PROMOTING NORMAL:

JEWISH CULTURE IN OCCUPIED AMSTERDAM

by

Scott A. Swartsfager

APPROVED BY SUPERVISORY COMMITTEE:

______Nils Roemer, Chair

______Zsuzsanna Ozsvath

______David Patterson

______Peter Park Copyright 2019

Scott A. Swartsfager

All Rights Reserved PROMOTING NORMAL:

JEWISH CULTURE IN OCCUPIED AMSTERDAM

by

SCOTT A. SWARTSFAGER, BA, MA

DISSERTATION

Presented to the Faculty of

The University of Texas at Dallas

in Partial Fulfillment

of the Requirements

for the Degree of

DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY IN

HUMANITIES – HISTORY OF IDEAS

THE UNIVERSITY OF TEXAS AT DALLAS

May 2019 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I would like to acknowledge the Ackerman Center at The University of Texas at Dallas for their unwavering support during the years leading up to this dissertation. I came to this program with one year of funding, and through the immense generosity of the Belofsky Fellowship, I have been able to complete my PhD in the next four years with all expenses paid. I also gained invaluable experience as a research assistant. I would like to particularly thank Selwin Belofsky and David Ackerman for this opportunity.

Next, I would like thank Dr. Nils Roemer, Dr. David Patterson, and Dr. Zsuzsanna Ozsvath for their instruction, mentorship, and support during this process. I consider myself extremely fortunate to have had the opportunity to sit at the feet of such wise and capable teachers.

Finally, I would like to thank my wife, Lori, for her undying support in both my military career and my venture into academia. She has moved with me more times than either of us can remember, but her unfailing optimism has never wavered.

April 2019

iv PROMOTING NORMAL:

JEWISH CULTURE IN OCCUPIED AMSTERDAM

Scott A. Swartsfager, PhD The University of Texas at Dallas, 2019

ABSTRACT

Supervising Professor: Dr. Nils Roemer

Amsterdam is a unique city in Holocaust history. It was home to a thriving, highly-assimilated

Jewish community, some of whom could trace their presence in the city back to the sixteenth century. Is also stands apart in the number of its Jewish residents murdered in the Holocaust: seventy-five percent compared to twenty-five in France. This study examines multiple aspects of the Dutch Holocaust and attempts to answer the question of why so many lost their lives. The dissertation is divided into five chapters. Chapter 1 is essentially an urban history of Amsterdam, laying the foundation for its uniqueness in European history and chronicling the arrival of the first Jews to the city. Chapter 2 takes a closer look at the Jewish presence in Amsterdam from their first communities in the seventeenth century, to the eve of the German invasion in 1940.

Here, we look at Jewish religious and secular culture, the growing divide between the Sephardic and Ashkenazi communities, Jewish social networks, and Jewish labor with its burgeoning ties to socialism. Chapter 3 begins with the German invasion in May 1940 and describes the crucial reaction of Jewish culture directly before and after the invasion. It also outlines the leadership and function of the German administration and Dutch bureaucracy in Amsterdam and goes into

v more detail about the formation and function of the Jewish Council and their role in the first year of the occupation. In Chapter 4, I focus on the main deportations from July 1942 to September

1943 and the insistence of many on the Council and in the community to cling to an optimistic ideal of ‘resettlement’ and ‘labor relocation.’ Chapter 5 deals with Jewish resistance and hiding, looking particularly at the catastrophic dislocation and murder of children, as well as the heroic attempts to save them. Here, the narrative turns back to the city of Amsterdam during the

“hunger winter” of 1944-1945 and the last days of the German occupation. The conclusion, then, sums up the ideas of Promoting Normal.

vi TABLE OF CONTENTS

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS...... iv

ABSTRACT...... v

LIST OF FIGURES...... vii

PROLOGUE: BENT BUT NOT BROKEN……………………...... ……………..……..….1

INTRODUCTION………………………………………………...... ………………..…...... …9

CHAPTER 1 JERUSALEM OF THE NORTH……...... ………....…...……………….….16

CHAPTER 2 JEWISH AMSTERDAM……...... …...…………...... …....………...... …41

CHAPTER 3 OCCUPIED AMSTERDAM: JEWISH CULTURE IN THE MELEE...... …63

CHAPTER 4 LEAVING AMSTERDAM: THE DEPORTATIONS………...... ……..…..94

CHAPTER 5 BENT BUT NOT BROKEN: THE FINAL PICTURE……...... …….....…..126

CONCLUSION PROMOTING NORMAL……………………………….…...... …..152

BIBLIOGRAPHY……………………………………………………….…...... …………..157

BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH………………………………….………….…...... …….....…166

CURRICULUM VITAE

vii LIST OF FIGURES

FIGURE 1 Cornilius Anthonisz, Bird’s Eye View of Amsterdam...... 19

FIGURE 2 Jacob Cornelisz, Amsterdam Miracle of the Host...... 25

FIGURE 3 Barend Dircksz, Wederdopersoproer...... 28

FIGURE 4 Jan Voerman Sr, A Cloth Merchant in the Jewish Quarter, Amsterdam...... 46

FIGURE 5 Max Liebermann, Jewish Street in Amsterdam...... 53

FIGURE 6 Cornelius Christiaan Dommershuizen, A View of the Jewish Quarter with the Oudeschans and the Montelbaanstoren, Amsterdam, 1886...... 54

FIGURE 7 Uilenburgerstraat, Jewish Quarter, Amsterdam, 1925...... 56 . FIGURE 8 Early Twentieth-Century Amsterdam, Jewish Quarter...... 57

FIGURE 9 Exclusion Form, 1940...... 74

FIGURE 10 Amsterdam Jewish Council...... 81

FIGURE 11 First Edition of Het Joodsche Weekblad...... 89

FIGURE 12 Het Joodsche Weekblad Advertisement Page...... 90

FIGURE 13 Roundup on Daniël Meijerplein...... 96

FIGURE 14 Map of Amsterdam with Jewish Sections in Black, 1941...... 98

FIGURE 15 The Jewish Quarter with Rembrandt’s House in the Background...... 99

FIGURE 16 Jewish Identification Card...... 107

FIGURE 17 Simon Caun...... 108

FIGURE 18 Jewish Council Identification Card...... 112

FIGURE 19 Extra Edition of the Jewish Weekly...... 116

FIGURE 20 The Joodsche Schouwburg Theater...... 119

viii FIGURE 21 People in the Alley of the Schouwburg Theater, Awaiting Deportation...... 119

FIGURE 22 Emmy Andriesse, Hunger Winter, Amsterdam, 1944-45...... 143

FIGURE 23 Emmy Andriesse,Boy with Pan on His Way to a Soup Kitchen Food Distribution. Amsterdam, Spring 1945...... 144

FIGURE 24 Emmy Andriesse, Liberation Party, Frederiksplein, Amsterdam, May 1945...... 146

ix PROLOGUE

BENT BUT NOT BROKEN

Abraham Van Santen sat in the attic and thought of Henri. It had been two years now since he had seen him. Henri had survived his arrest and incarceration in the city of Wassenaar but had gotten sick, and somehow had been released to his home in Laren.

That was January of 1943, and Dutch Jews were hanging on by a thread. The Germans were stepping up deportations, hoping to fulfill Eichmann’s demand to the Foreign Office that they ‘evacuate’ 40,000 Jews from the Netherlands at a rate of 1,000 souls per day. They had started the previous summer and were using the large Shouburg Theater in the Jewish Quarter as a staging area from which to send men, women, and children to Westerbork and then on to their deaths at Auschwitz or Sobibor. The Jewish council was still putting a good face on things, of course, but even their exemptions were running thin.

Abraham believed their optimism was not entirely feigned – most of them sincerely hoped that more Jews would be interned locally and used for labor. They continued to publish the Jewish newspaper and conduct business like things were more or less normal. But

Abraham’s optimism had left him. He would work within the system, of course – what else could he do? But for now, he wanted to see his ailing friend, which meant that he needed to travel from

Amsterdam to Laren, and for that, he needed the permission of the Jewish Council.

As the youngest board member of the Joodsche Invalide, the Jewish Hospital in

Amsterdam, Abraham had received a request from a prominent man in Laren named I.G.

Keesing, that he move to Amsterdam and occupy a room at the hospital. Keesing believed, as did many, that being a patient there would offer him some protection from deportation and Nazi

1 aggression. That would be in keeping with basic human decency, after all. Abraham received quite a few of these requests, and normally it was not something that he would have risked traveling for, but since his friend Henri also lived in Laren, he saw this trip as having a double benefit. He would approach the council and ask permission to collect Mr. Keesing, while visiting

Henri at the same time.

It was not as difficult as he thought it would be. The council members were distracted and barely listening. If the hospital had room for Keesing, and Abraham wanted to go collect him, then why would they stand in the way? He knew the risks, after all. Abraham left in good spirits and went home to pack a small bag and spend the evening with his wife and children. The next morning, he was at the Weesperpoort Station boarding a steam tram to Laren.

The dark red tram was small and crowded, but he found a seat and settled in with a fresh copy of The Jewish Weekly. It was thin these days, with less and less of a community left to report about. He received a number of sympathetic looks, as if they were seeing an innocent man on his way to the gallows. He wondered about them for a moment, until his eye caught the large yellow star on his coat, with the word ‘Jood’ clumsily sewn into the middle. Of course – the star.

It was the Hebrew Shield of David (Magen David), nimbly abducted by a Nazi regime that loved its symbols. Abraham had always been comforted by the images in Judaism, but this particular star felt lewd and unholy. For him, it wasn’t just the act of being branded by the Nazis, but that they were branded with a false translation of Judaism. With this star, they were Jews as the Nazis saw them, not as they saw themselves.

He thought for a moment about other Jews making other train trips, who were not nearly as comfortable as he, but he refused to entertain that thought for long. Who could say exactly

2 what they were traveling to? The rumors might not be true, and maybe the council was right.

Maybe the Jews of Amsterdam could still receive more favorable treatment than their neighbors, although it didn’t seem that way at the moment.

When he arrived in Laren, he was met by another old friend, Willem Vogt, a Dutch

Protestant, and president of AVRO, one of the main broadcasting companies in the Netherlands.

They shook hands and walked off the platform to Willem’s waiting car. He had contacted

Willem earlier, and Willem had insisted on driving him around while he was in town. They went back a long way, back to a dream of assimilation and equality. They talked about family and laughed about better times, as they drove to Keesing’s residence first, and then to Henri’s.

Abraham assured him that he could find transportation back to the tram station when the time came, but when he opened the car door, Willem grabbed his arm and suddenly looked serious.

“These are bad times, Bram.” He said. “I know I don’t have to tell you that.”

Abraham looked pensive. “They are – for some more than others.”

“Which is what I wanted to talk to you about.” Willem continued. “From what I’ve been hearing, the Germans are rounding up Jews from all over Europe, and at the rate they’ve been deporting people from Holland, how much longer can it be before they come for you and your family? Listen, Bram, Julia and I can take one of your children into our home. I wish we could do more, but I think one child is all we can manage without raising too much suspicion. Please, let us help you.”

Willem’s offer hit him like a hammer – was that really necessary? To go into hiding was one thing, but to split his family? No, it was still too much. He thanked Willem sincerely and said he would contact him if things changed, then left the car and walked to Henri’s door.

3 Willem looked at him with a mixture of sadness and pride as he drove away. Abraham watched him go, then straightened his coat and rang the bell.

Henri’s wife answered, looking tired. He kissed her on both cheeks. “How is he?” He asked in a low voice.

“Oh, he has his good days and his bad days.” She replied. “But he’s sicker than he admits, Abraham. I’m so glad you could come.”

He squeezed her hand, and she took him back to see her husband. All Dutch Jews knew of Henri Polak. He was practically a legend. Henri had formed the diamond workers’ trade union

– the ANDB – back in 1894, after a massive labor strike. He brought Jewish and non-Jewish workers, men and women, together in solidarity and created a Social Democratic labor union that became the model for all trade unions in Holland. These unions were instrumental in raising countless Dutch Jews out of abject poverty, while improving the quality of life and insuring higher wages for all workers. He also took up the mantel of Jewish culture as editor of ANDB’s newspaper, The Weekly, from 1895-1940. He was a prolific writer, his routine editorials passing on unique thoughts and points of view to so many of Holland’s Jews. Henri also had an infectious and on-going love affair with Amsterdam, which was apparent in all his writing, especially his book, Amsterdam, The Great City.

But now, Henri Polak looked so much older than when Abraham had seen him last. His thin hair was wiry and unkempt, and his body seemed hollow. “Bram!” He exclaimed, trying to rise and coughing at the attempt.

Abraham rushed to shake his hand and sit him back down. Henri’s black, round glasses and thick moustache were as he remembered, but the face was gaunt and ashen. “Hello, my

4 friend! So good to see you.” Abraham pronounced. “You are looking well.”

Henri laughed. “You are not a good liar, B`ram. I know I look sick. But I will mend! I may be an old man, but I’m not dead yet.”

Abraham smiled and nodded. “Oh – I have something for you,” he exclaimed, almost forgetting one of the reasons he had come. He fished through his bag and produced a small box of cigars, presenting it to his friend.

Henri’s face lit up and he made a clucking noise as he accepted the gift. “What a treat!”

He exclaimed. “Smoke one with me.” He found a box of matches and handed it to Abraham.

“Now tell me – how is my favorite city holding up?”

Abraham chuckled, lit both cigars, and talked about Amsterdam. The council, Seyss-

Inquart, Himmler’s Reichskommissariat, the Dutch Nazis, the first deportations, the theft of

Jewish property, and, of course, the Jewish Quarter.

“So, they built a fence around the Jewish Quarter and then just took it down?” Henri asked.

“Yes. Their reaction to the strike was so violent, that we feared the worst. But then one day, the barbed-wire came down and they declared that Amsterdam would not have a ghetto. It was remarkable, really.”

“Well, there aren’t that many Jews there anyway.”

Abraham laughed. “Not anymore. They’ll have to wall off South Amsterdam if their goal is to contain Jews.”

5 Henri smirked and shook his head, but he was fading. Abraham insisted that he rest and promised to visit him again as soon as he could. Laren was not that far, after all. Henri looked disappointed but did not protest. They embraced, and Henri’s wife escorted him to the door.

“Bram!” Henri called after him, a new strength in his voice, his finger waving in the air.

“Remember – I may be bent, but I am not broken!”

Abraham smiled, nodded, and turned to leave.

He had been back in Amsterdam for two weeks, when he learned of Henri Polak’s death.

Shortly after, he received word through the council that Henri’s wife had been deported to

Auschwitz. He had to do something. He didn’t know what, but it must be soon. He replayed that conversation with Willem over and over again in his mind. I will not separate my family, he decided at last – but we will hide.

Abraham had a family friend who owned a storeroom in an alley near Oudezijds

Achterburgwal, and he agreed to let Abraham and his family live in the attic. It was well-hidden and had what they needed to survive. So, in May of 1943, in the middle of the Sobibor deportations, they moved, one-by-one, into the attic and waited for the war to end.

Now it was April 1945, and Abraham sat and stared at the white window. It was just light outside, and his family was still sleeping. So long – so long to live in one tiny, cramped attic, never leaving it, not even once. And the hunger! But the war was almost over – it had to be.

Soon it would be official, and then what? Abraham was overcome with an urgency to leave the attic and breathe fresh air. Yes! Now was the time. He knew that his wife would protest, so he left her a note and slipped out, down the steps, through the alleyway, and onto Oudezijds

6 Achterburgwal Street. Oudezijds means ‘old side’ and is in the very center of Amsterdam. They had been in the middle of everything all along and were never discovered.

He strolled down the narrow street, the canal on one side, and flat-fronted, brick buildings on the other. The old stone road was moist, with green moss peeking out through the cracks. There were very few people about, but he couldn’t help feeling a bit naked. He wasn’t supposed to be out in public, certainly not without his star. But Abraham would never wear that star again, no matter what.

He walked for a while and felt invisible – no one saw him. No one cared. He relished in the feeling and suppressed an urge to skip, when something caught his eye. Through a bright window, he could see into a room filled with art. This was the Dutch way, to place large picture windows onto the street that signaled a connection to the community and told a little something about the occupants. And oh, the beauty of that room – paintings, drawings, sculptures. It had been so long since he had seen art – since he had seen anything really, other than the walls and painted windows of his attic. He had to see more. Throwing caution to the wind, he climbed the few steps to the front door and rang the bell.

He heard shallow footsteps from inside and realized how reckless he was being. The war was not over yet! Anyone could be inside. After a moment, a thin, older woman in a housecoat tentatively opened the door and said, “Yes?”

Abraham swallowed hard. “I’m terribly sorry to disturb you, madam. I couldn’t help but notice your beautiful artwork – is this a museum?”

The woman chuckled and told him that it was no museum. This was the home of Cefas

Stouthamer, the artist and draftsman. Abraham apologized again and asked if, by any chance, he

7 might come in to look at Mr. Stouthamer’s work? The woman eyed him suspiciously for a moment but could see the desire on his face. She smiled again and stepped to the side, telling him that he was welcome to look around if he liked. Abraham ambled into the front room and stopped, paralyzed. He stepped toward the first painting as a dying man in the desert crawls to an oasis – the colors, the images, the insight! He moved slowly through the room, from painting to painting, then stopped at a bronze sculpture of a gaunt woman kneeling on the ground, one hand held above her head. Her body seemed wracked with pain, but her face was turned up, looking to the heavens.

“It’s how he sees the Netherlands.” Stouthamer’s wife said, from behind.

Abraham understood completely, and he kneeled to read the inscription at the sculpture’s base. Stouthamer had called his work, Bent but Not Broken. Tears streamed down his cheeks as he remembered his friend Henri, and the immense suffering of the last five years, so perfectly captured in this one work of art

Abraham would later purchase that sculpture and keep it with him for the rest of his life.1

He had lived through the worst that humanity could offer up. The Holocaust was not merely a breakdown in German society, but rather a breakdown in human civilization. What had been lovely was foul, what had been pure was defiled, what had been kind was brutal, what had been elegant was shameful. But in the end, the people of Amsterdam emerged much like Henri Polak and Abraham Van Santen – Bent, but Not Broken.

1 Adapted from an interview with Abraham van Santen recorded in Philo Bregstein and Salvador Bloemgarten, Remembering Jewish Amsterdam (New York: Holmes and Meier Publishing, 2004), 218-219.

8 INTRODUCTION

There is something irresolute about a great city. While it is, in part, stark and immovable, it is also in constant flux. Places are purposed and re-purposed, spaces layered and consumed, both in the private and public spheres. Even great medieval cities such as Paris are ripe for a visionary like Haussmann to redesign – carving broad boulevards, leveling ancient structures, and developing new ones to meet the changing needs of its residents. In The Idea of the City in

European Thought, Carl E. Schorske notes that our very perception of a city is shaped largely through our social transformations. “No man thinks of a city in hermetic isolation. He forms his image of it through a perceptual screen derived from inherited culture and transformed by personal experience…into a myriad of concepts and values about the nature of man, society, and culture.”2 Great cities don’t simply exist in static display. Even a metropolis bends to the shifting moods and ever-changing needs of its people.

Amsterdam is a great city but has missed the mark of a metropolis. With its current population of 821,000, it is the largest city in the Netherlands, but a far cry from Paris’ 2.3 million and certainly London’s 8.3 million. Also, its history shows it to be much more malleable.

Perhaps it has even avoided what Sociologist Georg Simmel referred to as the blasé attitude or the blunting of observation and discrimination that is so common to residents of a major city.3 If this is so, it is likely because Amsterdam, historically, has been far more receptive to

2 Carl E. Schorske, “The Idea of the City in European Thought: Voltaire to Spengler,” in The Historian and the City (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1963), 96 3 Georg Simmel, “The Metropolis and Mental Life,” in The City Cultures Reader (Mass: Routledge Publishing, 2000), 15

9 environmental and political changes than its neighbors – in short, more responsive to the needs of its residents.

This is a study of Jewish culture in Amsterdam. As a cultural history, I have endeavored to examine various aspects of Jewish life, many of which are inextricably connected to the city itself. In fact, if this were a novel, the city of Amsterdam would be a main character. I am writing with this in mind – Amsterdam is not merely a backdrop for the persecution of the Jews during the Nazi occupation, it is part of the story. I believe the Germans intentionally used the city, at least the predominantly Jewish spaces, against them. But it is also true that the Jews used the city to their advantage as well, through resistance networks and hiding places that saved over 10,000 people. Amsterdam, then, both before and after 1940, is intricately woven into the fabric of the

Jewish experience, and it is where we begin.

Amsterdam was unique in the history of Holocaust. It stands apart from the other cities of

Europe and the Soviet Union in a number of ways. First, it was the only city to have university students and non-Jewish professors stage organized protests of anti-Jewish measures, leading to multiple arrests and the closure of the Universities of Amsterdam and Leiden. It is also the only city in Europe to have a large-scale labor strike in response to Jewish arrests and deportations.

The February Strike of 1941 lasted for three days and involved over 300,000 Dutch citizens from most sectors of society. While it was violently crushed by the Germans, it served as a symbol of solidarity between the non-Jewish Dutch and their well-integrated Jewish neighbors. Second,

Heinrich Himmler appointed a civilian administration for Amsterdam rather than a military one, which operated in concert with an intact, highly efficient Dutch bureaucracy. This bureaucracy believed that they were operating under a mandate from the Dutch government in exile and could

10 best serve the needs of the population at large by cooperating fully with the German occupiers.

Amsterdam also did not have a Jewish ghetto that could serve as a central, entry-controlled location from which to murder and deport Jews. Instead, the German administration used the

Dutch bureaucracy to oversee a series of comprehensive registrations to identify Dutch Jewish citizens for later deportation. Third, the Jewish Council (Joodsche Raad) in Amsterdam was established as most Jewish councils in Europe were – as an intermediary between the German administration and the Jewish communities. The Amsterdam Council, however, was unique in that it maintained the leadership of its co-chairmen, Abraham Asscher and David Cohen, throughout the entirety of the occupation until their own deportations in September 1943.

The final and most significant difference was in the number of people who perished in the Holocaust. The Netherlands lost seventy-five percent of its Jewish citizens compared to forty-five percent in Belgium and twenty-five in France. The significance of this number has prompted much concern as to how this could be, especially when most other factors were similar between these three countries. Monumental works such as Jacob Presser’s Ashes in the Wind:

The Destruction of Dutch Jewry have defined this field of study. Presser was a professor of history at the University of Amsterdam and a survivor of the Holocaust in the Netherlands. He wrote Ashes in the Wind on a grant from the Dutch government and it is encyclopedic in scope.

Presser has, however, been criticized by some for writing more from the standpoint of a survivor and less as an academic. Henriette Boas, for example, believes that Presser’s bias colors his work and also argues that he was so far removed from the Jewish community of Amsterdam as to have been out-of-touch with the typical Jewish experience.4 Presser is also assessed at times as being

4Henriette Boas, ‘The Persecution and Destruction of Dutch Jewry 1940-1945,” Yad Vashem Studies VI (1967), 361.

11 inconsistent, as he was critical of the Amsterdam Jewish Council, while at the same time accepting help from that same council. Another seminal study is from Bob Moore and is entitled

Victims and Survivors: The Nazi Persecution of the Jews in the Netherlands, 1940-1945.

Moore’s writing is also detailed to point of being exhaustive, but has been incredibly helpful in getting a clear, overall picture of the occupation of the Netherlands. He also relies heavily on

Presser’s work, while providing more focused coverage of the German administrative machine that was responsible for emptying the Netherlands of its Jews.

I also rely on works from Louis de Jong, Abel Herzberg, Peter Romijn, Pim Griffoen and

Ron Zeller, all of whom have done consistently good work on the Netherlands under the Nazi occupation. Where this dissertation differs from these previous works is in the focus and thesis.

While broader pieces have been written about the Netherlands in general, I concentrate on

Amsterdam specifically and attempt to provide an urban history of this city prior to and during the occupation. That is, of course, while trying not to lose sight of the fact that this is first and foremost a cultural history of the Amsterdam Jews. As such, I have endeavored to discuss only as much about the German occupiers as necessary, while preferring to illuminate Jewish culture in a time of great need. With that in mind, I have also made good use of Selma Leydesdorff’s,

We Lived with Dignity: The Jewish Proletariat of Amsterdam 1900-1940. While Leydesdorff’ chose to end her research with the occupation, her insights into Jewish culture were invaluable, as were those of Bernard Wasserstein in his biography of Gertrude van Tijn, a member of the

Jewish Council, and Daniel Swetschinski with his research on the Portuguese Jews of

Amsterdam.

12

Much of the concern for the disproportionate number of Dutch Jews murdered in the

Holocaust falls upon the Jewish Council, as seen in the conclusions of Louis de Jong and Jacob

Presser that the Amsterdam Council did in fact put their own interests ahead of the community they were sworn to represent. Is it possible that the Amsterdam Jewish Council went beyond the cooperation required by all Jewish councils and ventured into the realm of collaboration? They did, after all, protect themselves and their families, while sending a compliant Jewish population to their deaths in staggering numbers. They also worked closely with the German authority from their inception in January 1941 until their dissolution in September 1943 in not only registrations, roundups, and deportations, but in the transfer of Jewish property and wealth, and the sale and enforcement of the Yellow Star badges. Could they, perhaps, have even manipulated the Germans to suit their own needs while ignoring the needs of their community? I tend to dismiss these ideas, as I dismiss the assertions of historians like Ies Vuijsje, who blame Dutch bystanders for looking the other way, and rather actively allowing the oppressions and deportations that plagued Amsterdam. As I will show, non-Jewish Dutch did more both in protesting German actions and in helping Jewish victims than did the citizens of most European cities. I also reject theories that lay blame on the Jewish bourgeoisie for victimizing the proletariat, or on a failure of the Dutch Jews to mobilize Zionist networks, or to have, in effect, lost their “Jewishness.” Such theories not only lack sufficient evidence, but they use the benefits of hindsight to accuse the victims, or at least assign them some culpability, and in my mind, this reasoning is not only fallacious but injurious. The blame lies squarely with the perpetrators.

Instead I argue, as did Abel Herzberg, that the Jewish Council of Amsterdam was given an impossible task under impossible circumstances, and that they attempted to lead their

13 community pragmatically and ethically. They took on virtually every role within the Jewish community, from soup kitchen to public education to health care to mail delivery. They employed an average of 7,500 people, providing them with temporary exemptions from deportation, and suggesting loop-holes to hundreds more.5 Also, while they were not active in

Jewish resistance, they did clandestinely distribute the underground newspaper Het Parool (The

Watchword) to upwards of 100,000 people in 1942 and 1943,6 while warning the main Jewish hospital, the Joodsche Invalide, of an impending raid, allowing them to evacuate staff and patients. Additionally, they could not have known the complete plan of destruction because the

Germans themselves did not know it. At least not in the first year of the occupation. In what sociologist Zygmunt Bauman calls the “twisted road to Auschwitz,” the initial plan to relocate

Jewish communities and make Europe Judenrein, only became a plan of mass extermination after Hitler’s decision to murder the Jews of the Soviet Union, and even then under a cloud of deception.7 In most ways, then, the Jewish Council was as Hannah Arendt described them:

“…like captains whose ships were about to sink and who succeeded in bringing them safe to port by casting overboard a great part of their precious cargo.”8

At least that was their intention. To extend this analogy a little further, one could say that the Dutch ship made it to port with almost no one left on board. Therefore, I also argue that the

Jewish Council failed to sense the danger in store for Dutch Jews and consequently failed to

5 Bernard Wasserstein, The Ambiguity of Virtue: Gertrude Van Tijn and the Fate of the Dutch Jews, (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2014), 144. 6 Deborah Slier and Ian Shine, Hidden Letters, (New York: Star Bright Books, 2008), 166. 7 Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust, (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1989), 129. 8 Hannah Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil, (New York: Penguin Books, 2006), 118.

14 sound any warning at all that would have allowed more to flee or go into hiding. Instead, they stubbornly clung to the belief (encouraged by the German administration) that their assimilation into Dutch society would afford them a unique amount of protection. Or, if that ended up not being the case, they would certainly be rescued by the Allies before the Germans could deport them all. Through their community newspaper, Het Joodsche Weekblad (The Jewish Weekly) they urged Jews to obey all deportation summons (for fear of reprisals) and discouraged them from going into hiding, even after they had been given actionable intelligence on the atrocities taking place in the East. And instead of providing sober articles on the reality of the occupation, the Jewish Weekly was filled with fluff pieces about concerts, business classes, and community activities that communicated a false sense of normality, which then permeated the Jewish community and blinded them to the severity of any warning signs that they themselves might perceive. In essence, they clung to an optimism that colored their perceptions of reality – an optimism that Nietzsche would have said made them shallow and incapable of seeing the tragedy before them. An optimism that acted as their “destroying germ of society,”9 making Himmler’s deportation mandates that much easier for a determined occupier to carry out.

