Cruel World (63 page)
Authors: Lynn H. Nicholas
The very public spectacle of the arrests and deportations was a Guernica-like revelation to many in Amsterdam. Within days, groups began to form with the aim of hiding Jews, and in particular Jewish children.
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Some had their work literally thrust upon them. Desperate parents who had been summoned often had little time to prepare, and gave their children to trusted friends or even to not-so-well-known neighbors. The generosity of these families was extraordinary, as was the constant danger they faced. One household even took a three-year-old deaf child, luckily blond and blue-eyed, and made sure he went to a special school.
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Another woman, Cor Bastiaanse, who suddenly found her living room full of children sleeping all over the place, recruited student friends to help her find places for them to stay. One student left four children at a friend’s mother’s house. She in turn asked her son to find them homes.
From this small beginning came the Utrechtse Kindercomité, mostly run by students, which worked closely with another group of their peers in Amsterdam. Both were based on former student organizations. Other networks, some associated with the Dutch Reformed Church, also relied heavily on young people. Working with children appealed to many of the students: it was nonviolent and (they wrongly assumed) safer: the Nazis, they reasoned, would not blame them so much if they hid children.
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But harboring Jews of whatever age, the Germans would soon make clear, could cost you your life. Despite this, hundreds of adults and children were hidden until the liberation.
The most important thing was to get the children out of Amsterdam. Nowhere were they more concentrated than at the converted Hollandsche Schouwburg.
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Indeed, conditions were so crowded there that in October 1942, Jewish Council officials easily persuaded the Nazi authorities, in the interests of hygiene, to allow children up to thirteen to be taken
across the street to a crèche. When parents were scheduled for deportation, the children would be brought back to them. The crèche would soon become the most important escape route in Holland for Jewish children. If, after agonizing considerations, parents agreed, their children were spirited away by the student organizations. Officials of the Jewish Council and, it is thought, some Germans with a conscience then altered the records in several places so that the number of family members leaving for deportation would match those that had been arrested. When there was no time to alter the records, parents of very small children were given wrapped-up dolls or pillows to carry onto the trains.
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The real children, depending on their size, were taken out of the crèche in backpacks, laundry baskets, and garbage cans. Babies were given pacifiers and buried under heaps of old clothes and trash. Matters were greatly aided by the fact that there was a teacher training school next door to the crèche, with a connecting garden. To relieve crowding, the Nazis accepted the kind offer of the training school principal to let some of the crèche children take naps in a spare classroom. With the full knowledge of all the students and faculty, operatives used the school to save hundreds of older children: their stars were removed, their clothes were changed, and they simply walked out with their “relations.”
The Nazis, always terrified of disease, were also persuaded that the children would be healthier if they took walks. During these excursions children would disappear around corners or through doorways into the arms of waiting
Kinderwerkers
. The little ones were, of course, counted before they left, and their caretakers resorted to all sorts of subterfuges to make the numbers come out right, including fomenting general chaos at the front door, during which an extra child would be slipped into the crowd, or handing children out of the windows of the crèche to join the diminished returning group.
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Given the extraordinarily fast pace of the deportations, speed was of the essence, but the number of children removed each day could not be noticeable or the whole network would collapse. Particularly attractive children were at a disadvantage: one of the German guards took a shine to a tiny orphaned boy and even brought him a big teddy bear. This made it impossible for him to be rescued, and the child, like many other orphans, was used to bring one day’s quota up to the required level and deported in April 1943.
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When word came that orphaned children were to be chosen, the crèche workers, to whom the idea of a small child facing deportation without parents to comfort him was unbearable, did what they could to protect them. Some were hidden in attics. Older ones were even sent out to wander the streets for a time, a
marginally lesser danger. But in the end a certain number always had to go:
In the mirror of my memory I see a line of children crossing the street, out of the crèche—into the Schouwburg. Backpacks on. Those were children with no parents. They had to go when there were not enough adults for a transport. Aus der Fünten came himself to choose the children. I could not do anything about it.… I let the children cross, I did not hold them back. What do you think keeps me awake at night? Not the children I found after the war in Limburg, but the children that I let cross the street.
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Little did the crèche worker know: one report notes that the biggest transport to leave the Dutch staging camp at Westerbork consisted of 3,017 unaccompanied children and their escort. Its destination was the extermination camp at Sobibor.
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In the end only 600 children could be rescued from the crèche out of the estimated 5,000 to 6,000 who passed through, but hundreds of others would be collected from individual families and taken to safety.
For the students the hardest part of the process was picking up children from their homes:
I have the most terrible memories of it. Actually I believe that I only now realize how awful it was. That you walked in. Just to an address. And everything was ready. Packed up. A bundle and a small child or sometimes two children. And you left with them. You got their papers and then you went down the stairs. And they didn’t know your name, they didn’t know where you were going, they knew you would have no contact with them.… Sometimes you were impatient that they were taking so long because you had to go to another address.
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Another student
Kinderwerker
agreed, noting later that it was just as well that none of them had had children yet, otherwise these partings would have been unbearable.
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Their impatience was not insensitivity: more than once the students arrived at the appointed address only to find that they were too late and that the whole family had already been arrested.
