Were the rescuers sure they were doing the right thing? They said yes. However, the knowledge that they were subjecting not only themselves but their loved ones to great danger was a tremendous burden. Those rescuers with families who took Jewish children into their homes often struggled with the question of whether it was right for them
to put the lives of their own children at risk. And even if all went well, hiding Jews involved hardship and sacrifice; could they justify putting their loved ones through all that? Those who made the decision to go ahead in spite of it all seemed to feel that the need was so great that they simply could not turn away. As Catherine Klumper said, “I had to do it. I couldn’t bear to witness the pain and sorrow of the Jewish people.” Once involved in rescuing, they accepted the consequences these activities had on their families as part of the price they had to pay to do what they felt they must do. Several expressed that the example they set for their children had a moral value that was commensurate with the risks.
Both love and duty played out in the drama of saving Jewish children during the Holocaust, and continue to be expressed in their lives today. When I visited Jo Habers-Vinke, she told me about the elderly Jewish woman whom her family had hidden in the attic of her childhood home, and then, during a break in the interview, she and her husband took me outside to see their garden. When we walked by their garage, I saw that it was filled to the ceiling with garbage bags. “These are clothes that we’ve just finished collecting from all over our province,” Jo remarked. “Next week we’ll be sending them to Romania, where they will be distributed to people who don’t have enough warm things for the winter.” Though now in their seventies, eighties, and nineties, most of the rescuers still do what they can to help people who are suffering. And not only people: it is in the same spirit that, with her children, Hetty Voûte runs her foundation to promote the humane treatment of Icelandic horses.
Another of the rescuers, Laura van der Hoek, is a Quaker who, before the war, was part of the American Friends Service Committee (AFSC) network that helped to get Jewish children out of Europe to safety. She says her best Christmas ever was in 1942,when all her houseguests sang together and then shook hands. Why was this so memorable? Because her “houseguests” consisted of two Jews, a German army deserter, and a member of the Dutch Resistance—all of whom Laura was hiding in her attic.
When I asked if she had helped any groups of people since the war, she told me of how she had once become friends with a neighbor who, she later learned, worked as a prostitute in Amsterdam’s red-light district. When her neighbor contracted syphilis, her blotchy complexion and oozing sores caused her to lose all her clients. Left with no income
and rapidly deteriorating health, she turned to Laura, who took her in and cared for her. Laura later became involved in health education outreach to prevent other prostitutes from suffering a similar fate. This response of Laura van der Hoek illuminates another characteristic of the rescuers: a nonjudgmental attitude. They may be righteous, but they’re not self-righteous. They seem much more interested in understanding people than in condemning them.
Often this generosity of spirit extends to those who were bystanders during the war. This surprised me, for the rescuers, more than anyone, would seem to have a right to criticize such people. In the larger world condemnation abounds—both towards those who failed to act during the Holocaust, and in the form of general rebuke such this admonition by John F. Kennedy, based on a passage in Dante’s
Inferno
: “The hottest places in hell are reserved for those who in times of great moral crisis maintain their neutrality.”
Although the rescuers would probably agree with what was reportedly Kennedy’s favorite quote, they still seem reticent to pass judgment on those who did nothing. Perhaps it’s because they remember the great difficulties nearly everyone faced at the time. They also know that the reason that many families refused to take in Jewish children was because it would have put their own children in danger, and they are sympathetic to that position.
Or perhaps it is the rescuers’ humility that makes them reluctant to judge. In thinking about the religious rescuers, I’m reminded of an Isaac Bashevis Singer story in which a man sees someone doing something morally questionable. When the wrongdoer approaches the witness to gauge his reaction, the one who observed the act shrugs his shoulders and says, “Who do you think I am, God’s watchman?” It often seemed that the religious rescuers felt that it was not their place to judge their co-citizens; like the character in the story, they leave such matters to God.
