A Chosen Few - Mark Kurlansky [198]
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 force 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