by R. D. Rosen
He embraced Flora, who had no recollection of him, and sat in a chair in the living room, twisting his military cap while Flora squeezed in between Adalrik and Andrée on the settee.
“Stefanie—your mother,” he began, and the rest of it Flora heard only in snatches as she stared at him, trying to take in what he was saying as she felt Andrée’s arm tighten around her shoulder. “I know that she was deported to Drancy . . . ,” he said. “I’m sorry to say . . . transported to Auschwitz on October 28, 1943 . . . it can only be assumed . . . no word . . . Flora, I am so sorry . . . but I know she would’ve wanted me to give the two of you”—he was looking at her foster parents now—“her blessings to officially adopt Flora. . . .”
She couldn’t help fantasizing that the military man had at one time been more than her mother’s friend, and that, had she survived, perhaps she would have married him. For days a vision of the three of them walking hand in hand down Nice’s Promenade des Anglais kept playing in her head. Her never-to-be stepfather wrote a few letters to Flora after his visit, but they stopped and she never heard from him again.
Andrée kept telling Flora how brave her mother was and suggested they all go to Nice and see the apartment where Flora had last lived with her mother. Although others no doubt lived in the two rooms on Avenue Monplaisir, Andrée thought that perhaps Flora could reconnect there with her mother’s spirit, resurrect more memories of her, find some acceptance of her death.
So the Hogmans set off with her in the car one morning. To their surprise, they found the apartment door in Nice unlocked and the living room bare of furniture. Only a few useless objects were scattered about the desolate apartment. Flora, wandering the dimly remembered rooms in a daze, found her mother’s beautiful box of spools of thread. And there was a shoe box lying on the floor, which, when Flora removed the lid, revealed a jumble of black-and-white photographs, many of her, her mother, and her father. The ones with her father had been taken in San Remo or before, in Czechoslovakia; the ones with only her and her mother were from their time in Nice. There were other people in the photos she didn’t recognize, men and women posing with her parents.
“How come you’re not crying?” Andrée asked her, looking on.
When Flora got up and went to the kitchen, it had been stripped of everything but the sink. The stove and the squat little refrigerator were gone. When Flora looked in the sink, she stopped short, her heart pounding.
In it were two of her mother’s dirty dishes that, after three years, were still waiting to be washed.
After the war, Flora tried her best to approximate a normal adolescence. Adalrik’s reserve and Andrée’s flamboyance made for an odd combination of influences, but they were devoted to each other. At times, their mutual adoration made Flora feel even more like an outsider. The bloom on Flora’s relationship with Andrée began to fade; what had been exotic to a nine-year-old—the saris, the Indian hairstyles, her interminable yoga—was annoying to the teenage Flora. In an attempt to get closer to her adoptive father, Flora asked him to teach her Swedish.
Over time, the Hogmans grew elderly and developed health and financial problems, which necessitated a move to a smaller house. At least Adalrik had been an effective enough teacher of Swedish that he could arrange for her to work for a travel agency in Sweden. It was her first taste of real independence, as opposed to abandonment, but in 1956, when Flora had been living with them for almost a dozen years, Andrée suddenly died of a heart attack. Flora had lost her second mother. After she returned to Grasse from Sweden, numb and guilt-ridden, she soon got rid of Andrée’s yoga and Buddhism books. But the rest of the library, including several of Tagore’s books, inscribed by him to Andrée, she kept forever.
She had to turn her attention to Adalrik, who was in decline. She hired someone to look after him during the day while she took a job as a file clerk for the Swedish airline SAS in its Nice office, to which she commuted fifteen miles every day by motorbike. In the mornings and evenings, though, Flora spent increasing amounts of time caring for her adoptive father, giving him his medicines and injections and conversing in Swedish.
