A Chosen Few

by Mark Kurlansky

  Even de Groot's hobby, soccer, was a reminder of the war. When the Netherlands’ soccer team played Germany, signs saying “Give me back my bicycle” were held up in the Dutch crowd. De Groot was a fan of the Ajax team, as many Jews had been before the war. In those days, when Holland still had a large Jewish population, a number of Jewish soccer stars played for Ajax. De Groot said, “I have three Jewish places: shul, the Jewish cemetery, and Ajax.” In modern times Ajax has Surinamers but not Jews on the team. But that does not stop people from referring to it as the Jodeclub, the Jewish team. Fans of opposing teams show up at Ajax games with swastikas and have at times chanted, “Jodeclub, sieg heil, gas them!” The Jewish community is assured that these are just tasteless, overzealous soccer fans. Soccer fans are notoriously excessive. The police have interrogated some of these fans who shout “Gas them” and reported that they appear to know nothing about World War II. Do they not watch television?

  Lody van de Kamp grew up in a family that talked about the war. He learned about his father in Auschwitz, where his first family had been killed, and about his mother's life in hiding. In 1965, Lody went to school in England, and when he returned as a rabbi, to his surprise he was spending much of his time helping people with war-related problems. “When I came back in 1981 from England, I did not realize that in Holland there is such a thing as a war syndrome. Now I know differently. Some become depressed, some show a spirit of fighting and survival. Some people show an attitude toward children of overcaring and overprotection. There are things of guilt. Very often a wife dies, a husband dies, and then the I have to face not only the tragedy of what has just happened but the tragedy of years back.”

  Every year that Lody was back, he found that people talked about the war more and more. But not all their problems were psychological. Scores still remained to be settled. In 1990, Van de Kamp organized a committee to try to get back property that had been stolen from deported Jews and that was still in the hands of Dutch Nazis or their children. The most bizarre case was in a small town named Winschoten, where there had been a synagogue before the war and a committee was formed to raise money to restore it. One of three surviving members of the prewar Winschoten Jewish community lived in Amsterdam, and while visiting his hometown to raise money for the restoration, he stumbled across something called the Siemens Foundation.

  Willem Siemens was not a name that he would forget. Siemens had been a Dutch policeman in Winschoten who deported Jews to the death camps and then stole their property. He had personally placed 440 Jews on trains for Westerbork. Only nine survived, but those survivors told how he threatened them, forced them to give him their money, or sometimes took it in exchange for a promise to help them. In 1943, Siemens volunteered for the Waffen SS and fought on the Eastern Front. When he returned in 1945, he was arrested and served eight years in prison. Upon his release he returned to the same little town and lived in almost total seclusion. When he died in 1985, he left a large amount of money for an animal shelter that would bear his name. He loved animals. But when people learned that an animal shelter would be subsidized by the Siemens Foundation, since everyone in the area suspected how Siemens had gotten so much money, there was general opposition. The notary who was in charge of the Siemens money came up with another idea. Siemens's money could be used to quietly subsidize the cremation of pets. There was a nearby animal crematorium, and it was arranged that when a pet owner called to arrange the cremation of his dog, he would simply be told, “Oh, you get a fifty percent discount.”

  THE BIEDERMANNS raised their two sons with a Jewish education. Sieg took them to the synagogue until they were bar mitzvahed, and then told them that they had to decide if they wanted to continue going or not. But after the second bar mitzvah, he himself never went again. His wife, Evelyne, would never talk about her camp experiences and had her tattooed numbers surgically removed. When Sieg's sons asked about the numbers on his arm, Sieg would always say he wrote his phone number there so he wouldn't forget it. On vacation at the beach the boys would notice that their father's back was covered with perfectly round scars, each the size of a very large com. “What's that?” they would always ask. But he wouldn't answer. Then one day, in an unemotional voice, he told them. There had been something missing, and the SS had decided to take three prisoners and hang them upside down by their feet. After they hung for about four hours, the SS stuck them repeatedly with rifle bayonets. They would stick the bayonet in and twist it around.

