The Heart Has Reasons (37 page)

Later, after returning home, I discovered that part of me was still gazing at the vistas that had opened under the rescuers’ expansive influence. As I traveled on a Trailways bus from New York City to Ithaca in December 1996, I tried to hold on to my memories of them, even as the sight of acres of cars parked in front of huge shopping malls reminded me of a life I knew well, but no longer wanted.

It was my last semester at Cornell, but suddenly the emphasis on achievement and grades seemed out of balance. I knew that I was in the midst of a moral and vocational sea change, but with graduation fast approaching I felt pressured to quickly decide my next move, so as not to be left behind in the “real world.”

And yet the rescuers’ choices—both during and after the war—suggested that finding one’s way in life is not so much about using the will as it is about willingness; not so much about setting goals and pursuing them as it is about being open to life and able to respond to it: response-ability. After all, most of the rescuers had had educational and professional goals before the Nazis invaded; if they’d held to their plans, they might have graduated on time, but they would have missed the opportunity to save the lives of hundreds of children. I decided to do less planning and calculating about my future, and more listening and responding. I also did some volunteer work at a hospice and, later, at a homeless shelter. In short, I aspired to be a bit like the rescuers. Looking back now, ten years later, I see that by moving through the world in this
way, my calling has taken care of itself.

I learned some practical things from the rescuers, which can be summed up in a few sentences: Spend less than you earn. Save some money. Give some money away. When I visited one of the rescuers recently, he had a six-inch stack of letters on his dining room table. As we sat down and he moved them out of the way to make more room, he mentioned that they were fund-raising letters from various charities. He lets the letters build up and then, once a year, goes through them and writes checks to the worthiest causes. But he feels bad for the other organizations, so he writes little checks to many of them also. “Even a small donation can give encouragement to people doing good work,” he explained.

What a nice way to spend an afternoon. Beats trying to figure out what’s going on with the plastic in your wallet. When I lived in Los Angeles, I rarely gave away money, but I must have had a dozen credit cards. I was always trying to keep track of them, and I often spent too much. Now I have one. Life is good.

However, after being around the rescuers, it is difficult to conceive of my life as merely a personal journey, disconnected from civic and political responsibilities. Through their influence, I became aware of the tremendous opportunities that exist to join with others who also want to spend not only their money but their time to help build a more just and compassionate society. I have discovered that there are a mind-boggling array of good causes out there, and that the people championing them typically believe, as do the rescuers, that it’s better to care about others than to look out for yourself; that if you care about others, things will work out somehow; and even if they don’t, you won’t regret it. As I’ve gotten involved with some of those causes, my sense of connection to others has been restored, and I now think of myself as a part of a caring community striving to effect positive social change all over the world. How much is that worth?

....

As for my own personal debt to the rescuers, there is a deeper layer still, for they have revivified my relationship with Judaism. Many of the rescuers told me that they hadn’t registered a difference between Jews and non-Jews before the war, but that Hitler changed all that and there
was no going back. As the Nazis imposed their divisive way of seeing humanity onto the entire Dutch population, it became impossible not to see Jews as Jews; instead of ostracizing them, however, the rescuers came to their aid. This often brought them into close contact with strong Jewish individuals and a rich Jewish culture, even as that culture was being eradicated before their eyes.

When I met with the rescuers, I sometimes sensed that they were looking at me as a child or grandchild of someone they had rescued. They definitely saw me as Jewish, and that in itself had a profound impact. Why? Because being Jewish meant something different to them than it did to me.

I had been brought up with Judaism lite—the wishy-washy observance of certain customs, rituals, and cultural traditions, superimposed on a mostly unspoken family history of trauma and dislocation. In contrast, the rescuers had had a tremendously powerful experience of Judaism. They associated it not only with the incredible endurance that Jews demonstrated during the occupation, but also with a vibrant canvas of culture and religion that had enlivened all of Amsterdam before the war. They saw all this as my inheritance and thought I was helping to carry it on. They didn’t go out of their way to affirm my heritage, and yet, by seeing me in that continuum, they did just that. Ironically, it took people who were not Jewish to introduce me to a Jewishness I had never before encountered.

After I returned home to the United States, this new way of seeing Judaism stuck. Suddenly, its interweaving of social justice with spirituality seemed incredibly advanced and potent. Certainly the rescuers embody many of the ideals of Judaism. To know that, I needed only to remember some of the Torah I had read as a young person, passages such as Deuteronomy 10:17–19: “For the Lord your God . . . upholds the cause of the fatherless and the widow, and befriends the stranger, providing him with food and clothing. You too must befriend the stranger, for you were strangers in the land of Egypt.”

However, as a young person, I never saw that commandment—repeated thirty-six times in the Torah—being fulfilled in any earnest way by the people around me or the larger society, except at the nearby suicide prevention and crisis service, which provided runaways with free counseling and set them up with a place to stay. I discovered that by running away myself when I was about fifteen, running from an emptiness so profound that to be with the caring volunteers at the crisis service felt like an emotional step up.