And so, overall, the rescuers generally let the bystanders off easy. Some of them even expressed the view that the inaction of their bystander neighbors possessed some merit. They explained that if someone suspected that you were harboring Jews and yet did not inform the Nazis, that person was, in a way, helping the Resistance.
Why would the rescuers give bystanders so much credit? Perhaps they can never forget how much such silence was worth. The rescuers would also point out the people who helped in little ways. There was the baker who gave extra bread to Clara Dijkstra, and the policemen who warned the Vermeers and the Leenders of raids. Here again, the rescuers gratefully
remember how much they once depended on such people.
In contrast, the cruelty of the Nazi perpetrators—including the NSBers—still brings up strong emotions, even after six decades. The rescuers cannot forget the terrifying disregard for human life and human rights they once witnessed. Rage, fear, and grief arise unexpectedly when events trigger old and painful memories.
Kees Veenstra tells a story of going with his nephew to visit a military museum near Arnhem. After viewing dioramas depicting maneuvers involving Canadians, Americans, and Poles during World War II, he turned a corner and there stood a formation of mannequins in black SS uniforms. “You have no idea the impact that seeing that had on me,” Kees exclaimed. “I started swearing, and got all worked up. My nephew said, ‘But uncle, they’re just dummies!’” Kees’ visceral, instantaneous reaction testifies to the depth of the trauma he once experienced. The rescuers have had to learn to live with such residual distress, as have their loved ones, but the pain still cuts to the bone.
And yet, despite all the anguish that the Nazis inflicted as a group, the rescuers seem ready to acknowledge any particle of goodness that particular individuals had manifested. They often made a distinction between the hard-core Nazis and the German soldiers, many of whom were teenagers that had been forced to serve in the army. Even Kees, though he spoke more strongly than did any of the other rescuers of continuing to feel outrage towards the perpetrators, acknowledged these differences. He told me the following story about a time when he was biking towards Friesland with a Jewish boy on his handlebars:
I thought, I’ll never get there in time for the curfew. Well, I’ll just see whether I can find someplace for us to stay for the night. And there was a man in his shirtsleeves standing by a little gate in front of his house and I said, “Hello there, I’m here with an onderduiker, and we have to be in by eight o’clock. Do you think you could put us up for the night?” He just stood there and looked at us. “We’d be happy to sleep on the floor, if it comes to that.” Finally he said, “I can’t help you.” “Why can’t you help us?” He gave a crooked smile and answered, “Because I’m a Nazi.” What could I say? Stupid. I biked on, and kept looking over my shoulder, but he was still standing there in his shirtsleeves. I even got off my bike, as if to fix my chain, just to see what he was doing, but it didn’t look like he was going to phone anybody. He was “wrong,” but not so terribly wrong. He was what you would
call a faulty one, but not of the worst type. Yah, such people there were also, of course.
By refusing to generalize about the Nazis, the rescuers practice a principle they spoke about often: the importance of not stereotyping people. That is what Hitler did to the Jews, they would explain, and that was how he got people to hate them. Miep Gies reports that Otto Frank, father of Anne Frank, survivor of Auschwitz, and founder of the Anne Frank Foundation, was adamant on this point:
All people make their own decision, Otto used to say. Even parents and children do not always think and act in the same way. He felt very strongly that we should not make the same mistake millions of Germans once made. German children were never told that each person is an individual, free to make his or her own decision, free to take a personal stand in matters of human rights. Therefore Hitler had an easy go in Germany. . . . And so, Otto Frank insisted that we should stop talking about the Jews, the Arabs, the Asians, the Germans, or whatever. Lumping people together is racism, Otto said. And it leads to the Holocaust, and still destroys countless lives today.
Through witnessing the Nazi propaganda campaign against the Jews, the rescuers saw firsthand the destructive effects of negative stereo-typing. Gisela Söhnlein recalls that “during the war, there were people who had never known a Jew, yet they believed that the Jews killed Christian babies, and all the other terrible lies the Germans were telling them.” And so, the rescuers are highly sensitized to the need to see each person, not as a stereotype, but as an individual.
