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EmailThrough The Eyes Of The Child: Survival Of The Holocaust
by Jack Veffer
Introduction
Jackboots pounding on thundering pavement
Ancient Amsterdam cowering in self-conscious agony.
Marianne and Joseph, adoringly, gaze upon their newborn
I stare, with yet unseeing eyes, at their worried faces.
Hitler declares war on the world and
Vows to exterminate the Jews.
Humanity’s silence is deafening
It is October 12, 1940.
All sorrows can be borne if you can put them into a story or tell a story about them”.1
Arendt Hannah; (The Human Condition, first published in 1958.)
~
This story is the story of murder, mass murder, on a scale hitherto unknown, premeditated and committed in cold blood. The murderers were German and the murdered, the Jews of Holland. The Jews were, in a process of disenfranchisement and isolation, robbed of everything, transported and in a systematic-scientific, technically-efficient manner, murdered.
They were city folk and farmers, orthodox, agnostic and atheist, healthy and sick, old and young, families and individuals, Dutch and Aliens: men, women and children.
Without hurry, well thought out, registered and regimented.
The murderers were often not brutes nor illiterates, but academics and intellectuals with an abiding love for literature, sculpture and music: many were caring fathers and mothers and during the holiday season celebrated Christmas and thereafter resumed their labour: the murder of countless men, women and children, defenseless people, fellow human beings.
This is but one story, as seen through the eyes of one child, there are millions more.
Chapter 1
The War~
During the night of May 9, 1940 the German army traversed the border into Holland. This fact rang in a new era for the Dutch population, and signified a major shift in the history of Dutch Jews. An ominous shift, whose outcome most Jews could scarcely fathom.
Neither fight nor flight were options contemplated. After all, it was thought; were not the Jews of Holland full and equal partners in the fabric of everyday life?
Jews could proudly point to the many accomplishments in the arts, medicine and the sciences by such well known Jewish scholars as Baruch Spinoza, Martin Buber, Herman Cohen, Moses Mendelssohn, Sigmund Freud, Albert Einstein, and world renowned artists, Jan Peerce, Robert Merrill, Jascha Heifetz, Mischa Elman, Isaac Stern and Arthur Rubenstein, to name but a few. Their accomplishments accrueing to the good of all mankind.
The Jews of Holland considered themselves Dutch, first and foremost.
When a neighbour asked my father: "And you, what will you do?"
"Nothing," he answered in a loud voice "Why should we?"
When the German troops passed by in perfect goose-step he murmured: "See, they don't bother with us."
~
As I drink my fill from mother’s swollen breast, Maurice is watching this wondrous sight.
“Mommy, can I have some too?” he asks.
“No son, Jackie is only one and you’re five years old now. You have to drink from a cup” She replies with a smile.
Looking down at him with half opened eyes, I am content.
Daddy can no longer work at the diamond factory. The factory is closed because nobody wants to buy diamonds.
~
Paper currency is quickly losing its value, there are those that look upon owning diamonds as a hedge against the devaluation of the currency.
‘The business’ is the name that Jewish diamond workers call their work.
Many Jews are employed in the Amsterdam diamond industry. Amsterdam was the most important center for finished diamonds in the world; before the second world war.
No Guild exists for this industry so that Jewish newcomers from other countries such as Spain, Germany and Portugal could, since the seventeenth century, engage in this trade.
The Sephardim Jews have always had international relations in areas where diamonds are traditionally being mined, mainly South Africa, and so they became the most important diamond traders in Amsterdam.
The actual making of a diamond, from rough into a finished polished diamond, is also mostly in Jewish hands. Early on, the cutting of a diamond occurred at home, in attics. The cutting machines were operated by the cutters feet to make the cutting wheel spin. In later years, as production increased, factories were set up and the cutting wheels were steam driven.
Most diamonds came from South Africa and in the period before the war the diamond industry in Amsterdam was one of the most important centers in the world.
~
Da ddy told Mommy that he sold some of his diamonds for money. Now he can buy food for us.
Daddy complains to Mommy: “Seiss-Inquart, the German Reichskommissar, has stolen our money out of the bank account. Thank goodness, I hid some of the money in the house.”
