The Heart Has Reasons (23 page)

Not one of the young men from that original deportation survived. Hilberg reports: “The ‘work’ took its toll. Men began to drop from exhaustion, and after a while the Jews joined hands and jumped down, splattering the quarry with bones, brains, and blood.” Presser provides an alternate account: “On the third day the guards started machine-gunning the climbers; on the fourth, some ten young Jews linked hands and jumped to a voluntary death.”

In Amsterdam, their families were waiting and hoping, unable to believe—this was early in the occupation—that so many young men could be arrested for no reason and detained indefinitely. A few weeks later, when the death notices began arriving, shocked and grief-stricken parents took out obituary ads in the newspapers. This stirred up so much anti-Nazi sentiment that the Nazis prohibited any further ads. At the same time, Presser reports much outright denial among the families
of the bereaved, as well as by the general public:

The Chief Rabbi of The Hague made it known that no one need go into mourning; he had “good” reason to believe that the notifications need not be taken seriously. People went on seeking reassurance, clinging to any straw; for instance, from fortune tellers who “saw” that the victims were still alive, that they had merely been reported dead because the Germans would not publicly admit that the boys had made a successful escape. Some were said to have sent secret messages.

Still, a wave of fear spread, even among those who clung to disbelief. The death reports caused people to dread the thought of being deported to Mauthausen, and the Nazis were quick to exploit the horror the name conjured. An announcement printed on August 7, 1942 in the
Jewish Weekly,
the newspaper of the Jewish Council, warns that all Jews who do not immediately come forward for forced labor in Germany will be deported to Mauthausen. It adds that those who refuse to wear the yellow star, or those who change their place of residence without informing the authorities, even temporarily, will also be deported to Mauthausen. In a cruel irony, the desire to avoid Mauthausen led many Jews to end up in Auschwitz, Sobibór, and other extermination camps.

The German officer most involved in the practical details of implementing the Final Solution in the Netherlands was Ferdinand Hugo Aus der Fünten, acting director of the euphemistically titled General Office for Jewish Emigration. This office worked directly with the Jewish Council, mandating the number of Jews to be called up for deportation on any given week, but leaving it up to the Council to decide who those persons would be.

When Aus der Fünten was initiating the first deportations, he asked the Jewish Council to prepare Jews to form “police-controlled labor contingents.” “And why,” asked the Council members, “police-controlled?” Aus der Fünten replied that in the camp environment, the police could best be able to look after the safety of the Jews. Through such subterfuge, the Jews were being led into a trap from which few would escape.

....

Kees’s comments about the postwar lives of the Nazi medical doctors are corroborated by renowned psychiatrist Robert Jay Lifton. In his
book
The Nazi Doctors
he reports that some of those doctors who had been directly involved in murder returned to their home towns to become “conscientious, much admired physicians.” He explains, how-ever, that not all of them got away with their crimes against humanity:

Quite a few killed themselves . . . another group was executed after trials under Allied authority in Nuremberg and elsewhere, and after later trials under German authority. Many served prison sentences, which were, however, generally considered light for the crimes committed. A few, like Mengele, escaped and were never caught. A considerable number returned to medical practice and continued with it until retirement or natural death—or until, as in a few cases, they were discovered to have been criminals and belatedly tried.

SEVEN
~ JANET KALFF ~
A GLIMPSE OF GRACE

Dialogue requires an intense faith
in man, faith in his power to make and remake,
to create and recreate, faith in his vocation
to be more fully human.

—Paulo Freire

Janet kalff and her husband, anton, are quakers from england who originally met at Woodbrook, a Quaker college in Birmingham. In the early 1930s, the Kalffs moved to Apeldoorn, a city in the center of the Netherlands, where they helped to establish the Dutch Society of Friends. During the Nazi occupation, Anton became involved in the LO, helping to locate safe addresses for onderduikers and delivering
clandestine funds to the families of striking railway workers. Over the course of the war, the Kalffs took in two Jewish onderduikers: a man named Wolfgang Kotek early on, and later a young woman named Rosa.

