Jack Polak was the co-founder and Emeritus President of the Anne Frank Center USA. After he had made that first step of sharing his life story, Jack Polak spoke at hundreds of schools and civic events, and Anne Frank exhibition openings. Sometimes he would be joined by his sister Betty, and would usually end his talks with six key calls to action: Don’t Discriminate; Don’t Generalise; Don’t Be a Bystander; Choose to Work for Peace; Appreciate your Life and, finally, Remember You Live in a Great Country.
After the war, Betty Polak and her brother Jack found themselves living thousands of miles apart, and even if they had not been siblings, their lives would be forever connected by the link to Anne Frank. Betty had owed her life to the goodwill of the couple who were to ensure the publication of Anne Frank’s diary, and her brother, by coincidence, was to go on to be a founder of the Anne Frank Center in New York in the 1980s. But this story gets even more convoluted and astonishing.
On being told by Betty of where she had been hidden during the war, Jan Erik’s mouth dropped open and he very nearly dropped the glass of white wine he was holding. He took another mouthful of wine and then these astonishing words came out of his mouth. ‘Betty, I was actually born in that house on 30 March 1955’, Jan Erik told her. ‘Blaricummerweg 140 is the address of the house where I greeted the world.’
When in 2017 Jan Erik shared with me those incredible series of situations, he also revealed to me (some thirty years after our first meeting!) that he had actually been named after the Romeins’ own son Jan Erik. ‘I was born six weeks premature and my parents had not yet thought of a name for me. After my father had helped my mother give birth, he went upstairs to find a spare blanket to help keep me warm. Up in the attic, he came across some letters from the Romeins addressed to their son called Jan Erik. ‘My father quickly spotted that Jan Erik Romein had also been born six weeks premature. He went downstairs to my exhausted mother to inform her that he could not find a blanket to swaddle me, but had instead found a name for me!’
Having discovered their incredible shared connection to the house in south Amsterdam, Jan Erik and Betty decided it would be rather special to pay a visit to 140 Blaricummerweg together. Jan Erik had never been to the house before. He knew it only from its presence in the background of his own baby photos. So one evening in 2014, Jan Erik and Betty, accompanied by Jan Erik’s father, his wife Dienke and son Robbie, drove south from central Amsterdam.
On finding Blaricummerweg, Jan Erik asked a man standing in the street if he thought it would be OK for the party to ring the doorbell of number 140, replicating the action taken by the desperate Betty decades earlier. The man enquired politely as to why they wished to if they did not know the owners.
Jan Erik and Betty related their respective stories to the stranger, who turned out to be a local historian of the wartime period, a profession and specialism shared by Jan Erik’s wife, Professor Dienke Hondius. The man told them about the area in which they were standing, which turned out to be a tiny pocket of humanitarian action that defied the comparatively poor record of the Dutch nation in helping its desperate Jews. The man then summoned the group into a small side street off the Blaricummerweg called Paviljoenweg. It was discovered only after the war had ended that six out of the seven houses in that one small street had sheltered Jews, and in all the lives of eleven Jews had been saved. The Dutch political leadership of that community had been pro-Nazi, not knowing what was happening right under their noses.
Jan Erik was curious as to why this one street had shown so much humanity, each house guarding its dangerous secret from its neighbour. He discovered that in the 1940s this area had been populated by intellectuals and artists who had previously numbered Jews among their friends, explaining a lot about how fundamental human connections, and the empathy and understanding this generates, saves lives.
On their drive back on that dark night to central Amsterdam, a glistening shard of memory from those distant post war days suddenly came back to Betty. She had never shared it with anyone before as it was one of those instances that can shape history but have no particular significance at the time it happened. The visit to Blaricummerweg had propelled it back to the forefront of her mind.
