A Chosen Few (17 page)

But she and Sieg now had their marriage and the millinery business, and life could begin again.

I
N
A
UGUST
1944, when the Red Army entered Bucharest, four Russians tore into a night club that Germans were known to frequent. Most of the Germans had left, but the Russians grabbed the piano player. He was a small thin man in his midthirties who spoke both German and Romanian, with an accent. He had been popular with the Germans, picking out tunes on the keyboard while booted Germans stood around him staring tearfully at the ceiling, singing, “… 
wie einst Lili Marleen
,” or whatever else they wanted to hear. If you could give him a few bars, he could play the song.

As the Russians pulled this collaborator piano player out of the club, he shouted to them in awkward Russian. They didn’t really understand him, and it didn’t matter to them—these Romanians were going to pay for their Nazi alliance. But the wiry piano player wrestled one arm free and called out in German, “
aus das Lager!
”—something about “escaping camp.” He cried, “Auschwitz!” and held out a bony forearm belly up, so they could see the numbers tattooed on it.

His name was Mauritz Auerhaan, from a diamond-polishing family on a small street off the Jodenbreestraat, the crowded old Jewish section of Amsterdam. He had spent two years in Auschwitz and was then shipped to Birkenau, the death factory down the road. One day he found himself in a group of prisoners who were being marched past the tracks, past the crematoriums, past the fields where they dumped the ashes, and into a woods of tall straight Polish pines. He started to hear the pop of the German weapons and saw prisoners down the line falling—and he ran. Struggling through Eastern Europe at the height of the war, he managed to survive from place to place, working at odd jobs, looking for people who would help him, running from people who would turn him in. He worked for Poles, Russians, Germans, Ukrainians, and Romanians, always hiding the telltale tattoo on the inside of his arm. Eventually, he had found safety as a club pianist in Bucharest.

When he returned to Amsterdam and got his pack of cigarettes and his ten guilders, he found little sympathy for camp survivors among the general population. The people in the Netherlands felt that they had suffered tremendously during the hunger winter. They were and have remained full of tales of deprivation—eating pets to survive, burning their furniture to try to stay warm, suffering through a terrible diphtheria epidemic just before the Liberation. They did not regard the suffering of these gaunt sickly people—some still in striped clothes—as anything remarkable.

The survivors felt that nobody cared about them, and even if they had cared, they could never understand. “People would say it isn’t true,” said Mauritz Auerhaan. “I would tell them I have seen the gas chambers. I have seen them. I know what they did. I stayed alive because I could engrave SS on the cigarette cases they stole from the Jews. They did everything. I tried to stay alive.” But he quickly learned that people did not want to hear all this. They had survived the hunger winter.

Auerhaan had survived the Holocaust through his array of skills. Now he could survive postwar Holland. What could he do in a city that had been stripped bare? Sell tires. Nothing could move for lack of tires. Bicycles were on rims. Rusting prewar cars and trucks stood idle on their wheel drums. He could not get enough shiploads of tires—used tires to retread. Any kind of tire he could get, he could sell.

O
NE OF THE FEW
undamaged synagogues in Amsterdam was the huge Portuguese-Israelite, popularly known as the Esnoga. This was the synagogue of the Sephardic community, the direct descendants of the Spanish Jews whom Ferdinand and Isabella had expelled in 1492. These Jews had lived in Portugal for more than a generation, then moved to Morocco, and from there the grandchildren of the Spanish exiles had moved to Amsterdam. Their first Amsterdam religious service had been held in the Palache house in 1590. They flourished in Amsterdam without persecution for four centuries, marrying within their subgroup and keeping their unique customs, the language and music of the Portuguese Sephardic rite.

