Cruel World (67 page)

Zegota also took children to the Catholic institutions and supplied them with false documents, but space was always limited by the fact that the Jewish children could not be in the majority, as the convents and homes were often inspected by Nazis. During these incursions children fled to prearranged hiding places. If the raid was sudden, the nuns had to think fast. In one convent two little girls were put inside long dresses hanging in a wardrobe and by a miracle escaped being slashed by the searchers’ bayonets. Another survived at the bottom of a large basket of eggs that the beautiful nun in charge flirtatiously persuaded the Germans not to confiscate.
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Transfers were extrememly dangerous, especially in groups, and very Jewish-looking children who had to be moved might have their faces bandaged or their hair dyed, while those who spoke no Polish pretended to be deaf-mutes. Such measures did not make trips any easier:

This group was headed for a large orphanage at Turkowice, which would shelter about thirty-two Jewish children among its population of around 250. Life in such places was particularly hard for circumcised Jewish boys, who, in addition to everything else that had to be learned, always had to undress, urinate, and bathe where no one could see them, and often lived in constant loneliness and fear of discovery. Bathing was at a minimum, however, in impoverished Turkowice, which crawled with vermin. Late in the war the orphanage would also be threatened by Ukrainian partisans, who were anti-Polish as well as anti-Semitic. The nuns made plans to evacuate all 250 children to the forest, but before they could do so one sister and eight young boys were murdered when they went out to buy supplies.
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Within the institutions a “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy often reigned, although it was usually clear to the adults, at least, just who everyone really was. In these situations Jewish children who spoke Polish and were from more assimilated families naturally fared best. Here too the hidden children often gave themselves away by their accents or by being too Catholic: “Jewish children stood out by a mile. When they started eating they crossed themselves three times. ‘Do not cross yourself so often or else people will think that you are Jews,’ I explained … but that didn’t help much.”
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The Jewish children had to receive the same religious instruction as their Catholic peers in these institutions. The teaching, depending on the forcefulness with which it was delivered, was an experience that could be devastating when there was talk of Jewish guilt for the death of Christ, and of the sacrilege associated with the taking of Communion by the un-baptized. Many of the hidden children remember to this day the humiliation they felt.

But to others the convents and orphanages were refuges where they found overwhelming relief from fear and unquestioning love. Rachela G., five when the war began, was blond and blue-eyed, and safer than most with the Polish farm family to whom she had been sent. But as the roundups intensified the farmers became more and more frightened, as did Rachela, who witnessed

Rachela was, indeed, taken in, and once there was made to feel safe, surely not easy after what she had just experienced. She soon made friends; the nuns were kind and the religious instruction low-key. Rachela, like many others who were taken into convents in every country, found the ritual beautiful and comforting. After the war, still afraid of anti-Semitism and “not wanting to return to something that had been so tragic for me,” she would become a Catholic.
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All the efforts of the Dutch students, the Polish nuns, and rescuers of every variety in every occupied country to protect Jewish children could, in the end, save only a tiny percentage of the estimated 1.5 million who were being swept away to fates as yet not clearly understood in the human blitzkrieg so carefully organized by the Nazis. The rescuers should not have felt guilty for not having been able to do more, for by the end of 1942, many had themselves become the targets of Nazi manhunts.

Nineteen forty-two was a busy year in the Nazi bureaucracies. To the Jewish deportations, the ethnic rearrangements and labor roundups in the East, and the pressures of fighting an extended war was now added a vast program of labor conscription in the Western occupied lands. Labor chief Fritz Sauckel’s insatiable need for workers, unfulfilled by the enslaved millions of the East, would now require major forced recruitment in the West. This would involve groups previously not considered liable for such duty and be the catalyst for major resistance.

A quota of 129,000 workers was demanded from Holland for the period from April through November 1942.
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At the deadline the roster was 24,000 short, which caused Sauckel to cast his gaze on university students, up to now exempt. On December 2, he ordered education authorities to produce, within two weeks, 6,000 to 8,000 of them, which was approximately half the entire student population. The Dutch secretary general of education in the Seyss-Inquart administration managed to postpone this action until after the Christmas holiday and to obtain assurance that the students, if taken, would serve only one year in “suitable,” high-grade jobs.

Sauckel relented, but stated that if the requested numbers were not forthcoming, all Dutch students would be rounded up and sent to Germany. The rectors of the universities, sworn to secrecy, were informed of the situation and commanded to produce lists of names immediately. Fearing that the students, once in the Reich, would end up fighting on the Eastern Front, the rectors leaked the news. To prevent any
razzias
(roundups) of the kind being visited on the Jews, the Free University of Amsterdam began its Christmas vacation six days early. In a fiery speech to the students before they dispersed, one of the professors exhorted them:

Illegal Dutch Scouts soon to be rounded up for forced labor in Germany
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(photo credit 13.1)

The call to resistance was taken up by the underground Council of Nine, which represented the banished student organizations of the major universities. The council immediately circulated a pamphlet declaring that they “would never be slares.” Two more universities closed early. At the University of Utrecht member of the Kindercomité broke into the registrar’s office and burned registration records. Spontaneous strikes took place at three more universities. Afraid that the unrest would spread, the Germans withdrew the quota demand for the time being. On December 16, Christmas vacation began. But in the university offices the compiling of conscription lists secretly went fonvard.

