A Chosen Few

by Mark Kurlansky

  In 1987, Rene Sirat, the first modern sephardic Grand Rabbi of France, resigned. His successor was also from North Africa, from Tunisia. Sephardim or Ashkenazim was no longer an issue that interested many, although differences persisted. North Africans missed their countries. They spoke Arabic and listened to the free-spirited, whooping Arab music. But the Ashkenazim—the few who could remember—had no nostalgia for Poles or Poland. And some traditions remained different, such as the music of prayer chanting. The Sephardim made the Passover dish charoset with dates, while the Ashkenazim always made it with apples, and the Sephardim ate olives and didn't eat horseradish or chicken soup with knadlech, matzoh balls. And even in Paris Algerians still grilled lamb the night before Passover because they had each killed a lamb before Passover when they lived in Algeria and owned lambs. Sirat would confess to his family of his one great failing in rabbinical school: When he had studied kashrut, each student was required to slaughter a lamb in the ritual way, and he couldn't do it. He could not bring himself to kill the lamb.

  But the Ashkenazim were no longer concerned about the Sephardim taking over; they respected the Sephardic rabbis. On the other hand, some Sephardim, despite their numerical superiority, were concerned about the new Orthodox Ashkenazim taking over. Many Sephardim who had strayed from religion in France were brought back by Rottenberg or the Lubavitchers. This was not in itself upsetting. But when they grew peots, put on broad black hats and long black coats, dressing like they were from a shtetl in Poland, this was disturbing because it had nothing to do with North African Jewish tradition. Some Sephardim wondered why an Algerian would want to imitate the culture of poverty and oppression from Central Europe.

  Sirat had resigned as Grand Rabbi because he wanted to return to his true avocation, teaching, and participate in the extensive Jewish educational structure that he had done much to establish. With his soft, compassionate almond-shaped eyes, his black frizzled beard, moving his yarmulke around his head as he searched for words, he looked like a professor. He had a clear message for modern Jews about God's covenant, the responsibility of “the chosen people/’ He warned Jews against self-imposed ghettos: “I think that we must also be a presence in the world, especially in the places where men are suffering or humanity is attacked. Every time that people suffer somewhere in the world, the Jews suffer with them, and they must not remain indifferent to the pain and suffering in the world—not in Yugoslavia, not in the former Soviet Union. We do not have the magic to solve all the world's problems, but we must not be indifferent. If we are indifferent to the suffering of other people, how can we ask others to be sensitive to our suffering? Because we must never forget that all people suffer, not only Jews.”

  EMMANUEL AND FANIA EWENCZYK were having coffee on a rococo table in their spacious, ornate sixteenth-arrondissement apartment. There was a time when they could not have dared hope that life would turn out this well. One of their teenage grandsons, a son of Lazare and Suzy, was there. The question came up, if Fania had ever regretted her decision in 1945 not to move to Israel. Emmanuel smiled at the question, but his smile was blunted by Fania's response. “Yes and no,” she said.

  The air between them in their gracious living room somehow seemed to stiffen.

  “Yes and no.” She insisted on making clear that the look Emmanuel was giving her would have no effect on what she had to say. “No, because I wouldn't have been married and all, but I do regret not having lived in Israel.”

  Emmanuel looked away. Their grandson was watching from a distant couch with bemused fascination.

  “If he would agree right now/’ she continued, “I would move to Israel.”

  “And leave all our children here?” Emmanuel challenged.

  “Ah, you see, there it is.”

  “You wouldn't want that.”

  “No?”

  He shook his head.

  “I am just more steadfast than you.”

  “One of my brothers once almost went to Israel…”

  And the conversation safely passed on to the story of how Sam had left Poland.

  32

  In Amsterdam

  MEIJER'S KOSHER BUTCHER AND SANDWICH SHOP WAS too new and uncluttered to have any kind of a look other than clean. It was in the Rivierenbuurt, one of those twentieth-century parts of Amsterdam where everything was built to show off a little extra space because it had been settled by people from the center in search of more room. Sal Meijer and his son complained of a declining business, but they were busy most of the time. It was a pleasant place to be—a place to meet other Jews, which was not that easy to do in Amsterdam anymore. “I come for the society, not the food,” Victor Waterman, now in his nineties, would say to annoy Sal. In 1975 he had retired from the kosher chicken business in New Jersey and moved back to Amsterdam with this advice: “When you are from Europe, you have to go to America when you are young, make a lot of money, and then get out. Don't die in America!”

  For years, when Waterman ran into people whom he had not seen since he left, he had this little joke he would try. They would say, “Where have you been?”

  “In New Jersey,” he would say, hoping they took the bait.

  “What were you doing in New Jersey?”

  He would lower his voice, turn his face sinister, and say, “I was a killer.”

  “A killer!”

  Quickly he would shoot an index finger straight up and lighten his tone, “But kosher.”

  One of Waterman's sons had also moved back to Amsterdam and had a prosperous art dealership. The two were inseparable. But in 1991 the son died of a heart attack and Waterman quarreled with his grandchildren and was alone. He settled in the Rivier-enbuurt and was a regular, a kind of local character in the sandwich shop part of Sal Meijer's. He never talked about his son, just as he had avoided the distant memories of his murdered family.

