A Chosen Few - Mark Kurlansky [200]
Aaron was a kleptomaniac. His elderly mother said he started stealing and acting oddly at age 12. When Aaron was one year old, she was deported to a concentration camp and saved her son by throwing him off the train. One thing that life in Wallenberg had in common with “normal” life in the rest of Amsterdam was that the society was still haunted by World War II.
“There are many people here who still have problems with the war,” said Theo Meijer. “I have one who is Jewish but denies it. If you say, ‘You are Jewish/he says no. His problem is that he thinks the troubles might come back and that he won't be recognized.” This man lived a secret life, rarely talking to anyone except when the horror of his dreams awakened him and Theo spent the night comforting him. In those long late-night sessions he told Theo that he had been in the camps, but he never explained the long thick scars that covered his body.
Another Wallenberg resident could not find his way in society because he bore the psychological burden that his father was a well-known Dutch Nazi. And there were others who themselves held been Nazis or collaborators. In Holland, once you are labeled as having been “wrong in the war,” you are an outcast. Of the several Nazis he had looked after, Meijer could recall only one who expressed remorse. Most of them were simply unhappy with their sense of isolation. “But I take care of them, too,” said Meijer. “It's my job.”
Barry Biedermann and Lody van de Kamp helped Theo celebrate holidays. For Hanukkah in 1991 the three were having a dinner in Theo's office with four Wallenberg Jews wearing the yairmulkes that Theo distributed. Van de Kamp blessed the wine, said another blessing, lit the menorah, and while they were sipping the wine, a pleasant man with a childlike openness named Bobby de Vries started telling Van de Kamp that he couldn't get circumcised because he had been born during the war. The troubled people of Wallenberg tend to have these disjointed conversations, stringing together nonsequiturs while normal people smile and nod politely, which was what Van de Kamp did. The conversation moved on, but then Bobby repeated his statement about being circumcised and added, “I was born during the war. My twin was sick, so we both had to be in an incubator.”
The conversation moved on again, but Bobby persisted, asking the rabbi, “Do you think you could do it?” Van de Kamp realized that Bobby meant what he was saying. The rabbi frequently got requests for circumcisions from people who had been born during the war. He explained to Bobby how it was done in a hospital in the presence of a surgeon. “It would round things off,” Bobby said, and then became embarrassed at the inadvertent pun.
De Vries was circumcised at an Amsterdam hospital by a surgeon with a local anesthetic, supervised by Van de Kamp and with the good-natured but slightly nutty crowd from Wallenberg enthusiastically attending the ceremony. These were De Vries's friends, and Wallenberg was their home. In fact, Bobby called Wallenberg the only real home he had ever had. When his parents were deported to the camps, they had managed to find hiding places for their sons. Suddenly the small child Bobby had been underground and alone. Only his father survived, and the children seemed an unwelcome reminder to him. Both Bobby and his twin brother had spent most of their lives in a kind of homeless limbo, never marrying, never holding down jobs for long. Asked why he and his brother were that way, he said, “I think it was from the war. We never saw my mother. Three years in hiding.” His brother died in a fluke biking accident, and Bobby lived alone in a sunny, one-room