A Chosen Few - Mark Kurlansky [50]
The role of Jews in the Polish Communist movement was greatly exaggerated. In 1938 some five thousand out of 3.3 million Jews had been active Communists. About one-quarter of Polish Communists were Jews. But there was an element of self-fulfilling prophecy in all this. The Jews were now marked as Communists because they had depended on the Red Army to protect them from Poles. Between Liberation and 1947, fifteen hundred Jews were murdered. The percentage of Jews in Poland who were Communists dramatically increased simply because most Jews who were not Communists decided to leave. Soon Polish Jewry had dropped down to about 90,000. A Jewish woman from a Warsaw Communist family said, “Primarily Communists stayed. Everybody else in their right mind took off.”
7
Liberated
Amsterdam
AMSTERDAM WAS LIBERATED ON THE LAST DAY OF WORLD War II, freeing the Dutch at last to restore their vaunted orderliness. A Red Cross office was organized to help people who were looking for vanished relatives by offering a series of forms, which they then tried to process with a maximum of efficiency. The office had to contend with long lines; it gave each applicant one card to fill out for each missing relative. Once the applicant got to the front of the line, someone would say, “How many, please?” and hand over the correct number of cards.
Sal Meijer, the kosher butcher, waited his turn patiently. “How many please?”
“One hundred, please,” he said in his husky voice.
“Just one card for each missing relative, please.”
“One hundred, please,” Sal Meijer repeated, trying to look straight ahead with no particular emotion.
They gave him ten cards. Coming from a large Amsterdam family, he actually did have one hundred missing relatives, including his mother, six brothers, their wives, and children. They could not all be gone. But he could find none of them.
The Dutch are a methodical people. An obsession with lists, registration, and carefully filled-out and catalogued forms was one of the Dutch traditions that the Germans had found helpful in the deportation and murder of 78 percent of the Jewish population of the Netherlands. In 1944 the SS in France had complained about the troublesome French character that was preventing the Paris SS from matching the deportation rate in Holland.
Sal Meijer went home to the room he was renting because a Christian family had taken over his apartment while he had been in hiding. He had not been surprised when strangers answered his door. “Excuse me/’ he said as he pushed past them. “I just wanted to get something.” He walked over to a doorway, reached up, and removed a concealed panel that the new residents had never noticed. From it he pulled out a twelve-inch oil-burning brass meno-rah that had been in his family for two hundred years, as well as a few other valuables that he had hidden there before he left in 1940. “Excuse me,” he said again, then left.
Meijer's grandfather had been mayor of Amsterdam. His father, like Sal, was a kosher butcher. The Meijers never would have hidden their Jewishness. There was no need to, and besides, Sal had always assumed that his prominent Semitic nose and strong features left no doubt as to his identity. If the Germans had wanted to know that he was Jewish they would not have needed a yellow star. Nevertheless, the Germans made him and the other 140,000 Dutch Jews wear them. One day when he was riding on a train, a German saw his yellow star and ordered him to stand up. Struck that the German had looked at the star first, Meijer realized that this German would not have known that he was Jewish except for the label. After that Meijer stopped wearing the star. He and his wife-to-be moved to Hillegom, in the heart of Holland's tulip-farming region.
There they lived as Catholics, regularly attending mass. No one in Hillegom had ever seen a Jew, and it never occurred to any of them to doubt that their new neighbors were what they said they were. Many people had left the cities for the