A Chosen Few - Mark Kurlansky [55]
Leo Palache never did find his relatives, or even most of his friends. One woman whom he had known all his life, like himself a direct descendant of the original Sephardim, had made it back. They were even very distantly related. She too had survived Buchenwald, although she was so ill that upon her return she spent the next two years in the hospital. They chose April 10, 1949, the fourth anniversary of the liberation of Buchenwald, as their wedding date.
Since Jews had been banned from schools under German occupation, most of the returning teenagers and young adults had not been to school for five years. When Leo Palache got back, he was almost twenty and had never finished high school, which was deeply troubling for a man who had come from a scholarly household. His father had been a distinguished Old Testament professor whose name had been given to one of the schools in the university, the Judah Palache Institute. Leo had wanted to be a lawyer.
A program of adult education was established for cases like his, but Leo had no one to advise him to go there. Instead, he simply went back to high school. There he sat, a twenty-year-old man who had survived the death camps, in a class with fourteen-year-olds. “I felt that emotionally, it was absolutely impossible,” he said. He never did get an education, and all his life, with a mixture of humor and sadness, he would call himself “am ha-arez” the biblical word for one of the ignorant masses.
ON THE TRAIN going into Amsterdam, Leo Palache had vowed that he would immediately return to a strictly kosher diet and strict observance of the Sabbath. Others, like Jaap Meijer, could never again believe in God and his commandments. For those who wanted to be kosher after Liberation, it was difficult because there was still little food. Sal Meijer wanted to return to his trade as a kosher butcher, but no meat was available, let alone kosher meat. Instead, he opened a coffee shop on the Jodenbree-straat, next to a Sephardic butcher. Sal suspected that the meat next door was not really kosher, and it certainly wasn't legal, since the import of meat was not allowed. Some meat did come from London and Antwerp on the black market. A small scandal erupted when one kosher steer arrived and two kosher tongues were sold.
Meijer rented a room in the Transvaalbuurt, an area so named because before the war it had been largely populated by diamond workers. Once meat became available, Meijer re-opened his kosher butcher shop on the Jodenbreestraat, but the area was still in ruins.
For years, the Dutch government held fast to the policy of not giving Jews special treatment. German Jewish refugees and fleeing Nazi war criminals were thrown into the same prison camp for illegal German aliens. Immediately after the Liberation, the tax office billed the Jewish Community of the Hague—most of whom were dead—for several years of back taxes on the plot of land under the unused synagogue. Nor did the government offer Jews much help in recuperating private property that had been stolen from them. Jewish property that Dutch Nazis had taken over was repossessed by the government, and survivors like Sieg and Evelyne Biedermann had to sue to get theirs returned to them.
The Biedermanns got their millinery business back, and after it was starting to prosper by the mid-1950s, a sheepish-looking man appeared at the Biedermann door. “Pm very sorry,” he began. “But you understand-—I was sent. This is not my idea.” Sieg slowly