A Chosen Few (60 page)

“There are many people here who still have problems with the war,” said Theo Meijer. “I have one who is Jewish but denies it. If you say, ‘You are Jewish,’ he says no. His problem is that he thinks the troubles might come back and that he won’t be recognized.” This man lived a secret life, rarely talking to anyone except when the horror of his dreams awakened him and Theo spent the night comforting him. In those long late-night sessions he told Theo that he had been in the camps, but he never explained the long thick scars that covered his body.

Another Wallenberg resident could not find his way in society because he bore the psychological burden that his father was a well-known Dutch Nazi. And there were others who themselves had been Nazis or collaborators. In Holland, once you are labeled as having been “wrong in the war,” you are an outcast. Of the several Nazis he had looked after, Meijer could recall only one who expressed remorse. Most of them were simply unhappy with their sense of isolation. “But I take care of them, too,” said Meijer. “It’s my job.”

Barry Biedermann and Lody van de Kamp helped Theo celebrate holidays. For Hanukkah in 1991 the three were having a dinner in Theo’s office with four Wallenberg Jews wearing the yarmulkes that Theo distributed. Van de Kamp blessed the wine, said another blessing, lit the menorah, and while they were sipping the wine, a pleasant man with a childlike openness named Bobby de Vries started telling Van de Kamp that he couldn’t get circumcised because he had been born during the war. The troubled people of Wallenberg tend to have these disjointed conversations, stringing together nonsequiturs while normal people smile and nod politely, which was what Van de Kamp did. The conversation moved on, but then Bobby repeated his statement about being circumcised and added, “I was born during the war. My twin was sick, so we both had to be in an incubator.”

The conversation moved on again, but Bobby persisted, asking the rabbi, “Do you think you could do it?” Van de Kamp realized that Bobby meant what he was saying. The rabbi frequently got requests for circumcisions from people who had been born during the war. He explained to Bobby how it was done in a hospital in the presence of a surgeon. “It would round things off,” Bobby said, and then became embarrassed at the inadvertent pun.

De Vries was circumcised at an Amsterdam hospital by a surgeon with a local anesthetic, supervised by Van de Kamp and with the good-natured but slightly nutty crowd from Wallenberg enthusiastically attending the ceremony. These were De Vries’s friends, and Wallenberg was their home. In fact, Bobby called Wallenberg the only real home he had ever had. When his parents were deported to the camps, they had managed to find hiding places for their sons. Suddenly the small child Bobby had been underground and alone. Only his father survived, and the children seemed an unwelcome reminder to him. Both Bobby and his twin brother had spent most of their lives in a kind of homeless limbo, never
marrying, never holding down jobs for long. Asked why he and his brother were that way, he said, “I think it was from the war. We never saw my mother. Three years in hiding.” His brother died in a fluke biking accident, and Bobby lived alone in a sunny, one-room Wallenberg apartment with a view of a canal. His only early childhood memory was of living in a basement. If he thought hard about it, he could remember this one thing: “ ‘Playing outside. Happiness outside from other children. But that’s all I can remember.”

T
HE
E
SNOGA
remained Amsterdam’s most famous synagogue, but on the five hundredth anniversary of the Spanish expulsion, the Sephardic community was down to only five hundred Jews, and the younger ones were rapidly intermarrying with Ashkenazim. None of Leo Palache’s three children married a Sephardi. But Palache and others worked hard to preserve their traditions. Sephardim still wore top hats in the Esnoga, but the front row was no longer their proud and exclusive reserve. They were now happy to have any Jew who would learn and follow their rites. There were Iraqis, Turks, Surinamers from the Sephardic community in Paramaribo, even a Russian Jew from an atheist background who learned of Judaism after emigrating to Amsterdam. Some of the Moroccan families who went to Israel instead of France and sent back unfavorable reports later emigrated to Amsterdam and were active in the Esnoga. Originally, the old-line Sephardim were very upset about this influx, fearing that North African rituals would overtake their traditions, as has happened to the Salonikans in Paris. But in time they learned that if they were conscientious enough, their own tradition would prevail. If someone made an error while chanting in a service, others would immediately correct him. Palache searched his memory for tunes and chants from his childhood to reintroduce to the service. Everything had to be conserved.

A Turkish Jew who grew up in Amsterdam was training thirteen boys to take over as the next generation. One of these young men, wearing his top hat, was showing Israeli visitors around the synagogue. He mentioned that he had learned some of the rites from Israelis. “See,” said one of the Israelis, “the only future for Judaism is Israel.” The comment seemed to lie there for an instant like an hors d’oeuvre that had just dropped onto someone’s shoe. Then the young man said, “But I was born in Israel.” The Israelis did not
want to discuss this phenomenon of people leaving Israel to return to Europe.

Amsterdam, like Antwerp and Paris, had an ever-increasing Israeli population. Like Moishe Waks and Ron Zuriel, these were people who found that material life was better in Europe than in Israel. But what was more embarrassing to Israelis, some of these new emigrants were not even European-born. They were Israelis or North Africans who had chosen to forget the Zionist dream and live in Europe, where they could earn a good living. In Amsterdam they often opened little carry-out restaurants featuring falafel and other Middle Eastern specialties. As in other European cities, most of the Israelis in Amsterdam were neither religious nor involved with the Jewish Community.

Leo Palache worked for Israel for forty years as the Dutch director of the United Israel Appeal. He noted, not with unhappiness, that Holland had one of the highest percentages of Jews who emigrated to Israel. He called the ones who had left “the best of us.” But in all those years he never was tempted to make the move himself. “It’s very interesting. I worked forty years for Israel. I have visited Israel privately and in my job many many times. I have traveled up and down. I have a lot of friends. Israelis are my life. But looking at my background and my roots, my social contacts and my friends are in Holland and the language and the climate and the food, and the total picture. Living there is a different story, I think, if you are very young.”