In 1959, Adalrik died. Flora was now twenty-three, a beautiful petite young woman with a warm smile and her dark hair grown out and parted in the middle. In a photo from that year, she leans against a rock in the sun, surrounded by cypresses and cacti, wearing white espadrilles and a pretty sundress. She could be any attractive young French woman from a good home with her life ahead of her. But she was now without family, and with the war years a distant—indeed, mostly repressed—memory, she had no idea what to do. She had been Flora Hillel, granddaughter of a famous Czech rabbi, then Marie Hamon, then Flora Hamon, and finally Flora Hogman. Her faith, what there had ever been of it, had been fractured beyond any denominational recognition. She had been a Czech Jew born in Italy, a Roman Catholic living in a Riviera convent, a reluctant Buddhist, a French Protestant, and finally an atheist—and all by the age of fifteen. She had put together a life out of spare parts and the kindness of fearless strangers, and had emerged from her fragmented childhood with a fighting spirit. She just had no idea what to fight for. She was as trapped in her confusion as she had once been in a convent. Where her life was supposed to be, there was only numbness.
Incredibly, just as she had been rescued so many times before, someone appeared and, with the help of a coincidence too pat even for pulp fiction, pointed the way to the future. Flora had an aunt she didn’t know, the sister of her aunt in Geneva, who had managed to escape from Austria to New York City in 1940. The aunt’s son, her first cousin, now in his twenties, decided he wanted to see Vienna. Before he left on his trip, his mother gave him one last instruction: “Go find Flora Hogman in southern France.” That was the sum of anyone’s knowledge of her whereabouts; not even her sister in Geneva knew any more than that.
On his way to Austria, he stopped in Paris, where he happened to walk by a store for tourists called Maison de Nice. He knew that Flora had once lived in the Côte d’Azur, so, for the fun of it, he stopped in to ask the young salesgirl there—what did he have to lose?—if she happened to know a Flora Hogman in southern France. But what were the odds that, just because the store had “Nice” in its name, someone there would ever have heard of his cousin?
The salesgirl, whose name was Thérèse, smiled at him. “Bien sûr, elle est une de mes meilleures amies.”
One of her best friends? “C’est incroyable!” the young man said, exhausting in one phrase a good portion of the French he had mastered, then using up a good portion of the rest by saying, “C’est possible?”
Therese knew Flora from the tourist industry on the Riviera, where she had previously worked, and they had stayed in touch. She gave him her address in Nice.
And that was how Flora Hogman received a visit out of the blue from some cousin speaking a mélange of bad French and unfamiliar English. Between one thing and another, one of the lucky survivors of history’s most efficient genocide was soon walking down Fifth Avenue in a city that, thanks to that genocide, was now home to more than 50 percent as many Jews as remained in all of Europe.
By 1959, New York City was home to more than its fair share of young adults who had survived the Holocaust in hiding as children, including a woman whose path Flora was destined to cross more than three decades later at the most important event in the lives of hidden child survivors everywhere.
CARLA
My first glimpse of Carla Lessing came in the Manhattan office of the Hidden Child Foundation, an organization that wasn’t formed until the world’s scattered and isolated hidden survivors had already reached middle age. Carla spends every Wednesday in the office as the Foundation’s vice president and volunteer social worker. She works behind a frosted glass wall in a room about twenty-five feet square that contains numerous file cabinets and four computer terminals filled with data about the organization’s global membership of roughly 6,000 hidden child survivors—still just a fraction of the unknown total. I
n one corner stand two bookcases bulging with Holocaust memoirs. These volumes—and the new ones that arrive all the time—are a drop in the bucket of Holocaust memoirs and histories, but there are fewer every year.
Carla is a small, dark-haired, energetic woman in her eighties who looks years younger than her age. She speaks in a very precise, thoughtful manner, her English still bearing inflections of her native Dutch. Like Anne Frank and her family, Carla spent most of her war years in Holland, which lost nearly 75 percent of its Jews, hidden with her family by Christians of uncommon generosity and courage.