He takes Mommy to the cupboard in the kitchen and he takes down a shoebox. When he opens the box I see lots of money. Some of it falls on the floor. I help to pick it up and put it back in the shoebox.
~
Food is scarce. To procure food, people travel great distances, usually at night, to the farms outside Amsterdam to get a few potatoes and vegetables. Meat and eggs can be obtained at exorbitant prices. Securing food for the family is a full time job.
”No Jewish community in Western Europe suffered more during the Holocaust than the Jews of Holland. Out of a prewar population of 140,000 (including 15,000 refugees from Nazi Austria and Germany), barely 30,000 Dutch Jews survived the four years of Nazi terror. A lucky handful escaped the death camps by fleeing before the invasion. But most of those who survived the war in Holland did so by hiding with the help of a network of brave countrymen who risked their own lives for the sake of others - usually total strangers.”
( Richard Chesnoff , Pack of Thieves)
~
Outside the house I can hear the wind howl. I shiver. It is very cold in the house. Daddy can get a few pieces of coal from time to time so the kitchen stove is only used for cooking. We all circle around to get warm for a while. Daddy has long ago burnt the little bit of wood he found from things we don't need around the house and pieces he found outside. Mommy dresses me in warm clothes to try to keep me cozy.
There is no electricity. We have to use candles for light.
We manage to get through the winter of 1942.
"Life is very hard." Daddy complains. "But, see, I told you that the Germans would leave us alone. They know we are Dutch citizens, and that counts for something. We pose no threat to them." He adds with hope in his voice.
Mommy and Daddy don’t go outside much. When they do, they have to wear a big yellow Star of David on their coat so that every one knows that they are Jews.
They talk softly to each other. They think I can’t hear what they’re saying. Daddy says he is not so sure now that we won't get picked up in one of the many raids.
~
“When Hitler came to power in 1933, Dutch Jews began to feel the consequences at once. Caring for and housing refugees from Germany and Austria became a major concern: an estimated 34,000 of them arrived in Holland between 1933 and 1940. The government left the organization and financing of refugee relief to the Jewish community but required that it put up a guarantee of one million guilders. A tough policy was introduced to stem the growing tide of refugees after the anti-Jewish violence of Kristallnacht (November 8-9, 1938): entire groups were sent back across the German border. The government forced the Jewish community to intern refugees in Westerbork - later used by the Nazis as a transit camp for deportees to the death camps. Except among Socialists, the Jews, and especially German Jews, were increasingly viewed as a problem.”
( Edward van Voolen, Curator of the Jewish Historical Museum, Amsterdam.)
Anton Mussert, who was appointed as the leader of the NSB, the Dutch fascist party, was a great admirer of the Italian fascist leader Benito Mussolini and copied many of his political ideas. He shared 'il Duce's' hatred towards democracy and egalitarianism.
Mussert claimed that Holland needed a powerful central government that could provide strong rightist leadership for the Dutch.
Mussert also borrowed many of his political ideas from Adolph Hitler.
The NSB, as was Hitler's Nazi party, was anti-Semitic and in order to ingratiate himself to the German occupiers, co-operated with them to denounce Jews from their hiding places.
Informants were paid seven guilders per Jew (approximately 2 dollars). Once the Jews were rounded up they were sent to the labour camp of Westerbork and from there, packed in cattle cars, to Bergen Belsen, Theresienstadt, Buchenwald, Mauthausen, Sobibor or Auschwitz.
Mussert overestimated his own role and thought that Hitler had the best interest of the Dutch people in mind. The Germans and the Gestapo did not care for his political ideas. Their co-operation was forged because he was the only one with whom co-operation was possible.
Anton Adriaan Mussert, the symbol of treason, was convicted of collaboration with the enemy and shot on May 7,1946.
“The heroism of Holland's savers is legendary: the anonymous volunteers who waited outside the internment center at Amsterdam’s Hollandsche Schouwburg theater to catch children literally tossed over the wall in a frantic last-minute attempt to save them from deportation; the underground railroad of workers, housewives, students, and clergy who passed fugitive Jews from one to the other, then sheltered them in attics, in basements or in the case of the smallest children, raised them as their own; the brave souls like the gentle Miep Gies who at enormous risk to herself and her own kin helped hide three Jewish families, among them a young girl named Anne Frank.
