The Forger's Spell - Edward Dolnick [14]
When the Nazis took over, the plan resurfaced. Lentz devised a new card that each Dutch citizen over the age of fifteen had to carry at all times. Failure to produce the card meant arrest on the spot. This was no mere typed form—the specifications included two photographs, two sets of fingerprints, two signatures, the signature and initials of a registry official, and an official stamp. (Everyone also had to carry a ration book in order to obtain food, shoes, coal, and other necessities. In Holland in the 1940s, few people were as vital to the Dutch resistance as skilled forgers.)
By the end of 1941, Lentz’s new registration system was in place, and the Germans could immediately check the identity of anyone they encountered. All Jews were ordered to have their identification stamped with a large black J.
Astonishingly, Lentz never seemed to understand what he had done. “Although undoubtedly pro-German,” according to the Holocaust historian Bob Moore, “…he did not join the [Dutch Nazi Party] or any other anti-Semitic group, either before or during the occupation.” Instead, writes Moore, Lentz was “that strange animal, the bureaucrat who was always anxious to please his masters and for whom perfect organization was everything…. The arrival of the Germans gave him the chance to carry out his dream.”
8
THE WAR AGAINST THE JEWS
Holland’s Jews were no better prepared to recognize their predicament than were the rest of the Dutch. At home in famously tolerant Holland since the time of the Spanish Inquisition, the Jews had let down their guard. But even if they had grasped the full extent of Nazi fanaticism as soon as the war began, by then it was too late. Like their Christian neighbors, Holland’s Jews put their faith in neutrality. Then they waited, “a little prayerful and very hopeful,” in the words of the Dutch historian A. J. Herzberg, “with pounding hearts and closed eyes.”
Those hopes had been betrayed. Before the war, the Jewish population of Holland was 140,000. Of that number, the Nazis killed 102,000. Some 25,000 had gone into hiding; 8,000 of them, including Anne Frank and her family, were found and killed. In perhaps the least anti-Semitic country in Western Europe, the proportion of Jews killed—73 percent—was highest.*
IN THEIR WAR against the Jews, the Nazis operated with cunning as well as brutality. They spoke only of deportation, for instance, never of extermination, and went to elaborate lengths to play up the charade. Prisoners who were taken to concentration camps but not killed at once were forced to send cheery postcards to their relatives at home. “I have now been here four weeks and I am well,” read one such note, written at Auschwitz. “Work is not particularly heavy…. Food is good: at noon we have a warm meal and in the evening we get bread with butter, sausages, cheese, or marmalade.” For their part, Jews still in the Netherlands were encouraged to send letters to their relatives who had been deported. “Tens of thousands of such letters were handed to the Germans,” wrote the historian Louis de Jong. “Of course not a single one was ever delivered.”
The blows directed at the Jews came singly at first and then in clusters, and finally they rained down uninterrupted. On January 10, 1941, all Jews were required to register with the authorities. In April, Jews living in Amsterdam were forbidden to move elsewhere in the country. In May, Jewish doctors and dentists were forbidden to treat non-Jews. In August, Jewish children were forbidden to attend school with non-Jews. In September, Jews were banned from parks, restaurants, hotels, theaters, swimming