  One of the sons, Barry, became a very aggressive child. He was a sturdy little boy, and he believed that the best response to any comment about Jews was a fist in the mouth. For several years Sieg was regularly paying for the repair of other children's teeth. On Barry's seventh birthday, Sieg and Evelyne gave him a cowboy outfit. He wore it to school, and the teacher pointed at the sheriff's badge and said, “There was a time when your parents had to wear those stars.” Having no idea what this could mean, he asked his parents and they explained about the stars. Barry stopped hitting people and grew up to be an active man in community affairs, but one thing never changed —he always hated that schoolteacher.

  Sieg and Evelyne's goal was to build a normal life for their family, and they succeeded, even though neither of them ever regained their health. Barry could not remember a year of his childhood when at least one of his parents did not spend time in the hospital. When Sieg was 65, under pressure from his family, he reluctantly retired. The Biedermanns bought a house in Tel Aviv and moved back and forth trying to relax, enjoy life, and not think about the past. Two years later, Sieg died. Evelyne, who was eleven years younger, also died in her mid-sixties.

  Once his mother died, Barry felt completely alone. He did not know how to deal with the loss of both his parents. He had never lost anyone. All his other relatives had been killed before he was born. It had always been just the four of them. His brother moved to New York, but Barry stayed in Amsterdam and married an Aruban Jew whose family had no Holocaust experiences. They had two children, whom they named after Barry's parents.

  Barry's wife came from a religious family and they took up a traditional Jewish life. He began to wear a yarmulke and a beard. They were one of an estimated three hundred kosher households in the Netherlands. Barry believed it was important to have a religious background. “If you have to get knowledge starting from the age of eighteen, you will never be at the top. It is a free choice in a way, but on the other hand it is not free choice because what you learn in your very first years, you can never make up later. You will never dovin in a natural way.”

  Dovining—the bowing, bobbing, dipping, and other ecstatic moves of traditional Jewish prayer—was something he grew up seeing, but because he was not encouraged to participate, he was not sure that he completely fit in during prayer. He was not sure if he dovined in a natural way. “I can't shuvel in a natural way. You know, I can't be in a kdans. I can pretend to. But my three-year-old boy—it's not forced. He's just got it!”

  If Barry Biedermann had one friend who he was certain would never dovin in a natural way, it was Theo Meijer. A small, fit-looking man with close-cropped hair and beard who almost always wore his rhinestone star of David neck chain, Theo, in his own way, was also a war victim. His mother was Catholic, and his father, as he suddenly discovered at age 14, had been Jewish. The father had survived in hiding. After the war he decided he was no longer Jewish and never discussed it again. Theo did not know exactly what had happened to his father during the war. He was not even sure if there were surviving relatives, except for a grandmother whom he met briefly on only two occasions. Living on a shady canal near the Nieuwmarkt, Theo was raised Catholic like his mother. Then one day a neighbor told him, in a not unpleasant way, that he was a Jew. To everyone but Theo, this was not surprising, since Meijer is often a Jewish name and the family lived in a somewhat Jewish neighborhood. It had been very Jewish before the war, and Theo could remember as a child how survivors would show up from time to time and claim a house and try to for
ce the people there out, almost always leading to an angry legal battle. Someone came back from Russia and demanded the house next to theirs. Theo liked to joke with Sal Meijer, the butcher, about being a distant relative. Sal, whose shop was then nearby in the Nieuwmarkt, joked that Theo was from the wealthy side of the Meijer family, although no doubt Sal had more money than Theo's father, who was a ship rigger in the nearby docks.