For several years the Nazis exempted the Amsterdam Sephardic Jews from the Final Solution, partly because of their vague tie to Portugal, which was a neutral country. There were protracted negotiations to try to get all 5,500 of them Portuguese nationality, which would have ensured their safe passage to Portugal. In the meantime, the SS thought that since the Esnoga was such a large space, it would make an excellent gathering place for Jews awaiting deportation. Throughout Europe, the SS created such centers, like the sports stadium in Paris and the Umschlagplatz in Warsaw, where Jews waited for days until enough of them had been collected to fill a transport train to a camp. The SS informed the leaders of the Sephardic Community that someone would be coming around to look over the space. Since refusing the SS did not seem a realistic possibility, the Jewish leaders decided that the best approach would be to have an innocent-looking teenager who could not answer any questions show them around. They chose seventeen-year-old Leo Palache, a direct descendant of the Palache who had hosted the first service in 1590.

Leo politely answered all the SS’s questions as they walked around the synagogue. The SS discussed where would be the best
spot for the first-aid unit, how the balcony could be used, what could go up on the raised reading area. Then there was the question of the windows. It was wartime, and any building used at night had to be blacked out. “There are seventy-two windows,” Leo, their young guide, informed them. The SS looked up at the ornate decor with the rows of arched decorative windows.

After this tour, the Germans never came back, and the Esnoga got through the entire occupation without damage. The SS chose a theater for their transit spot instead. Exactly why this happened is unknown. But the Sephardic-Portuguese community ran out of luck in early 1944, when the Germans lost interest in their negotiations with Portugal. They deported the Sephardim to the camps, including the Palaches—father, mother, older brother and sister, and Leo. They were able to stay together in Theresienstadt, but Leo was separated from the family when he was sent to Auschwitz. Then, as the Red Army approached southern Poland, he was sent to Buchenwald, where he was liberated by the Americans.

Thousands of the 5,500 from the old Sephardic-Portuguese community were missing without a trace. About 600 returned. But these few were determined to preserve their traditions. Shortly after the Liberation, they reopened their historic synagogue, the Esnoga, and held a service to which they invited all the Jewish community. Hundreds came. Some came for the service, to thank God for saving them. Some made speeches about showing the world that Jews were back. But it soon became clear that many had come in the hope of seeing their missing relatives. As they milled around, as Jews often do during the chanting of the service, the search grew increasingly frantic, some completely abandoning all pretense of doing anything but sifting through the faces in the crowd.

Leo Palache never did find his relatives, or even most of his friends. One woman whom he had known all his life, like himself a direct descendant of the original Sephardim, had made it back. They were even very distantly related. She too had survived Buchenwald, although she was so ill that upon her return she spent the next two years in the hospital. They chose April 10, 1949, the fourth anniversary of the liberation of Buchenwald, as their wedding date.

Since Jews had been banned from schools under German occupation, most of the returning teenagers and young adults had not been to school for five years. When Leo Palache got back, he was almost twenty and had never finished high school, which was
deeply troubling for a man who had come from a scholarly household. His father had been a distinguished Old Testament professor whose name had been given to one of the schools in the university, the Judah Palache Institute. Leo had wanted to be a lawyer.

A program of adult education was established for cases like his, but Leo had no one to advise him to go there. Instead, he simply went back to high school. There he sat, a twenty-year-old man who had survived the death camps, in a class with fourteen-year-olds. “I felt that emotionally, it was absolutely impossible,” he said. He never did get an education, and all his life, with a mixture of humor and sadness, he would call himself “
am ha-arez
,” the biblical word for one of the ignorant masses.

O
N THE TRAIN
going into Amsterdam, Leo Palache had vowed that he would immediately return to a strictly kosher diet and strict observance of the Sabbath. Others, like Jaap Meijer, could never again believe in God and his commandments. For those who wanted to be kosher after Liberation, it was difficult because there was still little food. Sal Meijer wanted to return to his trade as a kosher butcher, but no meat was available, let alone kosher meat. Instead, he opened a coffee shop on the Jodenbree-straat, next to a Sephardic butcher. Sal suspected that the meat next door was not really kosher, and it certainly wasn’t legal, since the import of meat was not allowed. Some meat did come from London and Antwerp on the black market. A small scandal erupted when one kosher steer arrived and two kosher tongues were sold.

