A Chosen Few - Mark Kurlansky [56]
“Well, you understand, this is not my idea. And you don't have to do it. Other people have said no, and nothing has happened to them.”
Biedermann was losing patience. “What do you want?”
“Well, in fact, the sixty guilders.”
“What?”
“At the train station in 1945. Ten guilders were allotted, but you got sixty guilders. That was a loan. But, as I say… “
Biedermann paid back the sixty guilders and demanded a receipt.
The Netherlands wanted to remember its Resistance, but it did not want to remember what it had let happen to Jews. A pension was offered for Resistance veterans but not to Jewish victims. An equivalent pension for Jewish victims was not passed until 1973.
Not only was there little sympathy for Jews, but books and newspapers published in the Netherlands after the war revealed a certain anti-Semitism in comments about the cowardice of Jews, how they had to depend on other people to save them, how Jews in hiding stole things and couldn't be trusted.
More than 150,000 Dutch people were denounced as collaborators and arrested. A few were sentenced to death for war crimes, but most of the executions were never carried out. Dutch retribution fell far short of that of France, which prosecuted 170,000 cases of collaborators, sentenced 120,000, executed some 2,000, and lynched another 4,500. Belgium, with a population of only eight million, investigated 634,000 cases of collaboration, though only 87,000 were actually prosecuted, most of which led to convictions. It wasn't that the Dutch hadn't had collaborators. Dutch collaborators enabled the Germans to kill a far higher percentage of Jews there than in France or Belgium. Major SS operations, such as Westerbork camp, were operated by Dutch, not by Germans. Thirty thousand Dutchmen had volunteered to fight for Germany. The Germans paid seven guilders for a tip on a Jew in hiding, and one-third of the Jews hidden by Christians were betrayed to the Nazis, the best-known example being the family of Anne Frank.
But now the Dutch government seemed to lack either the will or the means to process all the cases that were being reported. Complaints were often investigated by amateurs. After a few years the government decided to release all but the most flagrant cases. It sent a letter to the Jewish Community saying that it had decided to release the others into society and hoped that the Jewish Community would understand and receive these people “in a Christian manner.” It was a form letter that went to all religious groups.
JEWISH LIFE RESUMED in Amsterdam. But the scale of it was different. Amsterdam had been a city like New York, where Jewish life was a basic component of the culture. Like New York, the local slang in Amsterdam was heavily laced with Yiddish. The slang continued, but with few Jews. Slowly, the figures were tabulated. Of the 110,000 Dutch Jews who had been sent to the camps, 5,000 had survived. More than three-quarters of Dutch Jewry had been murdered, the worst rate of genocide in all of Western Europe. In 1945, Victor Waterman was walking on an Amsterdam street wearing a good suit, when he heard a voice from somewhere behind him say, “Look, they missed one.”
P A R T T W O
BROYGEZ
IN THE
COLD WAR
“And what did our Eternal Father have to say on the subject? If he had no part in this, then what did he have a part in? Was he looking at life as you look at a newsreel? Was he shaking his head, and then wondering whether the survivors still loved him? And what did Jesus do about Hitler, Himmler and the Waffen SS? Turn the other cheek? And what did the pope do, and the Allies, and the Jews? God and man, old and young, wise and foolish, this race and that religion—who did not take part in this obscenity?”
GYORGY (GEORGE) KONRAD, A Feast in the Garden
8
From Lódź
to Dusseldorf
IT DID NOT TAKE A POGROM IN KLELCE TO CONVINCE LEA Lesser or Aaron Waks that this burned-out cemetery called Poland was no longer their home. The Lessers had survived by fleeing to the Soviet Union.