The Nazi interrogator in Janet Kalff’s story about her mother-in-law is the ultimate demonstration of this principle. When Mrs. Kalff told him the truth about her rescue activities and those of her children, he replied, “Madam, I have an old mother, and she thinks just the way you do. You’ll hear nothing more about it.” Such responses were, of course, rare, but they did occur within the Nazi ranks and at times made the difference between life and death. One of the most striking examples occurred in Le Chambon, France, where the successful rescue of hundreds of Jewish children by the residents of that pastoral French hamlet would not have been possible without the purposeful
inattention of the chief Nazi officer responsible for overseeing the region. Those perpetrators who acted in this way removed themselves from the killing machine, even though tremendous pressure was being exerted on them to function as its cogs.
Browning comments that many of the qualities I have been discussing—moral and social autonomy, empathy, habits of caring, rejection of stereotypical thinking—were as absent in the perpetrators as they were present in the rescuers. His observations on how ordinary men were able to commit unspeakable crimes parallel to some extent the process by which other ordinary people, the rescuers, were able to rise to extraordinary moral heights:
Few among the perpetrators held firm political convictions that shaped their decision to become killers, but once the initial direction had been taken, subsequent behavior deepened commitment. Ideology was shaped by what they were doing, and, in the case of the killers, they internalized and adopted as their own the political doctrines of the regime that legitimized their actions.
Considering the moral impoverishment of perpetrators and the strong social and political forces sanctioning their criminal behavior, for a perpetrator to
not
do his job was perhaps as much of an ethical achievement as for a bystander to become a rescuer. How then can we justify encouraging the exercise of conscience in bystanders without doing the same for perpetrators?
Through my contact with the rescuers, I have ceased to view perpetrators as two-dimensional figures, figures I could never become. We all have the capacity for evil, and all of our institutions and social structures are capable of being perverted to serve the wrong ends. Those institutions and social structures, in turn, are capable of socializing people to do the wrong things. Our sense of what to guard against can be informed by the past, but the way in which evil manifests is ever-changing. Even the vigilant could end up as perpetrators of something that is not recognized until later to have been morally disastrous. It is critical to ask, then, how can evil be transformed?
One answer is that it can be transformed through a genuine encounter in which people step out of their set roles and relate as one human being to another. I believe this was a factor in the outcome between Mrs. Kalff and her Nazi interrogator, who, for all we know, had never
responded in such a way before. This cannot happen when either party insists on viewing the other as less than human: a mere statistic or a generic representative of a category. Nor can it happen when the human element is foreclosed by distance and technology, as when a missile is launched from hundreds of miles away by a technician who will never know whom he is killing, let alone see their faces and hear their screams. In contrast, consider the “truth-in-reconciliation” hearings in South Africa in which enemies encounter each other, albeit after the damage has been done, in a setting carefully structured to promote mutual understanding and effect “restorative justice.” Sometimes dramatically effective, these hearings can result in repentance on the part of the perpetrator and forgiveness on the part of the victim.
I often asked the rescuers about their current feelings towards Germans. I was interested in how their love of people had played out over time towards those who had caused them and others so much agony. In answer to this question, the rescuers tended, overall, to be forgiving, even as they reported that younger generations, perhaps their own grandchildren, are carrying on the old hatreds. Several Dutch young people told me the same urban legend about a Dutch boy who goes to Germany on vacation and, after lingering in a store for a while, is asked by the impatient shopkeeper if he’s going to buy anything. “First give me back my grandmother’s bicycle,” sneers the Dutch boy. This may get a chuckle from Dutch youth, but the rescuers do not join in. They seem to be struggling with the paradox that while those who forget the past may be condemned to repeat it, dwelling on the past can sometimes perpetuate hate and prejudice. The solution that some of them have pointed towards is for the lessons of the past to be remembered well, but not interpreted narrowly. Instead of drawing literal conclusions from history, we must recognize those principles and patterns that
will
recur, though under different and most likely unexpected circumstances.