A Chosen Few (16 page)

A similar pogrom was averted in Czeştochowa because there the local bishop, Teodor Kubin, denounced the accusations of blood ritual. But Bishop Stefan Wyszynśki of Lublin, who later became Cardinal Primate, explained to the Jews that they were resented because “they took an active part in the political life of the country.” The statement went on to explain, “The Germans murdered the Jewish nation because the Jews were the propagators of Communism.” When the Lublin Jews asked him for his position on the accusations of ritual murder, he said, “The use of blood by Jews was never completely clarified.”

The role of Jews in the Polish Communist movement was greatly exaggerated. In 1938 some five thousand out of 3.3 million Jews had been active Communists. About one-quarter of Polish Communists were Jews. But there was an element of self-fulfilling prophecy in all this. The Jews were now marked as Communists because they had depended on the Red Army to protect them from Poles. Between Liberation and 1947, fifteen hundred Jews were murdered. The percentage of Jews in Poland who were Communists dramatically increased simply because most Jews who were not Communists decided to leave. Soon Polish Jewry had dropped down to about 90,000. A Jewish woman from a Warsaw Communist family said, “Primarily Communists stayed. Everybody else in their right mind took off.”

A
msterdam was liberated on the last day of World War II, freeing the Dutch at last to restore their vaunted orderliness. A Red Cross office was organized to help people who were looking for vanished relatives by offering a series of forms, which they then tried to process with a maximum of efficiency. The office had to contend with long lines; it gave each applicant one card to fill out for each missing relative. Once the applicant got to the front of the line, someone would say, “How many, please?” and hand over the correct number of cards.

Sal Meijer, the kosher butcher, waited his turn patiently. “How many please?”

“One hundred, please,” he said in his husky voice.

“Just one card for each missing relative, please.”

“One hundred, please,” Sal Meijer repeated, trying to look straight ahead with no particular emotion.

They gave him ten cards. Coming from a large Amsterdam family, he actually did have one hundred missing relatives, including his mother, six brothers, their wives, and children. They could not all be gone. But he could find none of them.

The Dutch are a methodical people. An obsession with lists, registration, and carefully filled-out and catalogued forms was one of the Dutch traditions that the Germans had found helpful in the deportation and murder of 78 percent of the Jewish population of
the Netherlands. In 1944 the SS in France had complained about the troublesome French character that was preventing the Paris SS from matching the deportation rate in Holland.

Sal Meijer went home to the room he was renting because a Christian family had taken over his apartment while he had been in hiding. He had not been surprised when strangers answered his door. “Excuse me,” he said as he pushed past them. “I just wanted to get something.” He walked over to a doorway, reached up, and removed a concealed panel that the new residents had never noticed. From it he pulled out a twelve-inch oil-burning brass menorah that had been in his family for two hundred years, as well as a few other valuables that he had hidden there before he left in 1940. “Excuse me,” he said again, then left.

Meijer’s grandfather had been mayor of Amsterdam. His father, like Sal, was a kosher butcher. The Meijers never would have hidden their Jewishness. There was no need to, and besides, Sal had always assumed that his prominent Semitic nose and strong features left no doubt as to his identity. If the Germans had wanted to know that he was Jewish they would not have needed a yellow star. Nevertheless, the Germans made him and the other 140,000 Dutch Jews wear them. One day when he was riding on a train, a German saw his yellow star and ordered him to stand up. Struck that the German had looked at the star first, Meijer realized that this German would not have known that he was Jewish except for the label. After that Meijer stopped wearing the star. He and his wife-to-be moved to Hillegom, in the heart of Holland’s tulip-farming region.

