A Chosen Few - Mark Kurlansky [197]
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.