But Holland's Anne Franks were few in number, and even the twelve-year-old diarist whose notebooks came to symbolize the Holocaust ultimately was betrayed by a Dutchman.
For every Dutch Jew saved, ten others were shipped to their deaths for lack of neighbours willing to help Within hours of their arrest on August 4, 1944, the hiding place of Anne Frank and her family was ransacked and looted. Some say by her Dutch neighbours, others by the Dutch-owned, Nazi-hired Puls moving company.”
(Richard Chesnoff's, Pack of Thieves pgs.)
"This country took care of very few Anne Franks," says Dutch economist Victor Halberstadt, himself a hidden child during three years of the war. "The government did not protect us during the war. And when those of us who survived came back, the government was not particularly interested in us."
Says Ed Van Voolen: "The Nazi invasion, took the Dutch by surprise. For the Dutch Jews, a tolerated and never-persecuted minority, it comes as a crushing blow. The country was placed under a civil administration led by virulent anti-Semites like Arthur Seiss-Inquart (1892-1946) and Hans Rauter (1895-1949), who quickly introduced anti-Jewish legislation. On October 18, 1940, civil servants and students were required to prove they were not of Jewish descent.
October 22, 1940, Jewish business owners must register their businesses.
November 4, 1940, all Jews were dismissed from the civil service.
The High Court, the country’s supreme judicial body, submitted and approved the removal of its own president, Lodewijk Ernst Visser, a Jew.
Protest amounted to a handful of Christian leaders and students.
January 10, 1941, the Nuremberg race law of 1935, defining anyone with three Jewish grandparents as a Jew, was implemented in Holland.
An ensuing skirmish at the start of February 1941, protesting the law, caused the Germans to seal off the old Jewish quarter in Amsterdam.
Emulating existing Nazi policy in Eastern Europe, a Jewish Council, composed of the leaders of prewar Amsterdam Jewish leaders, was set up on February 13, 1941.
February 22-23, 1941, a round-up of 425 young Jews on Jonas Daniël Meijer Square, and forced onto a transport train to Buchenwald and Mauthausen, where they were soon murdered.
In protest the underground Communist party in Amsterdam provoked a strike. Although the strike was broken in three days, the event is now recognized as a true popular protest against the injustice being done to the Jews.
It was the start, however, of the large scale round-up of Jews everywhere in the Netherlands.
"On June 3, 1941, compulsory identity papers were issued: Jews’ were stamped with a large J. On May 1, 1942, Jews were forced to wear a visible badge: a yellow star with the word Jood (Jew). A few months later, the Nazis turned the Hollandsche Schouwburg theater on Plantage Middenlaan (where Jewish artists had been performing for exclusively Jewish audiences) into a collection point for Jews en route to the Westerbork transit camp. Between July 1, 1942 and September 13, 1944, a train of sealed cattle cars departed Westerbork every Tuesday morning, each taking an average of 1,000 to the death camps of Auschwitz and Sobibor or to Bergen Belsen and Theresienstadt.
Of the nearly 80,000 Jews living in Amsterdam in 1941, barely 15,000 survived the war, in hiding or in concentration camps. Of the 140,000 Jews in the Netherlands at the start of the war, fewer than 30,000 (21%) were alive at its end.”
( Edward van Voolen, Curator of the Jewish Historical Museum, Amsterdam.)
~
It is Passover and the family comes together at our house, 14 Christiaan de Wetstraat II, for Seder. Mommy and Daddy don’t keep a kosher house, but they do follow the Jewish Holy day traditions. Some of my aunts, uncles, and their children are here. Many are missing because they have been taken by the bad German soldiers.
Mommy with eyes that are full of tears, says, in a voice filled with sadness, to no one in particular, but looking right at Maurice and me, as if she is trying to burn the names into our brains: "Missing are Opa and Oma, cousin Jacob Veffer and his wife Klaartje, Oma Bekkie Nebig, Aunt Rika Brilleslijper and her husband Jacob and their children, Jonas, Annie, Clara and Vrouwtje, Uncle Appie Veffer and his wife Hester and their children, Japie, Susanna and Jonas, Aunt Anna Veffer, Uncle Abraham Nebig, Aunt Esther Nebig, great Aunts Betje, Esther and Kaatje Nebig. Your Auntie Saar and Uncle Jonas and their children, are not here because they have recently gone into hiding."
