we moved there in 1947, it was a time of great peace, and the peo
ple were famous for their hospitality. They would help you; they would do anything for you.

When you walked into a village, the first person you met would give you a big greeting and take you straight to the town chief. The chief would sit you down in the shade, and bring you some cold water. He’d offer you a banana or an avocado and tell you how honored he was that you had come to his village. And if you needed a place to stay, he would give you the best hut. He’d move out the people who lived there for a few days, but
you
had the good hut.

In Holland, Tilla and I had been living comfortably. When we got to Liberia there was no running water and no indoor light—except for kerosene lamps. The weather was hot, with heavy rains in the summer, and dry Sahara winds in the winter. Our cabin was in a dense tropical forest. So we realized immediately that this would be a completely different life. But it was a healing place for us, a place where people really understood how to work together in harmony.

We spent twenty-five busy, productive years there. In addition to being in charge of civil engineering and exploration at the mine, they made me head of a sawmill, a quarry, a panel factory, and a carpenter shop. That enabled me to help the Liberians with all kind of projects: we built a railroad track from scratch—that was a hell of a job—and a bridge over the Maher River. I also helped them to build churches, all kinds of churches: Catholic, Protestant, you name it. I gave them plans, construction materials, labor, and all the things more.