The Heart Has Reasons (4 page)

To go underground posed a different set of difficulties. The Neth
erlands is only 12,900 square miles—about the size of Maryland—and in the 1940s it was already densely packed with a population of nearly nine million people. The Dutch take pride in themselves, saying that God made the world but that they made Holland, because their ambitious system of dikes reclaimed large tracts of land that were once underwater—including what is now Amsterdam. It is an exceedingly flat country, with no mountains and very little forest. Its excellent network of roads, stretched across the level countryside, enable anyone with a vehicle to be anywhere within its borders within a few hours. However, an environment so meticulously planned and developed does not lend itself to hiding. In the 1940s, only the rural areas provided some open space where one could walk around without much risk of being observed.

It has often been noted that the Jews were well integrated into Dutch society, having lived harmoniously in the Netherlands since the seventeenth century. That is true, but not in the sense that the term“integrated” is often used. Though Jews enjoyed full Dutch citizenship and encountered little anti-Semitism, they, like other religious groups in Holland, had their own separate political representation and functioned parallel to other groups without necessarily having much contact with them. Often they lived in the Jewish sections of Amsterdam, or in other enclaves. As a result, many Jews didn’t know many non-Jews. This made going underground extremely difficult.

The best bet for would-be
onderduikers
—that is, people who wanted to “dive under”—was to find some shelter on the property of a sympathetic farmer. Unfortunately, this required contacts that most city dwellers, especially those Jews who lived in the Jewish Quarter of Amsterdam, simply didn’t have. This left only the option of finding a hiding place somewhere in the city, where the houses were built close together. Such proximity to one’s neighbors reflected the close-knit nature of Dutch life, but made it difficult for someone to remain undetected for long. What’s more, curtains were typically left open, leaving the common living areas of the home in plain view.

To hide under such conditions required a high level of secrecy. Some special situation—an attic, a basement, a crawl space—would probably be necessary. But of course one could not live in such a space self-sufficiently; hiding would require the cooperation and assistance of other people. Possible helpers had to be approached very cautiously due to the possibility of betrayal. After all that, there was still no assurance that even the most sympathetic person would be willing to take the risk.
On January 20, 1942, at the Wannsee Conference in Berlin, Reinhardt Heydrich, designer of the Nazis’ mechanism for mass murder, presented his strategy for the deportation and extermination of every remaining Jew in Europe—
eleven
million
was the targeted number! Within an hour-and-a-half, consensus was reached by the enthusiastic quorum of fifteen high-level Nazis, eight of whom held Ph.D. degrees. The Holocaust was officially underway.

It’s difficult for us to imagine today that there was a time when names such as Auschwitz held no particular resonance. Before the Holocaust, the horrors of high-tech genocide were, as Dutch historian Louis de Jong states, “beyond the belief and the comprehension of almost all people living at the time, Jews included.” The Final Solution was a massive undertaking, requiring multiple layers of administration and the varied skills of many professionals. Yet, despite the complexity of this “apparatus of total destruction,” the basic formula behind it can be stated in four words: denigrate, isolate, deport, and kill.

Seyss-Inquart already knew the routine, albeit on a small scale, from his experience as Commissioner of Security and Police in Austria after Hitler forcibly annexed it to Germany in 1938. Under his orders, Jews in the Netherlands began to be rounded up in the summer of 1941—first to be detained in Amsterdam, and then sent off to Westerbork, a transit camp located almost one hundred miles northwest near the small village of Hooghalen. Of the many officials below Seyss-Inquart, only one warrants our attention: Ferdinand Hugo Aus der Fünten, who was principally responsible for coordinating and implementing Seyss-Inquart’s plans for the Jews in Holland. We will hear more about Aus der Fünten in chapter eight from rescuer Piet Meerburg, who helped to free captive Jewish children right from under his nose.

All the Nazi officials were part of a well-defined hierarchy that maintained an unusually strong presence in the Netherlands. In France and Belgium, the Germans were content to rule through a puppet government with the army as the ultimate authority. But in the Netherlands, the elite SS and Nazi party representatives were involved in every aspect of the transformation that they envisioned. One indication of this is that 5,000 German police were stationed in the Netherlands, and only 3,000 were stationed in France, despite the fact that it is a much larger country and contained twice as many Jews. Browning believes that the Nazis exercised tighter control in the Netherlands
than in any other Western European country because they saw the Dutch as a kind of Nordic-Germanic people to be absorbed into their inner realm.

Jewish children in Westerbork. Courtesy of the United States Memorial Holocaust Museum, Washington, D.C.

Despite their large numbers, however, the Nazis could not have done it alone. They relied on Dutch government employees and numerous public agencies and utilities to carry out their objectives. They used the entire governmental infrastructure as a platform from which to pursue their master vision which involved not only the extermination of the Dutch Jews but the Nazification of Dutch society and the full exploitation of all Dutch resources. Despite their misgivings, all but a few Dutch officials cooperated with the wishes of their Nazi occupiers. Dutch civil servants supplied Jewish addresses; Dutch policemen forcibly removed Jews from their homes; Dutch tram conductors transported Jews to the train stations, and Dutch railway workers operated the trains to Westerbork. Though there were some who tried covertly to resist—for instance, in Amsterdam, Police Inspector Schreuder organized a team of his men to inform Jewish people of upcoming raids that the police themselves had to conduct—others performed their jobs with zeal.

