Читать книгу The Courage to Care - Carol Rittner - Страница 14

On May 10, 1940, the German Army invaded the Netherlands. The invasion was a surprise. During World War I the Netherlands had managed to maintain its neutrality, and we hoped to be able to do that again. I was living in Nymegen, close to the German border and awoke very early in the morning to the drone of numerous aircraft flying overhead, and Germans on motorcycles lining the street. It was clear that the planes were not engaged in one of their regular raids on England, but that we were being attacked. It was a miracle that the Dutch held out for even five days in view of the overwhelming military superiority of the enemy.

NETHERLANDS

The Germans knew that anti-Semitism would not be acceptable to the vast majority of the Dutch people. After the surrender, the occupation forces instituted a very unsubtle education/propaganda approach, aimed at converting the general population to the Nazi ideology. Obviously it would be much easier to isolate, and then round up and deport the Jews if the majority of the citizens were in favor of this process. I remember a film called “The Eternal Jew.” I attended it with a group of friends, some fellow students at the school of social work, some Jewish, some gentile. It was so crude, so scurrilous, that we could not believe anybody would take it seriously, or find it convincing. But the next day one of the gentiles said that she was ashamed to admit that the movie had affected her. That although it strengthened her resolve to oppose the German regime, the film had succeeded in making her see the Jews as “them.” And that, of course, was true for all of us, the Germans had driven a wedge in what was one of the most integrated communities in Europe.

Gradually the Germans instituted and carried out the necessary steps to isolate and deport every Jew in the country. They did it in so many seemingly small steps, that it was very difficult to decide when and where to take a stand. One of the early, highly significant measures was the Aryan Attestation: all civil servants had to sign a form stating whether they were Aryans or not. Hindsight is easy; at the time only a few enlightened people recognized the danger and refused to sign. Then followed the other measures: Jews had to live in certain designated areas of the towns they lived in, and the curfew was stricter for them than for the general population. Jews over the age of six had to wear yellow stars on their clothing; Jewish children could not go to school with gentile children; Jews could not practice their professions, use public transportation, hire a taxicab, shop in gentile stores, or go to the beach, the park, the movies, concerts, or museums. The Jewish Committee was instructed by the Germans to publish a daily newspaper in which all these measures were announced, the regular Dutch press was not allowed to print anything about Jewish affairs. And in 1942 the deportations started in earnest.

One morning on my way to school I passed by a small Jewish children’s home. The Germans were loading the children, who ranged in age from babies to eight-year-olds, on trucks. They were upset, and crying. When they did not move fast enough the Nazis picked them up, by an arm, a leg, the hair, and threw them into the trucks. To watch grown men treat small children that way—I could not believe my eyes. I found myself literally crying with rage. Two women coming down the street tried to interfere physically. The Germans heaved them into the truck, too. I just sat there on my bicycle, and that was the moment I decided that if there was anything I could do to thwart such atrocities, I would do it.

Some of my friends had similar experiences, and about ten of us, including two Jewish students who decided they did not want to go into hiding, organized very informally for this purpose. We obtained Aryan identity cards for the Jewish students, who, of course, were taking more of a risk than we were. They knew many people who were looking to onderduiken, “disappear,” as Anne Frank and her family were to do.

Marion Pritchard. “It did not occur to me,” she said, “to do anything other than I did... I think you have a responsibility to yourself to behave decently. We all have memories of times we should have done something and didn’t. And it gets in the way the rest of your life.”

We located hiding places, helped people move there, provided food, clothing, and ration cards, and sometimes moral support and relief for the host families. We registered newborn Jewish babies as gentiles (of course there were very few births during these years) and provided medical care when possible.

Then I was asked by two men I knew well—one of whom had become a leader in the Dutch Resistance Movement—to find a place for a friend of theirs, a man with three small children, aged four, two, and two weeks. I could not find an appropriate place and moved out into part of a large house in the country, about twenty miles east of Amsterdam, that belonged to an elderly lady who was a very close friend of my parents. The father, the two boys, and the baby girl moved in and we managed to survive the next two years, until the end of the war. Friends helped take up the floorboards, under the rug, and build a hiding place in case of raids. These did occur with increasing frequency, and one night we had a very narrow escape.

Four Germans, accompanied by a Dutch Nazi policeman came and searched the house. They did not find the hiding place, but they had learned from experience that sometimes it paid to go back to a house they had already searched, because by then the hidden Jews might have come out of the hiding place. The baby had started to cry, so I let the children out. Then the Dutch policeman came back alone. I had a small revolver that a friend had given me, but I had never planned to use it. I felt I had no choice except to kill him. I would do it again, under the same circumstances, but it still bothers me, and I still feel that there “should” have been another way. If anybody had really tried to find out how and where he disappeared, they could have, but the general attitude was that there was one traitor less to worry about. A local undertaker helped dispose of the body, he put it in a coffin with a legitimate body in it. I hope that the dead man’s family would have approved.

A street in the Jewish ghetto of Amsterdam.

Was I scared? Of course the answer is “yes.” Especially after I had been imprisoned and released. There were times that the fear got the better of me, and I did not do something that I could have. I would rationalize the inaction, feeling it might endanger others, or that I should not run a risk, because what would happen to the three children I was now responsible for, if something happened to me, but I knew when I was rationalizing.

People often ask, Why did I decide to do what I did?

Let me digress for a moment. Some have explored this question, why did some gentiles act, while others stood by. I have been troubled by the tendency to divide the general population during the war into the few “good guys” and the large majority of “bad guys.” That seems to me a dangerous oversimplification.

Let me give you two examples, one involving a Dutch family, and one involving German soldiers.