The Heart Has Reasons (30 page)

Rebecca, a Jewish girl who was hidden by the Vermeer family, is
shown here sitting on a wall at their homestead during the war.

Do you remain in touch with the
“hidden children”?

Oh, yes. Now they live in many different places: Israel, Canada, the United States, South America. Every year, we have a reunion of the people we hid and their helpers. Not all of them can make it, of course, but there are always some who are able to come. They bring their children, and sometimes their grandchildren. We bill and coo over the new babies, and have a grand old time.

I am occasionally asked why I Didn’t meet with the polish rescuers. For years I said it was because there were so many Yad Vashem honorees in Holland, and, besides, the Dutch speak English well, and I would not have to become fluent in a new language. But there was a hidden reason, so visceral that not until my wife spoke it—and I felt the accompanying jolt of recognition—did I realize that it had been there all the time.

“It would have been too close to home,” is what she said. Indeed, to return to the place where, even before the war, my father and his family were taunted by anti-Semites; the place from which they barely escaped; the place where my remaining relatives all perished; the place where the crematoria of Auschwitz roared late into the night spewing human ash
into a strangely mute world—no, it would have been too much for me.

While hundreds of thousands of people travel to Poland each year to visit Auschwitz, Treblinka, and Maidanek, I wasn’t even been able to set foot in the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum until recently. The Holocaust figured too frightfully in my imagination for me to want to seek it out in that way. To give one early example: when I was twelve, an educator at my synagogue showed the members of my bar mitzvah class footage from the concentration camps. That night, the horrific images kept tumbling through my mind. I remembered, in particular, emaciated corpses—or were they still alive?—being pushed down a chute by a Nazi with a bayonet. For me, this was the start of a recurring nightmare in which a Nazi stabbed me in the back with his bayonet and I saw the blade come out the front of my chest.

If the subject of the Holocaust is so distressing to me, why did I undertake this project at all? Like a moth to a flame, I have been drawn to the Holocaust, and the idea of going to Amsterdam and meeting with the Dutch rescuers seemed like a scenario I could flit in and out of unsinged. I wasn’t after a healing, but as my relationship with the rescuers developed, my relationship to the Holocaust shifted—some psychic valve opened, much of the fear siphoned away, and I can now confront the historical realities with the calmness of someone who has at least partly come to terms with my family history.

When Hetty Voûte told me how she had made it through Ravensbrück with a smile and a song— many songs, actually, and a special friend —her words were like sunbeams pouring into a certain dark corner of my mind. When Clara Dijkstra reached across the table, took my hand, and said, “Together we’ll get through this,” I felt some ancient miasma melt away. Ted Leenders, profiled in the next chapter, had me chuckling about the same kind of Nazi that used to terrorize my dreams. The sum total of my meetings with the rescuers left me overwhelmed by their warm assurances that yes, it was terrible, but still we remained decent human beings, and, yes, we would have taken in you, too, had you come to our door during those years.

TEN
~ THEO LEENDERS ~
LAUGHING IT ALL AWAY

It’s easy to say “It’s not my child,
not my community, not my world, not my problem.”
Then there are those who see the need and respond.
I consider those people my heroes.

—Fred Rogers

Even the shortest conversation with ted leenders is punctuated by his relaxed chuckle, gentle and continuous, as if he is constantly deriving mirth from the circumstances of life. Laughter comes to Ted as easily as breath.

He met me at the platform of Heerlen station in the province of Limburg, his wiry frame exuding an unmistakable energy, as did his eyes and voice. I’d intended to fi rst take a taxi to interview Mieke Vermeer,
but Ted insisted on picking me up at the train station and driving me around, first to her apartment, and then to his.

“Later you will meet my wife, Tilla,” he said, as we got into his old but well-maintained blue Volvo. “We’ve been married for over fifty years.” After I congratulated him on his lifelong partnership, he proceeded to tell me the secret of marriage: “Never bring your troubles home to your wife.”

“Isn’t your wife supposed to be your best friend?” I countered. “If you can’t share your troubles with her—”

“Of course you want to confide in your wife. But sometimes the husband will come home and dump all the problems of the day onto his wife. I never let myself do that.”