There they lived as Catholics, regularly attending mass. No one in Hillegom had ever seen a Jew, and it never occurred to any of them to doubt that their new neighbors were what they said they were. Many people had left the cities for the countryside, where there was more food. Few villagers even thought about his typically Jewish name. They didn’t know what a Jewish name was. Occasionally it would come up, and he would explain that his family came from near the Meijerei River, in the Brabant region. There was nothing suspicious about them, although it took some practice for them to become convincing Catholics. When he had been there only a month, he took a handkerchief out of his pocket to blow his nose during a mass, and one of his removed and forgotten yellow stars fell out of his pocket. He stuffed it back in his pocket before anyone saw it.

In their home the Meijers tried to keep Jewish law. He fasted for the Yom Kippur holiday each year, telling his neighbors that he was ill and could not eat. But news of his sickness always concerned them, and they would bring him food. Toward the end of the war food was scarce even in this farm district. By 1944, famine was widespread in Holland. When people later asked Meijer how he had kept kosher during the occupation, he always shrugged and said, “Tulip bulbs are kosher.”

In the winter of 1944–45 many Dutch were eating tulip bulbs. It was called the hunger winter—an almost total breakdown in the economy because the Dutch were sealed off from Allied help, farming was not producing enough, and the occupiers had grabbed everything from food to bicycles and shipped it to besieged and desperate Germany. Southern Holland, like Belgium, was liberated in the early fall of 1944. But the Germans tenaciously held on to central and northern Holland, including Amsterdam. At the end of September the Allied airborne assault on Arnhem was driven off by German troops. Through that record cold winter, Amsterdamers struggled to survive. Wood was stripped from everything for heat—the ties in the tram tracks, the benches in the abandoned synagogues, any wood that could be found.

After the Liberation, Sal Meijer, eager to look for his family, pedaled from Hillegom back to Amsterdam on the rims of a bike that no longer had tires. There were almost no tires in Holland for either bicycles or cars. Amsterdam was a shock to Meijer. The city seemed empty. The old Jewish areas had been almost totally depopulated. Everywhere, iron rails—tram tracks that had been stripped of their ties—were lying uprooted. Ditches had been dug for latrines. Most of the synagogues had been completely gutted. Benches, arks, balconies—if they were made out of wood, they were gone. The old Jewish neighborhood around Jodenbreestraat—an area like Paris’s Pletzl, where working-class Jews lived in crowded, narrow streets that led to five major synagogues—was destroyed. The residents had all been deported, and Amsterdamers had gotten through the hunger winter by stripping not only synagogues but abandoned houses of furniture and even beams and floorboards. Buildings were still collapsing from missing beams.

Every day, Jews would go to the Central Station to see who got off the trains. They would go to the Red Cross office and fill out cards. The Red Cross started to compile a list of those known to have been killed in the camps and another of known survivors. But
it made mistakes. Some who survived and came back were listed as dead. So people who saw their wife or son on the death list could still hope it was a mistake.

The Moppes diamond factory became a shelter for camp survivors. Sal Meijer and other Jews went regularly, searching for relatives, but not a single one of his missing hundred relatives ever turned up there. Then one day he saw a newspaper article about a ship from Odessa that was landing in Tilburg. The article said that four Jewish camp survivors were on board the ship. Sal went back to the diamond factory the day after the ship landed and found his brother. Jaap was alone. His wife and child had been killed, and among the bodies Jaap had seen removed from the gas chamber were those of three of their brothers.

W
HEN
V
ICTOR
W
ATERMAN
got back to Amsterdam from the safety of Switzerland, he was shocked by the condition of Jews. Not only were they sickly looking, they were in rags. Some of the women were wearing dresses they had made from men’s prayer shawls. He saw these people walking in the streets as though they were lost. Sometimes he would recognize people he knew, but they wouldn’t talk to him. He would run up to someone and say “How are you?” and they would stare at him, and he would look into their vacant eyes and say, “It’s me, Victor Waterman, from Jodenbreestraat. Waterman, remember—the matzoh bakers. I had the chicken place.…”

But the only response he would get was, “Leave me alone.” Sometimes they would walk away without saying anything at all.