After the war ended, Betty had been working as a secretary for a civil servant whose government department controlled the distribution of paper, a valuable commodity immediately after the war as the limited amount available needed to be used wisely and productively. She told Jan Erik of a call she had received in 1947 from her wartime protector Annie Romein. Annie explained that a friend of hers had a manuscript that needed publication – it was the diary of his young daughter murdered in the Holocaust. After several rejections, they had at last found a company who wished to publish it, would she agree to supply the paper? Betty went to have a word with her boss, who agreed to supply Contact with the paper to publish 1,500 copies of Het Achterhuis – now known throughout the world as Anne Frank – The Diary of A Young Girl.
A phone call, a simple insignificant administrative action, and history is made. Jan Erik had found it perplexing that Betty, who in later life had been so interested and involved in her brother’s educational work for the Anne Frank Center USA, had completely overlooked her important role in the chain of events that had brought Anne Frank’s diary to the world.
The Love Story of Bergen-Belsen
In March 2017, I was staying for a few days in Los Angeles with Margrit Polak and her husband Harvey Shield, a London-born musician. Margrit is Jack Polak’s daughter. Her mother, Catharina ‘Ina’ Soep Polak, had died in May 2014 at the age of 91, and unexpectedly her father Jack, who was a decade older, had outlived his beloved wife – but only by eight months, passing away in January 2015 at the age of 102.
I had heard a lot about Margrit from Jan Erik over the years, and although she and I had never met before the afternoon I walked through the door of her Victorian house in Echo Park, we connected immediately. We hugged, laughed and had fun over the following three days I stayed there.
One afternoon Margrit prepared tea and we sat at her table in a room surrounded by mementoes of her Dutch family. For the next two hours she opened up to me about the impact gradually learning the truth about her family story had had on her own life and more facts about her aunt Betty and the amazing love story of Jack and Ina.
Jack Polak and Ina Soep had fallen in love in Westerbork transit camp after their arrests in Amsterdam. They had first met at a birthday party of a mutual friend in 1943, and in Jack’s case it was love at first sight. He was a struggling young accountant, already married, and Ina was the daughter of a wealthy diamond manufacturer. By the time he had met Ina, Jack’s marriage to his flirtatious and vivacious wife Manja was in an increasingly unhappy state, and they had agreed to divorce should they both survive the war. Ina’s fiancé Rudy Acohen had been arrested in a Nazi reprisal round-up of Jewish men in 1941, but she did not know at the time of the party that Rudy had been deported and was probably by then already dead.
Remarkably Jack found himself sharing Barrack 64 in Westerbork camp with both his wife Manja and his amour Ina, which he later sardonically described as ‘not easy’. Ina was in a dilemma, feeling guilt about her missing fiancé but having more and more feelings for Jack. It was a very complex and bizarre situation, and on one occasion, when Ina got very sick, Manja gave up her own bread to save her. When it was difficult to meet, Jack and Ina started exchanging letters. ‘I’m writing with a pencil stub. Darling, try to steal a pencil for me somewhere,’ wrote Jack in one of his letters.
After their miraculous survival of Bergen-Belsen, and deeply in love with Ina, Jack divorced Manja, with whom he afterwards remained friends, and married Ina, who had returned to Amsterdam to the confirmation that her fiancé Rudy would never be coming back. Jack and Ina Polak emigrated to New York in 1951 with their two sons, Frederick, named after his murdered grandfather, and Anthony. Upon arrival in his new country, Jacob Polak, previously known to his Dutch family and friends as
Jaap, Americanized his name to Jack. He got work as an accountant, they had a third child, a daughter called Margrit, and then he started to dabble in the stock market using his own and clients’ funds. Jack’s life as an investment counsellor started to take off.
In 1980, as a young adult, Margrit happened upon something that would change her life. She had been fascinated by a letter that her father kept in his study. It was in Dutch and apparently written to his beloved Ina during their time in the camps. One day, he casually told Margrit that there were ‘probably more letters up in the attic’. As a teenager, and having learnt about her family’s European history, she had experienced nightmares that there were both dreaded Nazis and the ghosts of murdered Jews living above them in their own New York attic. The attic of the Polak’s large family home in New York was not a place that Margrit ever relished visiting. Summoning all her courage and buoyed by curiosity, she ventured up to the top of the house and after a good poke around found a bag within which was a folder containing a large collection of letters. They were in fact 130 passionate love letters from Jack to Ina, written in another time and a terrible place, where each day was thought to perhaps be their last. As Margrit had imagined, there had indeed been ghosts in the attic.