This dissertation is divided into five chapters. Chapter 1 is essentially an urban history of

Amsterdam, laying the foundation for its uniqueness in European history and chronicling the arrival of the first Jews to the city. Chapter 2 takes a closer look at the Jewish presence in

Amsterdam from their first communities in the seventeenth century, to the eve of the German invasion in 1940. Here, we look at Jewish religious and secular culture, the growing divide

9 Friedrich Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy, (New York: Dover Publications, Inc., 1995), 66.

15 between the Sephardic and Ashkenazi communities, Jewish social networks, and Jewish labor with its burgeoning ties to socialism. Chapter 3 begins with the German invasion in May 1940 and describes the crucial reaction of Jewish culture directly before and after the invasion. It also outlines the leadership and function of the German administration and Dutch bureaucracy in

Amsterdam. I have deliberately restricted this section to a surface-level description of the

Germans leadership – there were many more low-level functionaries who interacted with the

Jewish Council and carried out the will of their superiors, but as the focus of this study is Jewish culture, I have chosen not to muddy the waters with administrative minutia. Instead, Chapter 3 goes into more detail about the formation and function of the Jewish Council and their role in the first year of the occupation, along with the Jewish community’s attempts to find a place for themselves in the gradually tightening coils of the occupiers. In Chapter 4, we focus on the main deportations from July 1942 to September 1943 and the insistence of many on the Council and in the community to cling to an optimistic ideal of ‘resettlement’ and ‘labor relocation.’ Chapter 5 deals with Jewish resistance and hiding, looking particularly at the catastrophic dislocation and murder of children, as well as the heroic attempts to save them. Here, the narrative turns back to the city of Amsterdam during the “hunger winter” of 1944-1945 and the last days of the German occupation. It then sums up the ideas of Promoting Normal.

Throughout this dissertation, and especially in Chapters 4 and 5, I endeavor to use as much archival information as possible. This includes letters and administrative documents taken from microfiche and microfilm, handwritten memoirs and interviews scanned from the archives of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, documents retrieved digitally from the

Amsterdam Institute of War, Holocaust, and Genocide (NIOD) as well as the Yad Vashem

16 archives, and editions of Het Joodsche Weekblad copied from the YIVO archives of the Leo

Baeck Institute. I also use a number of primary sources in publication, most notably from Jacob

Presser and Abel Herzberg, both of whom were survivors of the Holocaust in the Netherlands.

Additionally, I use survivor testimony in Philo Bregstein’s Remembering Jewish Amsterdam,

Bernard Wasserstein’s The Ambiguity of Virtue, and Etty Hillesum’s An Interrupted Life.

Through the eyes of survivors and the lens of scholars, we glimpse the Jewish experience in

Amsterdam during a period of unprecedented tragedy, and perhaps gain some insight into why their final outcome was so particularly vexing.

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CHAPTER 1

JEWISH AMSTERDAM

The Netherlands is a prize won by men from the sea; it is an artificial, a ‘made’ land; the Dutch made it; it exists because the Dutch defend it; it would disappear if the Dutch left it.

- Edmondo de Amicis, Olanda

You could say that Amsterdam was born out of necessity. It is young for a great

European city, especially when compared to the ancients, like Athens or Rome. It did not even arise from the ashes of the Roman empire, as did the northern outpost of Londonium, or the river town of Lutetia (Paris).10 The Netherlands, or ‘low lands,’ is an enormous river delta with a constantly shifting façade. It is inhospitable and uninviting, rainy and windy – a spot that most people would travel around, and few would settle down in.

It is fed by two of the major rivers of Northern Europe: the Rhine and the Meus. The

Swiss Alps give birth to the Rhine, which flows west across its homeland to Basil, then north, forming the border between France and Germany. It wanders its way up through Düsseldorf, where it runs alongside the Meus, fresh from France and Belgium. Together they flow into the

Netherlands, where they join and break into numerous waterways, before finally emptying into the North Sea. This continuous barrage of water meant that the Dutch landscape was ever- changing, constantly sculpted and re-formed.

10 Patrick J. Geary, Before France and Germany: The Creation and Transformation of the Merovingian World (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988), 78.

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If water were a character in the story of Amsterdam, then it would likely be the antagonist. Long before the creation of the Amstel river from three different waterways (one that flowed in the opposite direction), the waters ran wild, making permanent settlements difficult.

There is a Dutch proverb which states that, “God created the world, but the Dutch created the

Netherlands.” 11 Or one might even say that on the third day of creation, when God separated the land from the sea, he simply forgot about the Netherlands. Admittedly, people did settle there.

The Romans made a go of it as far back as Julius Caesar and his conquest of the Gauls, and they remained there throughout the Germanic incursions across the limes, the porous Roman border along the Rhine. There was also a Merovingian and Carolingian occupation of the Netherlands, including settlements of Angles and Saxons, who blended with and became part of the southern

Frisians.12

Still, it was not until 1000 AD that people took a serious look at terraforming the soggy tip of Europe that would become Amsterdam. Farmers began by cutting and draining the massive peat mounds that had built up across the Netherlands. This was not a dramatic, semi-mythical event, as it was in 1703 when Peter the Great, he himself inspired by the Dutch, cut a swath of peat from the bank of the Gulf of Finland and declared that upon this bog he would build St.

Petersburg. Rather, the reshaping of Amsterdam was a gradual process, born of predicament and practicality. The first Hollanders found a way to dry the land by digging drainage ditches, which allowed water to flow out of the spongey peat, leaving behind a ground that was fertile and ripe for farming. They also used clay and tree trunks to strengthen and anchor the peat, making it

11 Fred Feddes, A Millennium of Amsterdam (Bussum: Thoth Publishers, 2012) , 9. 12 James C. Kennedy, A Concise History of the Netherlands (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017), 14-26.

19 possible to build wooden structures and dwellings.13 The first Amsterdam historian, Johannes

Pontanus, wrote in his 1614 history about, “the ground being completely lost in the forest.”14 The problem they discovered, was that when they dried the peat and reinforced it with timber, they unintentionally lowered their elevation, until many parts of Holland were at or below sea level, causing more water challenges to arise.

The early Dutch also realized that they could not solve their water problems individually.

If they were to live and farm in the Netherlands, they must do it together. So, between 1200 and

1250, they undertook a number of massive civil engineering projects, beginning with the creation of an expansive canal system, which dramatically improved drainage. The canals attacked the liberty of the water with a prejudice that changed the direction of the south Amstel, ensuring that all rivers in the Netherlands would forever flow north. This hubris of man versus nature gave birth to the modern Amstel river. Soon, two distinct parts of the city would emerge, separated by the river. The Kerk Zijde (Church Side) on the east bank, would become the Oude Zijde (Old side) by the fifteenth century; while the Molen Zijde (Windmill Side) on the west bank, would become the Nieuwe Zijde (New Side). These two sides can be seen, connected by the dam, in

Cornelius Anthonisz’s map, Bird’s Eye View of Amsterdam, painted in 1538 (Fig. 1).15

The second part of the project involved combining many smaller, local dikes into two longer ones: a northern and southern dike along the IJ (pronounced ‘aye’), an inlet of the Zuider

Zee which forms Amsterdam’s waterfront.16 These dikes would hold back the water and act as

13 Elisabeth de Bievre, Dutch Art and Urban Cultures, 1200-1700 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2015), 261. 14 Johannes Isacius Pontanus, Brieven van en ann Jo. Is. Pontanus 1591-1639, P.N. van Doorninck and P.C. Molhuysen eds. (Haarlem: 1909), 275. ‘Waar de grond omghekeert men soud int bosch verdwalen.’ 15 De Bievre, Dutch Art, 255. 16 Ibid, 259.

20

Figure 1. Cornelius Anthonisz, Bird’s Eye View of Amsterdam

sentinels to the land. The third project became their culminating event – the story’s denouement

– when sometime after 1250, the Medieval Hollanders built a dam along the Amstel. The dam was part of the dike system and served three crucial functions: it controlled drainage; separated the Amstel and the IJ, creating a shipping harbor; and it acted as a bridge to safely and

21 conveniently cross the strong waters of the Amstel.17 And last but not least, it facilitated the growth of a complex community with a dam at its center – a city that would henceforth be known as Amstelredamme.18

The German philosopher Helmuth Plessner observed that, “through the reclamation of the low-lying peat bogs, the construction of dikes around the land, and the regulation of the water,

[the Dutch] very early learned to act rationally as a group.”19 They not only learned to act rationally, they also became a model of the modern European state. While the rest of Europe was organized around the political and economic models of feudalism and manorialism, with land grants, fiefs, and vassal homage, the Netherlands took a different path. They were still technically part of the Holy Roman Empire; that loose federation of kingdoms which presided over most of Western Europe, and which Voltaire famously described as neither holy, Roman, nor an empire. But it was the water that insisted on a different approach to government and land ownership, flipping the feudal system on its head.

Just as the taming of the waters required all Dutch to work together, so keeping the waters at bay required them to govern together. The early Amsterdammers set up regulatory groups or water boards, Watterschappen, to oversee the daily maintenance and upgrades to the dams, dikes, mills, and polders – reclaimed land. They also created the extremely important position of Dijkraaft, or Dike Count, whose job it was to oversee all things water.20 These boards, which still exist today, exerted a great deal of influence on Dutch culture and

17 Feddes, Millenium, 28. 18 Russell Shorto, Amsterdam: A History of the World’s Most Liberal City (London: Abacus, 2013), 32. 19 Ernst Zahn, Das unbekannte Holland: Regenten, Rebellen und Reformatoren., (München: Goldmann, 1993), 41. 20 Shorto, Amsterdam, 48.

22 cooperation. In fact, it would not be an exaggeration to say that these ideas of individualism within a larger framework of communal well-being, created the liberalism and tolerance that would influence John Locke and Thomas Jefferson, among others. The Netherlands also became a quintessential borderland between powerful European states and served as a particularly inviting home for the Sephardic Jews of Spain and Portugal, as well as the Ashkenazic Jews of

Germany and Eastern Europe.

Still, aspects of feudalism remained part of Amsterdam’s social structure. The city was governed by four burgomasters, descendants of the early Lords of Amstel. They managed the city, along with a group of aldermen known as the schepenen. Technically, this was an elected body, but, as with the Holy Roman Emperors, they exclusively elected themselves. The burgomasters were also members of the merchant class and, as such, exercised the real power in the city – much more so than the bureaucratic aldermen.21 The city was also officially the purview of the Count of Holland, Amsterdam being the youngest of the five cities in his realm. 22

Yet as far as land ownership is concerned, while most of the land of Europe was held by the nobility and the clergy, only 5% of the Netherlands was owned by their nobility, while 45% was owned by the common folk.23

Without realizing it, through a constant struggle to reclaim the land from the water, the first Amsterdammers had created an early urban settlement on its way to becoming a mercantile oligarchy. Amsterdam would even, due to the restrictions of space, organize with other Dutch

21 Miriam Boden, Hebrews of the Portuguese Nation: Conversos and Community in Early Modern Amsterdam (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1997), 51. 22 De Bievre, Dutch Art, 265. 23 Shorto, Amsterdam, 49.

23 urban centers, to become a model of the network system of urban development.24 But that is a topic best left to the twentieth century. Medieval Amsterdam was still small and unremarkable, at least until three unlikely events changed its size and sphere of influence: a miracle, a fish, and a ship.

It began on an average Tuesday in March of 1345. An old man named Ysbrand Dommer lay sick in bed, asking for a priest to deliver the last rights, in case the end was near. The priest arrives and gives him the Eucharist in the sacrament of Holy Communion. Shortly thereafter, the man vomits into a basin, which the attending women dispose of by throwing it into the fire. In the morning, when Dommer’s daughter-in-law pokes the peat ash, she finds the wafer, whole and unburned. She immediately summons the priest, who attempts to quietly carry the wafer to St.

Nicholas Church, only to have it reappear in the man’s house. This happens several more times, each time with the wafer transporting itself back to the home. It is not until the clergy make a very public spectacle of transporting the Eucharist to the church that it remains there. 25 The bishop declares it an official miracle, and a new chapel is built on the site of the man’s house, or, more specifically, the Heilige Stede or Holy Fireplace. Later, this chapel would burn down twice

– each time with the Host emerging unscathed. Word spread of the indestructible communion wafer and its supposed healing properties, and soon all Medieval Europe was a buzz. Not surprisingly, the rights of patronage are quickly taken from the bishop by Albert, Count of

24 Paul M. Hohenberg and Lynn Hollen Lees, The Making of Urban Europe, 1000-1950 (Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 1985), 240-242. 25 Shorto, Amsterdam, 33.

24

Holland, whose son and heir presented a crown to the holy relic,26 ensuring Amsterdam’s future as a major pilgrim destination.

Travel in the fourteenth century was not like it is today. One didn’t simply pack up and go somewhere for the pleasure of experiencing something new. There typically needed to be a reason to go from point A to point B, and a religious pilgrimage was an excellent one. These were commonplace in the Middle Ages, and the sites of the shrines benefitted immensely from the pilgrims. It was a goldrush of sorts. Examples abound, such as the little village of

Niklashausen, near Nuremberg, Germany, where the young drummer boy, Hans Behem, saw visions of the Virgin Mary while tending his sheep. Soon, thousands of pilgrims a day where visiting the site, and Niklashausen was filling its coffers with tourist dollars. That is, until young

Hans began preaching against the vanities of the Catholic church and was burned at the stake.27

Amsterdam, like Niklashausen, grew and flourished under the healing powers of the

Miracle wafer. It was even rumored that Maximilian, the son of the Holy Roman Emperor and soon to be emperor himself, visited the site in 1489 and was healed of his ills. The economy boomed, the city grew, St Nicholas Church expanded to become a grand, gothic cathedral, and a new church (aptly named New Church) was built on the dam in the city center. Almost two dozen new monasteries and convents where built within and outside the city walls to accommodate the masses of religious travelers. Pontanus recorded the sight of “people coming from faraway places not only bringing pilgrimage and prayers, but above all gold and riches.”28

26 De Bievre, Dutch Art, 264. 27 Richard Wunderli, Peasant Fires: The Drummer of Niklashausen (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1992), 107-114. 28 Pontanus, Brieven 1614, 21.

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Their annual trek through the city to the shrine, the Stille Omgang, 29 became part of the sacred time in their ecclesiastical calendar.

Amsterdam became a center for piety, hope, healing, and prayer. Art works abounded, depicting the old man, the ejected wafer, and the penitent attendants and priests, all under the watchful eyes of angels and saints. Jacob Cornelisz van Oostsanen, for example, the first important Dutch artist whose works foreshadowed the famous Golden Age of the 17th Century, carved a popular depiction from wood in 1518, entitled, Amsterdam Miracle of the Host.30 (Fig.

2). The woodcutting displays the story, from regurgitation to revelation, and includes the city’s coat of arms with its three vertical St. Andrew’s Crosses, as well as the name of the city, lest anyone be confused about where to visit. Jacob Cornelisz was a prolific artist, and partnered with

Doen Pietersz, Amsterdam’s most prominent publisher and printer, to create and distribute works of art for the religious and secular markets, earmarking Amsterdam as an early center of printing.

Their studio filled a growing European need for imagery in virtually every genre and was teaming with assistants and students from all over the Netherlands.31 The benefits of having a tolerant Amsterdam as a prolific printing center were not lost on the Jews of Europe. When Pope

Julius III banned the Jewish Talmud in 1553 and ordered the burning of all existing copies,

Amsterdam became one of the only places in which a complete Talmud could be duplicated, thus keeping alive an underground distribution network feeding the Jewish communities throughout much of Europe.32

29 Shorto, Amsterdam, 34. 30 de Bievre, Dutch Art, 267. 31 De Bievre, Dutch Art, 268. 32 Adin Steinsaltz, The Essential Talmud (New York: Basic Books, 2006), 98.

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Figure 2. Jacob Cornelisz, Amsterdam Miracle of the Host.

While the city was profiting from the patronage of the penitent, another innovation occurred to further cement Amsterdam’s course to greatness. This event was less concerning the preservation of the soul and more about the preservation of the Netherlands’ favorite delicacy – the shoaling herring. This small, sleek, schooling fish had long been a Dutch staple. It was caught in the cold waters of the North Sea, where it was forced by nature to pack on extra fat, giving it a robust taste and an oily flesh. Of course, once the fish is caught, the clock starts ticking, and the fish must be gutted, brined, and consumed before it goes bad. But what if you could reset that clock? At some point in the late fourteenth century, an anonymous fisherman,

27 perhaps himself inspired by the miraculous Host, discovered that the little pouch inside the herring’s stomach, the pyloric caeca, did more than help the fish digest food. If it was kept inside the gutted fish, along with the pancreas, it greatly increased the amount of time that the fish could stay in the brine before being consumed – up to one year. And, as a bonus, it gave the fish more flavor when it was finally eaten.33

This may seem like a fairly innocuous discovery, but it unleashed a chain of events that would further bolster the fortunes of Amsterdam. To begin with, the heightened longevity of the catch meant that ships could go further from the coast and into deeper waters, where they could reap the harvest of rich herring schools and potentially bring back more slimy gold. But to do this, they would need better boats – ones that could ply the choppy waters of the North Sea and hold more men and more lightly salted (or ‘soused’) fish. In 1416, shipbuilders to the north of

Amsterdam did just that – they built a longer, stouter boat, with upgraded and expanded onboard facilities to process and pack larger catches. This eventually made the Netherlands the primary supplier of herring to northern Europe, from France to Scandinavia, and all the way to Russia.34

Keep in mind, that this innovation would not have been possible without the cooperation and single-mindedness of the Dutch, developed through the ongoing struggle with their environment. Shipbuilding is a costly venture, making investments necessary. Also, these

‘herring busses’ required not only more men, but more specialists, trained and equipped, to bring the fish back to shore, ready for market. Additionally, since their cargo was so valuable, the

Dutch found it necessary to build up their navy to patrol the fishing lanes and accompany their

33 Shorto, Amsterdam, 39. 34 Kennedy, History, 53.

28 herring busses when they were further out to sea. This expansion in shipyards and shipbuilding was a mechanism with many moving parts, the results of which could be seen in the traffic that built up in the IJ, Amsterdam’s harbor. One visiting merchant described it metaphorically as a

“forest of masts.”35 Additionally, an explosive growth in fishing required significant merchant involvement and a growing trade network. These merchants influenced the formation and function of government and created a burgeoning European market with Amsterdam at its center: trade not only in fish, but in cloth, wheat, rye, soap, and ships.

The merchant class of Amsterdam was open for business and would prove alluring to a new group of people, recently expelled from their homelands in Spain and Portugal– people who would become known as the Portuguese Jews. This would not happen, however, for more than a century. During this time, The Dutch would suffer through an eighty-year war of independence from Catholic Spain. They would endure the clutches of the Spanish Holy Roman Emperor,

Philip II, and his notorious inquisitor, Pieter Titelmans. The citizens of Amsterdam would resist, forming a rebellion that, in a self-deprecating manner, referred to itself as the Order of the

Beggars. Angry protestant crowds erupted in various uprisings, bent on destroying Catholic property and icons, and bringing down the wrath of the Spanish army.

At the same time that the Dutch were fighting for religious freedom, Amsterdammers imprisoned and executed groups of fellow Protestants – exuberant Anabaptists, who took to marching naked in the streets, demanding that all Dutch Christians throw off their worldly possessions (including, apparently, their clothing), and embrace the acetic Anabaptist lifestyle. In

May of 1535, the Anabaptists laid siege to the town hall and murdered a burgomaster and several

35 Shorto, Amsterdam, 106.

29 others, before being subdued, tortured, and executed.36 This scene was depicted in wood by

Barend Dircksz, ‘the Deaf,’ entitled Wederdopersoproer (Anabaptist Riot). It was kept on display well into the seventeenth century, as a warning against religious deviation and anti-social behavior (Fig. 3).37

Figure 3. Barend Dircksz, Wederdopersoproer.

36Daniel M. Swetschinski, The Middle Ages to the Golden Age, 1516-1621 in The History of the Jews in the Netherlands eds. J.C.H. Blom, R.G. Fuks-Mansfeld, and I. Schöffer (Oxford: The Littman Library of Jewish Civilization, 2002), 78. 37 De Bievre, Dutch Art, 274.

30

They also withstood the onslaughts of the ever-efficient Fernando Alvarez de Toledo, known simply as the Duke of Alba, as he relentlessly laid siege to the Dutch provinces, slaughtering all who dared to challenge the absolute authority of the Pope and the Spanish king.

Finally, with the Union of Utrecht, drafted in the 1560s and recognized by Spain in 1609 (mostly because of their dire financial situation), the seven northern provinces became an independent

Protestant state. Perhaps more importantly, they made a statement about religious tolerance, long before the end of the Thirty-Years’ War, which resonated with such notions as, “each person shall remain free, especially in his religion.” 38 Understandably, this brought religious refugees, including a substantial number of Jews, across their borders to settle in Holland.

For the Jews of Western Europe, this was a tenuous time. The very picture of the Jewish diaspora is that of a people expelled from their homeland and wandering the Earth in search of a place to settle and live their lives according to their traditions and conscience. The truth about

European history is that even when the Jews did find a home, it was often temporary. In 1290 they were expelled from England, and then from France in 1306 and 1394. The Jews of Trier were forced to leave their homes in 1418, and Cologne expelled them in 1424. The difference among these expulsions is that the rulers of France and England signed the expulsion notices, but in Trier and Cologne, the people themselves pushed them out.39 Violence against Jews was commonplace in early Europe. The charges against them ran the gamut: they were killers of

Christ, haters of the Virgin Mary, desecrators of the host, murderers of Christian children in

38 Jonathon Israel, The Dutch Republic: Its Rise, Greatness, and Fall, 1477-1806 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), 184-96. 39 B.M.J. Speet, “The Middle Ages” in The History of the Jews in the Netherlands, eds. J.C.H. Blom, R.G. Fuks- Mansfeld, and I. Schöffer (Oxford: The Littman Library of Jewish Civilization, 2002), 26.

31 ritual sacrifice, poisoners of Christian wells, polluters of Christian innocence and moral fortitude, and usurpers of Christian wages.

In 1370, around the same time that Amsterdam was experiencing the spiritual and economic windfall from its Eucharistic miracle, a different story involving the Catholic Host was taking place in Brussels. The word spread that several “perfidious Jews” had persuaded a convert to Christianity to smuggle out a handful of sacramental wafers, so they could be ritually desecrated. The woman complied, but was stricken with remorse, and reported the exchange to the authorities, who found the Jewish men bent over a table, stabbing the bleeding host. All of

Brussels’ Jews were then rounded up, given a hurried trial, and “burned to dust, those wicked, evil Jews, as was their just dessert.”40 This story was recorded in the fifteenth-century canticle,

Van den Heilighen Sacramente (On the Holy Sacrament), which begins with the declaration,

“Arms I call down upon the Jews! Foul Murder they have done. They have bought Our Lord’s body from Judas’ brother…” The canticle goes on to record that 900 Jews lost their lives as a result of these accusations. 41

Fabrications such as this served numerous functions: they legitimized anti-Semitic sentiment and actions, placed Jews in a compromised social position regardless of their behavior, fueled the fire for pogroms and mass killings and, ultimately, acted as a public proof for such

Catholic beliefs as transubstantiation. Why else would the wafers bleed if they were not the actual body of Christ? Furthermore, the ‘wicked Jews’ must have known them to be the body of

Christ, otherwise, why go through the hassle of murdering them? Following this logic to its

40 Speet, Middle Ages, 37. 41 Ibid, 36.

32 conclusion, this must be proof that the Jew of Europe really did believe the truth of Christianity and, as Martin Luther surmised, only failed to convert out of stubbornness and sin.42

In point of fact, many European Jews did convert to Christianity, especially in Spain and

Portugal, whose governments expelled their longstanding Jewish communities in 1492 and 1497, respectively. In order to stay in their homes or buy themselves time, and often through compulsion and fear, many Jews became Conversos. Actually, many Spanish Jews had already converted through almost a century of social pressure, and often at the tip of the sword, to accept baptism or face the consequences. As it turns out, through these forced conversions, Spanish and

Portuguese New Christians found a unique door of economic opportunity opened to them that they had not previously enjoyed.43 This never set well with the Spanish authorities, who were fairly convinced that most of these conversions were faked, and the individuals were living as

Marranos, or “crypto-Jew.”

They were baptized into the Catholic church. They took Christian names and lived within

Christian society, they wore religious symbols and crossed themselves appropriately – but late at night, behind closed doors and thick curtains, the crucifixes came off, the Talmud came out, and they practiced Judaism to their heart’s delight. The German scholar Carl Gebhardt described the

Marrano as, “a Catholic without faith and a Jew without knowledge.”44 Concern over this practice was the genesis of the infamous Spanish Inquisition in 1480, and the Portuguese

42 See Martin Luther, On the Jews and Their Lies (1543), part 11. 43 Swetschinski, History of the Jews, 48-52. 44 H.A. Krop, “Spinozism and Dutch Jewry between 1880 and 1940,” in Dutch Jewry in a Cultural Maelstrom: 1880-1940, Judith Frishman, ed. (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2008), 108.

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Inquisition in 1536.45 Their missions were to ferret out the insincere New Christians, force them to confess their treachery, and mercifully send them back to God for judgement.

These same Portuguese New Christians began arriving in Amsterdam in the late sixteenth century. With de jure religious toleration spelled out in the Union of Utrecht, most of these

Conversos began converting back to Judaism, albeit slowly at first. You can hardly blame them, having lived much of their lives under the watchful eye of the Inquisition. One sixty-year-old

New Christian, for example, successfully defended himself in an Amsterdam court against a charge of theft in 1603, and revealed at that time that he had secretly returned to Judaism several years before and was currently a Rabbi, leading a small Jewish community.46 When it became clear that the Dutch authorities would abide by their concept of toleration, more and more immigrants identified themselves once again as Jews.

For many of them, Judaism was a distant memory. Not only were they unfamiliar with the daily adherence to Jewish law, they had all but forgotten how to study Torah, or even keep the Shabbat. Yet still they returned, as distant relatives to a long-awaited reunion. Shortly after

1610, Amsterdam had three separate Kehilot, or small congregations, and were already beginning plans on a single place of worship for the Portuguese Jews. By 1639, the Sephardic community was known as the Kahal Kados de Talmud Tora, which, loosely translated, means elevated community of Talmud and Torah. They also began plans for construction on a new, grand synagogue, which would open in 1675 as the Esnoga – the Portuguese Synagogue.47

45 Daniel M. Swetschinski, Reluctant Cosmopolitans: The Portuguese Jews of Seventeenth-Century Amsterdam (Oxford: The Littman Library of Jewish Civilization, 2000), 4. 46 Swetschinski History of the Jews, 66. 47 Swetschinksi, Cosmopolitans, 5.

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At the same time, in the 1630s, Ashkenazic Jews from Eastern Europe began to arrive through Germany and into Amsterdam. By 1675, at the dedication of the Esnoga, there were

2,500 Sephardim and 5,000 Ashkenazim living in Amsterdam – by 1795, that number had grown to 5,000 and 19,000 respectively.48 Their chief difference was not population or country of origin, nor was it how they defined and expressed their religion – their chief difference was culture. The Ashkenazim spoke Yiddish, along with German, Polish, or any number of Eastern

European languages. They were much more culturally diverse and, on the whole, poorly educated. They were easily recognizable by their dress and appearance and the way in which they interacted with non-Jewish residents and burghers.49 Many of them were laborers, which was a hit-or-miss industry in Amsterdam – the city did at times have an advertised shortage of labor, which encouraged more immigration. But at the same time, guild membership was required for many jobs, and guilds were firmly closed to Jews. Therefore, the Ashkenazim, many of whom had already lived most of their lives in poverty, became some of the poorest residents of the city.

By contrast, the Sephardim spoke Ladino and Portuguese. Ladino was a dialect of early

Spanish, with elements of Hebrew; it was a distinctly Jewish language, spoken as far away as

Istanbul and Salonika. They also represented a smaller, more homogenous group, many of whom benefitted from the legendary scholarship of the Spanish Jews, prior to their expulsion. Many of the Portuguese Jews took their places in the merchant class and where recognized by the

48 Bob Moore, Victims and Survivors: The Persecution of the Jews in the Netherlands, 1940-1945, (London: Arnold, 1997), 20. 49 At this time, Amsterdam did not have a modern concept of citizenship. You lived there, or you did not. If you met certain criteria and were willing to pay the fee, you could become a burgher, the social class from which city officials were typically drawn.

35 important role they could play in the city’s economy. They assimilated faster, and were often embarrassed by the quaint, rural ways and traditional customs of the Ashkenazim. As a result, the two communities largely ignored one another. They built separate places of worship and pursued divergent paths. By the end of the eighteenth century, the Sephardim had weathered economic ups and downs, proven themselves to be completely Dutch, and had become wealthy, politically connected members of Amsterdam society.50

He was born in 1632, the son of Portuguese immigrants to Amsterdam. They named him

Baruch, which means ‘blessed.’ He was a bright boy, obedient and well-liked. He respected his parents. When he started school at the yeshiva, it was clear that he had promise, and after a few years, he was being singled out as exceptional. He studied with the chief rabbi of Amsterdam,

Rabbi Morteira, an Ashkenazic scholar from Vienna, as well as a myriad of visiting rabbis from across Europe. Rabbi Morteira told the other yeshiva teachers that he was as impressed with

Baruch’s character as he was with his mind. How could a young man be so adroit and so modest at the same time? Truly he was well named, for he must be blessed. People were even starting to use the term Talmid Khokhem, a gifted scholar destined to do great things in the community.

Surely this young son of a Marrano fruit seller would one day receive smikha, the rabbinic ordination, and then who knows – chief rabbi? 51

Then, as a teenager, Baruch dropped out of the yeshiva and began working for his father.