The trips, usually by train, to take these strange, fugitive children to shelter, though less emotional, were no less nerve-racking. The best couriers were young girls, less likely to be questioned by the Germans than military-age boys. Most of them knew next to nothing about children, especially small ones: “There I sat with such a baby. A child three weeks
old. With a measly cotton suit on. Terrible, so shabby. Oh, and that child looked so bluish and sick … that I was mortally afraid each time I looked to see if it was still alive or not. I had no experience whatsoever with little children.”
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Traveling with very Jewish-looking children added to the tension. Some were said to be from Indonesia, then a Dutch colony. But much depended on the tacit cooperation of fellow travelers and above all on the railroad personnel, who must have recognized the students who made repeated journeys on the same routes, always with different children. The latter, if old enough, had almost always been well instructed by their parents and behaved remarkably well. Toddlers could be a problem: talkative ones were apt to say that Mommy had gone away, sing Jewish songs, or refuse nonkosher food. But even very small children, somehow aware of the danger, could behave with remarkable restraint. In July 1943, at the height of the deportations, Mien Bouwman had to take fourteen-month-old David from Amsterdam to the north of Holland:
He was not toilet-trained.… He was a circumcised boy, so that was not so great. At that time you didn’t have plastic pants and so forth. If a child peed, everything got wet. I didn’t want to have to change that child’s pants. From Amersfoort to Zwolle an NSB [Dutch Nazi] woman sat across from me. That kid didn’t look at all Jewish. He was blond and you didn’t notice right away. That woman said: “Cute child.” … I had my story ready of course: he was my nephew and I was taking him to relations in Groningen. He was from Rotterdam. The story was good, but the crazy thing was that I thought: “Either you get off the train or I do.” Somewhere in your heart you are so terribly angry. Because I thought: “Rotten woman. Here you say how cute this child is. And if I gave you your way, you would kill him.”
Not only did brave David not wet his pants on the train; he waited until he was safely inside the farmhouse that was to be his refuge.
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Moving children one by one was the least conspicuous method, but as the numbers of Jews left in Holland diminished, the Nazis decided to close the crèche and ship off all its remaining inhabitants. Typically, they picked one of the most sacred Jewish feast days, Rosh Hashanah, the New Year, for this action. This led the students to take chances. Three young men brazenly took a group of fourteen children out of the crèche and on by train to the south of Holland. The headmaster of the neighboring teaching school chose twelve others from the hundred or so remaining: “That was the hardest day of my life. You know you can’t take them all. You
know for sure that the ones you do not take are condemned to death. I took twelve. Later you ask yourself: ‘Why not thirteen.’ ”
The agony was not all on the side of the rescuers. Fifteen more children were hidden in the offices of the Dutch Jewish Council. One of them, thirteen at the time, remembers:
Our biggest problem was to keep the little ones quiet. We pre-chewed cookies for them. While we were there people came to look at us, students who were not strangers to us because we had seen them at the crèche. They took us away one by one. I was the last to leave. Because I was so old I was hard to place.… I had to go to the Central Station and buy a ticket to Limburg. In Venray a lady with a blue skirt and a yellow purse walked by. That was the signal for me to get out of the train.
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The rest of the children of the crèche were deported a few days later in buses, which for four hours shuttled between the converted theater and the waiting trains.
Once the children were rescued, the problem was what to do with them. Their numbers grew so rapidly that taking them to friends and relatives soon did not suffice. The difficulties were enormous. The children needed the national identification cards that were the norm in European countries, and had to be registered in their place of residence. They also needed ration cards for food. Reasons for their presence in a family had to be convincing. If they were to be new brothers and sisters, age and appearance had to be taken into consideration.
It was hard at first to persuade people in the countryside that there was an urgent problem. The Nazi-controlled press did not, of course, publicize the deportations, and in remote farm villages most inhabitants had never met a Jew and knew nothing of their situation. The caretaker networks expanded at first with agonizing slowness. All sorts of subterfuges were used to explain the presence of the children. “Foundlings” were left on prearranged doorsteps and were then registered as such with the authorities. The Nazis soon caught on. In January 1943 they declared that in the future all foundlings would be assumed to be Jewish.
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Many children were said to be refugees from bombed-out Rotterdam. Brave female
Kinderwerkers
told neighbors that they had borne an illegitimate child, not at all acceptable at that time. And in an act of remarkable love a man with a Jewish wife, whose newborn child had died at home, called the
Kinderwerkers
to say that they would take one of the threatened children. In the week it took to find a suitable baby, the mother, making crying sounds, pretended for the sake of the neighbors that her own infant was still alive. The courier who brought the new child took the dead one away and buried it deep in his own mother’s garden.
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Two sons of the Bogaard family with Jewish girls they hid on their farm in the Netherlands. Three members of the family were caught by the SS and died in concentration camps
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(photo credit 12.1)
Efforts were made to send fairer children to the northern provinces and darker ones to the south of Holland, where blending with Southern European cultures was marginally greater. Children were carefully distributed so that no area would be saturated. A complex support operation, involving local church and government officials, produced false identification and ration cards and, with the connivance of “good” teachers, even allowed some of the children to go to school. By late 1943 so many Jews had been deported that the flow of children slowed down, but the couriers still had to visit the caretaker families to deliver clothes, money, and up-to-date ration cards, for the Nazis, well aware that thousands of Jews and Dutch resisters were in hiding, frequently changed the format and number of documents needed, in order to flush them out. These efforts were foiled by the complicity of many a local bureaucrat.