A Chosen Few - Mark Kurlansky [194]
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 happened 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,