Perhaps he felt like he had come far enough and could go no further under the tutelage of Rabbi

Morteira, or maybe he just needed time to think – time to work out his proofs on the essence of

50 Moore, Victims, 21. 51 Rebecca Newberger Goldstein, Betraying Spinoza: The Renegade Jew who Gave Us Modernity (New York: Schocken Books, 2006), 21-36.

36

God and His role in human history. When pressed, he would talk about his views to his former classmates, and word of his strange philosophy began to circulate throughout the Sephardic community. Didn’t Maimonides, in his Thirteen Articles of faith, say that God is non-corporeal – having no body – and that through the resurrection of the dead, human beings will face judgement? Yet Baruch is saying that God is made of matter like us, and that human beings do not have a soul. If this is true, then how can we experience the olam haba, the world to come, in which we will be held to account for our actions? And did he really say that the Torah was not written by Moses and that, because of what he calls the “Infinite Intellect of God,” Ha-Shem did not really choose the Jews as His people? 52

At this point, Baruch Spinoza was not known to the world as anything but an Amsterdam yeshiva dropout. He had not yet completed and published his Tractus Theologico-Politicus

(Treaty on Theology and Politics), which would, in many ways, define modernity. He certainly hadn’t catalogued his myriad of thoughts and assembled them into The Ethics, which would become his masterpiece. The Ethics, which would profoundly influence his contemporaries;

Leibniz, Huygens, and Locke. The Ethics, which would be debated ad nauseum throughout the

Enlightenment, and would continue to have modern applications in string theory and neurobiology. The Ethics, which gave Spinoza’s, “complete description of humanity, of nature, of the world, and of God,”53 and made, “all the claims for reason that have ever been made.”54

Still, with just the circulation of his basic ideas, the twenty-three-year-old Baruch was brought before the Parnassim, the governing body of the Portuguese Jews, and put into kherem –

52 Goldstein, Spinoza, 31. 53 Roger Scruton, A Short History of Modern Philosophy (New York Routledge, 1995), 66. 54 Goldstein, Spinoza, 6.

37 excommunication. This was not, in itself, unusual. People could easily be excommunicated for a variety of khayt, or transgressions, and it was usually delivered along with the way back: t’shuva, or repentance. Often, the excommunication was only for days or weeks, for such infractions as not diligently observing dietary laws, failing to correctly observe the Shabbat, or cheating someone in business. A person could even find himself in kherem for inadvertently putting a

Marrano family, still living under control of the Inquisition, at risk of being exposed.55

Or, it could be about some doctrinal issue, such as when Uriel da Costa, a converso and

Catholic church official, had become convinced that Judaism was the true religion, and immigrated to Amsterdam. He whole-heartedly embraced the Torah but would not recognize the

Talmud – the Mishna or Oral Law taught by Moses, or the Gemora – commentary on the Mishna by centuries of Rabbis, as being revelation from God. For da Costa, this was too reminiscent of the body of Catholic doctrine rejected by Martin Luther as being apart from scripture. Da Costa was excommunicated twice and allowed to return each time, even after a scathing response to the

Parnassim: “I would like you [synagogue elders] to answer one question: if these groundless fears which you instill in the minds of men are contrived to restrain their natural inclination to evil and to keep them from going astray, did it never occur to you that you then likewise are full of malice…without compassion or mercy?”56 Clearly da Costa’s issues, regardless of how heart- felt, were ones that could be dealt with entirely within the Jewish community. They had no bearing on the Christians of Amsterdam, nor would they place the greater community at risk.

55 Swetchinski, Cosmopolitans, 225. 56 Ibid.

38

For Spinoza, the excommunication was permanent, with no hope of returning. His khayt were too egregious and would even have been considered heretical by non-Jewish

Amsterdammers. I suspect this was at least part of the reason for his strict sentencing. The Jews of Amsterdam had been living there quietly and cooperatively for only half a century and were expected by the burgomasters to adhere to Jewish Orthodoxy, as this was also the bedrock of

Christianity. To have someone in their community espouse such alleged ideas as God and nature being one and the same would reflect suspicion upon all of them, and possibly even lead to violence. Everyone remembered the Anabaptists, after all.

Spinoza seemed unphased. He accepted his sentence, moved away from Amsterdam, and started referring to himself as Benedict, rather than Baruch. He began grinding lenses for a living, and soon established a reputation for producing optics of unmatched quality, all-the-while gathering a loyal following of disciples, who spent their time struggling to understand his teachings. It is perhaps important to note that excommunication in Judaism is different from

Catholicism in that you are not excommunicated from the entire religion, but only from a certain community. Spinoza could have joined another synagogue in another city, but he did not, nor did he convert to Christianity. So what was Benedict Spinoza? Was he still Jewish? He was not, after all, an atheist in the strict sense. Was he something else? Ultimately, Spinoza defies labels. He hated all controversy, avoided personal quarrels, wore a signet ring inscribed with the Latin word caude (“cautiously”)57, and, in the end, was content to remain simply Benedict.

The question at the heart of almost any discussion concerning this famous

Amsterdammer is not about his natural genius or his contributions to philosophy. Rather, the

57 Goldstein, Spinoza, 8.

39 question is one of identity. If a Jewish philosopher advocates a point of view that is completely contrary to the basic tenants of Judaism, is he still considered a Jew? What does it mean, exactly, to be Jewish? This question of identity was essential to the Amsterdam community, who had so recently lived under the harsh gaze of the Inquisition, and the question would crawl to the surface again under the austere classifications of the Holocaust. Is Jewishness solely a matter of biology as Hitler would have us believe, with his Nazi policies of “race and blood?” If it is only an inherited trait, at what point does the child of mixed ancestry cease to be Jewish? And what about the convert to Judaism, such as Ruth, the great-grandmother of King David? Or should it be defined by a strict adherence to Halakah, or Jewish law? In this case, must a Jewish thinker always be within the orthodoxy of belief to make a claim of Jewishness? If so, at what point are they no longer Jewish, and is it then even possible to be a Jewish thinker outside the small circle of religion? Certainly, Spinoza crossed almost every doctrinal line that can be drawn, his writings even giving Kant the opportunity to define Judaism as a religion without religion.

Spinoza’s Tractus argued for a separation of religion from the state, through which Kant, in an intentionally narrowly reading, interpreted Judaism as merely a type of politics.58

Emil Fackenheim said that, “nothing so powerfully makes a philosopher Jewish as

Torah,”59 and on thinkers like Franz Rosenzweig, Martin Buber, or Emmanuel Levinas, who are more in line with Jewish precepts, the title of Jewish philosopher is easy to confer. But what about the neo-Kantian philosopher Hermann Cohen, who argued for reason as the approach to

God, and reduced the Messiah to a simple ‘messianic idea,’ applicable across the field of

58 Michael Mack, German Idealism and the Jew: The Inner Anti-Semitism of Philosophy and German Jewish Responses (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003), 23. 59 David Patterson, Emil L. Fackenheim: A Jewish Philosopher’s Response to the Holocaust (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2008), 147.

40 philosophy and religion? Or even Moses Mendelssohn, who adapted Spinoza’s radical ideas concerning the authorship of the Torah to posit that Moses had meant the Torah to be less of a universally valid revelation and more of a “context-specific form of action.”60 Heinrich Heine suggested that, “As Luther had overthrown the Papacy, so Mendelssohn overthrew the

Talmud…”61 This begs the question, then: was Mendelssohn a Jew? Clearly, the answer does not lie in Jewish thought alone. In other words, as Fackenheim might say, just because a Jew has a thought, it does not make that a Jewish thought.

Perhaps the answer is in how the individual himself defines Jewishness. Spinoza apparently struggled with this problem and, as philosopher Rebecca Newberger Goldstein suggests, the fact that he did wrestle with the question is enough to make a claim for Jewishness.

“Perhaps, too, the sense of an intense, if covert, conflict over the issue of Jewish identity provides at least part of the explanation of why generations of Jews have felt a mysterious kinship with this philosopher whose system would seem, on the surface, to offer no special meaning or message for Jews.”62 This is the point of view that seems to have prevailed throughout the Haskalah, or Jewish Enlightenment, and into the 1920s and ‘30s, when many

Amsterdam Jews hailed the works of Spinoza, and embraced his Philosophy as Jewish. I. Kisch, for example, writing in the 1932 Dutch Jewish periodical, Ha’Ischa, affirmed Spinoza’s

Jewishness. “We do not require improbable proof that his work might contain the essence of the

Jewish Faith, or that it was written as only a Jew would have done. In Spinoza we pay respect to…the fellow-Jew, because the child Baruch had been the son of Hanna Debora and Michael de

60 Mack, Idealism, 81. 61 Heinrich Heine, Heinrich Heine: The Romantic School and Other Essays (New York: Continuum, 2002), 193. 62 Goldstein, Spinoza, 14-15.

41

Spinoza.”63 It would be a mistake, in my opinion, to infer that Kisch was reducing Jewishness to mere biology. He was saying that, regardless of Spinoza’s philosophy, as a human person he was still a Jew, and for that reason was connected by culture to a larger Jewish community.

In the context of Jewish Amsterdam, particularly as we examine their religious and social networks in the next chapter, perhaps the answer lies not in biology or in orthodoxy, but in culture. As Walter Benn Michaels suggests,

Many of those who think of themselves as Jews do not think that they are Jews because they have Jewish blood. For them, as for many members of other races (so called), cultural inheritance takes the place of biological inheritance. And many of those who think of themselves as Jews do not think that they are Jews because they believe in Judaism. But by redescribing certain practices that might be called religious (circumcision, for example) as cultural, Jewishness can sever their connection to Judaism, enabling Jews to give up their belief in Jewish blood and their belief in a Jewish God while still remaining Jewish. What they can’t give up is Jewish culture.64

Amsterdammers became the most acculturated Jews in Europe, and while many were not the most religiously observant, oftentimes not associating with the practice of Judaism at all, they were overwhelmingly still connected to one another through bonds of culture. These bonds developed and grew from separate Sephardic and Ashkenazi communities, oftentimes at odds with each other, yet each with the synagogue at its center, from which religious devotion, family strength, and distinctly Jewish social networks flowed.

63 Krop, Spinozism, 107. 64 Walter Benn Michaels, The Shape of the Signifier: 1967 to the End of History, (Princeton, Princeton University Press, 2003), 147.

42

CHAPTER 2 JEWISH AMSTERDAM

My eyes now gaze on Amsterdam before me, And I am free of the pit and of so many enemies. A worthy and divine analogy, My spirit recognized the evidence That he who puts his faith in you finds you; In your infinite and holy Providence Protection sought is found, If sought with just and proper reverence.

- David Jesurun (the ‘Child Poet’), seventeenth century

What began as a soggy fishing village, walled off by water and propped up by timber and tenacity, became one of the most important seaports in the world. It had a simple and sweeping design: clusters of straight-faced homes built around grand buildings, laced throughout with canals and harbors, beckoning to merchants and laborers alike. Amsterdam’s magnificent Ring

Canals, a creation of the seventeenth century, were designed to accommodate its rapid and bursting urban growth. Trade networks were growing, along with the military and the ubiquitous colonial interests of the day (including the 1624 settlement of New Amsterdam on modern day

Manhattan).65 The views of Amsterdam from both canal and land gave the illusion of one single, captivating entity. This was due, in part, to “the magic of the geometry, the connecting presence of the water, the alteration of wide and narrow open and closed spaces, the rhythm of the quays and bridges, the cadence of the facades.”66

65 Kennedy, History, 176-177. It is interesting to note, that despite unusually liberal religious freedoms in Amsterdam, the governors of New Amsterdam did their best to restrict the religious practices of Jews, Quakers, and Lutherans. 66 Feddes, Millenium, 75.

43

The newly established Jewish community referred to Amsterdam as Mokum, a Yiddish term derived from the Hebrew word Makom, meaning ‘place.’67 It is significant to note that

Makom is also one of the Hebrew names of God, particularly when used in the Mitzvot of

Shabbat and kashrut (observance of Kosher dietary laws). In fact, the Midrash (Bereishit Rabbah

68:5) describes God as the Place of the world, and immanent in all places. This was it for them, then – Mokum – the place, spiritually and physically. It was a home, somewhere to be who they really were, without the fear of ostracization, torture, or death. The motives behind exactly why the Burgomasters and people of Amsterdam chose to be a welcoming community, when this was far from the norm at the time, are unclear. It is possible that their history of individualism amid large-scale collaboration, alongside a tradition of Renaissance humanism left by Desiderius

Erasmus among others, made opening their doors to a community in need a natural thing to do. It is also possible that since the Catholic church had worked tirelessly to eject and persecute the

Jews of Western Europe, and the Dutch Republic was decidedly and militantly Protestant, there may have been an incentive to demonstrate how un-Catholic they were. But whatever the case, their motivation was likely as much economic as it was altruistic. Many of the Portuguese Jews were talented, wealthy merchants, and the booming Amsterdam economy needed fresh input to insure economic prosperity. It was symbiosis.

The Amsterdam bureaucracy didn’t warm to the Jews immediately, of course. In 1608, they were denied a permit to buy land on which to build a cemetery inside the city68, and even the right to practice their own religion was de facto until 1612. There is a story from Daniel Levy

67 Robin Ostow “Mokum is Home: Amsterdam’s Jewish Historical Museum” in European Judaism vol 38, no. 2, Autumn, 2005, 43. 68 Swetschinski, Cosmopolitans, 11.

44 de Barrios in 1684, that recounts a Yom Kippur service in 1595. When the small congregation had reached the Ne’ilah, the climactic final prayer, they were interrupted by the “rigorous police of Amsterdam,” who, believing them to be Catholics, proceeded to arrest them and demand their religious paraphernalia. What they found instead were books in Hebrew – at which point they realized these were Jews and not Catholics. As the story goes, the police asked the community to pray to the God of Israel for the government of Amsterdam, and they declared on the spot that

Judaism could be practiced openly in their city. 69 As early accounts go, the details are fuzzy and blend with other stories, and it is unclear whether the rabbi was Moses Uri Halevi from the

German town of Emden, or Jacob Tirado, who led a local minyan (prayer meeting). What we do know, is that the group’s rabbi and his son were, in fact, jailed and charged with committing adult circumcision – an obviously Jewish crime. According to Halevi’s account, he presented his case to the burgomasters in the following way:

It is true that we did what you said we did [circumcise people in the practice of Judaism], but it was done for the profit and benefit of this city of Amsterdam so as to let it share in a large trade…we did it here so that it might share in large maritime trade activities, for these Spaniards carried large sums of money and riches with them; if the burgomasters see fit to grant these Spaniards the freedom to live here, we assure them that within one year there will be more than fifty families of this Spanish and Portuguese nation with large capital resources, who would make Amsterdam the leading commercial city of Europe.70

Halevi’s memory may be somewhat biased, but the charges were in fact dismissed, and the rabbi and his son were sent home to practice their religion with the Burgomasters’ blessings.

This small congregation congealed into three over the next several decades. When the carnage of the Thirty-Years’ War in the 1620s caused a spike in immigration of Ashkenazic Jews

69 Bodian, Hebrews, 22. 70 Swetschinski, Cosmopolitans, 168.

45 from Germany and Poland, the three Sephardic congregations found it necessary to create a more distinct Portuguese community and establish one governing body who would build the Esnoga – the Portuguese synagogue, that in 1675 was the largest in Europe. To accomplish this, they relied on the leadership and example of the Sephardic community of Venice, which had already intervened in previous disputes. They had already established parnasim – small governing bodies from the congregation – and they now sought to merge those into one legislative and administrative unit. This merger was fraught with difficulty from the beginning, as each of the three bodies wanted credit for the merger, which they could then use as leverage over the other two. According to an eighteenth-century chronicle by David Franco Mendes, Rabbi David Pardo thought to deliver a separate copy of the merger agreement to each congregation at the same time, so each would sign, thinking themselves to be the first.71 The documents were also signed by every head of household and unanimously approved. Five members of each parnasim then formed a fifteen-person voting body who, like the Venetian Sephardim, elected a seven-member

Mahamad, which would elect future members, and control virtually every aspect of religious and civic life among the Portuguese Jews.

The Ashkenazi experience was quite different. They came to Amsterdam much like their

Portuguese neighbors had, in search of safety and the promise of a better life. Yet, while the

Sephardic Amsterdammers routinely assisted Jewish communities living elsewhere in Europe, they hesitated when the needy came flooding into their own city. They were bound by Jewish law to help, and they did take new immigrants into their communities. They tended to their needs, but kept them at arm’s length, hoping to usher them on as soon as possible to other

71 Bodian, Hebrews, 51.

46 destinations, beyond the Netherlands.72 For example, while the Ashkenazim were initially allowed to worship at Sephardic synagogues, they could not become members. They could also bury their dead in the Jewish Ouderkerk Cemetary, but only in the section designated for ‘other nations.’73 Most of these new immigrants were from Germany, Poland, the Ukraine, and what would later become the Jewish Autonomous Region of the Soviet Union, yet the Portuguese referred to them all as Tudescos, a Spanish form of the Venetian Tedeschi, meaning German.

Having received this compulsory assistance, most of the newly arrived Tudescos who chose to stay, settled into the lowest level of Amsterdam society. For many, it was what they knew from their home countries as well. They were peddlers, beggars, laborers, and sometimes thieves. These were seen by the Portuguese as the “shame-faced poor” – those for whom poverty had become a way of life (Fig. 4). There were poor among the Sephardic community as well, of course, but they saw this as a temporary setback, not a permanent culture, and pride would not allow many to accept charity. An example of this can be found in the Santa Companhia de Dotar

Orphas e Donzelas (Holy Brotherhood for the Endowment of Orphans and Maidens), or Dotar for short. This organization, which was also modeled from the Venetian Dotar, was essentially a dowry society, providing young women with what they would need to obtain a proper marriage, when they had no dowry to offer. A 1941 periodical from the Jewish Council mentioned that needy Sephardic girls received relatively large dowries from the Dotar. 74 Yet, according to their own records, these donations were frequently declined by socially-conscious fathers who viewed

72 Herbert Bloom, The Economic Activities of the Jews of Amsterdam in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries, (Williamsport: The Bayard Press, 1937), 25-26. 73 The Sephardic community eventually helped the Ashkenazim purchase a plot of land for their own cemetery, freeing the Sephardim to deny them burial rights from that point on. 74 Selma Leydesdorff, We Lived with Dignity: The Jewish Proletariat of Amsterdam, 1900-1940, (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1994), 40.

47 any charity as an insult, even to the point of denying their own daughters a proper wedding.75

They were not, after all, among the shame-faced poor.

Figure 4. Jan Voerman Sr, A Cloth Merchant in the Jewish Quarter, Amsterdam, circa 1883.

75 Bodian, Hebrews, 126.

48

For the next several centuries, Amsterdam’s two Jewish cultures continued to push each other away. The Portuguese Mahamad snubbed and berated the Ashkenazim for their appearance, behavior, and apparent vices, prohibiting inter-marriage with them, and denying children of these inevitable unions membership in the Talmud Torah. At the same time, the

Ashkenazim built their own synagogues, sustained their own customs of speech and dress, grew far beyond the Sephardim in numbers, and tried their best to wriggle into whatever layers of

Dutch society available to them. They also settled alongside their Portuguese brethren in the

Jewish Quarter, albeit in the old, working-class sections. Theirs were not the grand homes on

Breestraat, but rather the slums of Marken, Rapenburg, an Uilenburg. A city planner named N.

Redeker Bisdon, who proposed sweeping changes to the Amsterdam infrastructure in 1865, described them this way:

The grime and filth prevailing in Marken, Uilenberg, and bordering neighborhoods are probably not surpassed in any other place on earth…We do not wish to blame the inhabitants for this evil; rather, we believe that the cause lies in the narrowness of the alleys and passageways, as well as the cramped, poorly organized housing. Moreover, this evil stems in part also from the nature of the work of the inhabitants, most of whom ply their trade in the public streets, despite the fact that a handcart can scarcely pass along the main thoroughfares…The inhabitants are forced to carry out their work in the streets because their homes are too cramped.”76

The streets were much wider one block over, on Breestraat and Sint-Anthonisbreestraat.

They could hold more than pedestrians and handcarts, and there one would routinely see large, horse-drawn carriages parked in front of stately homes. The Portuguese living there had a much longer and storied history with the Jewish Quarter. In the 1650s, Daniel Pinto owned the house at

No. 2 Breestraaat, as well as No. 4, which he rented to Rembrandt van Rijn. Rembrandt was

76 Leydesdorff, Dignity, 38.

49 already well-known as a brilliant painter, but was a less-than-reliable renter, whose finances never seemed to be in order. Across the street, Isaac de Pinto lived in an immense home, taking up Nos. 7 and 9, while one block down lived Miguel de Spinoza with his young son Baruch.

Rabbi Saul Levi Mortera, lived just across the sluis from Daniel Pinto, and Rabbi Manasseh ben

Israel, possibly the most famous Jew in Europe, lived just a short distance away, on Nieuwe

Houtgracht.77 Manasseh ben Israel’s contribution to Seventeenth-Century Jews cannot be overstated. He became a mediator of sorts between Christian Europe and diaspora Jewry, in many ways defining European Jewish culture on the road to modernity. He petitioned Oliver

Cromwell to re-admit Jews into the United Kingdom Commonwealth (including America) after the English Civil War and worked closely on many projects with Rembrandt – each helping the other gain a certain prestige, while communicating a common message to the Christian world.78

Breestraat housed another Isaac de Pinto a century later, a wealthy director of the Dutch

East India Trading Company, who would argue for Jewish intellectualism during the Eighteenth- century enlightenment against none other than Voltaire himself. The chief concern and point of criticism in Voltaire’s writings had always been intolerance. He was in fact the “enemy of prejudices,”79 and yet he was less than kind in his assessment of European Jews. In fact, it had become commonplace within the Republic of Letters to misinterpret and brashly criticize Jewish learning and culture, in order to set it apart from “Enlightened society.”80 De Pinto took Voltaire

77 Stephen Nadler, Rembrandt’s Jews, (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003), 15. 78 Michael Zell, Reframing Rembrandt: Jews and the Christian Image in Seventeenth-Century Amsterdam, (Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2002), 58-59. 79 Isaac de Pinto. Letter of Certain Portuguese Jews, with Critical Reflexions, of the Works of Mr. de Voltaire, with Respect to the Jews, 1762, 33. 80 Adam Sutcliffe, “Can a Jew Be a Philosophe? Isaac de Pinto, Voltaire, and Jewish Participation in the European Enlightenment,” in Jewish Social Studies, Vol. 6, No.3, Spring/Summer 2000, 32.

50 to task on this, and did elicit an apology of sorts, with his 1762 Critical Reflections on the First

Chapter of the Seventh Volume of Mr. de Voltaire’s Works. Ironically, one of de Pinto’s main arguments for the inclusion of Sephardic Jews into the ranks of European philosophes, was how different they were from the Ashkenazim.

If Mr. de Voltaire had acted according to that Principle of sound Reason, which he affects to do, he would have begun by distinguishing from the other Jews the Spanish and the Portuguese, who never have been mixed or incorporated with the Crowd of the other Sons of Jacob…He has been in Holland, and knows that they have separate Synagogues, and that although they profess the same Religion and Articles of Faith, yet their Ceremonies have often no resemblance: The Manners of the Portuguese Jews are also very different from those of the rest: The former have no Beards, nor any thing peculiar in their dress. The Rich among them vie with the other Nations of Europe in Refinement, Elegance and Show; and differ from them in Worship only. Their Variance with their other Brethren is such a height, that if a Portuguese Jew in England or Holland married a German Jewess, he would of course lose all his Prerogatives, be no longer reckoned a Member of their Synagogue, forfeit all civil and ecclesiastical Preferments, be absolutely divorced from the Body of the Nation, and not even buried with his Portuguese Brethren…81

Regardless of the tenuous ethics in this argument, it was the truth from de Pinto’s point of view. It was also likely a foreshadowing of the assimilation that Amsterdam’s Jews enjoyed on the eve of the German invasion of 1940, and it was this very level of comfort that blinded many to the dangers of the Nazi occupation. Even in Isaac de Pinto’s time, most Portuguese Jews were virtually indistinguishable from Dutch burghers of the day. Their hairstyles, clothing, and speech patterns blended seamlessly. Even their names changed, at least when conducting business, so that a Josef de los Rios might become Michel van der Riveren, or a Luis de Mercado might be known among merchants as Louis van der Markt.82 Ironically, these name changes would present

81 Isaac de Pinto, Letter, 35. 82 Nadler, Rembrandt, 16.

51 somewhat of a challenge to a later Nazi administration set on identifying all Jews, assimilated or not, for deportation and destruction.

Still, for the eighteenth-century Jews of the Netherlands, it was a time of physical and financial growth, bookended by great wealth and abject poverty. They lived peaceably with their non-Jewish neighbors, but were not Dutch citizens, and therefore could not be fully integrated – that is, until Napoleon’s Batavian Republic took power in 1795. The French occupation brought with it full citizenship for the Jews of Amsterdam. However, this was not universally applauded, as many of the more conservative Jewish leaders believed that citizenship, along with increasing economic opportunities, would weaken the influence of the synagogues and water down the identity of increasingly cosmopolitan Jews.83 They were no longer an Israelite nation living in the Netherlands – they were Dutch. This seemingly small distinction brought with it an increasing desire to exercise those rights and press for equal opportunities across the board. A

Jewish patriot group known as Felix Libertate formed that same year, with the belief that religious freedom was not enough, that economic equality must also be allowed. In the words of its chairman, Mozes Asser, “We were granted the right to sing psalms in public and to starve to death.”84 Finally, in 1798, the Dutch National Assembly agreed to abolish guilds and trade unions, which had barred membership to Jews, thus removing the last obstacle to upward mobility.

Ashkenazic Amsterdammers began, slowly, to move into positions that were previously the purview of the Portuguese. They formed literary societies, like those of the Sephardic in the

83 Leydesdorff, Dignity, 40. 84 Bregstein, Remembering, xvi.

52 preceding century, most notably the Tongeleth Circle in 1816. Based on the Hebrew word for

‘benefit,’ Tongeleth was run by Ashkenazic intellectuals and young enthusiasts who read and wrote poetry in Hebrew and translated Jewish literature into Dutch and German.85 While the

Tongeleth never attracted a huge following, it does represent a step further towards integration into Dutch society for the Ashkenazim. By the 1850s, Dutch had officially replaced Yiddish as the daily language for this community, even in the Jewish schools, although their Dutch was still peppered with Yiddish phrases and had a strange sound to the non-Jewish ear – a dialect known as Joedenhoeks. Still, the result was the disappearance of Yiddish altogether from Dutch Jewish culture.86 While this no doubt brought them closer to non-Jewish Amsterdammers, it also isolated them from the rest of Jewish Europe that still communicated in Yiddish – another likely puzzle piece in the tone-deafness of Dutch Jews to the rise of the German Nazi party (NSDAP) and the Dutch Nazis (NSB) just prior to the Second World War.

Then in 1849, the Dutch government established a new constitution, which separated church and state. As a result, the Jewish religious community was released from under the

Ministry of Religion and the General Committee for Israelite Affairs, which had exercised authority over Jewish synagogues since the fall of Napoleon in 1815. This necessitated another restructuring of the Dutch Jewish religious communities to fill the void in leadership, in the absence of this bureaucracy. In order to communicate effectively across the Netherlands, the

Jewish community published their first weekly journal in the same year, Nederlandsch-

Israëlitische Niews-en Advertentielbad (Dutch Israelite News and Advertiser), followed by the

85 R.G. Fuks-Mansfeld, “Arduous Adaptation, 1814-1870,” in The History of the Jews in the Netherlands (Oxford: The Littman Library of Jewish Civilization, 1996), 220. 86 Bregstein, Remembering, xvii.

53

Israëlitisch Weekblad (Israelite Weekly) in 1851.87 Both newspapers published articles, readers’ letters, and advertisements, which served as vital communication for Dutch Jews, especially as things changed for them economically and socially throughout the nineteenth-century and into the twentieth.

But the poverty in the old neighborhoods persisted. Flat-fronted buildings with narrow alleyways and soot-stained, crumbling brick, stood along filthy streets lined with working-class

Jews. Sunday markets on Oude Schans and Waterloo Square brought crowds of Amsterdammers, many of them Christians, to browse and behold the sea of tented stalls selling produce, Herring, pickles (a specialty of Amsterdam Jews)88, and all manner of junk. Wealthy Jews could take the

Valkenweg ferryboat on Fridays to Waterloo Square and buy crates of whatever was selling on that particular day: melons, oranges, bananas, you name it. Then, on most days, they could pay a vendor’s son to carry the crates to their home, where they would arrive just before Shabbes.89

Scenes of these Jewish markets, as well as Jewish poverty, captured the imagination of many artists including the German Impressionist painter Max Liebermann, who rendered quite a few paintings from the Amsterdam Jewish Quarter in his own unique style (Fig. 5). Another example of the artist’s eye could be from Dutch artist Cornelius Christiaan Dommershuizen, as he captured not only the bleak, gray poverty of the Jewish Quarter but a certain vibrancy of community as well (Fig. 6).