I’ve gradually come to realize, though, that the spiritual and emotional vacuum in which I was raised was yet another part of the legacy of having been born in the shadow of the Holocaust. My father, having lost faith in any God that could have allowed the death of six million innocent people, tried to escape his sense of fear and rootlessness by fixating on material security. His childhood experiences of anti-Semitism caused him to dig in his heels against a threatening world, and this meant armoring himself against any emotion that might make him vulnerable, including the whisper of his own spirit.

As a young person, I tried to kick a hole in that emptiness, which often meant rebelling against Judaism itself. I realize now that I was flailing against a post-Holocaust Judaism that had yet to recover its shining heart—a Judaism that had grown rich materially due to the affluence of Jews in the United States, but one that had remained spiritually bereft, even as my father had remained spiritually bereft. In the presence of the rescuers, I was finally able to break through that vacuum to breathe the fresh, heady air of a life lived on the other side of fear and trauma.

This was no small thing. Unresolved fear and trauma are more than old wounds that have not healed: they shape the present and determine the future. Mistrust generates mistrust; abuse generates abuse. This is bad enough within a family, but when it happens within a community, or an entire society, the negative synergy can be deadly—as we see in Israel/Palestine today. Violence breeds fear; fear breeds violence. How to break the endless cycle?

There must be many ways, but I suspect it mostly happens one by one, and also one-on-one. I am grateful, in my own case, to have had the help of the rescuers. They present a crucial testimony to the Jewish community that the Jews were not entirely alone in the world during the Holocaust. The solace of that truth may be seen as a last parting gift from the rescuers to the Jewish people.

In contemporary Jewish circles, there is an oft-repeated folktale of how the saintly Baal Shem Tov, a great zaddik who lived in eighteenth-century Poland, used to go to a certain spot in the forest where he would light a fire, meditate, and say a special prayer on behalf of the Jewish people. Years later, one of his disciples went to that same place in the forest but didn’t know how to light the fire. Nevertheless, he meditated and said the prayer. Still later, another disciple came along who knew neither how to light the fire nor say the prayer, but he was still able to meditate at the place in the forest, and that
was sufficient. But finally, there came a disciple who said, “I am unable to light the fire. I do not know how to meditate or say the prayer. I can’t even find the place in the forest. All I can do is tell the story, and that must be sufficient.” And it was sufficient, so we are told.

I believe that this tale obliquely expresses the sense of loss that Jews felt, and continue to feel, in the wake of the near-destruction of Jewish life and culture in Europe. To be sure, it ends with a message of comfort: the suggestion that remembering what was lost is sufficient. But Judaism can’t subsist on memories of a time when Jews lived full and vibrant spiritual lives, any more than the rescuers can subsist on memories of what they once did during the war. Though this book is full of the rescuers’ stories, the rescuers did more than tell me their stories. By possessing a spirituality that was strengthened rather than shattered by the Holocaust, and by being powerful embodiments of the lovingkindness through which, the Jewish sages tell us, the world is sustained, they were able to offer me a new vision of my heritage, one infused with
chaim
—life. In the course of being swept away by the immensity of their faith, I found myself carried back to my own.

ENDINGS

For righteousness shall lead
to peace; it shall bring quietness
and confidence forever.

—
Isaiah 32:17

The curtain is quickly coming down on bystanders, rescuers, perpetrators, and survivors alike. Soon the Holocaust will be but a memory of a memory. My father,
alav ha’shalom
, died in January 2004, shortly before this book found a publisher. I had hoped that all the rescuers would live to see their words inspire younger generations, but that was not the case. Of those profiled, Hetty Voûte, Heiltje Kooistra, Janet Kalff, Mieke Vermeer, and Theo Leenders have passed away. It has been my great honor to share the stories and wisdom that they and the others entrusted to me.

I continue to keep in touch with Clara Djkstra, Rut Matthijsen, Piet Meerburg Gisela Söhnlein, and Kees Veenstra. Since September 11, 2001, I have heard them decry both the subsequent hostile backlash against Arabs and “the new anti-Semitism” towards Jews. I have shared their dismay over the unfolding tragedy of the war in Iraq—especially troubling to the rescuers because it was started by the trusted nation that once liberated them from oppression and starvation under Hitler.

My wife and I had a son in June 2005, and Kees Veenstra called to offer his benediction: “I hope he grows up to be one of those people who bring some light into this troubled world.”

That, of course, is as good a description of the rescuers as any I could come up with. Although the historical context in which they beamed that light is increasingly distant, their witness continues to shine. Against the seemingly limitless void of the Holocaust, the rescuers have revealed to us nothing less than the ultimate power of the individual, when surrounded by hate and fear, to act with love and compassion.

2012 UPDATE

Piet Meerburg remained an esteemed presence in the Amsterdam arts community until his health began to rapidly decline in 2010. He passed away on April 11, the same day his friend Krijn van den Helm had been executed by the Nazis sixty-five years earlier. In September of this year, the mayor of Amsterdam officiated in a ceremony at which a bridge along Nieuwe Keizersgracht was named after him. Although Piet had already received the prestigious silver medal for his lifelong contribution to Amsterdam's cultural and arts scene, the bridge naming was in special recognition of his role as a rescuer of Jewish children during the Nazi occupation.