Margrit had suddenly found a cause and she set about working with her father to translate the letters into English. She convinced him that translating the letters together would help her to learn Dutch. Ina was still too traumatized by those years to take any part in the process, and even working with Jack took many months as Margrit adopted a patient and sensitive approach, working on just one letter at a time. She became so passionate about uncovering every aspect of her parents’ lives that she even went over to Amsterdam to interview her father’s first wife Manja. In 2000, the love letters became the basis of a book, Steal A Pencil for Me, and then a documentary film with the same title made by Michele Ohayon. The film was critically acclaimed and won several film festival awards, including the Yad Vashem Prize at the Jerusalem Film Festival. It continues to be used in schools throughout the US for Holocaust education. In 1992, Jack Polak was knighted by Queen Beatrix of the Netherlands for his work in Holocaust education.
Prompted by my curiosity to know more during my visit, Margrit and I spent time talking about her parents and their remarkable story. During her childhood there had been no mention of the Holocaust at home, but there were odd references made to the many family photos that adorned the walls. In answer to little Margrit’s enquiries about the faces who stared down at her every day, there would be from her Mom, ‘That’s my cousin, she died in the war’, or from her Dad, ‘They were my parents, they didn’t survive the war’. These were the only descriptions of her murdered family members that Margrit remembered. It was the same with her parents’ Dutch survivor circle who would visit their home, elegantly-dressed Continental people who would drop their lively chatter during the evening to talk about ‘certain things’ in whispers.
One day in her early teens, Margit had been taken by her father to an amateur football game in the Bronx and so found herself with one to one time and the opportunity to probe further his early life in Europe. He quietly explained to his inquisitive American-raised daughter that his own parents had actually been murdered, he had had a difficult time in those years and talked briefly about his marriages to Manja and to Ina. But then the subject was closed down again.
Margrit only really found out about the Holocaust when she went to interview a local survivor called Jack Topolsky for her school magazine. At that stage she was trying to ‘put the pieces together’. Margrit Polak finally learnt the truth about her own family’s experiences through Topolsky’s story. The terrible and incomprehensible truth about her parents’ early lives affected Margrit’s teenage years deeply. She was a sensitive and creative girl and started to read incessantly about the subject to find out more and more.
After school, she moved herself far away from New York to Kenyon College in Ohio, where she majored in drama (some years earlier their ‘star pupil’, one Paul Newman, had also studied the art of acting). After several years as an actress and then acting coach, Margrit opened a successful talent agency. Meanwhile she had married Harvey Shield, a musician who was a member of the London rock band that became Deep Purple, and had their daughter Sofia, known as Sofi.
For Margrit the stresses of the frenetic world of pitching clients around Hollywood are broken up by an early-morning walk of her dog around Echo Park Lake, a midday half-hour stop for a silent meditation session and her leisurely commute to work, which simply requires an enjoyable stroll down the path of her fragrant rear garden.
Margrit and Harvey’s garden, with its lush trees, hot tub, barbeque and constantly blue sky, is firmly Californian, however the interior of the house is overtly European in its feel. Many of its contents help to keep the connection tangibly alive between Margrit, her daughter Sofi and their Dutch heritage. Sofi, who had been very close to her grandparents, had recently graduated from the University of Amsterdam with a Masters’ Degree in Conflict Resolution and Government, while spending some of her time in the city as a volunteer at the Anne Frank House.
As we sat in her Los Angeles house, Margrit Polak wanted to tell me about the next project to share her family’s history for posterity and to ‘give life to those no longer there’. She and Sophie were planning to work on this together. Margrit pulled out a weathered album from beneath a pile of documents. It contained a series of black-and-white photographs that captured a summer’s day in the Netherlands in 1941. A group of eight teenagers from Amsterdam had been on a cycling excursion in the countryside. One of them had recorded the laughter-filled day on camera, and the albums were distributed to all the eight. Ina’s copy of the album had lain in her parents’ Amsterdam home throughout the seizure of the house by the Nazis and had been found after liberation, along with half the family’s valuable silver cutlery which had inexplicably been left behind.