Descriptions of the poverty vary, and the literature of the Jewish Quarter tends to be as bipolar as the areas themselves. On one hand are the accounts of crushing poverty; stifling and

87 Fuks-Manfeld, Adaptation, 203. 88 Bregstein, Remembering, 124. 89 Ruben Groen in Bregstein, Remembering, 43.

54 devoid of meaning. Residents described multi-generational homes with as many as thirteen people to a room.90 “Those apartments had no kitchens. They were just rooms with a built-in-the- wall bed, and a lot of them had a cubbyhole over that recessed bed that you could reach with a

Figure 5. Max Liebermann, Jewish Street in Amsterdam.

90 Hartog Goubitz in Bregstein, Remembering, 74.

55

Figure 6. Cornelius Christiaan Dommershuizen, A View of the Jewish Quarter with the Oudeschans and the Montelbaanstoren, Amsterdam, 1886.

ladder. It had a door to it, and you could sleep in there, too. There was water, but no flush toilet, just a commode, a stool with a bucket.”91

Others wrote of poverty with a silver lining – particularly narratives with socialism as savior. Herman Heijermans, for example, wrote of the deplorable conditions and the

91 Ibid., 75.

56 degeneration of the “faithful Jewish people”92 in his 1908 novel Diamantstad (Diamond City).

Heijermans’ main character, Eleazar, raises himself up from the filth of these orthodox communities to an elevated socialist status that he attains through labor activism. The clear message being that it was socialism that saved him – not religion.

In the still air hung the stench of the islands of Marken and Uilenburg…there he knew the drowsiness of innumerable courtyards and blind alleys, gray cement and drab, dying brickwork – the coming and going of Jewesses, withered and pasty in their kerchiefs and beribboned caps – the grubby little games of the red-eyed urchins – the shadowy night surrounding these tiny, glowing, overheated rooms where the lamps hung and lips sighed.93

Eleazar’s experience appears as a common theme among the rapidly-assimilating Jewish communities of fin de siècle Amsterdam: religion is the past, socialism is the future.

On the other side of this argument stood an unimposing figure: a Hasidic man named

Meijer de Hond, often referred to as the Rabbi of the Poor. De Hond lived and worked in the old quarter and found there a bastion of the faithful: those who had not assimilated or embraced the socialism that seemed to be overtaking many of the more successful, unionized Jewish workers.

He was a religious teacher, a prolific writer, and a keen observer of Jewish culture. His most popular work, Keikjes (Snapshots from Jodenbree Street to Waterloo Square), illuminates a different side of the poverty. While not romanticizing or downplaying the squalor, he saw a solidarity and spark of life that made these communities animated (Figs. 7, 8).

De Hond himself was larger than life in the old quarter. If one found him in his little neighborhood synagogue on Korte Houtstraat, they could always engage him in conversation

92 Herman Heijermans, Diamantstad (Amsterdam: Tredition Classics, 2013), 103. 93 Ibid., 15.

57 over a ready cup of tea. If not, he was probably out and about, working with youth or attending to various needs of the community, with his ever-present sense of humor. Jacob Soetendorp

Figure 7. Uilenburgerstraat, Jewish quarter, Amsterdam, 1925

58 remembered asking de Hond at a bar mitzvah if they were allowed to eat there. He replied,

“Where I go, people may eat, otherwise they should not expect me.”94 And, of course, you could find him drawing a crowd on Saturday afternoons with his animated drosjes (impromptu sermons), held at various venues around town.

Figure 8. Early twentieth-century Amsterdam, Jewish Quarter

Meijer de Hond perceived an overarching community need, as evidenced by the enormous turnouts at these weekly drosjes, and so he founded Betsalel in 1908. Betsalel was not a study group, but a community gathering – a place of solidarity, to keep Jewish traditions and

94 Jacob Soetendorp in Bregstein, Remembering, 57.

59 culture alive. In a way, it was a counterbalance to socialism, or at least to the socialist diamond worker’s unions, which were luring more and more Jews away from austere religious observance.95 De Hond supervised most aspects of the group, from writing a column in the popular newspaper De Libanon, which was distributed to youth throughout the Netherlands, to directing a theater group, designed to demonstrate various aspects of Jewish life.96 In time, it included a choir, Jewish travel clubs, and Rashi classes. A member of the theater troupe described Betsalel as a “one-man show. It was totally dominated by Rabbi de Hond. He wrote the plays. He also wrote the pieces that had to be read aloud…That man taught me how to sanctify life. He was a man who went straight to the heart of everything.”97

Meijer de Hond worked tirelessly in the Jewish quarter, through the German occupation of 1940, and until his death in 1943 at Sobibor. He did not see a dichotomy between modernism and tradition, or socialism and religion, only that the latter should not be abandoned for the former. According to Barend Luza, another Betsalel member, “I didn’t get the idea that he had anything in particular against the Socialist Party, but he was so religiously oriented that he didn’t think it was necessary. I think de Hond’s reasoning went like this, ‘As long as they think of God, honor God, and follow God’s laws, why do we need socialism?’”98

Still, things were changing during the first half of the twentieth century and many Jews found the socialist philosophy espoused by labor unions irresistible. For one thing, Jews began attending Dutch universities and moving into the professional ranks. Since the time of their

95 Karin Hoinmeester, Jewish Worker and the Labour Movement: A Comparative Study of Amsterdam, London, and Paris, 1870-1914, (Abingdon: Routledge, 2017), 46. 96 Leydesdorff, Dignity, 206. 97 Jacob Soetendorp in Bregstein, Remembering, 56. 98 Barend Luza in Bregstein, Remembering, 55.

60 arrival in the Netherlands and before, Jewish parents had dreamed of their boys becoming learned men – rabbis and scholars. Now the desire was for them to become doctors, lawyers, journalists, contractors, or bankers.99 Already, many in the Jewish community were gaining prestige as successful merchants in the age of modern capitalism. Increase in trade and demand had improved the overall economy and created niches that even the poorest of the Jewish Quarter might fill.100 Amsterdam had become a hub for the diamond trade after 1870, and this presented a golden opportunity. As more Amsterdam Jews went from, say, textile vendor to department store magnate, or diamond cutter to factory owner, more men from the poorer Quarter were able to move into their ranks, receiving the training necessary to hold a skilled position, and working alongside their gentile colleagues.

The diamond industry of Amsterdam, as a matter of fact, was largely Jewish, and they were responsible for creating a trade union that would, in many ways, become a model for other

European unions, such as the later Dutch Federation of Unions (NVV).101 The General Dutch

Diamond Workers’ Union (ANDB), started in 1894 from a strike organized by gentile workers.

While this would typically have led to separate unions, the Jewish organizers, led by Henri

Polak, formed an inclusive organization as an alternative to the Social Democratic Labor Party

(SDAP), or the Jewish Workers’ Society (HWV). Polak was actually a founding member of the

SDAP as well but took the fledgling ANDB under his wing.102 The ultimate impact of the ANDB on Amsterdam Jews is hard to calculate. While it was a socialist union with compulsory membership, it was also distinctly Jewish in flavor. It was not at all religious, yet in many ways,

99 Ibid, xvii. 100 Ibid, xix. 101 Ibid, XX. 102 Blom, Economic Activities, 262.

61 took the mantel of Jewish education away from the Synagogue, much to the chagrin of organizations like Betsalel. This was a new, progressive Amsterdam, and more and more Jews were turning to the secular messages of the ANDB and the SDAP, embracing their liberal models of government, art, and culture.

Polak’s message was transmitted primarily through ANDB’s Het Weekblad (The

Weekly), which he edited and contributed to from 1895 until 1940. Het Weekblad eclipsed most of the previous Jewish periodicals to become a central source for community information and advertisements, just as ANDB had far surpassed organizations like Betsalel in membership.103

All diamond workers received their copy of Het Weekblad like clockwork. “Every week, Henri

Polak wrote a feature article in it. He would write in such simple terms that everybody understood them…The spirit of the organization bore primarily Henri Polak’s stamp.”104 Polak also published Het Jonge Leven (Young Life), which became a mainstay for younger readers, containing articles on, “sports, culture, chess, music, you name it.”105

At the same time, more and more Jews were moving from the Old Quarter to the south and east of Amsterdam, taking advantage of a fledgling prosperity and no longer tied to an orthodox synagogue. Additionally, the SDAP exerted pressure on the city council to break up some of the worst neighborhood slums and facilitate the relocation of poorer families to better housing.106 This also created somewhat of an identity crisis among Amsterdam Jews who had been living for generations in these neighborhoods. Still, it opened the door for further integration into Dutch society, which had the unintended consequence of making containment

103 Blom, Economic Activities, 220. 104 Aron De Paauw, in Bregstein, Remembering, 93. 105 Ibid, 94. 106 Moore, Victims, 27.

62 and identification more difficult for the civilian Nazi administration that would be tasked with facilitating the Final Solution in the Netherlands.

The assimilation of Dutch Jews, which had been occurring slowly and sporadically during their centuries-long connection with Amsterdam, reached its apex in the years leading up to 1940. Many Amsterdam Jews describe a purely cultural Judaism, adhered to out of habit rather than piety. In several instances, residents speak casually of Friday evenings being, “far from religious. They were social occasions, see. That social element always played a very important role for Amsterdam Jews, although maybe in its origins it had certain religious roots.”107 This is not to say, however, that they were no longer religious at all. In fact, the exact opposite was true. At least in a cultural sense, most Amsterdam Jews were still attached to their religious communities. Of the 79,400 Jews living in Amsterdam in 1940, only 0.6 percent had converted to Christianity, while 7.18 percent were living completely outside the community.

Also, approximately 92 percent of Jewish marriages were still being performed in a synagogue (a much higher number than either Catholics or Protestants in their respective churches), and only

16.9 percent were in mixed marriages with non-Jews.108

This might be an opportune time to again examine the idea of Jewishness in context with

European assimilation. Gershom Scholem, in a lecture given at the World Jewish Congress of

Brussels in 1966, discussed the idea that European Jews had constructed a series of protective illusions when it came to assimilation. On the one hand, German Jews believed that it was possible to claim a full measure of Deutschtum, or German-ness, while still being fully Jewish,

107 Simon Gosselaar in Bregstein, Remembering, 36. 108 Moore, Victims, 25.

63 and that the hostility conveyed towards them by nineteenth and twentieth-century Germans was bound to diminish over time. They chose to believe that they would eventually be accepted as they were in German society. On the other hand, Scholem examined a different yet closely related illusion that he called the flimsiest and most pernicious of all, and it is what I believe the

Dutch community clung to – that a middle ground was possible somewhere between absolute assimilation and complete, unfettered Jewishness.109 That ultimately, one need not claim a full measure of either. Perhaps by taking this middle ground, the majority of Amsterdam Jews were never really assimilated, nor were they fully Jewish, and this crisis of identification allowed them to believe what they wanted to believe until reality came crashing down around them.

Still, overall, what we know of the Jewish community on the eve of the German invasion does not paint the picture of a culture devoid of its heritage and completely removed from its religious observances. Instead, illusion notwithstanding, it was a culture attempting to adapt to its circumstances and strike some balance between Jewishness and European urban life. Amsterdam would become a place for German Jewish refugees like the Anne Frank to flock to – a place that offered security, opportunity, and tolerance. It was a Jewish culture that the invading Germans in

May of 1940 would find to be a vibrant, well-integrated community – hopeful of its place in the order of things, but fearful of an occupier who would only see life in terms of black and white, superior and inferior, Aryan and Jewish. An occupier whose focused goal was their very extermination.

109 Michael R. Mannus, “European Jewry and the Politics of Assimilation: Assessment and Reassessment.” The Journal of Modern History, Vol. 49, No.1 (March 1977), 91.

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CHAPTER 3

OCCUPIED AMSTERDAM: JEWISH CULTURE IN THE MELEE

We Jewish Dutchmen of every rank and station We want to give our best for fatherland and nation We Jewish Dutchmen, through Torah and tradition, Are to our very marrow united with Holland, United with Holland.

- Theo Van Raalte, National Hymn for Jewish Dutchmen

On May 9, 1940, Jenny and Oscar Lichtenstern went with their friends Heinz and

Margret to the shore for dinner. There was a little beach café that they enjoyed on Amsterdam’s west side, just south of Bloemendaal aan zee. It was a normal evening at first. They shared a drink with Heinz and Margret and laughed at a joke before embarking on their culinary quest.

But then little things started to happen. They were stopped at a checkpoint that hadn’t been there before. They were asked for their identification. Then they were told to turn their headlights off periodically. It was all just an exercise, the soldiers said – to be prepared in case of a real incident. Still, it was very strange. Holland had been neutral during the Great War and they were firm in their neutrality still. Did the military really think Germany might attack them now?

Oscar had been a little concerned about getting a table that late in the evening, but their restaurant was practically empty and illuminated only by candlelight. They took a table by the window, and a grim-faced waitress told them that there was nothing wrong with the power – they were simply complying with the military exercise instructions. The food and wine were excellent as usual, as was the dimly-lit atmosphere, but there was a pall over the conversation. Things weren’t adding up in anyone’s mind. Nothing felt right about this evening.

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After dropping Heinz and Margret off at their home, the Lichtensterns didn’t get to bed until after midnight. Oscar had just dropped off to sleep when he was awakened by a loud crash from somewhere outside. Jenny sat straight up in bed. He rushed to the window and fumbled with the lock, finally opening it to hear an unfamiliar siren. Airplanes filled the dark sky and one burst into flames and fell to the ground right before their eyes. Jenny turned on the radio and anxious voices told them that the Netherlands were under attack. Their worst fears had been realized. They held each other without speaking and wondered what would come next for them and for their home.110

In truth, no one knew what the future held. The Netherlands could only withstand the

German onslaught for five days, at which point the Dutch military commander Winkelman officially surrendered on May 15, 1940. During the attack and even before, some Jews were successful in fleeing the country. There was already an organization in place, headed by a professor of ancient history at the University of Amsterdam, Dr. David Cohen, called the Comite voor Joodse Vluchtelingen (Committee for Jewish Refugees, or CJV), whose mission was to assist Jews in doing just that.111 Refugees began arriving in earnest in 1933, when Adolf Hitler forced his way into power in Germany. Tables had been set up in the Jewish Invalide (a newly remodeled hospital in Amsterdam) for these families, in order to help them either settle into

Dutch life or move along to other destinations. Then after the Night of Broken Glass

(Kristallnacht) in November of 1938, in which Nazi-sponsored gangs raided and destroyed

Jewish homes, businesses and synagogues throughout Germany, Cohen and the CJV established

110 Oscar Lichtenstern My Struggle for Survival 1940/45, compiled and translated by his granddaughter, Ruth Lichtenstern Fishman, (KIC scan, RG-02.118, United States Holocaust Memorial Museum Archives, Washington, D.C.), 1-4 111 Moore, Victims, 29.

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Westerbork as a transit center for the enormous number of refugees flooding into the country. 112

The idea was to create an immigration point in the countryside close to Amsterdam, that would give refugee families someplace to stay, and the CJV time to decide who amongst them would be allowed to settle in the city (typically German Jews with capital and contacts).113

The spike in the number of immigrants from Germany and Eastern Europe, some 25,000 before 1940, was a strain on the Jewish community of Amsterdam. To some of the Jewish youth who had been excluded from membership in the chic chapters of the Amsterdam Student

Corps114, the newly arriving Germans represented a level of culture that they felt they were lacking. Mozes Gans, for instance, remembered that, “We really looked up to the refugees. They were much more than we were, culturally speaking, growing up as they had with Goethe,

Schiller, and Heine. They recited these kinds of things by heart. We were complete hicks in comparison.”115 But what may have easily impressed the youths of Amsterdam, was a concern to the community at large. They were worried about competition for scarce jobs and insulted by the feeling that many of the immigrant families had no intention of assimilating, or even deigning to learn the Dutch language.116 They were a culture apart. Many began referring to the Germans as the “Wenn man nicht (“If-we-hadn’t”) Jews. They would use phrases such as, “Wenn man nicht damals aus Berlin hätte fliehen müssen, dan hätten wir unsere Möbel noch (“If we hadn’t been forced to flee Berlin, we’d still have our furniture.”) According to one woman in the Dutch

112 Deborah Slier and Ian Shine, Hidden Letters, (New York: Star Bright Books, 2008), 15. On the night of 9-10 November 1938, 100 synagogues were burned, 7,000 businesses were destroyed, 91 people were killed, and 26,000 were sent to concentration camps. 113 Eduard Charles Keizer in Bregstein, Remembering, 181. 114 Carel Josef Edersheim in Bregstein, Remembering, 131. 115 Mozes Heiman Gans in Bregstein, Remembering, 183. 116 Moore, Victims, 28.

67 community, they also called them the “buffet table” Jews, because they would say things like,

“Zu Hause hatten wir ein grosser Bufet, aber das konnten wir nicht mitnehmen” (At home we had a large buffet table, but we couldn’t take it with us”117). This thinking, of course, caused friction in the Jewish community overall, as the Dutch saw the Germans as living in sub-standard conditions among them, yet still feeling superior and rubbing their noses in that sentiment. This clash of communities was understandable, especially with the added anxiety of a powerful, belligerent Germany whose actions grew to be less and less predictable.

Additionally, a number of Dutch Jews believed that the calamity from which German

Jews were escaping was a distinctly German phenomenon. They speculated that this was a unique persecution – one that the German Jews had somehow brought down on their own heads

– and that the same persecution could not be repeated in the Netherlands.118 They were Dutch, and as such enjoyed the same privileges of neutrality that any other Dutchman enjoyed. They also considered themselves to be more patriotic than the average European Jew. They had a higher percentage of Jewish doctors, commercial scientists (economists), and jurists than did most other countries and they served in every level of government, to include the President of the

Supreme Court, Lodewijk Visser.119

Perhaps with this in mind, relatively few of the Dutch Jews sought to escape the German invasion. Most of the Dutch government had re-located to England, but they failed to leave behind any kind of evacuation plan. While some 3000 people did manage to escape during the

117 Wilhelmina Biet-Meijer in Bregstein, Remembering, 180. 118 Helen Fein, Accounting for Genocide: National Responses and Jewish Victimization during the Holocaust, (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984), 18. 119 J.C.H Blom and J.J. Cahen, Jewish Netherlanders, 1870-1940 in The History of the Jews in the Netherlands, Blom, Fuks-Mansfeld, and Schöffer eds. (Oxford: Littman Library of Jewish Civilization, 2002), 248.

68 onslaught, the renowned Dutch scholar and Amsterdam Holocaust survivor Jacob Presser estimates that only a few hundred of them were Jewish.120 This includes 75 children from the

Jewish orphanage in Amsterdam, who were the remaining members of the Kindertransporte, which Cohen and the CJV had been evacuating through the Netherlands under the leadership of

Gertrude Wijsmuller-Meijer.121 While some refused to evacuate on patriotic or sentimental grounds, others simply did not have the means to escape, or were caring for elderly family members and did not have the mobility. And some calculated that the risk of staying behind and taking their chances were better than being themselves refugees in another country that might not end up being any safer from the Germans than Amsterdam.

Still others decided that death by their own hand was preferable to death at the hands of the Nazis. Many of the Dutch Jewish survivors of the war had someone they knew, sometimes entire families, who chose to end their lives. Rosa Cohen-De Bruijn, for example, received a jubilant phone call on 9 May from a family friend who had received a certificate for his family to immigrate to Palestine. “He had been very optimistic. He couldn’t imagine that the Netherlands would capitulate.” Then with the invasion the next day and the surrender on 15 May, Rosa was concerned, and checked on them as soon as she could. She found that the entire family had committed suicide. Rosa describes sitting in shock on the apartment stairs for what seemed like an eternity. “He had a big family. These are the things that can still give me nightmares.”122 In

Amsterdam, a total of 128 cases of “death by choice” were recorded in the days following the

Dutch surrender, with an estimate of just over 200 for the entire country.123

120Jacob Presser, Ashes in the Wind: The Destruction of Dutch Jewry, (London: Souvenir Press, 1965), 9. 121 Moore, Victims, 46. 122 Rosa Cohen-Bruin in Bregstein, Remembering, 208. 123 Peter Romijn, The War, 1940-1945, in The History of the Jews in the Netherlands, 300.

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But those first few weeks after the surrender were relatively quiet. The German army overran France and forced their surrender on 22 June 1940. In Amsterdam, the word among the

Jews was that, according to the remaining Dutch bureaucracy, the Germans did not consider the

Netherlands to have a Jewish problem. Presser points to this as lending to an overall feeling of hope that they would, in fact, be treated differently from their German and Polish counterparts.124

This feeling was reinforced when the German authority established a civilian, rather than a military administration in Amsterdam. Hitler chose Arthur Seyss-Inquart, who had served as

Chancellor of Austria for two days before the takeover (Anschluss) by Nazi Germany, to serve as

Reichskommissar. Seyss-Inquart was to lead the civilian administration (secretaries general) left in place by the departing Dutch government, as well as four general commissioners appointed from Germany: Han Fishböck (Finance), Frederick Wimmer (Justice), Hans Rauter (Higher SS and Police Commissioner), and Fritz Schmidt (Party and Special Affairs), the latter two being

Hitler’s personal selections.125 Rauter took control of the Dutch police and replaced the solicitors general with Dutch Nazis, while Wimmer managed the Ministry of the Interior. It is important to note that the Germans inherited an extremely efficient Dutch bureaucracy led by Permanent

Under-Secretary Karl Frederiks, the highest ranking Dutch civil servant. Frederiks was not a

Dutch Nazi, or even a sympathizer, but rather a career civil servant who believed that the expectation of the government-in-exile was for him to remain in position and run the Interior as effectively as he could.126 This efficient bureaucracy has also been cited by Dutch scholars Ron

124 Presser, Ashes, 11. 125 Moore, Victims, 51. 126 Peter Romijn, The ‘Lesser Evil” – The Case of the Dutch Local Authorities and the Holocaust, in The Persecution of the Jews in the Netherlands, 1940-1945 (Amsterdam: University of Amsterdam Press, 2012), 15.

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Zeller, Pim Griffoen, and Peter Romijn as a crucial element in the comparatively high murder rate of Jews in the Netherlands.127

In my opinion, it was an administrative symbiosis. The occupiers under Seyss-Inquart wanted a smooth transition, organized deportations, and relatively little resistance, while

Frederiks and the Dutch civil service felt that they were the best compromise for the population at large. Ultimately, Frederiks feared the Dutch Nazis (Nationaal Socialistische Beweging or

NSB) more than he did the German administration. He knew the Germans to be more or less consistent and level-headed, but the NSB were perceived as gangsters and fifth columnists. Saul

Friedländer asserts that Anton Mussert’s Dutch Nazi Party was never fully trusted by the German

NSDAP, and they never attained any real political power beyond supplying enthusiastic henchmen and spies for the Germans. It was in fact the Dutch Union (Nederlandse Unie), formed after the occupation, that achieved some level of legitimacy among the Dutch and trust from the

Germans, behaving somewhat like the Vichy government in France.128

In Frederiks’ mind, then, it would be far worse for the Dutch populace if a collaborationist group like the NSB or the Dutch Union were to attain real administrative power over the city. The secretaries general and the civil service over-all, then, sought to appease the new government rather than risk being removed from power.129 Plus, frankly, they were still employed. This is similar, in my opinion, to the apparent collaboration of the Roman Catholic

Church in German-occupied Europe. The church believed that as long as they were able to operate, they could administer the Sacraments and save the souls of their parishioners, but if they

127 Romijn, Lesser Evil, 14. 128 Saul Friedländer, The Years of Extermination: Nazi Germany and the Jews, 1939-1945, (New York: Harper Perennial, 2007), 122. 129 Romijm, Lesser Evil, 18.

71 openly opposed Hitler and the National Socialist agenda and spoke out against their treatment of the Jews, they would be removed from the equation and unable to perform their primary function.130 Frederik reckoned that the best way to serve the majority of Amsterdammers was to continue operating the most efficient bureaucracy possible, even if it meant holding the door open to the Nazi Party and the SS. But as far as Seyss-Inquart and his general commissioners were concerned, they were being handed Dutch Jewry on a silver platter.

Their first move was essentially to reset the Dutch clock back to 1933 Germany with a gradual, yet steady exclusion of the Jews from society. Jehudith Ilan-Onderwyzer was just ten years old in September 1943, when her family was deported to Bergen Belsen. Her grandfather had been the Chief Rabbi of Amsterdam, Rabbi Abraham Samson Onderwijzer. He was highly respected by both the Jewish and non-Jewish communities and his many accomplishments included translating the Torah with Rashi’s commentary into Dutch. Her parents were academics, and she had nothing but fond childhood memories of the Jewish community in

Amsterdam. She had lived a “full Jewish life” before May of 1940. She remembered the invasion and subsequent occupation with vivid detail, as she saw those months marking the end of her childhood forever. In her testimony to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, she remembered that the persecution of the Jews did not begin immediately.

They first let us ‘recover’ from the initial shock of actual war and occupation, while for a very short time, we deluded ourselves that maybe at least in Holland – things would not be so bad. But when the campaign eventually started, a series of decrees incessantly fell upon us starting in the summer of 1940 and persisting until we left for the camps – we realized that it had been rigorously prepared and thought out, to the very last detail! The objective of its planners was to gradually restrict the

130 Hilberg, Destruction, 618.

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movement of the Jews, and as a result, systematically remove them from all areas of public and economic life in the country.131

The first exclusion seemed innocuous enough – the removal of all Jews from the Civil

Air Defense on 1 July 1940. This was preceded by the distribution of an attestation form on which all members were required to identify their race. They were told that the Germans were attempting to identify three problematic people groups, but only the Jews were dismissed. This exclusion did not affect a very large number of Amsterdam Jews, but still several non-Jewish members resigned in protest and the mayor complained that this would make it difficult for the

Civil Air Defense to fulfill its mission. He was allowed to retain only a small number of Jewish members.132

This was followed immediately by a favorite from the Nazi playbook – the restriction of ritual slaughter, designed to hamper the ability of the Jewish community to observe Kosher laws.

The measure was challenged by Frederiks and the Dutch authorities, but to no avail. Then in

August, the government put a hiring freeze on Jews in the civil service and prohibited Jewish employees from receiving promotions. At the same time, Reichskommissar Seyss-Inquart was given legal authority (VO 108) to dismiss any government employee at will.133 September saw a tentative clarification in who was to be considered a Jew: anyone with one Jewish grandparent who had been active in the Jewish community.134 Odd that this and the subsequent official order were not along strictly racial lines, as were the Nuremberg Race Laws that would have categorized an individual as Jewish even if his grandparents had been completely secular or even

131 Jehudith Ilan-Onderwyzer Memoir, (RG-02.196, Survivor Testimonies, The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum Archives Washington D.C.), 4. 132 Moore, Victims, 54. 133 Ibid, 55. 134 Presser, Ashes, 18.

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Christians. Instead, the Nazi administration in the Netherlands required a certain amount of cultural culpability – not on the individual per se, but the grandparents.

In October, another requirement was meted out for all government workers (including teachers and university professors) to fill out an ‘Aryan Attestation,’ in which they were given two forms – A for Aryans and B for non-Aryans (form B in duplicate). The appropriate form was to be returned by 26 October 1940.135 To assist in this process, Article 4 of VO 189/1940 was published officially defining a Jew as: 1) All persons who possessed three or more fully Jewish grandparents (full Jews defined as any individual who had ever been part of the Jewish religious congregation), or 2) persons with only two Jewish grandparents but who were either married to a

Jew after 9 May 1940, or who were part of the Jewish religious community after that same date.

This attestation, coming as it did on the heels of the Civil Defense Service dismissals, created quite a commotion in both the bureaucratic and academic communities. Professors and students at Leiden University and the University of Amsterdam protested what they called “these despicable forms,” and many signed a petition sent to Seyss-Inquart. The Roman Catholic church wrote a pastoral letter condemning the measure, but it was never distributed. The Dutch

Reformed Church did, however, write a letter opposing the Aryan attestation that was read from many church pulpits on the Sunday before the form was due. The Dutch theologian Jan

Koopmans formally criticized the leadership of both churches for not doing more. But ultimately, these protests fell on deaf ears and nearly everyone returned the forms.136 In his diary of Bergen Belsen, Abel Herzberg noted, “We recalled grandparents, we signed, but none of us

135 Ibid, 19. 136 Moore, Victims, 55.

74 really knew what we were doing…Each signed his own death warrant, though few appreciated this at the time.”137 Within several weeks, all Jewish civil servants, teachers, and university professors were dismissed. But even more to the point, they had taken the first step to being identified for future actions (Figure 9 shows a form from the Municipal Administration identifying a 44-year-old, married Jewish man named Albert Jacob Kaplaskie).

While the Dutch secretaries general negotiated for some kind of severance package, students from Leiden and Delft went on strike and two professors spoke out publicly against the firing of their Jewish colleagues.138 Professor R.P. Cleveringa, Dean of Leiden’s College of Law gave a particularly stirring speech in honor of E.M. Meijers, in which he proclaimed to a packed audience with more listening over loudspeakers, “This noble son of our people, this man, this father to his students, this scholar, whom usurpers have suspended from his duties…A man who, as all of us know, belongs here and, God willing, shall return to us.”139 The Germans subsequently arrested Cleveringa and closed both universities. What followed in the first six months of 1941 was essentially a reenactment of the German Nuremberg Laws impoverishing the Jews and excluding them from Dutch society. Both Oscar Lichtenstern and Jehudith Ilan-

Onderwyzer had vivid memories of Jews being excluded from theaters, movies, restaurants, coffee shops, hotels, and parks. They were forbidden to use public transportation, shopping hours were reduced, and curfews were implemented. Jews were not allowed to give blood and Jewish physicians and nurses were prohibited from treating Gentile patients. Signs saying, “Jews

137 Abel Herzberg, Between Two Streams: A Diary from Bergen Belsen, (London: I.B. Taurus & Co., 2008), 46. 138 Slier and Shine, Letters, 17. 139 Friedländer, Extermination, 124.