My meeting with the Kalffs occurred serendipitously when they graciously offered to act as interpreters for my interview with their neighbor Laura van der Hoek, also a longtime Quaker. Unlike Laura, the Kalffs have not received the Yad Vashem award. However, Wolfgang Kotek honored them directly by planting two trees in Israel, one for each of them, through the Jewish National Fund. My time with the Kalffs was brief—only a shared pot of tea. However, I took from it the following unforgettable story, as told to me by Janet.

We were living in Apeldoorn with our two young daughters when a certain doctor who happened to be in the Resistance asked us if we would take in a Jewish girl named Rosa. Why yes, we would take her, and so she came from Rotterdam—a pretty girl of about twenty. Our neighbors saw her now and then, but we explained to them that a doctor had sent her to Apeldoorn for her health, and we had agreed to rent our spare bedroom to her. Apeldoorn was known for its good climate and greenery, so they believed the story. The children liked her, and we all got along, so everything was fine at first.

But then the Germans moved the entire governmental infrastructure from The Hague to Apeldoorn in order to be further inland and therefore better protected in the event of an Allied invasion. At this time we received a notice asking us to billet our spare bedroom to one of the civil servants who was being relocated. Opposite us was a big building where he was to have his office, and all his underlings would be there as well. Well, we couldn’t refuse unless we had a very good reason, and we didn’t know anything about this man—he could have been a Dutch Nazi.

So we decided to send Rosa to the boarding house where my mother-in-law Adriana lived. We explained our situation to the woman who ran the place; she was sympathetic because she was up to her neck in the Resistance. But she said, “I’ll take her on one condition: if there’s ever any trouble, if she’s ever questioned, she must say that she was sent here by you.”

“Yes, yes, we’re prepared to answer for her,” I said.

Well, a few weeks later, my husband was arrested. He had a small photograph of the queen on his desk at work, and his boss, an NSBer,
reported him. And then Rosa was arrested. She had been told never to go out on the street, but she fell in love with a young man living there, and she wanted to buy him something for his birthday. So she went out one day, and, because she looked Jewish, she was immediately picked up.

It was hard to accept that the Nazis had Anton, and now Rosa, in their clutches, but there was nothing I could do. I also realized that Rosa might give them my name, for she wasn’t the type to stand up to a Nazi interrogation. I prepared for an interrogation myself and was terribly nervous—if they didn’t believe my story, they could have easily executed both my husband and myself. He was in Vught concentration camp by then, and they needed only to send the order.

Well, Rosa
did
tell them my name, but instead of coming to me, they went to my mother-in-law, who was also known as Mrs. Kalff. I’d instructed Adriana, “Remember: if there should ever be any trouble with Rosa, the story is that a doctor sent her here for her health, and we helped her find a place to room. But we never for one moment guessed she was Jewish; if we had known that, we wouldn’t have had anything to do with her.” Yes, yes, she understood all that. Or so we thought.

Adriana Kalff at the time of the war.

When the Nazi interrogators arrived, the proprietor of the boarding house ran up the stairs to my mother-in-law crying, “Mrs. Kalff! Mrs. Kalff! Two men are here to question you. Remember that story!” But my mother-in-law, who was, of course, an old lady, couldn’t remember a word of it. It just flew out of her head. Soon the men entered her room: a German in uniform, and an NSBer. The NSBer did all the questioning—the German just sat there and listened.

Now Adriana was a very religious woman, and while
one of them was lighting a cigarette, she said a little prayer: “Dear God, please tell me what I should do!” And, according to her, God told her to tell them the truth. So when the NSBer began to question her, she said, “All of us, myself, my children, my son and daughter-in-law, are completely opposed to the way the Jews are being treated, and we feel it our Christian duty to do all that we can to help them. My son and daughter-in-law took in this girl, knowing she was Jewish, because of their strong convictions. And now this has happened.”