The Forger's Spell - Edward Dolnick [15]
In March 1942, Jews were forbidden to travel by car. (Exceptions were made for ambulances and hearses.) In May, Jews were required to wear a yellow star sewn (not pinned) to their clothing, with the word Jew written on the star in black letters. In May, too, Jews were obliged to turn in their jewelry and art. (They were allowed to keep wedding rings, pocket watches, four pieces of table silver, and their gold teeth.) In June, Jews were required to hand over their bicycles. In July, Jews were ordered to remain in their homes between eight in the evening and six in the morning. They were forbidden to visit non-Jews, to travel by “public or private transport,” or to use public phones.
On July 10, 1942, Anne Frank and six friends and relatives went into hiding. On November 19, Anne wrote in her diary that “countless friends and acquaintances have been taken off to a dreadful fate. Night after night, green and gray military vehicles cruise the streets. They knock on every door, asking whether any Jews live there. If so, the whole family is taken away. If not, they proceed to the next house. It’s impossible to escape their clutches unless you go into hiding. They often go around with lists, knocking only on those doors where they know there’s a big haul to be made. They frequently offer a bounty, so much per head.”
By the end of September 1943, the Nazis had achieved their goal. With the roundup and deportation of even those Jews who had been in hospitals and old-age homes, Holland was finally Judenrein, Jew-free.
NO NATION IS composed entirely of heroes, but the Dutch did better than most. In February 1941, after the Nazis rounded up and beat 425 young Jewish men in Amsterdam (and later sent them to their deaths in a concentration camp), the workingmen of Amsterdam protested by going on strike. The city shut down. Stevedores closed down the port, streetcar drivers left their trams sidelined, shopkeepers locked their doors. After two days, the SS fired into a crowd of demonstrators, killing seven people and wounding forty-five, and the workers returned to their jobs. “This strike,” Louis de Jong wrote proudly, “[was] the first and only anti-pogrom strike in human history.”
But most people, neither heroes nor villains, did their best to keep their heads down and to survive. “One felt sorry for the Jews and congratulated oneself on not being one of them,” in one Dutch historian’s summary. “People gradually got used to Jews having the worst of it.”
Anne Frank lived at 263 Prinsengracht, in what had once been a pleasant location along a canal. A ten-minute stroll away sat Van Meegeren’s grand house at 321 Keizersgracht. The sound of sirens penetrated even those thick walls, but the partygoers enjoying Han van Meegeren’s hospitality barely noticed.
9
THE FORGER’S CHALLENGE
Van Meegeren never met the eccentric, fabulously successful inventor Leo Baekeland, but the forger’s career owed everything to the inventor’s genius. Without Baekeland’s breakthrough, Van Meegeren would never have had his Amsterdam mansion, and no critics would have sung hymns to his paintings.
For Van Meegeren, making a painting that looked old was easy. The real challenge was making a painting that behaved as if it were old when subjected to the standard tests. This was where Baekeland came in.
Much of the technical side of forgery is largely a matter of care and research. The white paint used by Vermeer and all his contemporaries, for instance, was called lead white, because it was made from lead. It had notable virtues—it dried quickly and it covered well—but it also had the considerable defect of being poisonous. By about 1845, lead white began to give way to the newly invented zinc white, which is still standard today. Any forger must know such dates intimately, for chemists can easily distinguish paints that look identical. In a painting supposedly by Vermeer, zinc white would be impossible, as much a blunder as an iPod for the Girl with a Pearl Earring.*