Not wanting him to share more of his life philosophy without the recorder rolling, I changed the subject by asking him if he’d been interviewed before. “No, but just last week some woman named Doris tried. She and her crew came to my apartment with cameras and lights. And then she starts asking me questions, and I’m trying to tell her what I remember, but she says she wants to know the first and last names of people, and all the things more, and I felt like my memory was on trial. Some I didn’t remember, or maybe the person is living, and might not want me to say. When I complained, you know what she answered? ‘What I ask—you tell!’ I said, ‘Go to hell,’ and threw her out of my apartment!”

“Ted, I know her!” I exclaimed. Just two weeks earlier, I’d been looking for an interpreter in Amsterdam to help me interview several rescuers who couldn’t speak any English, and an archivist at the Jewish Museum had suggested that I call Doris, since her project made use of many interpreters. After I had explained my situation to her on the phone, she replied, “Who do you think I am? Do you think I can give you interpreters out of a tin?” I felt as though I’d been punched in the stomach; now it turned out that Ted had been mistreated by the very same woman! I told him my story and we laughed over our respective encounters with the disagreeable Doris.

My spirits were up as we climbed the concrete steps to his modest apartment. Tilla opened the door, and, with smiles all around, Ted introduced us. An earth grandmother with ruddy cheeks and an apron, Tilla’s sedate hospitality made Ted’s jauntiness stand out even more. There’s something playful about this man. He sits you down on the sofa as if he expects to have a lot of fun with you. Even his stories of the Nazis were sprinkled with moments of grace or good fortune that drew forth his contagious chuckles. Still, there was a pedal tone of
sadness that often sounded below Ted’s good cheer—one that even his invincible laughter couldn’t drown out.

I was born in Nymegen, in Gelderland, in 1915. My father was from a well-to-do family, but he lost all his money playing cards. Ha, ha, not really, but almost—he bought a lot of German marks the year before I was born, thinking that after the war they would be worth lots more. But the German economy collapsed, and the currency became completely worthless. So he had to go to work.

He didn’t loaf around; he came down to this mining town where nobody knew him, and he got a job scrubbing floors. He was the lowest paid man, but he worked to support us. I was three years old when we came here to the southern part.

I’m a duplicate of my father. You don’t realize that when you’re young, but when I look back at the way he was, and how I am now, then I see him sitting in this chair here. He was a very religious man. My mother would talk about something bad that had happened and he would say, “Cora, that is all God’s will.”

He was a very humble man—he had to be humble because he had nothing. So we grew up poor because my father had no trade. And after everything I’ve been through, I thank God that I have been poor also. I’m not ashamed to say that. Because I can understand the poor man, you know? People in need. I can bring my whole heart to the case. When I was a boy, the other kids had a ball to play with and I didn’t have one. And the other kids had candy and I didn’t have any. But I am grateful to God that He put me through that, because I know what it means to have nothing.

Now, my father was a quiet man, but my mother, she liked to laugh. She would make all of us laugh. She had tremendous nerves—nothing could throw her. She never complained about having to do without—she knew that we had a lot of love in our family, and that that was what mattered. She used to say, “Some people are so poor that all they have is money.”

When the Germans occupied our country, we started taking down the names of Dutch people who were helping them, so that after the war we could do something about it. But as the war continued, Tilla and I decided to skip that and spend our time helping the Jewish people. I met
a man named Siem deVries who was already helping Jewish people and we started to work together. Jewish children were being held in a certain building, and the German soldiers guarding the place were willing to sell the children for a handful of silver—not to help the children, just for some pocket money to buy drinks. Aach, you could bribe anybody. But those children, they were lucky to get out.

Siem de Vries would come to me and say, “Here are some people who need to be brought somewhere,” and all the things more. And so we did it. Our little house given to us by the mining company became a place where people could hide. At the beginning we only took them for a few days, until they could go somewhere else.

You should have seen those people when I told them they had to move again—they would shrink, get smaller. Their faces would become like ash. I always felt like I was some kind of a bastard when I had to tell them that. We didn’t know where they would be going either, or who they would be staying with, so we couldn’t promise them anything.

During this time, I was working in the nationalized coal mines. I had no education beyond grade school, but the mine offered a course of study in engineering, which I completed. So around that time they made me a geological engineer. This meant that the entire site was my place of work, and I was free to walk anywhere in those mines.