A Chosen Few - Mark Kurlansky [61]
“You couldn't get to him. He wouldn't stop,” said Perl. The community finally fractured into two groups, both of them Orthodox, both of them traditional, but with separate Chief Rabbis and separate central synagogues. Rottenberg, who otherwise might have been a Chief Rabbi like his father, was kept away from the important rabbinical posts.
AT THE LE-EZRATH HA-JELED ORPHANAGE in Amsterdam, Isaac Lipschits, a small teenage boy from Rotterdam, found his new family of fellow orphans, the people he would always think of as his brothers. Near the diamond exchange, across the street from a home for the elderly that had been reopened as a home for ill camp survivors, le-Ezrath Ha-jeled, which in Hebrew means “help for children,” was home to twenty-three boys who had no home and no family but each other. They became their own family, and bonded together in both sadness and secrecy, they worked for the Haganah. In fact, the top floor of the orphanage became the Dutch headquarters of the Haganah.
The family that Isaac Lipschits had lost had been in Holland since at least the eighteenth century. Like many Jewish families in Rotterdam before the war, they had worked in the central market, in their case selling bananas. Like many poor people they were concerned about being buried well and they had taken out a policy to insure their funeral and burial. Once a week, an insurance man came to collect a few cents in payment. The six Lipschits children always called the man Uncle Pete. Not much was known about Uncle Pete other than that he was some kind of Communist. When the Germans occupied Holland, Uncle Pete hid the Lip-schitses with their three younger children.
Uncle Pete, his wife, and daughter were not as poor as the Lipschitses, but they did not live so well that they had space for five extra people. Uncle Pete would come home late at night with a few other men to his crowded apartment. They would arrive breathless and excited, armed with machine guns, grenades, and large quantities of the kind of fresh, well-stacked money found in banks. But his little group took orders from a Communist organization that told him it was foolish to be hiding Jews while doing this work, and the Lipschitses were sent away. Isaac went to a childless Rotterdam couple who pretended he was their son. But they were extremely nervous and would panic if he walked near a window. Then suddenly one day a stranger came, stared at him grimly, and without explanation moved Isaac to another house. In the next two weeks the boy was moved by strangers to twelve different homes. The strangers were always whispering to each other, and Isaac would catch a few words such as “orphan” and “poor thing.” He realized that the Germans must have found his parents.
In the flat north region of Friesland, the city boy had his name changed and lived the life of a rural Dutch boy going to school in a two-room schoolhouse and ice skating after school. He never even noticed a sign on the village cafe that said “Jews forbidden.”
When the war was over, Isaac returned to bombed-out Rotterdam. The tiny two-bedroom house where his family had lived was still standing, but none of the family possessions were in it and other people now lived there. Isaac went to see Uncle Pete, who told him what he already knew: His parents had been caught, and killed at Auschwitz. His oldest brother and his family were also deported and killed, as were his sister and her husband. “I am one hundred percent sure they are not alive now,” said Uncle Pete. “The same thing for your brothers Maurits and Jacob.”
Isaac was stunned. He had been braced for almost all of this, but not Jacob. Jacob was supposed to be safely hiding in Amsterdam but he had been caught on a train while trying to visit Rotterdam and had been deported to Sobibor, where the entire train of people had been unloaded and immediately killed.
Isaac had one relative left—his baby brother Alex. Uncle Pete gave him an address