  Sal Meijer was also a well-loved local character. People didn't know that in the same long, narrow, bay-windowed apartment he had found after the war, his nights were spent screaming. In quiet Holland, where people control themselves and don't carry on, where the story of Anne Frank was endlessly promoted instead of discussing the Dutch record under occupation, where Resistance heros increased their ranks in the popular mythology every decade, but collaborationists and deportees were not to be mentioned, more and more survivors and children of survivors were beginning to scream.

  The Rivierenbuurt had been settled in the 1920s. The neighborhood sprawled with low buildings of handsome wooden art deco details and wide streets that told Amsterdamers that here there would be space to waste. The old Jodenbreestraat neighborhood never became Jewish again. There were not enough Jews. The synagogues of the neighborhood, except the Esnoga, remained in ruins. To the Jewish Community, they were ugly reminders of missing Jews. The Community gladly would have torn them down, but the city regarded them as historical landmarks and to save them bought them from the Community. The survivor generation was not interested in synagogues. They wanted to preserve the Hol-landse Schouwburg, the theater that had been used to collect deportees. The Jewish Community fought furiously to prevent its being turned back into a theater. This was the past they wanted preserved.

  The gutted old ghetto was torn down and replaced with tall new buildings on widened streets. Sal Meijer in 1964 had moved to Nieuwmarkt, an old commercial area near the Central Station. Enough Jews still lived in the center to support a kosher butcher, but in the 1960s a street life dominated by young people and drugs gradually drove Sal and most of his customers away. Ten years younger than Waterman, Sal no longer felt up to a full work schedule at the butcher shop, so his son and daughter-in-law ran the shop, making the third consecutive generation of kosher butchers. He still had the brass menorah on the wall that he had hidden during the war, and books and photos that he studied intensely. The screaming usually began at night, but he would be like that sometimes even during the day. Suddenly, in his eighties, he could no longer stay silent about the Holocaust and what had ha
ppened to his family. He also became obsessed with news, particularly focusing on wars. “God is busy!” he would angrily declare when the death toll from some distant conflict was reported on the television.

  In recent years the Netherlands has seen a dramatic increase in World War II survivors of all kinds seeking psychiatric help. The 1940-1945 Foundation had been created in 1944 by Resistance members to help their people and Jewish survivors after the war. It was thought that the organization would disband sometime in the 1950s. But in the 1990s thousands still turned to it for help-Resistance veterans and camp survivors who were still trying to live secret lives, keeping their phone numbers unlisted, even trying to hoard unlicensed firearms.

  Many Jewish survivors, recalling the compulsively efficient Dutch lists that had marked them for deportation, still shied away from official records, refusing to answer census questionnaires, asking Jewish organizations to use unmarked envelopes when sending them mail. Many Jews refused to state their religion when they checked into a hospital. Psychiatrists found many patients with problems from their childhood in hiding, including some who had been sexually abused by their protectors. Jitschak Storosum, a psychiatrist with a Jewish agency, said that he often had patients who were sexually abused while in hiding as children. Jewish social services reported that about three thousand people each year—10 percent of the Jewish population of the Netherlands—sought help from them, Most of those cases were war-related.

  It is tempting to see this as a Dutch phenomenon, a product of a repressed society that, unlike France, never exploded the myth of a valiant Resistance. The emphasis in Holland was always on how the Anne Frank family had been hidden from the Nazis; the fact that they were also betrayed by Dutch collaborators—possibly for 7.5 guilders—was overlooked. No one wanted to hear the stories of deportees, and survivors kept their stories to themselves. The facts that Holland had its own neo-Nazi movement and that a racist, far-right political party had won legislative seats were ignored as aberrations without precedent. When these subjects were brought up, the usual response was, “It is shocking. This is very un-Dutch. We have always been a tolerant people.” Tolerant, which is the same word in the Dutch language, was an obsessively overworked term. The Dutch frequently spoke of their tolerance of minorities, as though Jews, blacks, and Asians were an unpleasant burden that they were able to bear because they, the Dutch, were a strong and stoic people.

  But there was another factor. The Dutch health system encouraged people to seek psychiatric help. Someone who could show psychological problems as a result of wartime experiences was entitled to a special pension. Unfortunately, none of this had been available in the years immediately following the war, when these people could have been most helped by it. The mental health profession was strongly influenced in the 1970s and 1980s by the work done in America on traumatized Vietnam war veterans.

  The noticeable increase in war-related traumas was frequently attributed to retirement. People who had kept busy all their lives were suddenly faced with inescapable free time. “They hold it down,” explained Jitschak Storosum, “but very suddenly something very specific, often very small, sets them off, and they can no longer cope. Sometimes it is just a normal illness, or a picture of Auschwitz on television. My mother could never look at a train without getting a flashback. Many don't sleep because they want to avoid the dreams they have. When they have a bad dream, it can take them weeks to recover.”