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Figure 9. Exclusion Form, 1940

76

Forbidden,” and “Jews Not Wanted” began to appear throughout Amsterdam.140 All Jewish members of the Dutch Cinema Union were fired, and Jewish musicians in the Concertgebouw and Residentie orchestras were moved from the front rows to the back and then eliminated altogether, while the orchestras were forbidden to play works by Mendelssohn (apparently the

‘Jewish-ness’ of other composers was still under consideration). Jewish journalists and publishers were also removed from their unions and dismissed, and in May 1941, all Jewish firms were registered and sold.141 At this point we should note that the Germans were still getting quite a bit of push-back from the Dutch population at large, particularly with signs forbidding

Jews, and they decided to back off a bit from their vitriol in order to maintain the peace. In just one year, however, the signs would reappear with virtually no complaints.

In July 1941, the Germans made public Article 45 of Decree No. 138, which officially gave Rauter, who was not only the Higher SS and Police Commissioner but also the

GeneralKommisar for Public Security, the power to do whatever he deemed necessary to the

Jewish community in order to preserve ‘public safety.’ This decree contained five articles that spelled out many of the exclusions that had already gone into effect, along with Article 1b which excluded Jews form boarding houses, Article 1e barring them from sporting grounds, museums, and zoos, and Article 2, which forbade Jews from participating in public markets and auctions.142

These had a profound effect on the Jewish community of Amsterdam in several ways. First, it targeted the large numbers of Jews living in poverty by making it illegal for peddlers to sell their wares on the streets or for anyone to participate in the traditional Jewish markets on Oude Schans

140 Lichtenstern, Struggle, 2. 141 Moore, Victims, 59. 142 Presser, Ashes, 83.

77 or Waterloo Square. In my archival research, I found abundant documents revoking licenses and permits for fruit, vegetable, and flower venders, along with Circulars 35 and 37 of the newly- formed Jewish Council attempting to extend those licenses to allow venders to sell to non-Jewish customers. With the exception of a few short-term extensions, these came to no avail, making it virtually impossible for the self-employed to make a living after 1941.143 Secondly, Article 1 made it illegal for the Jewish community to play in, referee, or observe football matches or any other sporting events – another law explicitly designed to affect those living at or below the poverty line and to take away a major source of entertainment for the Jewish community. Presser mentions a Nazi Journalist in Amsterdam who took it upon himself to write a letter in September of 1941 to the Generalkommissar of justice in The Hague, complaining about two Jewish footballers who were still playing the sport and several Jewish fans (whom he named) who were still watching the matches. The “dire consequences” of this letter no doubt drove home the finality of this and other decrees.144

Lastly, since it barred Jews from gentile boarding houses, it prompted the Jewish Council to supervise the formation of Jewish boarding houses along with Jewish homes for the elderly.

The Jewish Council issued a special circular explaining the application process and specific terms for the homes, which were springing up all over Amsterdam.145 But what seemed to be a possible bright side to Article 45, creating affordable housing for displaced Jews, ultimately provided the Nazi administration with a collection of ready-made detainment facilities for spoon feeding victims to Seyss-Inquart and his deportation mandates.

143 Gemeente Archiev, Amsterdam Politie (5225), United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, Doosnummer 22. 144 Ibid, 85. 145 Moore, Victims, 56.

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It also bolstered Rauter’s authority which, along with his overall enthusiasm for the job, allowed him to plunder Jewish property at will. Presser put it elegantly when he said, “It is a well- known fact that they joined hatred of Jews to an intense love of Jewish possessions, a love shared by Nazis great and small, believers and free-thinkers, illiterates and intellectuals alike.”146

Jehudith Ilan-Onderwyzer recalls that Jews were required to, “deliver cash, stock certificates, insurance policies, houses and land, valuables and jewelry to authorities.” She remembered some families she knew burying their most valuable belongings in their back yards or attempting to smuggle them out of the country. But for the most part, the Amsterdam Jews ended up being

“devoid of all their possessions.”147 Likewise, Oscar Lichtenstern reported that, “Radios of

Jewish households were confiscated, as well as gold, silver and jewelry items and one had to submit a precise inventory of assets which later on were totally confiscated.”148 The theft was not confined to individuals either. During the first years of the war, Nazis plundered the Jewish libraries of Amsterdam, namely the Rosenthal Library (20,000 volumes) and the Library of the

Sephardic Community in Amsterdam (25,000 volumes), both of which were incorporated into

Alfred Rosenberg’s Bibliothek zur Erforschung der Judenfrage (Library for Investigating the

Jewish Question). The Societas Spinoza and the Spinoza House were also ransacked, with one of the German academics making the statement that the Spinoza director had tried to “swindle us out of this library. Luckily, we discovered his ruse in time.”149 Raul Hilberg notes how extremely valuable some of these libraries were, both financially and culturally. Many of the volumes made it into the Hohe Schule, the Nazi ideological university, where they hoped to ascertain, among

146 Presser, Ashes, 82. 147 Illan-Onderwyzer, memoir, 6. 148 Lichtenstern, Struggle, 2. 149 Presser, Ashes, 82.

79 other things, Cromwell’s attitude toward the Jews and their role in the development of the secret service.150

Also in the first few months of 1941, two events occurred which significantly affected the

Jewish community of Amsterdam: All Jews were ordered to formally register and receive a yellow card, and the Jewish Council (Joodsche Raad) was formed. Decree VO6/1941 in January required all Jews (according to the broadest definition of one or more Jewish grandparents) to register and complete a basic questionnaire. Temporary census offices were set up all over the

Netherlands and Jewish citizens who provided their information were required to pay a guilder before receiving their yellow card.151 This census became part of a record kept by the Bureau of

Population Records (Bevolkingsregistrar) and was later used by the Zentralstelle für Jüdische

Auswanderung, Rauter’s Central Agency for Jewish Emigration, to select groups of people for deportation.152 It marked the last documented information on the Jewish community prior to their persecution at the hands of the Nazis. Those who felt that their ancestry was in question could petition the Generalkommissar’s office and individual cases would be referred to a Dr. Hans

Calmeyer – a lawyer brought in from Osnabrück to become the Director of Interior

Administration. These families would be put on the “Calmeyer List” and granted a temporary exemption from future deportation until their Aryan ancestry could be corroborated. Surprisingly enough, when solid information could not be found, a large number of individuals did receive the benefit of the doubt and were allowed to remain in Holland until the end of the war.153 Calmeyer

150 Raul Hillberg, The Destruction of the European Jews, 3 vols. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1961), 630. 151 Moore, Victims, 64. 152 Werner Warmbrunn, The Dutch under German Occupation: 1940-1945, (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1972), 65. 153 Warmbrunn, The Dutch, 67.

80 later asserted that he knew the assertions to be false, but was extending a “lifeboat” for about

3,700 Jews, saving them from deportation.154 However, decisions such as this point to the obvious fact that early in 1941, the Germans themselves did not have a concrete plan for the

Netherlands and frequently were creating policy as they went along.

Clearly what made this registration unique was not that the German authority required it, but rather the number of Dutch Jews who dutifully returned the form. Bob Moore, in his pivotal book Victims and Survivors, found only one or two people in Amsterdam who deliberately failed to register as a Jew.155 From our perspective, one wonders why more people didn’t simply

‘forget,’ or even refuse out of moral indignation. We might even be tempted to assign some culpability to the Jewish citizens of Amsterdam for not resisting this effort. But from their points of view, the information they provided was already in the hands of the city government, so they weren’t giving them anything they didn’t already possess. And since the Germans were threatening a huge penalty – a prison sentence of up to five years – for non-compliance,156 obeying the order was not only the natural thing to do in a Dutch society of rule-followers, but it was also the safest move at the moment. Additionally, as is central to my thesis, they believed that even in the midst of the first exclusions, they as Dutch Jews could persevere through this temporary occupation. Looking back on this, the Security Police Commander, Sturmbahnführer

Willy Lages, in a June 1944 communique entitled Entjudung der Niederlande (Elimination of

Jews from the Netherlands), admitted that the status the Jews enjoyed in the Netherlands allowed them to believe they could survive the war:

154 Louise Baring, Emmy Andriesse: Hidden Lens, (Amsterdam: Schilt Publishing, 2013), 60. 155 Moore, Victims, 65. 156 Ibid, 64.

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With their liberal-humanitarian view of life, the Dutch did not perceive the Jews as alien foreigners, but as equal nationals. Due to the pro-Semitic leanings of the royal family, the government, and the supporting plutocratic stratum, their inclination towards Judaism has only strengthened since 1933. Thus, the Jewish measures of the occupying power were made more difficult by a generally unconscious and Jew- friendly attitude of the average Dutchman, encouraged by the advocacy of the (especially Protestant) church…. they [the Jews] continually hope to make it through until the expected victory of the Allies.157

In February 1941, on the heels of two mass arrests, Seyss-Inquart directed Hans

Böhmcker, his delegate to the Dutch civil service, to form a Jewish Council in Amsterdam. The primary function of this council was to act as an intermediary between the Germans and the

Jewish community. This was not unusual – in fact a Jewish council (Judenrat) was formed in virtually every German-occupied city in which a Jewish ghetto had been established and, in all cases, it provided a semblance of legality and legitimacy for the perpetrators, while invariably putting the Jewish communities in an impossible situation. There was always controversy in these communities over the very existence of the councils, and certainly over the degree to which they should cooperate.158 What made the Jewish Council of Amsterdam unique was that it was the only council in which the leadership did not change from formation to deportation.

Böhmcker chose Professor David Cohen, who was already the chair of the Jewish Refugee

Committee, and Abraham Asscher, the president of a large diamond company, to be co-chairs.

Asscher and Cohen then selected prominent members of the Jewish community to be on the council, nearly all of whom agreed (Fig. 10). Historian Hans Knoop claims that Böhmcker’s original idea was for more of a neighborhood committee of working-class representatives from

157 Entjudung der Niederlande (Stand vom 15.6.1944), Archives of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, (A-000850, Leonie Penney, 1995.A.316 (11/93), Inhalt des Vorgangs. 158 Isaiah Trunk, Judenrat: The Jewish Councils in Eastern Europe under Nazi Occupation, (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1972), 17.

82 the Jewish Quarter, but Asscher believed that it should consist of wealthy, well-educated

Amsterdam Jews. Knoop even quotes Asscher as saying, “one could not allow the Jews to be represented by the butcher and the baker.”159 This comment is questioned by Moore, who notes that Knoop did not cite his source, but as it turns out, the only member who did come from the

Jewish Quarter was a Butcher from Jodenbreestraat, and he only lasted a few weeks.160

Figure 10. Amsterdam Jewish Council. Asscher and Cohen are sitting at the left of the table.

The formation of the Jewish Council was, from the beginning, in opposition to an existing group known as the Joodse Coördinatie-commissie (Jewish Coordination Committee, or

JCC) which was created in December of 1940, initially under the auspices of a Zionist

159 Hans Knoop, De Joodsche Raad: Het Drama van Abraham Asscher en David Cohen (Amsterdam: Elsevier, 1983), 82. 160 Moore, Victims, 68.

83 organization. It was founded in coordination with the ruling councils of both the Sephardic

(Supreme Committee of the Portuguese Community) and Ashkenazi (Netherlands Israelite

Congregation) communities and was designed to represent all Jews of all congregations, all countries of origin, and all political and philosophical views in hopes of holding the Amsterdam community together. It even included David Cohen for a time as one of its original members. It was essentially a grass-roots organization attempting to patch the divides within the Jewish community that had been there for centuries in order to face an oppressor who didn’t recognize any differences between them. The JCC selected Lodewijk Visser, who had recently been ousted as President of the High Court, as their chairman.161 Visser became an outspoken opponent of the

Jewish Council, as he saw any communication at all with the occupying authority as a mistake.

He repeatedly warned that the Jewish community should only deal with the Dutch authorities, and to do otherwise would inevitably lead to collaboration. Visser used every legal means available to him to undermine the German actions in the first year of the occupation, and he famously refused to accept an identification card marked with a “J.”162 In some ways, the Jewish

Council and the JCC were able to operate in concert with one another, at least initially, but the

JCC grew more defiant in its rhetoric, and by November 1941, it was dissolved. Visser continued to warn that compliance with the Germans would bring ruin upon the Jewish community and he wrote regular columns in the weekly underground newspaper Het Parool (The Watchword) until his death in January of a heart attack. Moore believes that Asscher and Cohen were not simple spectators in all this, but they were instrumental in bringing about the demise of the JCC, and he

161 Bernard Wasserstein, The Ambiguity of Virtue: Gertrude Van Tijn and the Fate of the Dutch Jews (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2014), 98. 162 Slier and Shine, Letters,21.

84 accuses the Jewish Council of using their contacts with the Germans for empire-building in order to control every aspect of Jewish life in Amsterdam.163

While this is probably true, the fact remains that controlling every aspect of Jewish life was indeed their obligation. With the formation of the Council and the later issuance of Article 45,

Jewish community life came to a grinding halt. Most of what had sustained the community, outside of the synagogue itself, was suspended or absorbed into the Jewish Council. The foundational Jewish cultural organization of Betsalel, still run by Meijer de Hond, was terminated, as were the Jewish bridge clubs, Jewish dance halls, Jewish youth centers, and the

Jewish Women’s Council with its organization for young girls, the Swallow’s Nest.164 Jewish boxing and gymnastics clubs (two extremely popular sports in the Amsterdam community) were declared illegal, as were all other Jewish sporting clubs. Political organizations and labor unions such as the ANDB and the Handwerkers Vriendenkring (the Craftsman’s Guild, which was not an exclusively Jewish organization but seemed suspiciously Jewish) were dissolved, as was the

Arbeiders Jeugd Centrale (Central Organization of Workers’ Youth).165 The Jewish Youth

Federation, the Zionist Palestine Pioneers, and the Oosteinde 16 Group (a youth club for German

Jewish refugees), were absorbed into the Jewish Council.166 The Committee for Jewish Refugees was also closed, and its responsibilities taken over by the Council. In this case, the JCR staff made a smooth transition to the purview of the Jewish Council, still serving as an emigration office and “Promoting…the interests of non-Dutch Jews.”167

163 Moore, Victims, 69. 164 Leydesdorff, Dignity, 204. 165 Ibid, 192. 166 Parenthetically, these last two organizations became active resistance movements during the deportations, rescuing an untold number of people. 167 Wasserstein, Ambiguity, 98.

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Charitable organizations were also absorbed into the Jewish Council, and this was no mean feat, as their responsibilities within the Amsterdam community were immense. In her study on the Jewish proletariat of Amsterdam prior to the Second World War, Selma Leydesdorff discusses the concept of tsedaka, or charity, as the ultimate form of righteousness in Judaism and a priority in the Amsterdam community. To put this in better Jewish context, Leo Baeck, in The

Essence of Judaism, quotes the great Talmudic teacher Hillel as saying that caring for one’s fellow man is “the essence of Torah” and is the “commandment in which all others are included.” Baeck, who was himself a chairman of the Berlin Jewish Council, goes on to tie the act of charity to the Jewish community by saying that, “The social attitude here is religiousness, and religiousness a social attitude.”168 Charity is to be given anonymously and received without obligation or shame. It forms a cohesive bond that holds all Jewish communities together.169 In the case of Amsterdam, charitable organizations of all sorts arose in the seventeenth century and became even more numerous as the number of Ashkenazim grew. Charities like the tamhui, or soup kitchens, and Beis Yisroeil, a popular youth organization, also provided an opportunity for religious leaders to reach the needy and strengthen their ties to the synagogues.170 They supplied the community with food, clothing, and shelter, and so of course, especially in the case of the

Jewish Poor Board, they were abolished by the occupiers. But the obligation and the need remained and became the responsibility of the Jewish Council.

168 Leo Baeck, The Essence of Judaism, (New York: Schocken Books, 1961), 193. It is interesting to note that as a leader of the Jewish community in Germany, Leo Baeck declined offers to escape the Holocaust, and chose to remain, where he survived incarceration in Theresienstadt. 169 Leydesdorff, Dignity, 195-196. 170 Ibid, 198.

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Included in this was the Joodsche Invalide, or Jewish hospital. The need for a Jewish hospital that would also serve as a home for the poor grew out of the nineteenth century, and the

Invalide found a temporary home in 1912, moving to a more permanent location in 1926. Then, in 1938, with much pomp and circumstance including a dedication by Princess Margriet of the

Netherlands, a beautiful new building was opened on Weesper Square.171 The Joodsche Invalide did so much more than just treat those with medical conditions. It provided temporary shelter for the poor, lodging and therapy for the disabled, a focal point for scores of refugees, and it became a model of the modern assisted living facility for the elderly.172 It was a way to receive charity without seeming to receive charity and it was a single point for all things Jewish, including its legendary Seder services. It was funded by private donations, lotteries, and various fund-raising, and it was common for families in the Amsterdam community to have a poor box in their homes with spare change that would go either to the Jewish Poor Board, or the Invalide. Thus, as

Leydesdorff notes, “the groups of charitable organizations tried to throw up a dam of Jewish solidarity against the rising tide of fascism.”173

All of this, along with the task of delivering the mail, became the responsibility of the

Jewish Council. Their first action, as minor as it may seem, was to disarm the Jewish Quarter.

It’s unclear whether this was actually assigned to them by Böhmcker or whether they themselves felt that it was a prudent measure to take in order to prevent violence which could have massive repercussions for the entire community. Evidence suggests the former: after an earlier clash in the Jewish Quarter between the Weerafdeling (WA – citizen members of the Dutch National

171 Ibid, 207. 172 J.C.H. Blom and J.J. Cahen, “Jewish Netherlanders, Netherlands Jews, and Jews in the Netherlands, 1870-1940” in The History of the Jews in the Netherlands, 258. 173 Leydesdorff, Dignity, 211.

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Socialist movement), and a Jewish resistance organization left a WA member named Hendrik

Koop dead, Presser reports that Böhmcker threatened to execute 500 Jews and order a police raid in order to disarm the community. 174 The Council would have had their own reasons as well, however, since residents of the Quarter had been apprehended at random and photographed with guns. These photographs were then sent to the press to support the claim that Jews were dangerous to society. The Jewish Council did then issue an official circular, and Abraham

Asscher addressed an audience of 5,000 Jews in the great hall of the diamond exchange, outlining the function of the Council and ordering residents to turn in all weapons that may be in their possessions. The very small number of weapons (particularly firearms) actually turned in, suggests that the residents of the Quarter did not, in fact, possess a significant number of them.

Böhmcker was eventually appeased but not pleased.175

Regardless of where the idea originated, the order to disarm the Jewish Quarter established a pattern in which the Jewish Council channeled the will of the German occupiers into the community with very little pushback to the perpetrators. Critics of the early council pointed immediately to the perception of elitism in the selection of its members and the concern that

Asscher and Cohen were forming too close of an association with the German authorities, and perhaps even using them as scapegoats for implementing their own will in controlling their fellow Dutch Jews. Post-war historians such as Knoop make the claim that the very idea of a

Jewish Council in Amsterdam came from Asscher and Cohen, that they staffed it only with like- minded members from their own social rank, and that it was in no way representative of

174 Presser, Ashes, 48. 175 Ibid, 49.

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Amsterdam Jews, most of whom lived in poverty.176 David Cohen, however, responded to this by saying that the members of the Council had, “dedicated their lives to the community, either in the religious or the philanthropic or social fields. For them, there was no question that they should take this [task] on.”177

Visser and his associates had warned Asscher and Cohen that they would be hated by the

Jewish community and perhaps they took this to heart when they began communicating to Dutch

Jews in April 1941 as their representative body. One of the important facets of the Jewish community had always been their press. Newspapers such as Nederlands-Israelitische Niews en

Advertentieblad (Netherlands Israelite News and Advertisements) went all the way back to 1849 and the Israëlitische Weekblad (Israelite Weekly) to 1851. Now in 1941 all newspapers – Nieuw

Israëlitische Weekblad, Centraal Blad voor Israelieten, De Joodsche Wachter, De Lebanon, Het

Jonge Leven, and Henri Pollack’s ANDB periodical, Het Weekblad, were all absorbed into the

Jewish Council’s Het Joodsche Weekblad (The Jewish Weekly). The editor, Jacques de Leon, was appointed by the Germans, who changed and redacted articles as they saw fit,178 although it gave the impression that it was strictly by the Jews for the Jews. It identified itself on the front page as being published by the Jewish Council under the direction of Ascher and Cohen. While the Germans might have only wanted a newspaper that would convey their orders to the largest number of people in the shortest time, Asscher and Cohen had a more comprehensive periodical in mind.

176 Knoop, Joodsche Raad, 89. 177 Moore, Victims, 70. 178 Slier and Shine, Letters, 23.

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They hoped, for better or worse, that it would pick up the mantel of the former Jewish papers and contain community information, advertisements, editorials, and religious instruction from Amsterdam’s leading rabbis. In the first edition printed in April 1941, page one featured a column introducing the members by name, and a large article titled simply, Ter inleading (In

Introduction) (Fig. 11). It promised to supply the Jewish community of the Netherlands with

“everything considered important at this time.”179 The Council assured the community that they would provide them with leadership and that they would look after their interests whenever possible. The last paragraph is quite telling in that it all but promises that if the Amsterdam community obeys direction given by the Council, they can weather the storm of Nazi occupation.

…rumors will lose their force and eventually be laid to rest, something which is necessary for our daily work. In order to achieve this peace of mind, we call on everyone. We are now experiencing a difficult time together. We can bear it if we draw strength from Judaism, which it amply provides, and if we remain calm, thus allowing ourselves to do our duty to ourselves, our family, and our neighborhood. May this newspaper help us with this.180

The next week’s edition ran a front-page article on Changes of Profession – the

Central Problem for Jews During These Times. The paper was eight pages in all, with articles on the Prophet Elijah – The Invisible Guest, and how the rain shortage has affected crops in Palestine. Within the next several months, the papers would grow to include several pages of advertisements (Fig. 12), large photographs, a Hebrew column, listings of concerts and plays at the Hollandse (now the Joodsche) Shouwburg Theater,

179 Het Joodsche Weekblad, Uitgave van den Joodsche Raad voor Amsterdam, Jaargang 1-3, 1941-1943, (YIVO Institute for Jewish Research, A1962-35-133, Leo Baeck Institute, New York, New York), Volume 1, No 1. 180 Ibid.

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Figure 11. First Edition of Het Joodsche Weekblad (The Jewish Weekly).

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Figure 12. Het Joodsche Weekbland advertisement page.

92 services offered in the community from piano lessons to business classes, and a fairly

regular column entitled Wat Man Weten Moet (What People Need to Know), which passed

on specific information or instructions from the German administration. Gertrude van Tijn

had been David Cohen’s assistant back in the Committee for Jewish Refugees and later in

the Jewish Council, and she described the Weekblad as, “a vehicle for repeated

admonitions to Jews to follow German instructions. It issued strictures against rumor-

mongering, together with a leavening of articles on communal and devotional topics.”181

Van Tijn also believed that, since this was a Jewish paper that targeted the Jewish

community, it allowed the Germans to issue them orders that the overall Dutch population

might miss, and allowed the Dutch population “who wished to avert their gaze, [to] do so

more easily.”182

In these first few months, the Jewish Council, under the watchful eye of the German

authorities, set the stage for what I believe supplied the Amsterdam community with a false

sense of normalcy and delayed escape or evasion for many until it was too late. With such a

vibrant, busy society, still with a rich culture intact, how could things be as bad as some people

thought? This also played right into the hands of the evolving German plan for Jewish

annihilation, a crucial component of which was a compliant victim. It was always important to

the Nazis that they maintain the illusion of choice among the Jews. While the choice was only

subjective, it was nevertheless important that victims believe they had options – exemptions,

elevated racial status, labor, simple incarceration. It is what Zygmunt Bauman has called the

181 Wasserstein, Ambiguity, 98. 182 Ibid

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“save what you can game.”183 Even at the very end, when arriving Jews were selected for death, the members of the Sonderkommando, Jewish prisoners forced to run the gas chambers, were absolutely forbidden, on threat of immediate execution, to tell them that what they were walking into was not a shower house.

This illusion was as powerful within the Jewish Council as it was among the general populace. What became the Council’s crucial mistake, however, is that they continued to promote the attitude of normality all the way up to September of 1943, when their own council was deported to concentration camps. The final issue of the Weekblad, now only two pages long, included a small column of Wat Man Weten Moet, along with innocuous articles such as People of the Book and Blowing the Shofar. It also listed various goings on in synagogues across the

Netherlands, and even advertised courses in vocational training (beroepsleiding) for an

Amsterdam community that, at this point, had either been eradicated or gone in hiding.

Be that as it may, in the first year of the occupation, the Jewish Council were just starting to play this very delicate balancing game. On the one side, they were trying to appease an angry occupier bent on deception, theft, and murder, while on the other side not actually collaborating with this enemy and betraying their own people. It was a game that they were already losing, as evidenced by the claim from Jane Fresco, a Dutch resistance fighter, that most people used a play on words to describe the council, referring to the Joodsche Raad (Jewish Council) as the Joods

Veraad (Jewish treason).184 And while no one could have known this at the time, the Jewish

183 Bauman, Modernity, 131. 184 Slier and Shine, Letters, 23.

94 community of Amsterdam was preparing to leave a period of uncertainty and restriction, and enter into a phase of terror, deportations, and murder.

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CHAPTER 4

LEAVING AMSTERDAM: THE DEPORTATIONS

The old clock has stopped. The Child’s rocking horse is rotting away on a disused balcony. The Costly exotics in the garden are destroyed. All that was elegant is wretched. All that was noble is shabby. All that once told of civilized elegance, now speaks of ruthless barbarism.

- J.R. Gilmore, The Continental Monthly

The first year of the German occupation of Amsterdam went by quickly. Practically every month had brought a new action against the Jewish community, but all gradually enough so as not to raise too great an alarm among the Dutch populace. The German administration, led by

Arthur Seyss-Inquart, was using the tried-and-true method of Jewish extermination: registration, segregation, robbery, and ultimately deportation.185 These measures were not merely practical.

They were not solely for the purpose of rounding up Jews and sending them to concentration camps. Instead they were carefully designed to impoverish the Jewish community and take away any possibility of making a living. They were also calculated to radically separate them from their non-Jewish neighbors, most of whom they had known for generations. And finally, as Peter

Romijn says, “In the persecution of the Jews, the National Socialist regime revealed its true face: it was doing its utmost to deprive these human beings of their humanity.”186

In February of 1941, a number of things happened on the heels of one another. The SS were allowing the NSB (Dutch National Socialist Movement led by Anton Musser) and the WA

185 Hillberg, Destruction, 267. 186 Peter Romijn, “The War, 1940-1945” in The History of the Jews in the Netherlands, 298.

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(uniformed, but unarmed civilian defense wing of the NSB) to run roughshod over the Jewish community, provoking violence, smashing windows, and disturbing the peace; much as Viktor

Lutze’s SA had done in Germany after 1934. This led to the Koot incident, in which the WA took it upon themselves to terrorize the Jewish Quarter until a Jewish resistance unit called the

Knokploegen (Action Groups) fought back, leaving WA member Hendrick Koop dead. This, of course, caused more violence and vandalism. Several days after Koop’s sensationalized funeral, the Ordnungspolizei (German Order Police) and the Sicherheitspolizei (German Security Police) conducted a raid on the Koko Ice-Cream Parlor in South Amsterdam, which had been a meeting place for the Knokploegen. The owners, Ernst Cahn and A. Kohn panicked, thinking that it was the WA back to cause more damage, and they detonated a pre-positioned canister of ammonia gas at the Germans, who then opened fire on the ice-cream parlor. The two owners managed to escape, but they were captured several days later and executed. The German administration used this event to classify the Amsterdam Jews as terrorists who were so bold, that they even attacked a group of German policemen protecting the peace in broad daylight. The Dutch Nazi newspaper, Volk en Vaderland, described Koop as having been, “cut down with sadistic lust.

Crushed under the heel by a nomadic race of alien blood.” Both Rauter (head of the German police in Amsterdam) and Böhmcker (Seyss-Inquart’s representative in Amsterdam) reported that at the Koko Ice-Cream Parlor, members of the resistance had bitten policemen in the face, and that one man had clamped onto a German’s throat with his teeth and attempted to suck his blood.187

187 Presser, Ashes, 46. This kind of macabre accusation cannot help but bring to mind the Medieval blood libel frequently used against the Jews (see chapter one).