In the spring of 1942, Jews were ordered to wear the yellow star of David. There were scattered protests from the non-Jewish community: some donned homemade stars that said “Protestant” or “Catholic.” Leaflets protesting the policy were distributed in the tens of thousands.
Such responses were not unusual in Holland—statements of protest in regard to the Nazis’ treatments of the Jews were plentiful throughout the war, and petitions and protest letters were sent to everyone from Seyss-Inquart on down. De Jong informs us that the Netherlands Institute for War Documentation houses over 70,000 different issues of more than 1,200 underground newspapers. In such documents we find human rights and decency preserved on an ideological level, and certainly they served as morale boosters. However, these “paper tigers” did not do much more than that, at least as far as the Jews were concerned. They may even have inadvertently misled the bewildered Jewish public by reinforcing the notion that in a civilized society, in solidarity with their non-Jewish co-citizens, such injustices could not long continue.

Most Jews, instead of realizing that they had better scramble to save their lives, underestimated how long the war would continue and how much damage the Germans would be able to do before it ended. They also misjudged the Allied forces in thinking that they would take action against egregious human rights violations, when actually their objectives remained strictly military, and, as has often been noted with bitter regret, they could not even be persuaded to bomb the railway tracks to Auschwitz. In the words of Elie Wiesel, “The blindness of the Jews was equaled only by the indifference of the Allied leaders to their plight.”

And so Jews put on their stars and “set off for the streets, embarrassed, proud, ill at ease, or indifferent.” Most felt that since they had already registered as Jews, they might as well wear the star, although the stars unmistakably marked them for discrimination, deportation, and, when the time came, death. None of the scribbled letters of protest, or the noble, measured phrases of the petitions, or the rough-and-ready prose of the underground newspapers could save them then. On July 14, 1942, a major razzia took place in Amsterdam, and the next day, to make room for the new arrivals, the first trainload of Jews left Westerbork for Auschwitz. Death trains, filled to capacity, were soon leaving Westerbork regularly. To expedite turnover, the Nazis requested additional train service from Amsterdam to Westerbork, and the Dutch Railways complied by adding train number 11537, departing Amsterdam 2:16 a.m., arriving in Hooghalen 5:58 a.m.

Even as the Jews were being called up to work in “labor camps,” able-bodied Dutch men were being conscripted to work in Germany, mostly in factories, so that the Germans they replaced could be drafted. Failing to get an adequate response from their call-up notices, the Germans started rounding up Dutch men by the tens of thousands—a two-day raid on
Rotterdam later in the war yielded more than 50,000 deportees. Before the war had ended, more than ten times that many had been used to provide manpower for the Nazi war effort. It turned out that these men, unlike their Jewish co-citizens, were made to do purposeful work.

For the Jews, the requirement that Dutch men provide labor, and the roundups of Dutch men that followed, added to their confusion. They had already seen how everyone had to register, but it was the Jews who were singled out for discrimination. Now, all Dutch men had to provide labor, as did all Jewish men and women. But would their treatment be the same?

Most Jews did not learn what was in store for them at their “labor camps” until they were already there. And then they were forced to write letters to family members stating that everything was fine. The following is one example, a letter written in December ’42 by an inmate at Auschwitz III, the I.G. Farben factory where two out of every three prisoners perished:

I have now been here four weeks, and I am well. I am in good health. Work is not particularly heavy. We start at seven in the morning and we work till four in the afternoon. Food is good: at noon we have a warm meal and in the evening we get bread with butter, sausages, cheese, or marmalade. We have central heating here and we sleep under two covers. We have magnificent showers with warm and cold water.

Jewish families en route to Westerbork. Courtesy of the Netherlands Institute for War Documentation.

In Amsterdam, those same relatives were encouraged by the German authorities to write back. De Jong reports: “Tens of thousands of such letters were handed to the Germans. Of course, not a single one was ever delivered.”

To understand how such deceptive tactics could have been official, albeit secret, German policy, one need only look at Hitler’s writings:

When you lie, tell big lies. . . . [The masses] more readily fall victim to the big lie than the small lie, since they themselves often tell small lies in little matters, but would be ashamed to resort to large-scale falsehoods. It would never come into their heads to fabricate colossal untruths and they would not believe that others could have the impudence to distort the truth so infamously.

And so Jews in Amsterdam were exposed to much propaganda and deception, along with rumors, guesses, warnings, assurances, and secondhand reports. Most of them, facing a gaping uncertainty each day and trying their best to cope with the mind-splitting worries, simply muddled through, hoping for the best.

For those still undecided about what to do, receiving a deportation slip brought matters to a head. Some reported as required while entrusting their children to others. Some families tried to dive under together or, failing in that, tried to split up and secure separate hiding places. In any case, finding “safe addresses” was very difficult.

It must be remembered that in 1942 the German forces appeared invincible. Not until the battle of Stalingrad a year later did Hitler suffer his first major defeat. As Browning points out, “This is not a point that one can say the Allies will win the war, or even that the war is going to be over soon. Those who hid Jews in the Netherlands in July ’42 were making a very extraordinary decision considering that there was no timetable and no guarantee of liberation.”