Meijer rented a room in the Transvaalbuurt, an area so named because before the war it had been largely populated by diamond workers. Once meat became available, Meijer re-opened his kosher butcher shop on the Jodenbreestraat, but the area was still in ruins.

For years, the Dutch government held fast to the policy of not giving Jews special treatment. German Jewish refugees and fleeing Nazi war criminals were thrown into the same prison camp for illegal German aliens. Immediately after the Liberation, the tax office billed the Jewish Community of the Hague—most of whom were dead—for several years of back taxes on the plot of land under the unused synagogue. Nor did the government offer Jews much help in recuperating private property that had been stolen from them. Jewish property that Dutch Nazis had taken over was
repossessed by the government, and survivors like Sieg and Evelyne Biedermann had to sue to get theirs returned to them.

The Biedermanns got their millinery business back, and after it was starting to prosper by the mid-1950s, a sheepish-looking man appeared at the Biedermann door. “I’m very sorry,” he began. “But you understand—I was sent. This is not my idea.” Sieg slowly came to understand he was from the government. But what did he want?

“Well, you understand, this is not my idea. And you don’t have to do it. Other people have said no, and nothing has happened to them.”

Biedermann was losing patience. “What do you want?”

“Well, in fact, the sixty guilders.”

“What?”

“At the train station in 1945. Ten guilders were allotted, but you got sixty guilders. That was a loan. But, as I say … ”

Biedermann paid back the sixty guilders and demanded a receipt.

The Netherlands wanted to remember its Resistance, but it did not want to remember what it had let happen to Jews. A pension was offered for Resistance veterans but not to Jewish victims. An equivalent pension for Jewish victims was not passed until 1973.

Not only was there little sympathy for Jews, but books and newspapers published in the Netherlands after the war revealed a certain anti-Semitism in comments about the cowardice of Jews, how they had to depend on other people to save them, how Jews in hiding stole things and couldn’t be trusted.

More than 150,000 Dutch people were denounced as collaborators and arrested. A few were sentenced to death for war crimes, but most of the executions were never carried out. Dutch retribution fell far short of that of France, which prosecuted 170,000 cases of collaborators, sentenced 120,000, executed some 2,000, and lynched another 4,500. Belgium, with a population of only eight million, investigated 634,000 cases of collaboration, though only 87,000 were actually prosecuted, most of which led to convictions. It wasn’t that the Dutch hadn’t had collaborators. Dutch collaborators enabled the Germans to kill a far higher percentage of Jews there than in France or Belgium. Major SS operations, such as Westerbork camp, were operated by Dutch, not by Germans. Thirty thousand Dutchmen had volunteered to fight for Germany. The Germans paid seven guilders for a tip on a Jew in hiding, and
one-third of the Jews hidden by Christians were betrayed to the Nazis, the best-known example being the family of Anne Frank.

But now the Dutch government seemed to lack either the will or the means to process all the cases that were being reported. Complaints were often investigated by amateurs. After a few years the government decided to release all but the most flagrant cases. It sent a letter to the Jewish Community saying that it had decided to release the others into society and hoped that the Jewish Community would understand and receive these people “in a Christian manner.” It was a form letter that went to all religious groups.

J
EWISH LIFE RESUMED
in Amsterdam. But the scale of it was different. Amsterdam had been a city like New York, where Jewish life was a basic component of the culture. Like New York, the local slang in Amsterdam was heavily laced with Yiddish. The slang continued, but with few Jews. Slowly, the figures were tabulated. Of the 110,000 Dutch Jews who had been sent to the camps, 5,000 had survived. More than three-quarters of Dutch Jewry had been murdered, the worst rate of genocide in all of Western Europe. In 1945, Victor Waterman was walking on an Amsterdam street wearing a good suit, when he heard a voice from somewhere behind him say, “Look, they missed one.”