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Published: November 2nd 2009
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Dear Ms. Jacobs,
I am a Canadian, Jewish, and living in a small canal house on the outskirts of Amsterdam for the month of October. Searching the shelves for something to read, I came across your book, A Safe House, Holland 1940-1945. Immediately, I picked it up and read it from cover to cover. Your true story, so vividly told, sent me first to the city of Amersfoort, where you and your mother sheltered four Jews during the Nazi occupation. I wasn't looking for your particular house, but needed to get a sense of what it might have felt like for you, as a young girl, hiding and caring for four strangers that became family.
As a writer, I was moved by the purity of your voice and the simplicity of your descriptions. Consequently, when we arrived in Amersfoort in the chilly mid-morning of 2009, I had no trouble looking past the bustling storefronts and conjuring up the rubble-strewn streets. In particular, I pictured you with your stick-thin legs, hauling illegal pine trees home to be sawn up for fuel on the living room rug. Also in my mind's eye was a vision of you on your bicycle, toiling
along treeless stretches of road, delivering buttons. This month, one of my great pleasures has been to join the carefree throngs of Dutch cyclists and rely exclusively on that mode of transportation. Good tires, obviously, are a necessity, and I can't imagine how you ran your grim errands on replacement tires of an old rubber garden hose stretched onto the rims of the wheels.
Equally shocking was the chill and the starvation. When I visited the Dutch Resistance Museum, I saw a jar of pickled tulip bulbs and had a strong reaction to those vile little nuggets that, along with rotting potato peels, people were reduced to eating. On the opposite side of the emotional spectrum, I had an unexpected surge of pride when you described those two Canadian couriers rumbling into town on the first day of peace. ("Very special we thought. Very Canadian we thought/ though no one had ever seen a Canadian before.") My taste buds reacted to the food that they brought: Swedish white bread and margarine that "tasted better than the best-quality butter."
As we passed benignly into Germany, I imagined the insidious advance of an army appearing on your doorstep. After the
Germans bombed Rotterdam, and with no adequate defenses to counter such a horror, it is simple to understand why the Dutch government capitulated. With cunning subtlety, the anti-Jewish laws came into force, and it was then that decent people, like your mother, had the moral fabric to counter it.
Now we come to the part that I don't understand. My new friend, Peter, has supplied me with statistics and I now know that 25,000 Jewish people were hidden in Holland during the war. Many, as was the fate of Anne Frank and her family, were discovered by SS soldiers and sent off to die in concentration camps. Of Holland's hidden Jews, only 16,000 (12% of the Jewish population before the war) survived. A heartbreaking few (only 4,500) of those survivors were children.
At the Dutch Resistance Museum, there is a door and a doorbell above it. When I rang the bell, recorded voices gave the predictable excuses. A woman's voice said: "Sorry, we have our own troubles." A man's voice said: "It's too dangerous. Go away." Another woman said: "My husband was rounded up last month. I have no food for my own children."
These are plausible reasons, all of them, and it is remarkable that your mother, Maria Wolask, involved herself at all. How terrifying it must have been to conceal the illegal occupants of your house by scattering newspapers and onions over the trap door. Gratitude does not begin to describe the sentiments of the Jewish people alive today, whose families owed their existence to the bravery of Righteous Gentiles. This includes my husband, Ron, whose mother and grandmother were hidden in Hungary and spent two years cowering in a small back room of a Budapest apartment.
The story of hidden Jews, everywhere, invites a profound discussion about human nature that goes beyond the Anne Frank House. I am starting to understand that the people of Holland were caught unprepared for the atrocities that followed after Rotterdam, that an entire population (Jews included) complied obediently and signed up for an identification paper that allowed a large "J" to be stamped onto it, and that anti-Jewish sentiment, festering so viciously less than a hundred kilometers away, likely spilled over into the Netherlands. After all, anti-semitism doesn't park its car at the border.
Speaking of the Anne Frank House, yesterday Ron and I decided to spend our last afternoon in Amsterdam doing a very touristy thing. We took a canal cruise, and watched the city from the water, while sitting cheek to cheek with all the weary others - Americans, Russians, Japanese, and Germans. As daylight faded and the lights from the storefronts poured onto the canal, we stopped to let a clutch of tourists off at the Anne Frank House. Even at that late hour, there was still a line-up at the entrance that snaked around the block. I saw a hearty family having their picture taken at Anne's front door. My first response was the wrong one. "Don't smile," I wanted to yell at them. "This house is a hallowed ground. There was no happy ending, if you recall." Today, I've reconsidered. It's good to smile. We're all doing better, despite our complaints, than we were at the middle of the last century. So keep smiling, all you tourists. Keep coming. Keep remembering.
I'm not sure what you will think of this long letter. Books sometimes pass into oblivion and I wanted you to know that yours is still having an effect. It got me thinking and helped me to understand. And if thinking leads to remembering and remembering leads to reminding, that's a good thing, too. Vigilance is critical, so that such evil does not take hold again.
Sincerely,
Elizabeth Morantz
Amsterdam, October 2009.
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flaury Bubel
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A very poignant letter. Brought tears to my eyes.