Carla was already ten when the Germans invaded Holland, and so it is less of a struggle than it is for Sophie and Flora to remember the feelings and details of her years in hiding. Carla’s memories also go back much further, to her very earliest intimations of the disaster to come.
Since the early 1930s, Carla Heijmans had been aware of German anti-Semitism and the trouble being stirred up by Hitler’s National Socialist Party. As a little girl, she vacationed at her maternal grandparents’ home near Cologne, Germany, where she was constantly reminded not to talk or laugh too loudly, not to skip, and not to draw any attention to herself. She could tell that her grandparents were scared of the men in brown shirts and shiny black boots, and their fear frightened her.
In the spring of 1936, six-year-old Carla returned to The Hague from spending the winter with her grandparents to find that her mother, Herta, and brother, Herman, had moved from the family’s nice single-family home to a modest apartment—and that, far worse, her father, Julius, had suddenly died. Carla’s mother dodged her panicky questions; strangely, no one at all spoke to her about the cause of his death. It seemed like the vague threat she had felt in Germany had now spread to her own family, but in her mind Carla concluded that he had died of a heart attack. It would be decades before Carla learned for sure that her father had committed suicide in February of that year, an act motivated at least in part by Germany’s boycott of Jewish businesses—made official in 1935 by the Nuremberg Laws—of which the trading company run by Julius Heijmans, his father, and brother-in-law had been one.
He left behind a wife, an asthmatic son, Herman, and daughter, Carla, a family whose sudden poverty was masked by their expensive silverware and furniture, so that few friends and neighbors were the wiser. Carla’s mother Herta tried to make ends meet by selling linen and coal from home, as well as inventing a method for removing the shine from men’s well-worn suits. When Herta’s parents fled Gelsenkirchen shortly after Kristallnacht in 1938, leaving all their assets behind, they moved in not with her but with their son, who owned a factory in the east of Holland.
A year and a half later, in May 1940, they watched as the Germans invaded Holland and found no resistance. By 1942, the Germans began deporting Dutch Jews to Westerbork, a camp that the Dutch themselves had created in 1939 to house Jews entering Holland illegally. Now it had become a way station for Jews headed to Auschwitz, Sobibor, Theresienstadt, and Bergen-Belsen.
In a country that had nothing in the way of mountains and little in the way of forests, there were very few places a Jew could hide. Dutch Jews were dependent, more than in other European countries, on the kindness of Christian strangers. Outside of Eastern Europe and Greece, no country would lose as high a percentage of its Jewish citizens to Hitler’s Final Solution as the Dutch.
The persecution of Dutch Jews started slowly, and for a while life went on. In 1942, Carla’s family lived in a mostly Catholic neighborhood, where she attended a public school with her best friend, Fanny, who was one class ahead of her and also Jewish. “Best friends” hardly described how close they were; they shared everything.
Then the Germans began to show their hand more aggressively. It came as a rude shock to Carla when she was suddenly told that she could no longer attend swimming classes because of her religion. The Germans soon confiscated Herta’s valuables, the two gold rings she had given Carla for her eleventh birthday, Carla’s radio, and her beloved bicycle, which she had ridden every day to school. She was at least still allowed to go to a Jewish school, where everyone wore a yellow cloth Star of David. One of the teachers there, Mr. Engelander, helped Carla and some of her friends to stage their own operetta, which distracted them temporarily from what was going on beyond the school walls, where a sinister attrition of the student population had begun.
One day Carla walked around the corner to Fanny’s house and rang the bell, as she often did after school. When there was no answer at first, she looked up at Fanny’s second-floor bedroom window. By now Fanny would have appeared at the window or at the door, and they would have begun to share the day’s gossip. Carla rang again, absentmindedly touching her yellow star, but no one came. When she pressed her ear against the door, she heard nothing. Her mother had already explained to her at dinner that many Dutch Jews were either leaving everything behind and running off to England or Denmark, or going into hiding. But Fanny? Disappearing just like that? Carla was well aware of the growing list of restrictions affecting The Hague’s Jews, but a world in which your best friend could vanish without saying a word? Carla trudged home in despair.