~
An extra place is set at the table symbolizing the missing family members. The remainder of the family, hearts overflowing with sadness put on a cheerful face, hoping that the age-old Passover tradition of freedom for the Jews, and the promise of “Next year in Jerusalem” will come to pass.
Nobody talks much about the missing loved ones, for fear of inviting the worst kind of luck upon themselves. Those present are hoping fervently for better times to come. We share what little food we have. Everyone brings something.
~
Daddy says to Maurice: "as the youngest child here you may ask me the four age-old questions, that have been asked since time immemorial." My brother happy that he was asked to do this by Daddy has been learning the questions with Mommy's help all afternoon. I heard them so much that I remember them all too.
"Daddy, why is this night different from all other nights?"
"On all other nights we eat all different kind of bread."
” Daddy, why do we eat only matzo on Passover?”
”Matzo reminds us that when the Jews left Egypt, they were in a hurry and they had no time to bake their bread. They took the unleavened dough with them on their journey and let it bake in the hot desert sun into hard unleavened bread called matzo.”
“Daddy, w hy do we dip our food twice tonight?”
“We dip bitter herbs into Charoset, a mixture of nuts, cinnamon and apples, to remind us how hard the Jewish slaves had to work in Egypt. The chopped apples and nuts represent the clay that is used to make the bricks required to build Pharaoh's buildings. The parsley that we dip into salt water reminds us that spring is renewal time and new life is starting to grow. The salt water reminds us of the tears that the Jewish slaves shed.”
“Daddy, on all other nights we eat sitting up, w hy do we recline on a pillow tonight?”
“ We recline on a pillow to make us comfortable and to help us remember that we were slaves once, but that we are free now.”
Some people are sobbing, while others push back the tears.
“God, if you love us so much and we are your favourite people, why do you make us suffer so?” Daddy muses.
The questions have a special meaning tonight, as if God might soon fulfill the Prophecies.
Daddy says a prayer for the family members that are missing.
~
The war has been raging for about three years. Food and supplies are even scarcer now and the family comes together in secrecy, arriving a few at a time at intervals. Families support each other in the best way they can. Because of the night curfew imposed, the Seder is held during daylight hours as close to nighttime as possible.
~
Maurice counts the people that are in the house. At the number seventeen, he runs out of numbers.
“Mommy what number comes after seventeen?” he wants to know.
Mommy, thinking out loud replies: ”Before the war we had fifty-three people in our family and now twenty-eight are missing. We are only twenty five left.”
~
At war’s end, only seventeen members of my immediate family remain.
~
The familiar smell of warm milk attracts me. I hunt for its source until I find it. I reach up and pull. The instant searing heat makes me drop the pot. It is too late. The boiling milk I pulled from the stove has burnt me on one side of my body. My shirt sticks to my flesh. Hands pull at it.
The screams confuse me. I hear myself scream.
The immense all-consuming burning pain has not yet registered in my brain.
Mommy and Daddy rush me to the hospital to take care of my badly burnt body.
Far off, I hear the doctors talk. "Third degree burns halfway up his left arms and on one third of his chest. Does not look good. Not much we can do. Only time will tell if he'll make it."
I drift off into a deep sleep.
A doctor with a mask on his face is pulling at my shirt, gently removing it from the burned parts. Someone pricks me with a needle. It hurts and then I feel no pain anymore.
Ice is being put on the burns and I feel very cold.
And so it goes. I wake up. The pain is awful. I scream and a nurse comes running. She gives me a needle and I start to feel sleepy. When I wake up someone is changing the bandages. I start to whimper and I get another needle. My arm and chest hurt so badly I scream and I scream, but the pain does not stop. They give me another needle. It does not help. Through closed eyes, I see Mommy sitting at the edge of the bed and she cries hysterically, while Daddy holds her. There is no end to the pain. The pain is so bad my soul screams.
[1] Hannah Arendt, “Truth and Politics” (originally published in The New Yorker, February 25, 1967) , Peter Baehr, The Portable Hannah Arendt, (N.Y., Viking, 2000), 572