The winter term began nervously; there was sporadic unrest. In early February Resistance operatives attacked two high Dutch Nazi officials. One of them, before he died, identified his assassins as “students.” In reprisal, 600 students were rounded up and sent to the concentration camp at Vught, where they were told that those who behaved well and agreed to sign a loyalty oath to the Nazi government could be released. SS authorities, casting about for other ways to bring in students, now decreed that 5,000 young men, aged eighteen to twenty-five, the sons of “plutocrats,” who they assumed would be enrolled in higher education, were to be arrested and sent to hard labor in Germany. Lists of boys in this odd category had to be produced within twenty-four hours by the mayors of selected towns, many of whom stayed up all night to comply. On the
morning of February 9, 1943, the first roundups began. They were not a success. Not only were many of the addresses inaccurate, resulting in the arrest of a number of Dutch Nazi youths, but for once the SS had slept too late, and most of those targeted, who were not students at all, had left for work. The raiders, desperate to fill the required quota, began to pick up distinctly nonplutocratic boys at random on the streets. Schools and all sorts of businesses and buildings were surrounded, and young men who seemed to fit the profile were dragged out. As word of the
razzia
was telephoned all over the country, thousands of boys took cover, and in the end only 1,200 were captured.
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Himmler was so furious at this debacle that he ordered his minions to arrest all the sons of “plutocrats” in the country, plus their fathers. The hapless mayors who had provided incorrect data were to be sent to work in coal mines.
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Reichskommissar Seyss-Inquart, still trying to preserve his dream of converting the Dutch elite into National Socialists, refused to implement this drastic proposal, and instead ordained that all students sign a loyalty oath immediately and do one year of labor service in Germany after their graduation.
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The students were given one month to comply.

It was not clear what the best strategy would be. Refusal to sign, some reasoned, would result in being sent to forced labor anyway, which would only strengthen Germany. Compliance was a gamble, as it was possible that the war might end before the students would be inducted. The university authorities, fearful of being imprisoned for “sabotage,” a favorite Nazi euphemism, printed up the oaths and distributed them to the students by mail. But resistance had taken hold. In BBC messages beamed from London by the Dutch government in exile came encouragement to refuse. The secret student organizations were tougher, declaring that any student who signed the loyalty oath was “a deserter, who, now that the need of the Dutch people is greater even than it was in 1940, withdraws from the front we are forming.”
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In the end, only 3,000 of 14,000 eligible students signed.

This was not acceptable to the Nazis. On May 5, 1943, all male students who had not signed were ordered to report to processing centers the next day and to bring with them two suitcases containing “weekday and Sunday” clothes and blankets. There was no time for coordinated resistance. Nevertheless, only 3,800 students appeared, and of these only 2,900 would go to Germany. Despite their desperate need for manpower and the elaborate coercive measures, the Germans even now did not lower their physical or ideological standards for these workers, who, because they came from a “Nordic” nation, would be in close contact with German
nationals. Some 900 of those who reported were rejected because they had Indonesian blood or physical defects or were theology students. Later, with equally dismal results, 2,000 girls were also called up to do social service in Holland.
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In October 1943, the Dutch universities were ordered to reopen, but few students were now inclined to enroll. To all intents and purposes higher education no longer existed in the Netherlands except in clandestine gatherings, and thousands of students would join the hidden Jewish children in strange exiles.
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The students who had reported were sent to a camp at Ommen, in central Holland near the German border, where a tent city had been prepared for them. From here they went on to a staging area near Berlin. The 800 medical students among them were scattered to relatively good jobs in small hospitals, the idea being not to have too many in one place. Students from other disciplines did not fare so well. For them it would be the factory, and their living conditions, in the usual lice-ridden barracks, were hardly elitist. Food, supposed to be better than that of the Poles and Russians, was by now remarkably similar, as the designated supplies were frequently sold off on the black market by corrupt camp administrators. Room and board were deducted from the students’ tiny salaries, and what little was left they spent on food in the towns. Their eighty- or ninety-hour workweeks were so long that time for study, which they had been promised, was nonexistent. A significant number were sent off to punishment camps, and none were treated in any way as fellow members of the Master Race; even the dreadful Bulgarian cigarettes they were given were labeled “For Foreigners.” Indeed, authorities in Holland were informed that the student-workers were not behaving as young members of the Master Race should, but had made themselves unpopular and even hated by “singing the ‘Internationale’ with French and Russian workers [and] English songs on the streetcars, and by going out with Polish girls.”
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