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Böhmcker used this as a pretext to seal off most of the Jewish Quarter on 12 February, establishing a fenced ghetto with entry-control points, which he and Rauter had already been planning over the objections of their superior, Seyss-Inquart. It just so happens that Seyss-

Inquart was out of the country when all of this was taking place. Word of the incident made it to

Himmler, who ordered the first large-scale roundup from the Jewish Quarter, specifying the arrest of at least 425 Jews between the ages of 20-25.188 The Ordnungspolizei, also known locally as the Green Police because of their distinctive uniforms, surrounded the Jewish Quarter on 22 February and began knocking down doors and rounding people up off the streets. Then they hauled this terrified group onto the square at Jonas Daniël Meijerplein, adjacent to the

Portuguese Synagogue on Weesperstraat, where they forced them to remain on their knees with their hands in the air, while they screamed threats and struck them at will (Fig. 13). After counting their victims, they determined that they had not collected enough people, and repeated the measure the next morning. In the end, after a number of prisoners who did not fit the profile were released, 390 Jews were transported to Buchenwald, then 389 were sent on to Mauthausen, where they all perished.189 The underground newspaper, Het Parool, reported that, “The notorious Green Police closed off Apollo Lane in Amsterdam, dragged a number of Jews living on this avenue out of their dwellings and carried them off to an unknown destination.

Unsuspecting pedestrians who wanted to enter Apollo Lane were met with a roaring: ‘Bist du

Jude?’ (Are you a Jew?). Those who answered in the affirmative were referred to the police van.

188 Moore, Victims, 64. 189 Slier and Shine, Letters, 166. The one man not sent to his death, Max Nebig, was saved by a gentile prisoner at Buchenwald, who isolated him in the hospital and “lost” his prisoner number, so that he remained hidden until the end of the war. His rescuer, Alfred Leikam, was later given a Righteous Among the Nations Award by Yad Vashem.

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It was appalling.”190 At this same time, Böhmcker brought together Abraham Asscher (whom he referred to simply as ‘the merchant Asscher’) and the chief rabbis of both the Sephardic and

Ashkenazi communities, and tasked them with creating a Jewish Council. Asscher brought in

David Cohen of the Jewish Refugee Committee as his co-chairman, and the two rabbis recused themselves.191

Figure 13. Roundup on Daniël Meijerplein

All of this was a step too far for the residents of Amsterdam. There were a number of small protests, followed by a general strike that began on Tuesday, 25 February, with municipal employees, which widened to involve large sectors of the working population, including public

190 Ibid, 17. 191 Presser, Victims, 72.

99 transportation. It was originally organized by the then-illegal Dutch Communist Party (CPN), under the rallying cry, “These pogroms are an attack on all working people – strike, strike, strike!”192 This apparently struck a chord, as city metal shop employees and the Union of

Dockworkers quickly joined the strike. It took the Germans by surprise, and Böhmcker threatened the Jewish Council with more arrests, while Rauter mobilized the German police units

(Seyss-Inquart was still in Vienna), and implemented a 7:30 PM curfew. The next day, the

Waffen SS also mobilized, and a state of emergency was declared. German police and SS troops patrolled the streets, randomly shooting protestors and lobbing grenades, but the strike still did not end until Thursday.193 From the CPN point of view, the strike was proof that the Dutch citizens could be mobilized in protest against a foreign invader, but the Germans conceded nothing. Instead, they executed at least twenty people suspected of starting the strike and replaced Amsterdam’s mayor with a pro-Nazi successor. Ultimately, it furthered the understanding that these occupying forces would not tolerate dissent, no matter how heroic or heartfelt. It did seem to the Germans, however, that they had gone a bit too far too soon. In a

1952 interview by Jacob Presser with Willy Lages, chief of the SS intelligence branch in

Amsterdam, Lages admitted that he thought the entire affair was done with far too much sensationalism. “If the men had to be put out of the way, it would have been far better to do it quietly.”194 Immediately following the strike, Rauter discouraged further violence from the NSB and WA in the Jewish Quarter.

192 Slier and Shine, Letters, 167. 193 Warmbrun, The Dutch, 106. 194 Presser, Ashes, 50.

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As far as the Jewish Quarter goes, Böhmcker had been fixated on the idea of a fenced ghetto for quite some time, and he had tasked the head of the Bureau of Public Records to use the

December registration data to identify the streets in Amsterdam that were more Jewish than non-

Jewish. Böhmcker was presented with a map of 120 streets that formed an urban grid from

Nieuwmarkt down through Jonas Daniël Meijerplein and the Weesper neighborhood, past the

Plantage to the Transvaal, then east to Oosterpark and back up to Nieuwmarkt (Fig.14).

Figure 14. Map of Amsterdam with Jewish sections in black, 1941.

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This proved to be far too large an area, with too many non-Jewish residents whom they would need to quietly relocate, so he settled for cordoning off a smaller area.195 Now, the complaints of the Dutch citizens to having any portion of their city blocked off at all held sway, and the fencing was quickly removed (Fig. 15). But the first large-scale roundup of Jewish citizens and the violent response to the labor strike seemed only to widen the gap between the Jewish and non-

Jewish communities of Amsterdam. Not only had the citizenship and legal rights of the Jews been thrown out, but their very status as fellow human beings had been brought into question.

Figure 15. Jewish Quarter with Rembrandt’s house in the background.

195 Slier and Shine, Letters, 19.

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The next most effective weapon in the Nazi arsenal for depriving the Amsterdam Jews of their humanity was, as Jacob Presser points out in Ashes in the Wind, an attack on Jewish children.196 Jewish teachers had already lost their jobs back in the fall of 1940, and by July 1941, the Jewish Council was pre-occupied with preparing for measures to eliminate Jewish children from public education. Exaggerated reports of Dutch teachers and administrators showing undue favoritism to Jewish children had gone hand-in-hand with a request to Professor Van Dam, the

Secretary for Education, Science, and Culture, from the Reichskommisariat to supply them with the names and locations of Jewish school children. At the same time, the Germans were sporadically sifting through libraries and bookshops, removing literature that they felt was degenerate. They were also ‘amending’ history textbooks in the public schools to more accurately portray their Teutonic legacy and right to rule.197 In August, the Jewish Council asked David Cohen to form the Central Committee for Jewish Education and put together a plan for the inevitable exclusion of Jewish children from Dutch schools. By the end of that same month, Van Dam issued an edict that did, in fact, ban Jewish children from attending public schools and technical colleges. This did not apply to half-Jewish children, however, and Presser remembers from his own experience the rush of so many parents to move their children from

Jewish to non-Jewish schools, while petitioning the Secretary’s office to conduct a “racial investigation” into their mixed-race status.198

Protestant and Catholic private schools lodged a protest on behalf of their nearly 200 baptized students whom the Germans still categorized as fully Jewish. Rather than respond

196 Presser, Ashes, 75. 197 Moore, Victims, 59. 198 Presser, Ashes, 78.

103 directly, however, the German administration took up the matter with the Jewish Council, promising swift reprisals to the families involved if they didn’t change their tack. After further consideration, parents voluntarily disenrolled their children from the parochial schools.199 A careful look through the Amsterdam Municipal Archives under the topic Afdeling Onderwijs

(Department of Education) shows letter after letter, list after list of Jewish students – names and addresses – who were being identified and removed from their classrooms. Most were being referred to what the education department began calling “unsubsidized institutes of special education.” 200 This, of course, left the Jewish Council saddled with the additional responsibility of creating a school district for approximately 10,000 Jewish children. Cohen quickly appointed two seasoned educators to recruit Jewish teachers, in extremely short supply, along with other marginally educated Jews who could take over a classroom in a pinch. They also had to find facilities for said classes without violating the Jewish prohibitions that permeated the city of

Amsterdam.

Ernest Kaufman remembers being nine years old in 1939 when his family moved from

Germany to the suburbs of Amsterdam, where he enrolled in a Dutch school. His parents had applied for a visa to the United States before the war in an attempt to escape Germany, but were told that the quota had been reached, and it would take years for a spot to open up. His father was an engineer and used his business contacts to procure a job in the Netherlands, and escape what he believed would soon become an untenable situation for German Jews. Ironically, their new home in the Netherlands became a stop-over for other family members as they fled Germany for

199 Moore, Victims, 83. 200 Gemeente-Archief (Municipal Archive) Amsterdam, Afdeling Onderwijs (Department of Education), 51910, RG- 41.0003M, Doosnummer 39, U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum Archives, Washington, D.C.

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England and the United States. Then the Germans invaded. The Kaufmans stayed in Amstelveen during most of the first year, but now, by decree, they were forced to move to a designated apartment in Amsterdam’s city center. Ernest started at yet another public school, but he was soon removed and sent to a makeshift classroom for Jewish children. “The new school was exclusively for Jews and all teachers had to be Jews. It was okay, but suddenly everything was more difficult. Being a Jew had become a preoccupation. There was no way not to be aware of our special position. The feeling of dread grew. Spontaneity of action became more and more a rarity. Being careful was a full-time job.” At the same time, Ernest’s father apprenticed him to a local carpenter. He didn’t know why at the time but learned later that it was a “back-up measure…to ensure that there would be a way for me to work at a reasonable job if the Germans succeeded in blocking my education.” 201

Also, in the late summer of 1941, the Germans expanded the role of the Zentralstelle für jüdische Auswanderung (Central Office for Jewish Emigration) and began to concentrate Dutch

Jews from outlying regions into the city of Amsterdam. The Zentralstelle had been formed in the first few months of the same year on the behest of Reinhard Heydrich, who would host the

Wannsee Conference the following January. There he would facilitate the apparatus for the

Endlösung (Final Solution), focused on the efficient and complete extermination of European

Jews. Heydrich wanted an office in the Netherlands that would operate like the ones already in place in Berlin, Prague, and Vienna, and that would serve as a definitive model for his vision of effective collection, transport, and annihilation of Jews from Western Europe. He chose

201 Ernest Kaufman, Memories of Dark Times: The Days of the Holocaust, (A-3270, 1997.A.0062, U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum Archives, Washington D.C.), 6.

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Amsterdam specifically, because it was not in Seyss-Inquart’s direct line-of-sight from The

Hague, and because Amsterdam had the largest number of Jewish residents in the Netherlands at just over 87,000 people. Seyss-Inquart did not have the authority to override Heydrich in this matter but did make it known that he preferred the title ‘Central Office of Jewish Affairs,’ 202 perhaps because it might raise fewer alarms in the Jewish community. The resulting tug-of-war led to Heydrich downgrading the Zentralstelle to what appeared to be a simple bureaucratic office in Amsterdam under the authority of Willy Lages and Ferdinand aus der Fünten, while establishing a branch of Eichmann’s Referat IVB4 in The Hague to handle the overall plans of deportation to concentration camps. From the point of view of Willy Lages, however, it was his

Zentralstelle that was responsible for the heavy lifting in the removal of Jews from the

Netherlands through the city of Amsterdam. In his 1944 communique, Entjudung der

Niederlande (Removal of Jews from the Netherlands), in which he was writing an after-action report on the deported Jews, he states that, “The IVB4 unit in The Hague took the lead, assisted by the field service of the security police in the Netherlands, with the establishment of

Westerbork and Vught Jewish camps. However, the most essential part of the work was done via the apparatus of the Central Office for Jewish Emigration (Zentralstelle) in Amsterdam.”203

As far as the Jewish Council in Amsterdam was concerned, the plan to isolate Dutch

Jews, possibly using them for forced labor or even sending them out of Europe altogether (an idea referred to as Franz Rademacher’s Madagascar Plan), were the only options on the table.

When Eichmann ordered them to establish an Expositur, or liaison, between themselves and the

202 Joseph Michman, “Planning for the Final Solution Against the Backdrop of Developments in Holland in 1941” in Yad Vashem Studies, Volume XVII, Aharon Weiss, ed. (1986), 150-1. 203 Willy Lages, Entjudung der Niederlande, German (Germany), USHMM Archives, section V.

106

Zentralstelle, he also sent two representatives from Prague, well-known Zionist Jews, presumably in an attempt to gain the full support of the Amsterdam Council. These two men,

Jakob Edelstein and Richard Friedmann, had been involved in the establishment of the

Zentralstellen in Prague and Vienna, and could address any questions the Council might have.

This was an extremely revealing meeting and is a crucial moment in my thesis of Promoting

Normal. Not only were Edelstein and Friedmann – two Jewish men with authority from the SS and complete freedom of movement – sent by Eichmann himself, they also attempted to warn

Asscher and Cohen of the dangers that the Germans represented. They told the chairmen of what they had seen in Eastern Europe and assured them that this would be their fate as well, but

Asscher and Cohen were not convinced. They were firm in their belief that what was happening to Jews in the East absolutely would not happen to them. And even if they were wrong, they were ostensibly convinced that an Allied victory would liberate them before anything like that could happen in the Netherlands.204

This, of course, only gave the Nazi administration more time with an optimistic Jewish populace, to prepare for the Final Solution. In the fall of 1941, the German Minister of Finance in the Netherlands, Hans Fischböck, ordered that all Jewish assets and bank accounts be transferred to the Lippman-Rosenthal Bank. This had been a trusted Jewish bank, but it was now the property of Fischböck and the Germans. And while account holders were initially allowed to make small withdrawals to purchase necessities, all of this money would soon be inaccessible to them, and instead would be used by the Nazis to finance their deportations. In September, this

204 Michman, Planning, 154.

107 same order was expanded to include all Jewish real estate holdings.205 Then in October, the

German administration issued several more decrees that greatly curtailed life in the Jewish community: VOs 198 and 199 essentially gave employers the authority to fire Jewish employees for no reason and with very little notice. This also led to Jewish textile manufacturers, clothing venders, and publishing firms being permanently closed. Throughout the Netherlands, Jews were losing jobs and pensions. All of this to prepare for an initial deportation in January 1942 of 905 unemployed Jews, facilitated through the Jewish Council, to forced labor at Westerbork. The

Council was given only a few days to deliver these individuals, and although they protested about the transport on a Saturday (the Nazis had long enjoyed forcing Jews to break the

Sabbath), they provided the names nonetheless. Finally, VO 200 declared that Jewish families could not employ non-Jewish household staff, including caregivers for the disabled or elderly.

The Jewish Weekly made several impassioned pleas to solicit help for needy families, but they received very few responses. Essentially then, finding and scheduling domestic help and caregivers became yet another responsibility of the Council.206

The last few months of 1941 included two mandatory registrations for deportation: one for all non-Dutch Jews, and another for the unemployed and those on government subsistence.

The first tasking, to register 20,000 non-Dutch Jews with the Zentralstelle came from a meeting that Seyss-Inquart had with Hitler in September. The Führer made it clear that the 16,000

German Jews living in the Netherlands would be the first group deported to their deaths. But in order for this to happen, Westerbork would need some renovation. It is significant to remember

205 Louis de Jong, The Netherlands and Nazi Germany, (Cambridge Ma.: Harvard University Press, 1990), 63. 206 Presser, Ashes, 98-101.

108 that Westerbork was originally created by David Cohen and the Jewish Refugee Committee as a processing facility for Jewish immigrants prior to the war. Now in January of 1942, it would be expanded with twenty new barracks buildings to send those same Jews to their deaths.207 Yet it was still widely understood to be a workcamp and not a temporary transit point, but the Germans ordered the construction of railroad tracks that would basically lead to the front door of

Westerbork and beyond to the East, while telling the Dutch construction crews that they would only be using it for a year or so.208 Dutch historian Louis de Jong argues that Asscher and Cohen must have known that Westerbork would not hold even the 20,000 non-Dutch Jews for any length of time and, therefore, must have also known that they were really sending them to concentration camps in Germany and Poland.209 I would agree that if they had stopped to do the math, they certainly would have come to that conclusion. I suspect, however, that at this point they were overburdened with the day-to-day machinations of the Jewish Council and chose to believe the optimistic idea that at least some of the Dutch Jews would be able to shelter in place until the war was over.

In February of 1942, all Jewish residents were required to obtain new identification cards marked prominently with a “J,” in order to further separate them and facilitate the coming deportations (Fig. 16). As with previous identification measures, most of the Jewish community complied, even when non-compliance would have been an obvious first step to hiding. Sixteen- year-old Simon Caun is a prime example. Simon had been the quintessential Jewish youth: he

207 Moore, Victims, 88. 208 Presser, Ashes,, 135. 209 De Jong, Netherlands, 58.

109

Figure 16. Jewish Identification Card

was a bright and attentive student, active in the Beis Yisroeil Youth Club, an enthusiastic football player, aspiring musician, and lover of operettas. His father had apprenticed him to a furrier.

Simon also had blonde hair. When he and his father showed up to collect their new identification cards, the Dutch official pulled Simon aside, and told him that with his “Christian face,” he could easily blend in, and attempted to give him a card without the ‘J’ – an Aryan identification.

Simon’s “law-abiding father,” however, wanting to do the right thing, intervened and insisted that his son receive the proper identification card. Why would he not, after all? That summer,

Simon was excited about what he believed to be a ‘job call.’ The night before he was to leave, he had a passport photo taken for his prospective employers (Fig. 17). He kissed his parents goodbye with a smile and told them that he would return in three months. Simon reportedly sang

110 on his way to the train station. Then on 20 July 1942, guitar in hand, he boarded a train to

Westerbork and directly on to Auschwitz. He never even registered at his final destination, and it is presumed that he was killed immediately upon arrival.210

Figure 17. Simon Caun

It is probably worth noting that, by this point, the Germans knew exactly what their plans were, and the haphazard floundering that characterized the previous year had now been replaced with a laser-like focus. It may even be fair, in light of the offer given to Simon by the official, to say that the Dutch administration in the Netherlands also knew what was in store for their Jewish neighbors. But it seems equally clear that the Jewish community still did not have more than an inkling of what was on their very doorstep and missed what might have been their last good

210 Gemeente-Archief Amsterdam (Amsterdam Municipal Archive), Jokos nummer 2435.

111 chance to go into hiding. But why would they? The spring editions of The Jewish Weekly portrayed a community that was adapting quite nicely. The April copy featured a half-page column by Dr. Kurt Sternberg on Jewish philosophers and a story about the Van Leer Foundation selecting paintings and sculptures from twenty-six local artists for display. There were also a number of advertisements that appealed to one of the great loves of the Jewish community – music. The beautiful Hollandse Schouwburg Theater in the Jewish Quarter, now called the

Joodsche (Jewish) Schouwburg, was still presenting the long-running play Cape of Good Hope and was also featuring a performance by the Great Jewish Entertainment Orchestra under

Bernard Drukker. Additionally, a new musical by Rudolph Nelson entitled Fortissimo, was planning its opening night, and the Jewish Orchestra was, of course, playing Mendelsohn and

Mahler. If so inclined, one could also go to the Jewish Comedy Theater and catch a performance of Kalman’s Bayadere or Willy Rosen’s Bashful Susanna.211 These were the fine arts that had energized and uplifted them before the occupation, when even the annual Easter productions of

Bach’s St. Mathew Passion would bring Jews from all over Amsterdam (even from the orthodox communities) to pack the churches and concert halls, and simply revel in the music.212

Obviously, neither the Jewish Council nor the Jewish community could have known that their destruction was looming, but the signs of this abounded, and the saccharine pages of The

Jewish Weekly, while no doubt attempting to promote a climate of cultural normality, missed sounding even the subtlest of warnings to their community. Instead, they inadvertently fed them to the lions, as when in the March 1942 edition, The Weekly passed on a message from the

211 Het Joodsche Weekblad, YIVO Institute Archives, New York, April 1 and 17 editions. 212 Bregstein, Remembering, 156.

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Germans that all Jews betrothed to non-Jews must register their union with the German Security

Police (Sipo). When couples followed these innocuous instructions, they were promptly arrested; the women were sent directly to Ravensbrück, while the men were savagely beaten and sent to Mauthausen, were they all perished.213 By late spring, signs were once again posted across Amsterdam forbidding Jews from participating in any aspect of Dutch life, and while these signs had elicited protests just one year earlier, they were quietly accepted now.214

Then in April, in order to fully enforce these bans, the Germans rolled out their denouement of segregation – the Jewish star. The effect of this measure should not be underestimated. Of all the survivor testimonies that I have come across, especially from people who were children at the time, the yellow star still produces feelings of anger and shame.

Jehudith Ilan-Onderwyzer, for example, recalls that the “humiliating ‘stamp’ helped the Germans create total separation and distinction between Jew and non-Jew. It actually put the Jew, from the moment he put it on, in a position of total abandonment – it made him an object that anything can be done to.”215 Adding to the humiliation was the fact that the Germans, through the

Zentralstelle chief Aus der Fünten, required that the Jews purchase their stars at various points set up by the Jewish Council, that they also surrender points from their ration coupons meant for clothing, and that they start wearing the stars on all of their outer garments within three days, or face the consequences.216 Ilan-Onderwyzer uses the Hebrew word, zollelim (scoffed at) to express her feelings at this point of the occupation. “That is how cheap and ridiculed we had

213 Moore, Victims, 88. 214 Presser, Ashes, 103. 215 Jehudith Ilan-Onderwyzer, Survivor Testimonies, RG-02.196, USHMM, pg. 8. 216 Moore, Victims, 89; Ilan-Onderwyzer testimony, 8.

113 become – in the spirit of the words of the prophet who wrote the Book Eicha [Lamentations], who said: ‘See, O Lord, and behold, how abject I have become’ (Eicha 1:11).”217

The deportations began in earnest during the summer of 1942. The Jewish community and the Dutch populace, now worlds apart, had been sufficiently conditioned to expect almost anything, and Seyss-Inquart, taking his orders directly from Eichmann, who was taking them from Himmler, had established the mechanisms of deportation. To use Raul Hilberg’s metaphor, the tentacles of the Nazi anti-Jewish measures were all in place.218 Himmler had apparently been informed that the Netherlands could yield more than previously expected, and Eichmann set the initial figure at 40,000 Jews at a deportation rate of 1,000 people per day.219 This was a significantly larger figure than the original 15,000 agreed to in June by the RSHA (Reich

Security Main Office), and was due in part to a concern that France would not be able to meet their first deportation quotas.220 Aus der Fünten communicated Eichmann’s numbers to the

Jewish Council on 26 June by informing them that the deported would be sent to, “police- controlled labor contingents” in Germany.221 He also attempted to soften the blow by agreeing to grant exemptions from deportation to Council personnel and those they deemed indispensable. It was up to the Council to decide who would get these coveted exemptions. There was quite a bit of soul-searching and debate over this, and the Council created as many positions as they could, until Aus der Fünten capped the number at 17,500 (Asscher and Cohen had asked for twice that amount). Essentially, this would constitute a select minority whose primary responsibility was to

217 Ilan-Onderwyzer testimony, 9. 218 Hilberg, Destruction, 570. 219 Peter Romijn, The War, 318. 220 Moore, Victims, 91. 221 NIOD Archives, Amsterdam, 182 - Record of the Jewish Council for Amsterdam, 30 June 1942.

114 arrange for the deportation of the rest. They were rewarded with a special identification card that made them ineligible for deportation as part of the Council (Fig. 18). The Council justified this by stating that it was necessary in order to “preserve a core of the community.”222

Figure 18. Jewish Council Identification Card.

Any kind of arrangement in which the Jewish Council was solely responsible for who was and was not deported at any given time would naturally spark accusations of favoritism, as they received far more applications for exemptions than they were allowed to grant. As Cohen’s assistant Gertrude van Tijn observed, “since that core included themselves and their families, they laid themselves open to accusations of self-interest.”223

222 Wasserstein, Ambiguity, 154. 223 Ibid.

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Since the possibility of exemptions was on the table, the Portuguese (Sephardic) community took it upon themselves to appeal directly to the German authority, asking that they too be excluded, arguing that racially, they were really more Mediterranean than Jewish. In doing this, they completely bypassed the Jewish Council and used the Nazi’s own language of racial purity to make a claim for their exemption. Their request was taken under consideration by the Germans and investigated all the way up until 1944, when it was denied, and the ancient

Portuguese community was deported (likely from Vught concentration camp in the Netherlands) and murdered.224 The last set of exemptions came from those in mixed marriages. While the details of the German policy on mixed marriages were somewhat fluid, the overall plan was to allow Jews married to gentiles to remain in Holland, provided that they agree to undergo sterilization. Initially, some 600 men voluntarily underwent this sterilization procedure, but the majority did not, despite the threats of deportation. They also lost their jobs, as evidenced by a letter written in March 1943 from the headmaster of an Amsterdam school to the secretary of education. The headmaster made an impassioned plea to retain one of his teachers who had married of woman of “Jewish ancestry” some thirty years ago. It was not fair to the children, he claimed, to be deprived of a seasoned teacher and saddled with someone who did not even know the system.225 Requests like this were typically denied in the ongoing effort to impoverish anyone associated with the Jewish community. Later that year, the Germans stated that Jewish spouses and any children would be sent to a labor camp in the Netherlands, but then this policy was amended to allow the children to stay with the non-Jewish parent.226

224 Warmbrunn, The Dutch, 67. 225 Gemeente-Archief (Municipal Archive) Amsterdam, Afdeling Onderwijs (Department of Education) 51910, RG- 41.0003M, Doosnummer 39, USHMM. 226 Presser, Ashes, 115.

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Looking ahead again to 1944, in Willy Lages’ Entjudung report, he acknowledges that those who could present evidence of infertility would be exempted from wearing the yellow star and that, by that time, 2,562 people had taken advantage of this. For women, evidence of menopause was sufficient for this exemption, provided that they were the Jewish spouse. Lages asserts that those in mixed marriages were still excluded from most aspects of Dutch society, and that, as a final measure, Jewish partners (males and females without infants) were sent to forced labor at Westerbork. He believed that these individuals could be called up to defend the

Netherlands against an Allied invasion and hoped that the pressure of being separated would make the non-Jewish partner “more inclined to change their mind” and divorce their spouse.227

The first big roundup, or razzia as they were called in the Netherlands, was scheduled for

14 July 1942. The Zentralstelle selected 4000 Jews, mostly foreign-born as previously specified, from their 1941 card index, and mailed these individuals a letter ordering them to assemble at the

Amsterdam Central Station. As the day approached, the German authorities grew concerned that they wouldn’t get the turnout that they needed, and so on the actual deportation day, they rounded up 700 Jews off the streets from all across Amsterdam and held them hostage at the

German Security Police Headquarters. Jacob Presser was possibly one of the 700, as he gives a seemingly firsthand account of the situation:

They stood the Jewish women in the center of the yard and forced the men to march around them. German secretaries leaned out of their windows and took souvenir photographs. To judge from their cheers, they apparently really enjoyed the scene. One of the officers joined in the gaiety, which reached its climax when a young Jewish mother was separated from her baby daughter, who was lying in a carriage, and broke out in an attack of hysteria. It wasn’t that the Germans were cruel or sadistic, it was just that the incident appealed to their peculiar sense of humor.228

227 Willy Lages, Entjudung, section IV. 228 Presser, Ashes, 144.

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The Jewish Council sent out an emergency edition of the Jewish Weekly with the following message from the Security Police: “Approximately 700 Jews have been arrested in Amsterdam.

If the 4000 Jews designated to depart for work in Germany do not report this week, then those

700 will be transferred to a German concentration camp (Fig. 19).”229 The message was clear, and to drive it home, the Council sent out letters to the 4000 individuals stating that the fate of those 7000 rested on their shoulders. Still, only 962 people reported to the station and were transported to Westerbork in two trains. Since this was far fewer than expected, the Germans had to make up for it by supplementing the numbers from prisoners already at Westerbork, who could be sent to the East.230

It was nevertheless hailed as a success by the German administration. Hillberg reports that the word spread among the Jewish community that this was going to be a true resettlement in the East after all, but within several weeks, their hopes were dashed by more rumors of barbarity in the camps.231 Etty Hellesum, a secretary for the Jewish Council and prolific memoirist, wrote in her diary on 11 July 1942 that, “The surface of the Earth is gradually becoming one great prison camp, and soon there will be nobody left outside. The Jews here are telling each other lovely stories: they say that the Germans are burying us alive or exterminating us with gas.”232 Hellesum didn’t see the point in repeating such rumors, even if true, but they alarmed the Jewish community, who started to ignore deportation letters and began to move

229 Het Joodsche Weekblad Extra Editie, 2012.489.7, USHMM Archives. 230 Moore, Victims, 93; Romijn, The War, 319. 231 Hillberg, Destruction, 617. 232 Etty Hillesum, An Interrupted Life: The Diaries, 1941-1943 and Letters from Westerbork, (New York: Henry Holt and Company, Inc., 1996), 173; Sixtus Scholtens, Etty Hillesum: Kierkegaard’s Poet of Existence, A-000850, Leonie Pennie, 1995.A.316, USHMM Archives.

118 around without permission, risking well-known consequences – Mauthausen and certain death – if caught.233

Figure 19. Emergency Edition of the Jewish Weekly.

233 Romijn, The War, 319.

119

One of the central questions concerning the Jews in the Netherlands is: at what point did they decide to go into hiding? While the next chapter will deal with this question in more detail, I assert that it was only now, when the floodgates of deportation were flung open and rumors of destruction swirled throughout the community, that the Jews of Amsterdam started to seriously consider evading the clutches of the Nazi administration and their Dutch NSB counterparts.

While their options were limited at this point, some would continue moving their families to avoid capture, some would rely on the conscience of non-Jewish neighbors to hide them, and still others would attempt to flee the country altogether.

The Germans also started rethinking their strategies for deportation and tasked the Dutch police chief, Sybren Tulp, with creating a police battalion with the sole purpose of rounding up

Jews. This battalion of 254 men lived together in military barracks and formed raiding parties, rounding up families at their homes and searching for them on the streets. Tulp told Rauter in

September that his men were averaging 450 people per night, but that it was causing alarm and sympathy among the Dutch population. The presence of two or three of his men, however, was sufficient to quell any protests.234 With the step-up in deportations, the Germans outgrew their

Zentralstelle offices and moved their administrative apparatus to the spacious Portuguese synagogue on the Jonas Daniël Meijerplein. It is, of course, hard to imagine that this was the only or even best option to house the bureaucracy that would empty Amsterdam of its Jews.