  Seeing what had happened to others, some survivors, like Marian Turski in Warsaw, avoided retirement. Joseph de Groot was a tailor, and even in his late seventies he kept working out of his house. He smiled and laughed easily, he loved to gossip with his clients, and he pointed with pride to his well-fed pot belly. He also pointed with pride to the numbers tattooed on his forearm. An elderly widower with no children, he lived in his large-windowed, spacious home. A ring at the door, and he would leap to his feet, then painfully remember that his back hurt. Down the hall was the fitting room, and a helper worked in the basement. After one customer left, de Groot studied him through the window. “Ah, he is a millionaire. I'm going to make him pay. If you are poor, you pay very little If you are rich, I get you. That's how this operation works,” he said, chuckling.

  He seemed a happy man. His face of deep-set eyes and strong nose bore a look of contentment, and he had bad dreams only about once every five months. “I have good work. When I want. I don't want. I have worked enough in my life. In the concentration camps. 1 am seventy-eight. On the weekends I have a lady friend, I have many people over, we drink coffee. I have a good life. I live well. I am in good health. I am content. But I do not look at concentration camp films. When there is a film about a concentration camp on television, I never watch it. I do not want to look back too much at the concentration camps. And that is good for me. I will talk about it a little bit. But I have friends who talk about the concentration camp every day. I say I don't want to think about the concentration camp every day. That is good. I live well.”

  De Groot only recently started talking about his camp experiences. The story would come out in disjointed segments. He would often say that tailoring had saved his life at Auschwitz. But sometimes he would talk of how he did manual labor for I.G. Farben, the chemical manufacturer. Sometimes he would explain that tailoring hadn't really been his work there, but that he got food and money by making clothes for prisoners who attempted to escape. He also described how the prisoners would be forced to stand for hours in the cold, looking at the people in his clothes that the guards had hanged for trying to escape. Then his voice would break, and he would change the subject.

  During those executions a band would be forced to play. When visitors go to Auschwitz, they can see a photograph of the band by the front gate. De Groof s friend Lex Van Weren played trumpet in that band. He survived and followed a trumpet career in Holland until he was too old to play. Then he also had to face retirement. A pension was available —not for camp survivors, but for Resistance veterans, and Van Weren had been in the Resistance. He had been originally arrested as a Resistance operative, not as a Jew. When he applied for his Resistance pension, he was required to see a psychiatrist, who told him that his habit of talking openly about his experiences was healthy. That was what he decided to do with his retirement, write books and articles and give talks on his experiences as “the trumpet player of Auschwitz.”

  “I was always able to speak out about my memories,” Van Weren said. “People like Joopie de Groot, they have their memories and they can speak out with some acquaintances. But I have had the chance to speak out to people all over Holland. To millions, and that's good for a person. I am lucky that every thought inside has come out. I have had the opportunity to speak about it. That is the pity for all the hundreds and hundreds who are living now. They have had no chance to speak about it.”

  He seemed very pleased with his life, in his flat modern house in the flat modern Buitenveldert in the expanding south, where many affluent Jews settled. He sat on his patio looking across his small lawn at the rosebushes that edged the canal. “This is a very expensive neighborhood. My neighbors are rich. I'm just a musician. It was hard for me to get the money. But every time I look out at my roses, I feel happy.”

  Behind his blustery optimism was a voice of isolation like that often heard from camp survivors. “I don't trust people. I don't want to need anyone, but that is very difficult to achieve. You do need people. But I am ninety percent there. I don't believe in friends.”

  Mauritz Auerhaan, who never married, retired to a Jewish home for the elderly and made a similar observation, “To make friends is very difficult. To make a real friend, I couldn't find one. Everybody looks after his own life and to make money without caring.”

  Some remained fixated on their memories, like the woman who had a larger-than-life-size photo of her friend who had been with her in Auschwitz and had not survived. The photo was on the inside of the kitchen cabinet door, staring mournfully at her every time she op
ened the cabinet.

  To de Groot, not thinking about the Holocaust was a prerequisite of living well. “I want to live. When you think about the concentration camp, you don't live. If I start thinking about my friends in the concentration camps, how they died—the more you see of the concentration camp on the television, the more it is in your dreams. I watch football. That is my hobby.”

  Somewhere in the 1980s it started to get increasingly difficult for those who wanted to avoid reminders. Both television and publishing rained Holland with information about World War II and the Holocaust. Most of it was general. Sometimes it dealt with the Dutch past. Survivors found Auschwitz images coming into their peripheral vision regularly. Some survivors feared turning on the television, and random channel flipping was not to be risked.

  THE GHOSTLY PRESENCE of World War II was part of Dutch life. Political careers were still being ruined by revelations of dubious wartime activities. The underground Resistance tabloids, notably Het Parool, had become the press establishment. In crowded, cosmopolitan Amsterdam, a city of northern Renaissance architecture along a maze of interconnecting canals, tourists could ask directions in any Western language but German. Most Amsterdamers were multilingual, but they always said that German, which has the same roots as Dutch, was too difficult. Amsterdamers deliberately gave German tourists wrong directions. Some would respond to a question from a lost German, “First give me back my bicycle,” as though the mass deportation of bicycles to Germany was the most remembered atrocity.