I
SAAC
L
IPSCHITS’S
brother Alex, for whom Isaac had taken so many risks to get to Israel, stayed there, changed his name to David, became a civil servant living near Haifa, and had three children and grandchildren in Israel. But every now and then, Isaac still had a recurring nightmare that he was in Israel and something had happened to his brother. Most of Isaac’s friends from the orphanage did not stay in Israel and ended up living in many different countries. They remained a family to each other and continued to visit each other regularly.

Isaac became a noted Jewish historian, married, and raised two children in Groningen. The synagogue there had been converted into a dry cleaner after the war, then an Episcopal church. In the 1970s it was restored as a synagogue, only to lack enough Jews to fill it. So it was rented out for lectures and exhibitions.

Isaac did not give his children a religious upbringing, but he did give them a Jewish identity. And he seemed almost driven to assert that he was no longer in hiding: “I am known as a Jew throughout the Netherlands. I’m on TV as a Jew. I’m writing in the newspaper as a Jew. I’m always writing on Jewish problems. I’m a Jew.”

Isaac was a successful and well-adjusted man. The great irony of his life was that if his world had not been torn up by a Holocaust, he would have spent his life selling bananas in the Rotterdam market. When he turned 50, he completely broke down and sought psychiatric help. “You start looking back. I have reached things my parents couldn’t dream of. My father was a poor man working in the market. My brothers worked in the market. All my uncles, as far as I know, worked in the market. Without a war I would have, too. Without any doubt. I worked so hard that I became a professor. I studied so hard. I was from such poor surroundings that I would never have gone to a secondary school. But I worked so hard, when I came home at quarter past five and I asked my wife when we would have dinner and she would say ten minutes, I would go to my study and work for ten minutes. Later, with the help of a psychiatrist, I found out that I didn’t want to give myself the leisure to think. To sit and think, to sit and listen to music. I was frightened. If you are fifty, you can’t stand it anymore. You have to sit down and think over what you have done in your life. And then the war comes. The memories. The problems.”

T
HE PAIN
did not vanish. It passed to another generation. Barry Biedermann contemplated how he had grown up with no surviving relatives but his parents, and how hard it had been for him when they died. And he often reflected on the fact that it would be much the same for his children. Because the camps had ruined his parents’ health and they had died young, the Holocaust that deprived him of grandparents had also deprived his two children of them. They, too, had no extended family and had a sense of being raised in isolation, with the sometimes-spoken subject always looming somewhere. “I wonder when it ends?” he asked.

Most survivors said they saw little future for Jews except in Israel. But whatever they said, they were still Dutch, and Holland was their home, and many of them never left. In the 1970s their children started taking over the Community. To this new generation there was more than the Holocaust to Dutch history. They wanted
to preserve the Jodenbreestraat synagogues in Amsterdam and turned the four that had been saved by the government into an elaborate museum of Dutch Jewish history.

The old generation with its terrible memories was dying off. Mauritz Auerhaan retired from business and was alone. He moved into the Jewish home for the elderly in the south. As Amsterdam moved farther south, the architecture became more stripped down and less ornate. Far in the south it was just blocks of apartments and shopping centers. Beth Shalom, where Auerhaan lived, seemed to be the latest in homes-for-the-elderly, the optimal artificial environment that maintained the perfect temperature and healthiest air for elderly people—the human parallel to Dutch computerized greenhouses with their six-foot-tall hydroponic tomato vines. At Beth Shalom a central patio with comfortable chairs had a glass roof that assured that it was at once light, airy, and warm. In the hallways the elderly sat in silence. Auerhaan’s room was not unpleasant, with its balcony and little kitchenette, but neither was it quite up to what Bobby de Vries had in Wallenberg.

Auerhaan looked around his small tidy room. “If you are young, you are young, and you see all from your young eyes, and you don’t believe that one day you will live here. No. You can’t believe it.” He held out his arm. “Do you see the number? That is the only proof that I have been there. Sometimes I think it was a bad dream. I can’t believe it.”

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MONG YOUNGER
D
UTCH
J
EWS
, as in Paris, there was a trend toward more Orthodox practices. This, too, had its roots in the Holocaust—the conviction that assimilation did not work. One Orthodox rabbi said, “In my own family, directly after the war I had an uncle who said the only solution was to assimilate. But this was not true. Even Jews who were baptized—they found them.”

Jewish culture remained ingrained in Dutch life, especially in Amsterdam, where Yiddish words belong to the popular slang in much the same way as they do in New York.
Mazzel
is luck, a crowd or gang is a
miesjpoge
, they speak of
shlmeils
. Amsterdam ended up with ten working synagogues and even four
shtibls
. Most of them had to struggle for a minyan, because so many of the Jews had moved to the flatland in the south and were no longer within walking distance for the Sabbath. Even the
Esnoga began experimenting with offering a service in the south once a month.

The five-hundred-year history of Dutch Jewry was not over. In the 1990s only thirty thousand Jews remained in all of Holland—just slightly more than the population immediately after the survivors returned in the late 1940s. Survivors wanted the past to be remembered by others, but they did not want to look back on it themselves. Leo Palache said about watching television, “If I know there is something about the war, I switch off because I don’t want to test myself. Where is the limit of what I can stand? I don’t want to test myself. And I say if I want to know about the war, the concentration camps, I just close my eyes.”