  Theo had grown up around Jews, and then he discovered that he was one. The only problem with this new idea that so struck Theo was that it was really not true. He wasn't a Jew—not by Jewish law, since his mother was not Jewish, and not by culture, since he knew nothing about Judaism. He was a generally well-adjusted man. But he became the reverse of his father, who had worked so hard at being a non-Jew—Theo tried hard to be a Jew, even though no one in the Jewish community thought of him as one. He tried to learn, but the Orthodox would not have him. The liberals were more accepting, but he didn't like liberal Judaism. It lacked that exotic other-world kind of feel. “It's all or nothing,” Theo would say.

  Theo went his own way, insisting that he “felt Jewish” regardless oi what anyone said. “People say I am not Jewish, but I think I am.” On Jewish holidays he stubbornly went to the Esnoga. His father did not discuss Jewish issues except to object to his son's preference for German cars. Theo loved expensive cars and drove around in a Mercedes, always interrupting conversations to point out cars he admired. He would stop in midsentence and say, “Oh, nice Bent-ley.” When his father asked how he could drive a German car, Theo would point at the three-pronged hood insignia on his Mercedes and say, “That's the star the Germans have made ray generation wear,” and laugh.

  Theo became a social worker of tremendous energy and talent, a man with an instinct for working with people and a genuine sense of dedication. In 1970 he started working at Wallenberg, a homeless shelter in his old neighborhood. He roamed the streets looking for people in trouble to take to the shelter, and he especially sought Jews.

  He kept a pile of yarmulkes and Hebrew books in a corner of his office and tried to teach people of Jewish background and offer them Hanukkah and other Jewish holidays. If they died, he would say kaddish for them.

  “Look at this,” he said, springing from behind his cluttered desk in his cramped Wallenberg office. “Hanukkah—I can do this part,” and he picked up a prayer book, opened it, and began reciting Hebrew and dovining, bending and nodding and swaying. It was exactly what his friend Barry Biedermann called “not dovining in a natural way.” Still, it was impressive that he could read Hebrew that well. He moved his finger along the page and occasionally stumbled over a word, but it was generally good reading.

  “Naw,” he said with a big smile. “I memorized that passage from transliterated Dutch. I can't read Hebrew.”

  “Theo,” said Barry, “is a perfect example of why, if you have a mixed marriage, you should make clear to the children that they are not Jewish. It's just confusion.”

  WALLENBERG WAS LOCATED near the tight ancient waterways on the east side of Amsterdam's center city—a picturesque area so cramped that the stairways in houses had to be as steep as in a ship cabin.

  The Dutch don't like the word homeless or the word shelter. Probably none of the people living on the streets of Amsterdam lacked an alternative, because the government guaranteed all citizens an income and, if necessary, a home. The Wallenberg shelter was a government program consisting of two houses and a series of additional apartments, which in total gave private rooms to six hundred people who did not fit into society. There were no dangerous barracks with rows of beds. Seasoned drifters preferred Wallenberg because of the private rooms, whereas in the other Amsterdam homes you might be assigned a roommate. The state subsidized the home by charging residents $420 monthly from the social pensions paid them by the state. This still left them with spending money and enough extra for the annual May vacation at off-season rates in Palma de Mallorca, Spain, a package-tour spot popular with the Dutch.

  On his rounds Theo found Aaron, sleeping in the Central Station. It took several visits to gain his confidence, but Aaron eventually moved to Wallenberg and lived there for years. A small man with pronounced Semitic features, he was nervous and given to unprovoked fits of laughter, and like many of the residents, he had strong emotional ties to Theo. According to Theo, “He is a very nice man, but he will steal anything/’

  Aaron was a kleptomaniac. His elderly mother said he started stealing and acting oddly at age 12. When Aaron was one year old, she was deported to a concentration camp and saved her son by throwing him off the train. One thing that life in Wallenberg had in common with “normal” life in the rest of Amsterdam was that the society was still haunted by World War II.

  “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 held 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 yairmulkes 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 oth
er children. But that's all I can remember.”

  THE ESNOGA 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.