The happy and carefree group of teenage cyclists included two Christians and six Jews, four of whom were to be killed within the next three years. There, amongst the group, was the pretty young Catharina Soep. Between that day of laughter and fun, and her death in New York in 2014 at age 91, the fortunes of Ina Catharina Soep Polak’s life had turned like the wheels of her cycle.
Chapter 29
Anne Frank and her Fear
During her time in hiding, Anne often wrote about her fear of betrayal, arrest by the Nazis and its consequences. But this fear, as described from the relative safety of the hiding place on the Prinsengracht in the city of Amsterdam, would have been as nothing compared to the terror of the long train journey to Auschwitz, the separation from her adored and protective father, the strength and luck needed to get through each day, and the emptiness and despair knowing there were no rescuers in sight.
On 25 March 1944 Anne wrote a story entitled ‘Fear’. She imagined not being in hiding, but nonetheless still trapped in war.
It was eight thirty in the evening. The shooting had died down a bit and I was dozing fully dressed on the divan when we were suddenly startled by two horrendous booms. We all leapt to our feet as if we had been pricked with a pin and went to stand in the hall. Even Mother, who was normally so calm, looked pale. The booms were repeated at fairly regular intervals, and then all of a sudden there was a crash, followed by screams and the tinkle of broken glass. I began running as fast as my legs would carry me. Bundled up with warm clothes and with my rucksack on my back, I ran and ran away from the horrible mass of flames.
But Anne had an answer to the fear that had taken hold of her. She describes what happened next.
I was in a field of grass, the moon was shining and the stars were gleaming overhead, the weather was wonderful, the night was chilly but not cold. Hearing no more noise, I sank exhausted to the ground, spread out the blanket I was still carrying and lay down. I gazed up at the sky and suddenly realized I was no longer afraid. On the contrary, I was quite calm. The odd thing wa
s that I wasn’t thinking of my family at all, nor did I long for them. I longed only for rest, and soon I fell fast asleep in the grass beneath the starry sky. When I awoke, the sun was just coming up. I instantly realized where I was. In the distance the morning light revealed a row of familiar houses on the outskirts of the city. I rubbed my eyes and took a closer look around. There wasn’t a soul around. The dandelions and the clover leaves in the grass were my only company. I lay back down on the blanket and thought about what I should do next, but my thoughts kept wandering back to the wondrous feeling that had come over me in the night, when I had sat all by myself in the grass and not been afraid. Later I found my parents and we all went to live in another city. Now that the war has long been over I know why my fear vanished beneath that spacious sky. You see, once I was alone with nature, I realized, without actually being aware of it, that fear doesn’t help, it doesn’t get you anywhere. Anyone who is as frightened as I was should look to nature and realize that God is much closer than people think. From that moment on, though countless bombs fell close by, I was never really truly afraid again.
This is just one of several stories Anne wrote where she describes herself after the war, reaching adulthood or even as a 16-year-old, the age she didn’t reach. She writes in her diary too of the comfort she got from nature and the changing of the seasons, as displayed to her by the yearly stages of the deciduous chestnut tree she could see from the window.
In Bergen-Belsen camp, located on the barren and frozen Luneberg Heath in northern Germany, there was no chestnut tree, no verdant grass or dandelions to remind Anne of the wonder of nature. When Lien Brillesljper and her sister Jannie, who had described Anne and Margot’s final days in harrowing detail to Otto Frank, last saw the girls they seemed beyond the fear of their first weeks in captivity and way beyond the hope that Bergen-Belsen could offer more of a chance of life than Auschwitz. Consumed by the fever of typhus and by delirium from lack of food, surrounded by the dead and dying, Annelies Marie Frank, the girl who just seven months earlier had written, ‘I must hold on to my ideals, for perhaps the day will come when I will be able to realize them,’ was accepting of the inevitable.
The Legacy of Anne Frank Page 42
