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 meno-rah 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 Jodenbrees-traat—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.
WHEN VICTOR WATERMAN 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 v/ithout 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 chamb
er. 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, “Pve 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.
But she and Sieg now had their marriage and the millinery business., and life could begin again.
IN AUGUST 1944, when the Red Army entered Bucharest, four Russians tore into a night club thai 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 Ledger/”—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.
ONE 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 t
heir 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.
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