Hannah & Gordon in Europe - 2016

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The Anne Frank House – Amsterdam, 28 May

The rooms are small, dark, and musty. Windows are completely blacked out. Concealed behind a moving bookcase, steep, even by Amsterdam standards, steps lead up from the back of the offices to the hidden “Annex.” The clippings of movie stars and country scenes that Anne glued to the wall to interrupt the monotony are still there, as is the map Otto Frank used to track the progress of the Allies as they spread out from the beaches of northern France. The fifteen or twenty people who are touring the house at the same time as we are help give a sense of how crowded and claustrophobic the space is in spite of the lack furnishings. When I close my eyes, I see Anne’s mischievous grin and hear the murmured comings and goings of the eight who called this space home for 2 years.

Hannah and I step back into the corner, out of the flow of people, when we get to the largest room in the Annex, the combined kitchen, dining room, common room, and bedroom. I am disturbed by the stillness of the room. I hear faint echoes of the lives that filled this space, that threatened at times to overflow this space betraying those that lived here and those that were their lifeline. I hear too, the shouted orders, the confusion, the loud, abrupt end to the silence that had protected them until that night in August, 1944, when a squad of Dutch police and their SS leader burst into their refuge and arrested the Franks, the van Pels, and Fritz Pfeffer.

At some point the tears had started to flow. I wasn’t sobbing or weeping, just deeply moved, by the ordinariness, and the sadness, the wasted lives, the hope and desperation, and the rotten “luck” to have been betrayed when the Allies were just a few weeks away from liberating Amsterdam.

I cannot imagine the kind of fear that would drive me to such extremes, or the desperation that would help me contain the frustration and boredom that would build and fester and threaten to undo everything. Nor do I know what well of hope I would draw from to sustain the belief that this was going to turn out alright. And I marvel at the courage and the steady-handedness of the helpers who kept the secret and the flow of food and other necessities coming under increasingly harsh repression and economic hardship. What would I have done? Adapt, collaborate, resist?

Hannah arrived yesterday to begin our 12 day “pilgrimage” to cities and places in the Netherlands, Germany, the Czech Republic, Poland, and France that are tied in one way or another to the Nazi era. The fascination that propels this trip is one of the things that she and I share, although we came to it by different routes. More about Hannah in my next posting.

I first became aware of the Holocaust in 1967, when my high school history teacher asked me to do a presentation on “the final solution.” Before that I had not given the recent history of the Jewish people much thought.

I had a couple of Jewish classmates in grade school, Rhonda Snyder, who lived in a little cottage on the street behind ours, and Mitchell Dana who lived a couple of streets over. Otherwise I had only a conventional Protestant view of Jews and Judaism, leavened, if you will, by a vague awareness of the slightly exotic section of town, down near the beach, where all the Jewish bakeries and shoe stores were.

Then there was Mrs. Grodzsky, my fifth grade teacher, who tried, I suspect vainly, to stretch our young minds by introducing us the the stories behind the Jewish holidays. Up until then, my teachers had been Irish and Catholic, the two McGonagle cousins (grades 1 and 2), Mrs Roche, and Miss Finn (who had been my mother’s oldest sisters 4th grade teacher! And insisted we recite the 100th Psalm every morning).

Ours was not blatantly anti-Semitic household. As Protestants in a largely Catholic city, in one of the centers of the Irish diaspora, we were a minority with some sympathies for other minorities. We did comfort ourselves with the belief that we had inherited the mantel of “chosen people” since we had accepted Jesus and the Jews had rejected him. The Jews were a distinct, and distinctly different people with some unattractive physical features and an disconcertingly direct and at times offensively aggressive way of dealing with others. Our paths seldom crossed and they were not much on our minds. To my parents credit, that is not how we thought about people, as members of a group, but as individuals.

The research for my history paper was an eye-opener. Mr. Taylor, my history teacher, was big proponent of using original sources and of viewing things from multiple angles. (He had introduced us the use of original sources and to Howard Zinn’s Poor People’s History.) Reading about the emergence of National Socialism and its racial policies, about the “Wannsee conference” at which the Endlösung, “the Final Solution of the Jewish Question,” was agreed by the leadership of the Germany security apparatus, and the painstakingly detailed administration of their extermination program revealed a world I barely knew existed. Reading accounts of participants - guards, victims, collaborators, bystanders - introduced me to people who did not seem all that different from me, but who had done unimaginable things. Although the details are not clear, my perspective on human nature was fundamentally altered.

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Photos

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Anne Frank House - Amsterdam

Comments

[Brian]

Thanks for this!
I really appreciate your keeping a travel journal, Gordon-- makes it more than a travelogue, but also helps me see what it's meaning to you. I hope you find it helpful to do; and if so, that you find the time to keep going! Nice style, also.

[Darcy]

Although you talked about visiting Anne Frank's house before we all went our different ways from Amsterdam I really appreciate the continued intimate scope of your blog. And Gordon hearing about how your interest, this drive to know more, to understand more deeply unfolded in your youth is helping me to enter in to your experience. Thanks for that! Darcy