Waterman had been born on the Jodenbreestraat in 1896, when ten percent of Amsterdam was Jewish. He had grown up in a world of diamond workers and matzoh bakers. He and his eight brothers were all matzoh bakers at a time when Amsterdam was a matzoh center, exporting to Jewish communities all over the world every spring. His parents were organizers in the early days of the city’s labor movement, which began with diamond cutters and matzoh bakers. But unlike the diamond cutters, the matzoh bakers would not strike, because they only worked thirty-two weeks a year. If they ever talked about striking, the rabbi would say, “But we have to have the matzoh ready for Passover,” and they would go back to work.

In 1920, Victor married Heinje Hamerslac, and they had three
sons. He started a kosher chicken business and exported the feathers, which were used in quilts and pillows. There was a tremendous demand for feathers in Switzerland and the United States. Poor Jewish children who lived around the Jodenbreestraat could always earn money as Waterman’s pluckers.

He stayed in Amsterdam when the Germans came, and when they decreed that all Jews must register, and when they banned Jewish children from schools. Then in 1942, when they started rounding up Jews for labor camps, Victor Waterman decided that it was time to take his family to America. For many Jews, it would have been too late to get out. If he had waited a month or two longer, it would have been too late for him too. But his business had given him connections in Switzerland and the United States. His Swiss contacts were able to get him to Montreux, and from there they were supposed to arrange the trip to America. But they were never able to arrange it, and instead of America, the family spent the rest of the war in Montreux.

By the time Victor Waterman was able to return to the three handsome canalside houses where much of his family had lived, they had all been sold, and all his relatives and their families had been deported. Out of eight brothers and two sisters, only one brother and one sister returned. They told him about the camps, about how their mother, an eighty-three-year-old widow, had been forced onto a train, been found unfit at Auschwitz, and killed in a gas chamber. Victor’s brother told him how their sister had died and how their seven brothers had died, story after story, and he was in the middle of telling him about a starving man who had killed his son for a piece of bread when Victor put his hands to his ears and shouted, “Enough! I don’t want to know anymore!” He never again listened to stories about the camps.

A
LITTLE RECEPTION CENTER
was set up at the Central Station for returning camp survivors. Each was handed ten guilders and a pack of cigarettes. This was the only program that the Dutch government had set up for survivors. After the Liberation, with that peculiar sense of fairness, the government had decided that nothing special should be done for Jews. The Nazis had singled out Jews, set them apart. Now the Dutch government would not be like the Nazis—it would treat their Jews exactly like everyone else.

When Sieg Biedermann returned from Auschwitz, he talked the
reception office into giving him sixty guilders instead of ten. It would be enough for several meals. But he had no family, and no place to go. His wife had been among those rescued from the camps by Swedish diplomacy, but her rescue had come too late, and four days later she had died. He had found no trace of his sister and seven brothers who had been deported from Vienna. Sieg was Viennese, but he had lived with his uncle in Amsterdam since he was a small child. Now, with sixty guilders in his pocket, he went back to his uncle’s house. The people who were living there had no idea what had happened to his uncle or his uncle’s family—and they made it clear that they had no intention of giving back the house.

Biedermann had to start life again. Like many survivors, he had lost everything he had known, and because he was a true survivor, he understood that to keep going he had to begin a new life as quickly as possible. He married Evelyne, a nurse who had looked after his wife in the camp and been with her when she died in Sweden. Evelyne also needed to begin a new life. Her entire family was dead. When her father was deported to Auschwitz, he had confidently boarded the freight car they were being stuffed into, saying, “I’ve never been afraid of good, hard manual labor.” When Evelyne returned to Amsterdam she found that her father’s millinery business was still in the hands of the elderly man, a member of the Dutch Nazi party, the NSB, who had been given the business through the “Aryanization” program. As a known Nazi, the man was convicted, ordered to pay damages, and sentenced to prison. But he was 87 and too ill to serve out his term. In 1947 he died without having paid back anything.