When her brother, Herman, was soon conscripted to a German work camp, he was the first of their family to go into hiding. A Jesuit priest they knew arranged for him to live with a Christian family in The Hague. One night after school, he simply ripped off his star and walked to his new home. The priest would not tell his mother its location. An official letter arrived shortly after, instructing Carla and her family to take the trolley to the train station a few days hence, from which they would be taken to Westerbork for “relocation.” Herta immediately contacted the priest, begging him to send her and Carla to the same family Herman had joined.
The next night Carla’s mother made her take off her vest with the yellow Star of David sewn on it. Carla was afraid. At first she had been proud of the star, proud to be Jewish. Then she became so accustomed to wearing the proof of her Judaism that she barely noticed it anymore. It was as much a part of her as her dark hair, and, ironically, she felt exposed without it.
“When we get outside,” her mother said after they packed their bags, “I want you to just drop it in the gutter. From now on, you’re no longer Jewish.”
The two of them walked alone, along the trolley tracks, until they came to a house right by the trolley. To Carla it hardly seemed like a place to hide, but, sure enough, Herman was waiting inside for them, along with Mrs. Van Nooyen, the owner of the house, and the foster son who lived with her. Carla’s relief at having a safe haven soured soon enough as the three Heijmans crowded into a small, dark, stuffy room in the tiny apartment. They had to avoid all windows and ask permission to go to the bathroom. Carla’s asthmatic brother Herman was under strict instructions from Mrs. Van Nooyen to wheeze and cough only while muffled by blankets, for fear that the neighbors would turn her, and them, in.
At times Carla felt there was nothing to do but watch the minutes pass. At least Mrs. Van Nooyen could cook. Her kidney bean soup almost made life bearable. The most priceless diversion in their tight quarters was a dictionary that helped relieve the mixture of boredom and fear that now ruled their lives. The only good thing that could be said so far about the Third Reich was that it led to a rapid expansion of the two children’s vocabulary.
After just three months—though it already felt like a dark and idle eternity to Carla—Mrs. Van Nooyen’s foster son knocked on their door one morning to tell them that their presence had been discovered by neighbors and that they would have to leave immediately. As plausible as this was, they all suspected that having two quietly bickering teenagers hiding in her little apartment, one of them asthmatic, had simply proven to be too much. The real mystery was why Mrs. Van Nooyen had agreed to shelter them in the first place. How badly did she need the small amounts of money they could pay her? Only later would they learn from a priest that she felt she had sinned quite a lot in her life and that she believed that hiding a Jewish family
would be just the thing to restore God’s confidence in her. However, her anxiety over past transgressions was no match for the reality of risking her life for total strangers.
The Jesuit priest made new arrangements, and one night, after being engulfed by Mrs. Van Nooyen’s farewell embraces, Carla, Herman, and their mother were on the street again in the dark, this time headed to the Haag train station. They had not been outside the apartment for three months and the life of the city was a jolt to their systems. The trolleys startled her. The streetlights alarmed her. Carla felt unseen neighbors scrutinizing them from darkened windows. Even without their yellow stars, she wondered if it was obvious they were Jews. At last they were on a train for the short ride to the city of Delft, with directions to their new home, an apartment over a barbershop.
The apartment was bigger, but so was the family. The Van Geenens—it was Walter’s barbershop; his wife, Corrie, was the beautician—already had seven children, most of them hungry teenagers. Mr. and Mrs. van Geenen slept in the dining room while Carla, her brother, mother, and the van Geenens’ eldest daughter stayed in the front room on the third floor. The other six children were scattered in the third floor’s other bedroom and in the hallway just outside. Why had this good couple, who didn’t have enough space for their own brood, taken in three Jews? It was not something anyone talked about, yet it didn’t take long for the Heijmans family to discover that the bespectacled, chain-smoking Walter van Geenan was a very unusual man.
