A Chosen Few - Mark Kurlansky [202]
Isaac became a noted Jewish historian, married, and raised two children in Groningen. The synagogue there had been converted into a dry cleaner after the war, then an Episcopal church. In the 1970s it was restored as a synagogue, only to lack enough Jews to fill it. So it was rented out for lectures and exhibitions.
Isaac did not give his children a religious upbringing, but he did give them a Jewish identity. And he seemed almost driven to assert that he was no longer in hiding: “I am known as a Jew throughout the Netherlands. Fm on TV as a Jew. I'm writing in the newspaper as a Jew. Fm always writing on Jewish problems. Fm a Jew.”
Isaac was a successful and well-adjusted man. The great irony of his life was that if his world had not been torn up by a Holocaust, he would have spent his life selling bananas in the Rotterdam market. When he turned 50, he completely broke down and sought psychiatric help. “You start looking back. I have reached things my parents couldn't dream of. My father was a poor man working in the market. My brothers worked in the market. All my uncles, as far as I know, worked in the market. Without a war I would have, too. Without any doubt. I worked so hard that I became a professor. I studied so hard. I was from such poor surroundings that I would never have gone to a secondary school. But I worked so hard, when I came home at quarter past five and I asked my wife when we would have dinner and she would say ten minutes, I would go to my study and work for ten minutes. Later, with the help of a psychiatrist, I found out that I didn't want to give myself the leisure to think. To sit and think, to sit and listen to music. I was frightened. If you are fifty, you can't stand it anymore. You have to sit down and think over what you have done in your life. And then the war comes. The memories. The problems.”
THE PAIN did not vanish. It passed to another generation. Barry Biedermann contemplated how he had grown up with no surviving relatives but his parents, and how hard it had been for him when they died. And he often reflected on the fact that it would be much the same for his children. Because the camps had ruined his parents’ health and they had died young, the Holocaust that deprived him of grandparents had also deprived his two children of them. They, too, had no extended family and had a sense of being raised in isolation, with the sometimes-spoken subject always looming somewhere. “I wonder when it ends?” he asked.
Most survivors said they saw little future for Jews except in Israel. But whatever they said, they were still Dutch, and Holland was their home, and many of them never left. In the 1970s their children started taking over the Community. To this new generation there was more than the Holocaust to Dutch history. They wanted to preserve the Jodenbreestraat synagogues in Amsterdam and turned the four that had been saved by the government into an elaborate museum of Dutch Jewish history.
The old generation with its terrible memories was dying off. Mauritz Auerhaan retired from business and was alone. He moved into the Jewish home for the elderly in the south. As Amsterdam moved farther south, the architecture became more stripped down and less ornate. Far in the south it was just blocks of apartments and shopping centers. Beth Shalom, where Auerhaan lived, seemed to be the latest in homes-for-the-elderly, the optimal artificial environment that maintained the perfect temperature and healthiest air for elderly people —the human parallel to Dutch computerized greenhouses with their six-foot-tall hydroponic tomato vines. At Beth Shalom a central patio with comfortable chairs had a glass roof that assured that it was at once light, airy, and warm. In the hallways the elderly sat in silence. Auerhaan's room was not unpleasant, with its balcony arid little kitchenette, but neither was it quite up to what Bobby de Vries had in Wallenberg.
Auerhaan