Instead, it was yet another opportunity to turn the knife that was already perforating the Jewish community by appropriating a profound place of worship. They also had concerns about the

Amsterdam Central Station, mostly that it was too small to be an effective collection point, and

234 Hillberg, Destruction, 618.

120 also that it was too public, even though most of their deportations took place under the cover of darkness. They decided instead to take control of the Jewish Schouwburg theater and use it as their collection center for deportation. It was a spacious facility, but not equipped for this sort of large-scale operation. It had not been remodeled in any way, and only a few months prior had been used to entertain the Jewish community. Now hundreds, sometimes thousands of people were packed into the Schouwburg, awaiting processing and transportation to the Central Station.

They waited there for days at a time in their traveling clothes with the one bag allowed them.

They waited in sweltering heat, with inadequate bathroom facilities and little water, creating makeshift beds in the aisles,235 while counting down to the moment when they would leave their home and embark on a journey to some unknown destination (Figs. 20, 21).

In September of 1942, Rauter, as Higher SS and Police Chief, wrote to Himmler outlying his deportation plans for the rest of that year. This letter is marked ‘secret’ (geheim) and put the number of Jews in Dutch labor camps at 7,000 with another 1,000 expected by 1 October. Here

Rauter claims that they have allowed the Jews to flee to these camps, implying that at this point, many in the Jewish community considered labor camps to be a safer alternative to general deportation. He goes on to report that these individuals have about 22,000 relatives throughout

Holland whose location was known to them. His plan is to surround the labor camps (“they will be suddenly occupied by me”), while rounding up their relatives and deporting the entire lot through the newly remodeled Westerbork and Camp Vught, which was scheduled to be operational on the 10th of that month. He would then officially outlaw Judaism on the 15th, and

235 Moore, Victims, 97.

121

Figure 20. The Joodsche Schouwburg Theater

Figure 21. People in the alley of the Schouwburg Theater, awaiting deportation.

122 plan for all non-exempt Jews to be taken from the Netherlands by Christmastime. To facilitate this, he asks for three trains rather than two per week. Rauter also makes mention of the effectiveness of Tulp’s police battalion, how they have “distinguished themselves in the Jewish question by day and night arresting hundreds of Jews.”236

Many of those arrested during the October raids on work camps were held in reserve at

Vught or Westerbork in order to plump up the deportation numbers when their quotas started to look thin. The Germans were also emptying out senior living facilities throughout the

Netherlands with only a few exceptions, one of them being the Jewish Invalide hospital, that bulwark of the Jewish community, which received a letter from the Council in September thanking them for their “titanic labors” and affirming their status as a safe haven.237 During the last part of 1942 and the first months of 1943, the numbers of patients and staff at the Invalide had swelled, and it was relying on volunteers to supplement paid staff. I can’t help but wonder if the Council’s letter furthered the idea that this would always be so. As it turns out, this protection only lasted until March 1943, when the SS raided the Invalide, arrested staff and patients, and ransacked the building. The hospital had been given a rare warning from the Council that a raid was imminent, and they were able to evacuate most of the patients and all but a handful of staff, who chose to remain and care for those who could not be moved. Even many patients who were not ambulatory were evacuated by family members on litters and handcarts.238 Two days later, the Nederlands-Israëlitisch Hospital, without warning, was also emptied of its patients, staff, and pensioners. Moore asserts that no one who had witnessed or been made aware of the abject

236 Letter from Rauter to Himmler, Judenabschiebung, A-000850, Leonie Penney, 1995.A.316 (11/93), USHMM Archives. 237 Presser, Ashes, 188. 238 Ibid.

123 brutality with which these hospitals were attacked, could still have believed in the façade of labor service deportation.239

Also during the month of March, the Nazis suddenly changed the destination of deportees from Amsterdam to the killing center of Sobibor, in the Lublin district of Poland. This was due, in part, to the fact that Auschwitz-Birkenau was inundated with Jews from Salonica and was also fighting a typhus outbreak. But it is strange that transports from other Western European countries were suspended during this period, while the Dutch transports were merely re- routed.240 From March to July, 19 trains carrying 34,313 people were sent to Sobibor. Of that number, only 19 survived. 241 With so many of Amsterdam’s Jews gone, Aus der Fünten directed the Jewish Council to identify 7,000 of their exempted workers for deportation, as such a large staff was no longer necessary. Asscher and Cohen left it to the individual departments to decide who would be selected, and the departments determined this in various ways, from drawing lots to creating ‘hangman’s commissions,’ and while 7, 000 letters were finally given out, only around 3,000 people reported for deportation. As a result, the Germans rounded up another 3,000 from the Jewish Quarter, which emptied the Quarter of all known Jews once and for all.242 Then in June, the Germans assembled all hands, along with squads from Westerbork, and conducted massive sweeps of south and east Amsterdam, yielding approximately 5,550 people, who were then shipped to Westerbork.

The Germans then turned their sights on the Jewish Council itself and began attacking even the most protected group, those with a ‘120,000’ stamp, identifying them as those members

239 Moore, Victims, 101. 240 De Jong, The Netherlands, 203. 241 Moore, Victims, 102. 242 Presser, Ashes, 203.

124 who were absolutely critical to the running of the Council. Up to this point, Asscher and Cohen had been desperately re-categorizing people to maximize the number of protected individuals, but now the façade of protection was gone. On 29 September, the chairmen of the Council were themselves deported to the “propaganda camp” of Theresienstadt, along with 3,000 – 5,000

Council members.243 This ended up being the final privilege of the ‘120,000,’ that most of them were allowed to remain at Theresienstadt, where most survived. This was not because of any sentimentality or obligation on the part of the Germans, but rather that the Germans wondered if they might not still be of some value. Hilberg notes that even after the Netherlands were officially Judenfrei (free of Jews), a small fragment of the Council remained in order to file records and perform other administrative functions. They were able to draw this out until

September of 1944, when all of them went into hiding.

And just like that, the Jews of Amsterdam were gone. It was two days before Rosh

Hashana.244 All that remained were the roughly 8,600 in mixed marriages, some still on the

Calmeyer List or with special exemptions direct from the Germans, and those in hiding. A people who had helped form the very city of Amsterdam and been a part of her culture for three and a half centuries had now been decimated by a people who occupied her for only three and a half years. Now the occupiers were in a position where they could plunder at will. There was already a mechanism of sorts in place, in which a representative from the Lippmann-Rosenthal

Bank, two members of a newly-formed branch of the Zentralstelle known as the

Hausraterfassung (furniture acquisition), and two policemen would enter a vacated residence,

243 Moore. Victims, 104. 244 Lozowick, Bureaucrats, 174.

125 inventory all goods, and move any valuables to a central location. This caused a certain amount of struggle amongst the Germans as to who would control the material wealth of the Dutch Jews.

In the end, the home furnishings fell under the purview of Alfred Rosenberg and his Einsatzstab

(Operational Staff) Rosenberg who inventoried all homes and removed their contents. Eisatzstab

Rosenberg contracted a Dutch moving company called Puls to actually haul and store the goods.

This sight became so commonplace, that the Dutch created a new verb to describe a Jewish residence that had been plundered in this manner: it had been gepulst.245 The furniture from these procurements was largely ‘loaned out’ to German cities who had suffered under allied air attacks, but much of it was also sold off. Likewise, the most valuable jewelry went to Göring but was also sold at auctions throughout the Reich or donated to Göring’s Christmas Aktion.

Valuable art was taken to Nazi art experts under Mühlmann and Posse, while ‘degenerate’ art was sold off, and Jewish art (Jews as either the subject or the artist) was stored for further consideration. In post-war testimony, Seyss-Inquart claimed that the total of all sales and monetary acquisitions totaled 400 billion guilders, which would have equaled just over 212 billion dollars. According to Hilberg, when all was said and done, the Germans collected more wealth in the Netherlands than in any other territory of the great semicircle.246

As far as the real estate is concerned, some of the truly remarkable dwellings left behind were occupied by the German establishment and their Dutch protégés, but most of them were sealed off and left vacant, waiting for German patriots in need of lebensraum. Many of those were then literally torn apart for wood during the winter of 1944-45 when food and fuel were

245 Moore, Victims, 105. 246 Hillberg, Destruction, 629-31.

126 scarce, but some were quietly and covertly re-occupied by a scattering of Jews still left in the city. They were part of a remnant that was either in hiding or constantly on the move, obstructing the Nazi machinery where they could, and striving always to stay one step ahead of the perpetrators, while day after day looking to the West for help to arrive.

127

CHAPTER 5

BENT BUT NOT BROKEN: THE FINAL PICTURE

If all that we saw had any meaning, it was this. All the generations of Jews have lived in vain unless we recover their path – which in times of joy and of sorrow they never forgot. Following their tracks will indeed be difficult. Because we will never, never be able to forget this Amsterdam.

- Jaap Meijer, The Vanished Ghetto

From September 1944 until May 1945, there was nothing the remnant of Jews living in

Amsterdam could do but hold on. From the first mass deportation in July 1942 until the last train left the city in September 1943, Dutch Jews were faced with a terrible choice of either accepting deportation or trying to flee that fate. What deportation meant was always unclear and even if they had been given an accurate report of each train’s destination, they still could not have been certain of theirs, as the Germans themselves were not certain until the last minute. Westerbork –

Theresienstadt – Ravensbrück – Mauthausen – Bergen-Belsen – Sobibor – Auschwitz. Any of these were possible. At first, they might choose to believe in an urban relocation in which families could stay together in some distant place, or else a labor relocation, in which families might be separated, but would be put to work for the German cause, while surviving until the day of liberation. But as time went on, the realization set in that their fate might be much worse and their options severely limited.

If one wanted to escape the deportations, a possible option was to petition the German bureaucracy for an exemption. Some were even successful for a time. Exemptions were given to those working for the Jewish Council, those whose Jewish heritage was in question and had found themselves on the Calmeyer List, those who were in a mixed marriage prior to the German

128 invasion, or those whose names were included in an appeal from the Portuguese (Sephardic) community, whose biological Jewish-ness was still under investigation. Most of these exemptions were only temporary, however, and very few of them ended up being allowed to stay. The other option was escape. While the Netherlands was geographically challenging, in that it was not surrounded by vast amounts of forested countryside as were some other European cities, some were able to escape to the provinces or through Belgium to France or Switzerland and sometimes all the way to the Pyrenees and Spain. For the most part, however, to be successful required a sufficient amount of capital and social or business contacts outside of the

Jewish community – two things that the majority of Amsterdam Jews did not have. The last option available was to go into hiding.

After July 1942, the Jewish community started to use the word onderduiken (to submerge or plunge under water), to describe those who went into hiding. One moment they were there and the next they were not. I have used the testimony of Jehudith Ilan-Onderwyzer extensively because, unlike many other survivors, she was willing and able to recall wide-ranging, detailed memories of her experiences in Amsterdam and later in Bergen-Belsen. She remembers being a child in the fall of 1942 and going every day to the home of a Jewish teacher, along with several other students, until one day the students arrived, and their teacher had vanished. They all knew what happened – he had gone into hiding.247 It is likely that the teacher himself didn’t know that he would become an onderduiken until the opportunity presented itself. The simple fact is that only one in seven Jews in the Netherlands went into hiding. The actual figures vary quite a bit, but at most, 25,000 went into hiding between the middle of 1942 until the end of the war, and

247 Ilan-Onderwyzer memoir, 10.

129 only half of those survived.248 Yet if we compare that number to Berlin, where 6,000 at most went into hiding and only 10 percent of those survived, Amsterdam Jews fared remarkably well.

Still, there were a number of factors that made hiding particularly difficult. Often, family dynamics such as health problems or caring for elderly parents made hiding together impractical and separating unthinkable. For some, concern over not being able to continue orthodox religious observances was a factor, while for others, simply the fear of leaving their homes prevented them from hiding. Moore tells of a survivor who had the location and means to hide, and planned to do so with his business partner, but at the last minute, his partner’s wife became, “too sentimentally attached to her personal belongings and furniture and refused to leave the home.”249 Adding to these fears, the decision to become an Onderduiken always involved a significant amount of risk.

Since deportation was still a fluid concept, chances of surviving the war might just be better with this option, and anyway, an individual could reason that perhaps the worst fate of some deportees would not be their own. And then there was the Jewish Council, which discouraged hiding and consistently implored Amsterdam Jews to obey the summonses and report for deportations. The

Council members were connected to the German authority, therefore ‘in the know,’ and were supposed to represent the best interests of the Jewish community, so following their instructions made a certain amount of sense. But once a person became an Onderduiken, all protections were off the table and capture meant deportation to a certain death. One survivor remembered the finality that her family felt when they removed the stars from their clothing and stepped out onto

248 Romijn, The War, 325. 249 Moore, Victims, 151.

130 the street, leaving their home and all possessions behind, and walked two-by-two to their hiding place.250

Hiding was also difficult because it required contact in the non-Jewish community in order to find someone willing to help. While some had personal or business contacts that could assist them, others relied on their literal neighbors, those opportunities sometimes presenting themselves with little notice. Finding willing help was often easier in the provincial towns around Amsterdam, especially among the communities that adhered to a stricter form of

Calvinism. These groups believed that it was a clear duty of the Christian Elect (as defined by the Calvinist doctrine of predestination) to help their Jewish brethren and, in some circles, it became a status symbol to harbor onderduiken.251 Zentralstelle commandant Willy Lages confirmed this in 1944, when he estimated that at one point, approximately 500 Jews per day were going into hiding, and that they were having more success among the religious (particularly

Calvinist) communities in the rural areas of Holland.252 For most Amsterdam Jews, however, remaining in the city was their only option. And since communities in the central, south, and east parts of the city had historically housed higher concentrations of Jews, finding a hiding place in the north or the west would have the advantage of being raided less often.253 But really, most would take whatever they could get – a stock room, an attic, a cellar, a crawlspace – anything that would buy them time and keep them out of the public eye.

250 Interview with Theresa Rodrigues Pereira, (KIC Scan, A1995.A.1139, U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum Archives), 3. 251 Presser, Ashes, 382. 252 Lages, Entjudung, 2. 253 Moore, Victims, 156.

131

The very model of the hiding family comes from Amsterdam through the Diary of Anne

Frank. This particular account centers around several families living together in one space for an extended period of time before being betrayed by a neighbor, whose only apparent motive was to be a law-abiding citizen. In the case of the Frank family, Miep and Henk Gies were willing to shelter and feed them indefinitely, even going so far as to check on their former home and ask for them there to see what the rumors were as to their whereabouts.254 But this was far from the norm. The penalty for harboring Jews was severe, and the expense both in time and money caused some to abandon their good intentions of long-term shelter. Hans Rauter mentioned in a

September 1942 letter to Himmler that he was advertising that anyone caught harboring Jews or assisting in their escapes would have their own belongings confiscated and be sent to a concentration camp.255 Still, it was possible to find people willing to take their chances in order both to help the helpless and to do their part in damaging the plans of their despised occupiers.

Willy Lages noted that hatred for the Germans was indeed a driving force for some to help the

Jews and that, “There are a lot of Aryans involved in the escape of a single Jew.”256

A more realistic model for hiding involved moving around frequently, exposed for periods of time, and often with no idea of where the next place of refuge might be. Survivor

Theresia Rodriguez Pereira recalls no less than fifteen narrow escapes over three years while hiding, any one of which could have sent her to Auschwitz. She was nine years old when her family went into hiding. Her brother was good friends with Anne Frank and had been at her birthday party when she received her famous diary. At first, Pereira’s family hid in the

254 Miep Gies and Alison Leslie Gold, Anne Frank Remembered: The Story of the Woman who Helped to Hide the Frank Family, (New York: Simon and Schuster Paperbacks, 1987), 102-4. 255 Letter from Rauter to Himmler, (A-000850, Leonie Penney, 1995.A.316, 11/93), UHMM Archives. 256 Lages, Entjudung, 3.

132 crawlspace of a shop that sold frames and mirrors. There could be no sounds at all from opening until closing. This lasted for four months (what she recounts as a very long time), until a member of the German police broke through their crawlspace door and apprehended them all. She reckons that they must have been betrayed by a neighbor. For some reason, the German soldier interrogated them and then simply let them go. She remembers sleeping next on a grocer’s floor between the cauliflower and carrots, then staying with her brother’s former teacher until this woman gave in to her fear and asked them to leave. They then stayed in her uncle’s home that had already been emptied and sealed by the Germans, but only for as long as her parents thought safe. She and her brother stayed with a Christian family outside of Amsterdam for a time, then was back with her parents in an attic with a family of four, along with seven others whom she describes as, “Jewish peasant people.” One can’t help but wonder at the fact that, even now, there was such a sharp cultural divide between the two Jewish communities. After a while, a member of the Dutch police came to warn them that they had been discovered and would soon be rounded up. Her mother, who had been in the open, working as the cleaning lady, had formed a friendship over the fence with the next-door neighbor, a retired school teacher. They were fortunate enough to stay with her and her husband for a short time. These people then shuttled them to their son’s store, a cobbler shop, where they slept among the wooden shoes. From here she lost track of subsequent hiding places. They were malnourished and prone to infections. At one point, starvation prompted her father to sneak out for some milk and he took her with him.

They ran into a distant cousin who was married to a non-Jewish man and she snuck them food from time to time. When they were finally liberated, she says, “We were numb. There was nothing left. Just your naked, skinny body; no belongings, no family.” It is interesting to note

133 that Pereira admitted to grappling with the question that has haunted so many survivors and post-

Holocaust philosophers – what to make of their faith after the war. Her father, who had lost ten siblings in the Holocaust, made a choice that was immediate and visceral: he would never again be associated with religion, because “being Jewish had gotten us into so much trouble.”

Theresia, however, took what was perhaps the more difficult route and came back to Judaism whole-heartedly. “We have a Kosher home,” she says, “…and my children did not lose their

Jewishness. I feel that if you throw it all overboard, Hitler has had his way.”257

Hiding was also made difficult by the sheer chaos of the daily raids and Razzien. Survivor testimony brings to light the helpless feeling that every day would be worse than the last, with no idea when it would be their turn to leave. To Egbertina Olsson, “It seemed that overnight whole blocks of apartment houses were emptied. Sirens all night long. My family talking each day about which families were taken away…Conversations were in whispers only.”258 Likewise,

Oscar Lichtenstern recounts that, “Jews were hunted down like wild animals. One could see scared Jews climbing on roofs from which they were brutally pulled down by Germans. Time and time again, I was stopped on the street, but because of an identification card stating that I was part of the Jewish Council…I was released.”259 Mary Ebbe-Pront had a single Jewish grandparent, which she lied about to remain off of the Zentralstelle lists. She remembers how calm most of the families were as they were rounded up for a razzia; wearing their best clothes, their one suitcase in hand, as if they had been waiting by their front doors to be taken away. She went to the Schouwburg Theater and waved goodbye to friends. She carried the suitcases for

257 Pereira interview, USHMM Archives, 7 pages. 258 Egbertina C. Olsson, Memoirs Relating to the Holocaust in the Netherlands, (KIC Scan, 1994.A.0400), USHMM Archives, 2. 259 Lichtenstern, Struggle, 3.

134 some, including a woman who had just miscarried after seven months of pregnancy, as they walked to the Polderweg, where they were crammed together on the square by shouting soldiers, pushed into trucks, and taken to the train station.260

Perhaps later in the deportation process, when most of the Amsterdam Jews were gone, was an even a more precarious time to go into hiding or to be displaced between hiding spots.

Jews carried a bounty on their heads, and enthusiastic NSB members had an extra incentive to find hidden Jews. Lages reported the average bounty to be 40 Holland florins. Rachel Sacksioni

Levee was stopped on the street in May 1944, when two NSB soldiers were suspicious of her forged papers. They took her to Euterpestraat police station, where they argued about how they would split the bounty for her capture. She was sent to Westerbork, then on to Auschwitz where she survived.261 Olsson describes the feeling of hiding during this time:

The old neighborhood was desolate. All my friends were gone. Words like slave labor camps and concentration camps were whispered. Fear and distrust were the norm, except with our immediate family. Four uncles were sent to Germany to work in ammunition factories. One uncle was hiding in a closet when the Gestapo came to pick him up. They shot through each closet door and when finished, opened them one by one until my uncle fell out and died right in front of his wife and five-year- old son. After the war it came to light that the upstairs neighbor, a Dutch Nazi, had betrayed my uncle.

One question that comes to the forefront is why the Dutch Jews didn’t mount more of a resistance movement. There were no uprisings like in Warsaw or Bialystok, or over 100 other

Jewish ghettos. The primary reasons for this are the circumstances that I have previously discussed – namely a strong Jewish Council, an overly efficient Dutch bureaucracy, an equally

260 Interview with Mary Ebbe-Pront, Netherlands Documentation Project (RG-50.570, USHMM Archives). 261 Rachel Sacksioni Levee, transcript of a video interview (1995.A.0066, USHMM Archives), 3.

135 efficient German administration, a virulent Dutch National Socialist contingent, and a well- integrated Jewish population who were led to believe that they would be the exceptions. This is not to say that there was no resistance at all. There were active Dutch resistance movements, all of which included Jews as members, which typically worked on behalf of the Jewish community.

Presser, for example, mentions the Amsterdam Labor Office, which employed 600 people, 123 of which were Nazis. A number of officials would routinely stay after closing time, after the

Nazis had gone elsewhere, and then destroy Jewish identification cards, while forging documents for the Amsterdam Jews. They were successful, it seems, in sending some unemployed (and therefore at risk) Jews out of Amsterdam, some even to Germany, as Aryans with forged passports.262 There was resistance of this type throughout the Netherlands, some cities even more successful than Amsterdam, but Presser states adamantly that the Jewish resistance was comparably greater than that of the other Dutch.263

Jewish resistance was both great and small. Joël Cosman was an avid boxer when

Amsterdam fell to the Germans. Boxing had actually been a favorite sport in the Jewish community, and they had produced several champions, most notably Ben Bril, who competed in the 1928 Olympics and won the Dutch National Championship eight times in a row.264 Cosman and the rest of his gym witnessed firsthand the harassment from the NSB and WA in the Jewish

Quarter. An older woman whom everyone knew as Aunt Golly sold oranges on the street corner,

262 Presser, Ashes, 95. 263 Presser, Ashes, 279. 264 Mike Silver, Stars in the Ring: Jewish Champions in the Golden Age of Boxing, (New York: Roman and Littlefield, 2016), 99. Brill was barred from the 1932 Olympics because the Olympic commissioner for the Netherlands was a Dutch Nazi. He then refused to fight in the 1936 Berlin Olympics, even though he was the odds- on favorite to win. He was deported to Bergen-Belsen in 1942, where he survived the Holocaust and returned to Amsterdam to continue his career. He is still considered a Dutch legend in the sport of boxing.

136 and they kicked over her stand and roughed her up. They bullied people at the Waterlooplein market and would go street to street, breaking into homes and throwing radios and other belongings out the windows. Cosman decided to fight back the only way he knew how, so he and his teammates formed a gang that he credits as being the first actual resistance group in

Amsterdam. They made known their willingness to assist the residents of the Jewish Quarter and whenever they got a phone call of someone being harassed, they drove over in an old, stripped- down vehicle that they called their ‘assault car,’ and attempted to intervene. Cosman claims to have beaten up NSB and WA thugs at Koko’s Ice Cream Parlor before it was shut down and its owners killed by the Germans. He also states that it was his group who killed WA member

Willem Koot, an incident that caused a considerable amount of violence in its aftermath. As he tells it, it was around seven o’clock and there was a dense fog. Cosman’s gang heard someone they believed to be “NSB guys” walking over the Blue Bridge and singing, “Juden an der Wand”

(Jews against the wall). They ambushed the group in the square and most of them scattered, but

Koot was beaten unconscious, and later died in a hospital. Cosman also mentions the subsequent order to disarm the Jewish Quarter and thought about how comical that was – “Maybe the odd guy had a piece of metal, but for the rest, we did everything with our fists.”265 A slightly different perspective of the Koot incident can be found from Aron de Paauw, who worked for

Abraham Asscher at the Diamond Exchange. He described Koot as a reliable, non-Jewish maintenance worker there who had always been a nice person. After the German invasion, he showed up for work in his WA uniform and everyone was surprised. De Paauw seemed to feel

265 Joël Cosman in Bregstein, Remembering, 211-12.

137 bad about Koot’s fate, but quickly changed the subject to point out the prominent Jews who were abused by the NSB.266

Some of the great resistance work of the Amsterdam Jewish community either centered around children or was done by teenagers. Children were favorite victims of the Nazis. Both the

Midrash and the Talmud teach that the murder of a child is tantamount to an assault on the Holy

One,267 and it is clear that they were not ignorant of this. Children lived through the horrors of deportation and were often separated from their parents. Clara Asscher-Pinkhoff was a teacher, the wife of a Groningen rabbi and a tireless volunteer at Beis Yisroeil, a youth group and children’s charity in Amsterdam. She worked mainly among the Jewish poor and cared for homeless children before her own deportation in 1943. She published a series of stories about these Jewish children under German occupation in a book entitled, Star Children. Here she tells of forming a circle with the children after each deportation, and singing a little song – “The star children are singing, dancing…They neither see nor hear the sorrow that is rebounding from upstairs to downstairs, downstair to upstairs.”268 Asscher-Pinkhoff returned to Amsterdam after surviving Bergen-Belsen, but she was never able to rid herself of the images of those children and her powerlessness to protect them. She published Star Children in 1946 with this dedication:

To you I dedicate this book Little star boy. You who played harmonica In Hell.269

266 Aron de Paauw in Bregstein, Remembering, 209. 267 David Patterson, Fackenheim, 112. 268 Clara Asscher-Pinkhof, Star Children, translated by Teresa Edelstein, (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1986), 27. 269 Ibid, 5.

138

On the opposite end of the witness spectrum, Adolph Eichmann himself made mention of the number of homeless children rounded up during the deportations. During his trial in Israel, he claimed that he and his wife spent time in the ‘children’s home’ at Westerbork. Eichmann mentioned a ten-year-old boy who had been hidden with his family and not allowed to make any sounds, for fear of the neighbors hearing. In a judgmental tone, he told of how this child had not been able to play or even walk “as a child should walk.” When the boy came to Westerbork, he was still speaking in whispers, but now was discovering that he could finally make noise, and so was running around, playing loudly. When the prosecutor asked what became of the boy,

Eichmann answered matter-of-factly that he had been sent three days later to Auschwitz.270

Still, children figure prominently in some of the most inspiring instances of Jewish resistance. Walter Süskind was a German Jewish member of the Council, specifically tasked with assisting Jews who had been rounded up and sent to the Schouwburg theater to await deportation. Since a typical week could have as many as 400 - 1000 people crowded into the theater, Süskind began to find ways to help them escape, in the midst of the tumult. Initially he helped adults and families to slip out of the Schouwburg, and then he went about the much more difficult task of finding them places to hide or ways to smuggle them out of the Netherlands. The

Nazis made a practice of separating young children and babies from their parents and placing them in a day care center, or creche, across the street from the theater. Süskind found existing networks within Amsterdam and across the Netherlands that would be willing to take children and place them with temporary homes. Since the creche was lightly guarded compared to the theater, it proved easier to sneak children out in fruit crates, potato sacks, or random boxes. The

270 Lozowick, Bureaucrats, 178.

139 creche volunteers were also allowed to walk the babies in strollers, and they began leaving with these babies, then returning with dolls in the carriages. Older children where sometimes taken most of the way to the Central Station before being whisked off of the street at an opportune time. Oddly enough (or perhaps not), it was not uncommon to see Waffen SS men who were guarding the theater and creche, bring gifts to the children and play with them, even though they knew well that these boys and girls were sorted for deportation and murder. SS-Unterscharführer

Alfons Zündler took this a step further. While he receives barely a mention from Presser or de

Jong, Zündler, who was wounded in 1941 and re-assigned as a guard for the Amsterdam creche, at the very least turned a crucial blind eye to rescue efforts taking place there. He was not involved in any organized resistance movements, but he was opportunistically assisting Jews where he could, while still seeming to perform his duties as a guard. Typically, he just chose to look the other way, although on one occasion he leant his SS uniform to a resistance fighter for a mission. On another occasion, while involved in the roundup of a Jewish family, he offered to transport the father separately to the Schouwburg, and instead took him to a resistance organization. He then returned to the theater and smuggled the rest of the family out the back, and later destroyed their index cards. In 1943, Zündler’s superiors caught wind of his activities, and he was tried for the crime of Judenbegünstigung (favoritism toward Jews) and sentenced to death. His sentence was commuted, however, to ten years at Dachau, and researchers assumed that he perished there, until he was discovered in the 1980’s living in Munich. Zündler admitted

140 that he simply felt sorry for the Jews and had made up his mind to assist one per day, estimating that he helped over 400 people escape. 271

Yet central to all of this was Süskind. As a member of the Jewish Council, he was able to alter the card indexes so as not to raise suspicions, while arranging hiding places for children and sometimes whole families. It was imperative that the rescuers have parental permission whenever possible, although many of the children had already been separated from their families at this point. But rescuing children was only one side of the equation. To place the children with families willing to hide them, Süskind utilized several resistance networks already in operation: a rescue group that grew out of the Dutch Reformed Church known as the Naamlose

Vennootschap or NV (the term for a limited liability company); the Utrechtse Kindercomite, who collected children from Amsterdam and placed them with families in Utrecht; the Amsterdamse

Studentengroep, university students who placed children through contacts in Friesland, Arnhem, and The Hague; and a resistance group working through the underground newspaper Trouw

(faith), who used student couriers to transport children to pre-arranged foster homes across the

Netherlands. Süskind became the central supplier of refuge children to these organizations. All of them carried out oftentimes outrageous feats of heroism, as when the Utrechste Kindercomite lost three of their rescued children to a raid. Two members of the group traveled from Utrecht to

Amsterdam dressed in Nazi SS uniforms, where they barged into the creche and demanded the children back, on forged orders from the Higher SS. Moves like this were so out of character for the typically passive Jewish community that they were usually successful. Estimates put the total

271 Moore, Victims, 181-89; Presser, Ashes, 281. This estimate has not been corroborated, and other factors, such as his actions in the SS, have kept Zündler from being officially recognized by Yad Vashem.

141 number of children rescued from the Creche at 600, or roughly ten percent, and the grand total from Amsterdam at 1,100 children. 272

Several of the Jewish youth groups that were officially disbanded after the occupation also formed grassroots resistance movements. The Zionist Palestine Pioneers, for example, was an organization that trained teenagers in work skills, mostly agricultural, preparing them for eventual relocation to Palestine. The Germans deported 400 youth from a training camp early in

1941 (from information given to them by the Jewish Council), and when the large-scale deportations began in the summer of 1942, two youth leaders named Joachim Simon and

Menachim Pinkhof partnered with Joop Westerweel, the non-Jewish headmaster of an

Amsterdam school, to funnel other Pioneer groups out of the Netherlands. They formed a network that was initially successful, until Simon was arrested returning from France and took his own life rather than betray the organization. Westerweel continued rescue operations until his capture and execution in 1944. All told, the Westerweel Group rescued just over 150 Jewish youth from Amsterdam, 70 of whom eventually immigrated to Palestine.273

Another disbanded youth organization was the Oosteinde group, named after the address of their headquarters at Oosteinde 16 in Amsterdam Centrum, at the intersection of the

Singelgracht kanal and the Amstel River. They were initially a group formed for German Jewish youth, to help them connect to the Dutch community prior to the war. Rather than dissolving their organization when ordered to, they continued to meet and produce forged documents for the

Jewish community. Over time, the group expanded to facilitate matching onderduiken with

272 Moore, Victims, 184, 298. 273 Presser, Ashes, 282.

142 hiding places, often using their headquarters and the neighboring building as a stop-over. The

Oosteinde group also worked with Jacques van der Kar, another Jewish Council member at the

Schouwburg, to smuggle Jews from the theater through their headquarters to various hiding places, mostly in Amsterdam. And as if that weren’t enough, they also established contacts with a resistance group inside Westerbork and managed to rescue approximately twenty people from the camp itself.

Whole families were involved in the resistance movement. Egbertina Olsson was living with her mother, younger sister, and baby brother on forged papers (perzoonsbewijs) that identified them as non-Jewish. The perzoonsbewijs were crucial for everyone in the Netherlands, particularly towards the end of the occupation. They contained a person’s name, age, place of birth, race, and a photograph. They were also used for obtaining rations, and must be carried at all times, as one could expect to be stopped several times on the street while going from one place to another. If anyone were unable to produce their papers, they would immediately be arrested, Jewish or not. Olsson’s father was active in a resistance movement and her parents had divorced as a precautionary measure. She recounts several times that her mother was interrogated by the Gestapo and could answer truthfully that she had no idea where her ex-husband was, and less truthfully that she didn’t really care. They never had a very happy marriage, she would say.

Olsson remembers a German program in which Dutch families could send their children to

Vienna for six weeks, where they would stay with host families, experience the food and culture of Austria, and “listen as praise songs were sung to Hitler and the Reich.” Her father decided that this was perfect cover for them and sent her and her sister to Vienna. She was awestruck by the abundance and variety of the food, and she stayed with a kindly older couple whose son was in

143 the war. When she returned home, she had a German dirndl dress that they had given her, and her mother burned it, fearing that someone might associate them with collaborators.

Throughout the next few years, her father would return home for short periods of time between missions. Guns would appear in odd places (including her pillow) and then be gone the next day. She would see piles of blank perzoonsbeweijs and ration cards around the house, then people with code names only would arrive and take them away. They were raided at one point by

Gestapo men who tore open her brother’s crib with a bayonet but seemed to be placated by two

Nazi uniforms they found hanging in a closet that they considered to be real.

Olsson herself, though only twelve-years-old in 1944, played a role in the resistance. She would courier packages around to different addresses, then ring the bell three times, wait, and ring it twice more. A stranger would appear and take the package without speaking a word and she would return home. The idea was that she was less likely to be asked for identification and if apprehended, she was more likely to be let go, and this was in fact the case on several occasions.

An example would be during the hunger winter of 1944-45, when her family took their last few valuables in a ferry across the IJ to farms in the north, where they bartered for food. She remembers these farmers with disdain as having had an abundance of food when so many were starving, and yet filling their pockets with valuables worth far more than the food they were selling. On their way back with produce that could be the difference between life and death, they were confronted by German soldiers at the ferry landing who would routinely strip people of their valuables or food. Olsson’s family placed their produce in their son’s stroller and had

Egbertina slip past them unnoticed. At a later point, they lived in an apartment next to the railroad tracks and she would regularly squeeze through a small hole in the fence and steal coal

144 or whatever else the trains were carrying. She hid from German soldiers with dogs and was seized on one occasion when her sweater got caught on the fence. Her mother and grandmother watched helplessly from their apartment. Since she had lost her handfuls of coal and denied being Jewish, the soldier let her go. Her mother confined her to the apartment after that and she could only observe the bustle outside her windows. She didn’t realize until later that many of those cattle cars she watched go pass were crammed with Amsterdam Jews on their way to the camps.274

It is important at this point to emphasize that, while Paris was liberated in August of 1944

(the same month the Anne Frank family was captured), Amsterdam was still under Nazi control until May 5, 1945. This last year was a particularly stark period of starvation and deprivation for the residents of Amsterdam and those Jews still left in the city. Their once bustling, thriving port city, a jewel of Europe and gateway to the world, had been reduced to poverty and hunger. They were bombed continually and indiscriminately by the Allies, and empty homes were torn apart for the wood and anything else that could be used for fuel. Olsson’s family transported anything they could scrounge in their baby stroller in hopes of evading the German and Dutch Nazis who still patrolled the streets. As the noose tightened around the Amsterdam Jews, her father appeared one day with a container of dried beans for the family, then he was off again. Shortly thereafter, in February of 1945, two Dutch Nazis appeared at her door to inform them that he had been found murdered in the frozen harbor. This happened after an underground group detonated a bomb inside city hall to destroy Jewish records, and people were routinely being rounded up

274 Olsson, Memoirs, USHMM Archives, 1-7.

145 and shot in the streets on suspicion of sabotage against the Germans. Olsson describes the city this way:

By this time no one saw the Star of David on clothing – all Jews had disappeared. Garbage was no longer collected but deposited in parks and streets. Beggars for food, with distended stomachs everywhere. Corpses were collected daily by truck and buried in mass graves. Black market traffic on street corners and under bridges, where you could sometimes buy a potato for ten Guilders. Thousands of people with pushcarts, bicycles with wooden tires, baby carriages…275

Emmy Andriesse, a Jewish woman who would become one of the most important photographers of the twentieth century, lived in hiding throughout most of the occupation. She became part of an underground group, who would emerge with falsified papers to photograph the occupation and the hunger winter. Andriesse’s friend, Lili Jampol, described the atmosphere as,

“extremely tense; there was shooting on the street. Of course, we never spoke about the underground. It was unthinkable...” 276 As a Jew taking photographs of Nazi atrocities,

Andriesse used hoarded, rationed film, and a hidden Rolleiflex camera, often taking pictures through holes cut in bags or newspapers. Yet even with this subterfuge, Andriesse’s skilled, sensitive eye eloquently recorded the shock and scarcity of this last year. (Figs. 22, 23).

In the last year of the occupation, the German Referat IVB4 in The Hague estimated that there were still between 10,000 and 15,000 Jews in hiding and the Amsterdam authorities echoed this concern.277 They formed special units of Dutch police who became ‘Jew hunters,’ constantly patrolling the streets, stopping people who “looked Jewish,” and following up on leads to find hidden Jews. As previously mentioned, a bounty was paid for these individuals, and citizen

275 Ibid, 6. 276 Baring, Hidden Lens, 61. 277 Moore, Victims, 206; Lages, Entjudung der Niederlande.

146

Figure 22. Emmy Andriesse, Hunger Winter, Amsterdam, 1944-45.

groups also formed to take advantage of this policy, although Lages discouraged this and disbanded groups when they became too large. Pilfering from victims was also an issue with the

Dutch police. The Nazi administration, the same people who had made stealing from Jews a bureaucratic art form, frowned on local, opportunistic thieves and vigorously prosecuted those caught, some of whom found themselves, “delivered up to the Schouwburg.”278 The

Sicherheitsdienst (SD), an SS intelligence division linked to the Gestapo, also received thousands of denunciation letters from concerned Dutch citizens anxious to see hiding Jews brought to

278 Moore, Victims, 208.

147

Figure 23. Emmy Andriesse, Boy with Pan on his Way to a Soup Kitchen Food Distribution. Amsterdam, spring 1945.

justice. While there were some sympathetic Dutch police officers who destroyed letters or attempted to warn those in hiding, another 4,000 of the 11,000 Amsterdam Jews rounded up in

148 the last year of the occupation, were caught by these ‘Jew hunters.’279 In the weeks leading up to the liberation of the Netherlands, the German occupiers grew desperate and resentful, and the murder rate rose. A false report of an early Allied victory led a large group of Amsterdammers to take to the streets in celebration just days before the actual liberation. They approached the

Queen’s Palace on the Dam Square waving American, English, and Canadian flags and were mowed down by machine gun fire from the Germans still occupying the palace. Still, this did not dampen the enthusiasm of the celebrations after the actual liberation on 5 May 1945. People danced in the streets to Bing Crosby and the Andrew Sisters (Fig. 24), and Allied troops handed out vitamin C tablets, chocolate, chewing gum, and food – small amounts at first to allow the starving populace a chance to adjust.280 Children used biscuit tins from Allied food drops for drums as they marched through the streets in celebration.

Then slowly, little by little, Jewish residents emerged from hiding to rejoin the world.

They began returning to Amsterdam from forced labor and concentration camps. They told of horrors and atrocities that were beyond what anyone believed possible, even then. In the end, of the 105,000 Jews deported from the Netherlands, 1 returned from Mauthausen, 19 from Sobibor,

1,000 from Auschwitz, and just over 4,000 from Theresienstadt and Bergen-Belsen.281 The final analysis of Jewish culture in occupied Amsterdam is difficult. Comparisons to other occupied cities seem to fall short. Simply put, three out of four Jews who lived in the Netherlands at the beginning of the war were dead at the end. The numbers read more like Poland or Russia,

279 Hillberg, Destruction, 627; Presser, Ashes, 348; 280 Olsson, Memoirs, 11. 281 Hillberg, Destruction, 628.

149

Figure 24. Emmy Andriesse, Liberation Party, Frederiksplein, Amsterdam, May 1945.

although Amsterdam had an altogether different type of German administration and Jewish

Council from those areas. The Netherlands stand alone in Western Europe. The question of foreign Jews killed in Amsterdam compared to Dutch Jews is also an unsettled issue. Herzberg and Presser seemed to believe that Amsterdam was the exact opposite of France in terms of foreign Jews – while the Petain regime in Vichy France was quick to deport those considered foreign, but reticent to deport French Jews, Presser believed that Jews who immigrated to the

Netherlands after 1933 actually fared better in the end.282 More current scholarship by

Amsterdam historian Houwink ten Cate, however, disputes this idea. He asserts that foreign Jews

(‘full Jews’) constituted only about fifteen percent of the Dutch Jewish population, less than

282 Presser, Ashes, 221.

150 other Western European countries, and that they had fewer advantages in terms of charities available to them, employment opportunities, and contacts in the community. As far as it can be ascertained from available evidence at Amsterdam’s National Institute for War, Holocaust, and

Genocide (NIOD), foreign Jews perished in the same numbers as their Dutch counterparts.283

Anti-Semitism is another factor. The Netherlands had a centuries-old reputation as a tolerant nation, and this was a point of pride for twentieth-century Amsterdammers. This sentiment bled into the Jewish community and was as prominent there as it was among the non-

Jewish Dutch. I believe this view of tolerance as a patriotic virtue was yet another component feeding into the overall idea that the Dutch Jews would not be handed over to the Germans by their countrymen. As we have seen, this notion blunted the ability of Amsterdam Jews to sense imminent danger until it was too late and paralyzed the Jewish Council to sound any kind of alarm at all. It is also difficult to look at the final figures and not make a claim, as have a number of contemporary historians, that, “The occupation exposed the cowardice of the common man and his indifference to the Jews.”284 It also raises a renewed question of whether Dutch anti-

Semitism was a significant contributing factor to the overall murder rate. In a highly enlightening work published by NIOD and the University of Amsterdam, Bart van der Boom analyzed 164 diaries of Amsterdam residents during the occupation, 53 of which were written by Jews. While these diaries were randomly selected from different segments of the population, they correspond to a remarkable degree. Many diarists expressed a similar optimism in the initial occupation that

283 Moore, Victims, 213. 284Bart van der Boom, Ordinary Dutchmen and the Holocaust: A Summary of Findings, in The Persecution of the Jews in the Netherlands, 1940-1945: New Perspectives, (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2012), 31. For similar claims, see Dienke Hondius, Bitter Homecoming: The Return and Reception of Dutch and Stateless Jews in the Netherlands and Frank Bovenkerk, The Other Side of the Anne Frank Story: the Dutch Role in the Persecution of Jews in World War II, in Crime, Law, and Social Change, 34, 3 (2000) 237-258.

151 the Netherlands would be spared much of the atrocities of war, and they considered the suicides of both Jews and non-Jews to be premature. They also expressed faith in their tolerant Dutch culture. In fact, a Jewish teacher from The Hague wrote that the “Decency of the Dutch is one of those things the Germans will never understand.” 285

Certainly, the number of “ordinary” Dutch who embraced national socialism by joining the NSB or the WA, as well as those citizens who took it upon themselves to betray their neighbors by writing letters of denunciation, illustrates the fact that there were clearly anti-

Jewish and pro-German factions within the population. And while Dutch culture as a whole did not contain the kind of virulent anti-Semitism that might have been found in Poland or France, one could certainly find anti-Semitic tropes in Dutch culture, as well as areas in which the non-

Jewish Dutch saw their culture as different from their perception of Jewish culture. Yet van der

Boom only found these stereotypes in 24 of 111 diaries written by gentiles. Instead, what he found to be much more prevalent, was the identification of anti-Semitism with Nazism and therefore a rejection of it out of an overarching hatred for their German occupiers. Even when anti-Semitic sentiments were expressed, they were often followed by outrage at how the Jews were being persecuted. In fact, 92 out of the 111 diarists expressed explicit anger regarding the treatment of the Jews in their midst, with four who did not record their feelings, except to say that they disagreed with the overall deportations (three of them were NSB members).286

The presence of Dutch anti-Semitism can perhaps be summed up by an entry from a

Dutch Zionist youth, who recounted a slogan he had seen scribbled on a wall in town – “Let

285 Van der Boom, Ordinary Dutchmen, 37. 286 Ibid, 39.

152 these dirty Krauts keep their dirty hands off our dirty Jews.”287 While this is admittedly anecdotal, it does illustrate the point that anti-Semitism in Dutch culture did not equal approval of the German occupation or their measures against the Jews. Van der Boom also found that, while many speculated on where the deported Jews were going, not a single diarist had real knowledge of their fate. They only recorded rumors and fears.288 These were their Jewish neighbors, after all – many of whom belonged to families who could trace their Dutch lineage to the end of the sixteenth century. Some of them returned from the carnage and rebuilt their lives as well as anyone could. They became, once again, friends and countrymen. Men and women who claimed the city of Amsterdam as their own and would never relinquished that claim. For these people, living and dead, the words of Jaap Meijer, from his study of the old Jewish Quarter, ring true: “We will never, never be able to forget this Amsterdam.”289

287 Ibid, 41-42. 288 Ibid, 45. 289 Leydesdorff, Dignity, 42.

153

CONCLUSION

PROMOTING NORMAL

We end this study as we began it: with Amsterdam. The city that was unmistakably unique in European history was equally unique in the history of Judaism. Sephardic immigrants from Spain and Portugal began arriving in the late sixteenth century, thanks in large part to the liberality and tolerance of Amsterdam’s government, and by the 1630s had settled into Dutch society as the Portuguese Jews. They divided into parnasim, governing bodies of the three synagogues, and then joined these communities together to create a seven-member mahamad, that would control most aspects of life for the Sephardic community. At the same time,

Ashkenazi Jews began arriving from Germany and Eastern Europe, many fleeing the carnage of the Thirty Years’ War. The two Jewish communities interacted with one other only as much as was absolutely necessary. They grew together but remained apart – the Sephardim were far more integrated into Dutch society and the wealth of Dutch trade, while many of the Ashkenazim settled into the same lives of labor and poverty that they had previously known. The Jewish community as a whole was bookended by extreme wealth and abject poverty, but the first half of the twentieth century saw a rise in socialism and labor activism that was gradually improving the economic condition of many Jews, while drawing them further from the orthodoxy that had previously been their foundation.

The invading Germans of May 1940 found Amsterdam with an efficient, functioning, civilian bureaucracy and a largely assimilated Jewish community. They were Dutch citizens, fully and completely, and had the same expectation of treatment as their non-Jewish neighbors.

The German civilian administration of Arthur Seyss-Inquart appointed a Jewish Council led by

154

Abraham Asscher and David Cohen. Seyss-Inquart gave them every indication that their treatment would be similar to the treatment of their non-Jewish Dutch compatriots. I argue, then, that there was no collusion or treason on the part of the Jewish Council when dealing with the

Germans. From their formation in 1941, they passed on orders and information from the

Germans, while continuing to believe that things were not going to get much worse. From the last months of 1940 until the summer of 1942, the noose was slowly tightening around the necks of the Amsterdam Jews. German legislation prevented them from making a living, from observing Jewish law, and from educating their children in Dutch schools. The Germans confiscated Jewish property, possessions, and bank accounts and separated them from virtually every aspect of Dutch life. And still the Jewish Council was communicating to their community that Dutch Jews would be the exception to Nazi barbarism. I have found no evidence, however, to claim, as Louis de Jong and Jacob Presser have, that the Council acted in its own best interests to the detriment of the average citizen, or that they assisted the rich while abandoning the poor.

Instead, they took up the very mantle of Jewish charity and attempted to nurture Jewish culture by giving the impression that, at least in their cultural microcosm, things could still be as they were before. Here I make my second argument: the Jewish Council of Amsterdam kept the optimistic mirage of normalcy before the Dutch Jews to the very end, long after it was practical or even possible for many to go into hiding. Instead of sounding even subtle alarms, they warned of the dire consequences of disobeying a call-up summons, while touting the benefits of compliance.

To compare the Amsterdam Council with others in Europe is to cast them in a rather unfavorable light. Some council leaders, such as Adam Czerniakow in Warsaw, committed

155 suicide rather than comply with the deportation mandates of 1942, which he wrote were tantamount to the Germans asking him to murder children with his own hands.290 Others, like

Elias Barzilai, the Grand Rabbi of Athens, destroyed all Jewish records and sounded the warning to his community that they should immediately go into hiding. Even within the regional branch of the Amsterdam Jewish Council at Enshede, the local leadership ignored Asscher and Cohen and advised Jews to disobey their summonses and go into hiding. As a result, the region of

Enshede had a 38 percent survival rate, almost double the national average.291 The Amsterdam

Council, however, stubbornly believed that complete cooperation was their ticket to better treatment, and they allowed the fantasy of labor deportations to cloud their judgement. Even

Willy Lages, the German Chief of Police in Amsterdam, told Jacob Presser in a 1949 interview that the Jewish Council was used by him “In every possible way.” When asked if he found them easy to work with, he replied, “Very easy indeed.”292

Still, many other European councils also urged obedience and teetered on that fine line between cooperation and collusion, as did the Amsterdam Council. That in itself does not prove nefarious motives. And from July 1942 until September 1943, when deportations began in earnest and the Germans were deporting 1,000 people per day, many Jews did become onderduiken, or ‘submerged.’ The total number is somewhere between 22,000 and 25,000 people who went into hiding until the liberation of May 1945. If we compare those numbers to Berlin, where between 5,000 and 6,000 went into hiding (half of the total number in Germany),293 we

290 Trunk, Judenrat, 319. 291 Slier and Shine, Letters, 22. 292 Presser, Ashes, 344. 293 Richard N. Lutjens Jr., “Jews in Hiding in Nazi Berlin, 1941-1945: A Demographic Survey.” Holocaust and Genocide Studies, vol. 31, no. 2 (Fall 2017), 269. In Berlin, those who went into hiding were known as U-Boote, or submarine Jews, much as the Dutch Jews were known as the ‘submerged.’

156 see that Dutch Jews were quite successful by comparison. Then if we examine survival rates, it becomes even more stark: fewer than ten percent attempted to hide in Berlin, from which one quarter survived, while twenty percent of the Dutch Jews hid, with approximately fifty-eight percent surviving.294 This may even lead us to question what effect the Council’s policies actually had on the survival rate. Clearly, despite geographic challenges, the successful assimilation of the Amsterdam Jews, along with a mostly tolerant non-Jewish population allowed them to hide in comparatively large numbers. However, when we consider the fact that most did not even attempt to hide until the last year of deportations, we are left to wonder how many more might have been saved if the truth of Auschwitz, Sobibor, and Mauthausen, even the truth as

Asscher and Cohen understood it, had been disseminated earlier? I maintain that if a realistic picture of the occupation and deportations had been portrayed before July 1942, along with a rational assessment of the efficient Dutch bureaucracy and their willingness to assist the Nazis, more Dutch Jews would have gone into hiding. Then if resistance networks could have been put into place earlier as well, I believe the tragic number of Dutch Jews who perished would have been significantly lessened. The Amsterdam Jewish Council did not create this tragedy, nor was it their intention to exacerbate its effects. Still, their insistence on clinging to an optimistic picture of events, along with the willingness of Dutch Jews to share in this fantasy, coupled with an already strong culture of obedience (both as Dutchmen and as Jews), led to an outcome that stands out in Holocaust history as particularly catastrophic.

As observers after the fact, haunted by the Holocaust, we are left with not only what we remember, but how we remember it. As Zygmunt Bauman says, “having lost our innocence, we

294 Ibid.

157 are not certain of the knowledge we have acquired …but like the Holocaust itself, the way in which it is remembered is a matter of life and death.”295 Every Dutch Jew was a victim. They waited, they hoped, they obeyed, they resisted, they fought, they fled, they hid. As Israeli historian Yehuda Baur suggests, they “kept body and soul together”296 under unimaginable circumstances of fear, brutality, and deprivation. Ultimately, we remember the spirit in their resistance and the courage in their calm obedience. We remember this community, this

Amsterdam.

295 Bauman, Modernity, 232. 296 Yehuda Bauer, They Chose Life: Jewish Resistance in the Holocaust (New York: American Jewish Committee, Institute of Human Relations, 1973), 33.

158

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BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH

Scott Swartsfager came to The University of Texas at Dallas after a twenty-five-year career as an

Air Force officer. During that time, he completed a BA in Russian at the University of Arizona and a MA in history at the University of Colorado. He was an Assistant Professor of History at the U.S. Air Force Academy, where he won the Outstanding Academy Educator Award and the

David H. Zook Award for Excellence in Teaching World History. At the Academy, he taught courses in world history, early and modern European history, the history of Christianity, and the history of the Holocaust. He has also been an adjunct professor of history at Colorado State

University, The University of Maryland, Allan Hancock College, and Collin College. He was chosen for the Belofsky Fellowship in the Ackerman Center at The University of Texas at Dallas in 2015 and completed his dissertation on the topic of Jewish cultural history in Nazi occupied

Amsterdam.

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CURRICULUM VITAE

SUMMARY OF QUALIFICATIONS • Award-winning professor teaching European, American, Russian, and world history • Experience training and evaluating other instructors • Academic adviser • Course design, curriculum development, and textbook evaluation/selection • International education coordinator • 25-year career as an Air Force officer

EDUCATION • PhD (ABD), Humanities – History of Ideas, University of Texas at Dallas. Dissertation: Promoting Normal: Jewish Culture in Occupied Amsterdam. Adviser, Dr. Nils Roemer. • Belofsky Fellow at the Ackerman Center for Holocaust Studies. • Graduate Certificate in Holocaust Studies, Ackerman Center for Holocaust Studies, University of Texas at Dallas. • Master of Arts in History, University of Colorado, 2005 • Bachelor of Arts in Russian, University of Arizona, 1994 • Dissertation and Thesis Workshop, United States Holocaust Memorial Museum: The Holocaust in the Soviet Union, 2016 • Holocaust Education Foundation Summer Institute, Northwestern University, 2008 • Faculty Development Seminar: Teaching in Fractal Patterns, Idaho State University, 2008 • Faculty Resource Network Seminar, New York University, 2007

EXPERIENCE Instruction • Assistant Professor of History at the United States Air Force Academy. Taught multiple sections of World History, Early and Modern European history, the Holocaust, Greece and the Hellenistic World, the History of Christianity, and War Crimes, Genocide, and Human Rights (inter-disciplinary). Developed curriculum and assessments, created syllabi, and selected reading materials. • Director of Instruction, USAFA Department of History. Responsible for new and recurring teacher training for all department professors. Restructured and revised teacher training, evaluation, and continuing education. Developed curriculum and managed a $200K textbook budget for 4,000 cadets. • Adjunct Professor at Colorado State University, Pueblo, teaching Russian history.

• Associate Professor of History for Collin College, teaching American History I and II. Extensive experience teaching dual credit courses in three Dallas Texas high schools, as well as traditional students on campus. • Adjunct Professor for Allan Hancock College, teaching Survey of American History. Taught courses on campus and in Lompoc Federal Penitentiary. • Department Director of Cadet Summer Language Immersion Program. Worked with Russian language school and led team of 35 cadets to Russia for immersion and study. Wrote multiple reports on academic exchange and international education programs. Served on Intercultural Competence Team, developed core language and culture strategy, and briefed Air Education and Training Command. • Adjunct Professor for University of Maryland, teaching American History to deployed Airmen, soldiers, and sailors in Iraq. • Social Studies teacher: Advanced Placement European history, world history, psychology, and sociology. • Table Leader/Grader for ETS, the Advanced Placement Exam in World History, since 2007. Extensive knowledge of exam format and preparation techniques.

Advising • Academic Adviser to 96 officer candidates. Developed complete academic schedule with students and ensured that all graduation requirements were met. • Regularly represented students at Academic Review/Academic Integrity Boards • Associate Air Officer Commanding for Academics to Cadet Squadron 30. Developed a first- year schedule for approximately35 cadets per year and contributed to overall First Year Experience. AWARDS

• Belofsky Fellowship, Ackerman Center for Holocaust Studies, University of Texas at Dallas • Outstanding Academy Educator Award, US Air Force Academy, 2009 • David H. Zook Award for Teaching Excellence in World History, US Air Force Academy, 2007 • ETS Award for Outstanding Score on the Praxis Social Studies Content Knowledge Exam

EMPLOYMENT HISTORY • August 2015 – present, Associate Professor of History, Collin College, Dallas Texas. • August 2015 – present, Research Assistant, Ackerman Center for Holocaust Studies, University of Texas at Dallas.

• August 2012 – May 2014, Social Studies Teacher, Advanced Placement European History, Palmer Ridge High School, Monument, CO • December 2011 – May 2012, Tutor/Permanent Substitute, Fillmore Elementary School, Lompoc, CA • August 2010-December 2011, Director of Current Operations/Force Enhancement, 14th Air Force, Vandenberg AFB, CA • 2005-2010, Assistant Professor of History, USAF Academy; Air Advisor/Combat Planner, Baghdad, Iraq. • 2002-2005, Satellite Vehicle Operator/Engineer/Evaluator/Crew Commander/Evaluations Branch Chief, Schriever AFB, CO • 1999-2002, Executive Officer, 305 Rescue Group, Davis-Monthan AFB, AZ. (Reserves) • 1995-1999, Missile Combat Crew Commander, Minot AFB, ND. • 1986-1995, Hospital Administration/Information Technology Specialist/Russian Interpreter and Treaty Inspector, in Europe and the United States. LANGUAGES • Russian – speak/read/write with advanced proficiency. Level 3 on Defense Language Proficiency Test. • German – speak/read/write with advanced proficiency • Spanish – speak/read/write with intermediate proficiency • French – speak/read/write with intermediate proficiency PROFESSIONAL MEMBERSHIPS:

• Member of the American Historical Association • Member of the World History Association