An excerpt from Gordon Sander’s book, The Frank Family That Survived.
CHAPTER 6
The Decision
To the decree of 30 June 1942 D III 516 g with references to my teletype messages - No. 250 of 17 July 1942 . .
Subject: Deportation of Fens
…The deportation of the Dutch Jews has proceeded undisturbed. Today's train brings the total of Dutch Jews deported up to 6,000. The deportation [has] proceeded without any disturbances. Of course, the Dutch population became aware of this measure and some temporary excitement was noticeable.
From a secret message from Otto Bene, the representative of the
German Foreign Office in The Hague, to Reich Commissioner
Seyss-Inquart confirming the start of the deportation of the
Dutch Jews to the East, dated 31 July 1942
Despite his studied casualness, Myrtil Frank was by spring 1942 doubtless aware of German intentions towards the Jewish population. Although he had reluctantly obeyed each of the incrementally humiliating Nazi edicts since the invasion two years before, from the family's enforced move from the Dutch coast, through the compulsory census of January 1941, and all the other restrictions the Germans had imposed since then, he was able to keep his wits about him.
Not that it had been easy. By the end of 1941, the stress of the occupation, coupled with his growing money worries, in addition to the increasingly difficult task of finding food for the family, had turned the now forty-eight-year-old Jewish water pic salesman into a very nervous and anxious man.
The difference between Dorrit's state of mind and that of her father is readily evident in a snapshot taken of the two in the garden of the Hilversum house. Dorrit, her hair neatly coiffed, looks as if she hasn't a care in the world. By contrast, Myrtil, hair visibly greying, fingers clenched around a half-smoked cigarette, looks tense and forlorn; the smile he wears is forced; the old killer grin is gone. Clearly, daughter and father were living in different worlds. Dorrit is smiling broadly, while her father is trying to figure out how to keep his family alive. We can see this from his expression; we know it from the courageous decision he will shortly make, to take the family into hiding. Perhaps the thought of going into hiding had already occurred to Myrtil by the time the photo was taken. In any event, it is very possible if not likely that the idea of resisting had already occurred to him.
This, the ability and willingness to resist mentally in the first place and to resist the herd instinct amongst Jews not to resist - was the first prerequisite for becoming a successful onderduiker. As he had already proved on numerous occasions, Myrtil Frank possessed this prerequisite, along with the necessary courage to effect that resistance. So did his namesake, Otto Frank. As such, both men - along with the thousands of others who doubtless were entertaining similarly subversive thoughts at this time - were part of a minority. However, it is important to recall that there were other preconditions for 'diving under'. For even those Jews who were willing to countenance the thought of going into hiding needed other essential things before they could consider taking such a serious step, namely: money for renting and provisioning a hiding place for an indeterminate amount of time; a place where it was safe to hide, whether in the city or the countryside; and Gentile helpers or protectors who could be counted on to bring additional supplies for the duration of the 'dive', and who would not betray them or blackmail them, as a few mercenary-minded Dutchmen did.
One year hence, by which time the resistance had created a sophisticated nationwide support system to aid both Jewish and non-Jewish onderdwikers, these additional preconditions - money, food, addresses and helpers - would not be as difficult to come by. But, of course, no one could see that far into the future, then, in spring 1942. In any case, a year later, in 1943 it was too late for many Jews, for the great majority of them had already been deported and killed.
However, in the spring and summer of 1942, before the trains out of Westerbork bound for the East began rolling, when the conditions were 'good' for diving under, before the great razzias that would soon sweep across Amsterdam Zuid, these preconditions made all the difference. As Bob Moore, an historian of the Dutch Holocaust, writes, the real tragedy remained that the vast majority of Jews. had neither the money nor [an] "address" to go to [in 1942]'. The logistics [of going into hiding] were daunting,' said Leo Ullman, who survived the war after his parents hid him with a sympathetic Dutch policeman in Amsterdam.
This helps explain one of the great unanswered questions surrounding the near-extirpation of Dutch Jewry: why, according to historians, did only one out of seven Jews in the occupied Netherlands decide to dive under at all?
One must consider further. Something more was generally required to dive under, or to contemplate doing so: the willingness to think the unthinkable - to contemplate where the tracks to Westerbork really led. And who, in the spring of 1942, could possibly know that the tracks to Westerbork ultimately led to Auschwitz and Sobibor? No one knew about the gas chambers yet. No one had gassed an entire race, or tried to. 'People were not aware until much, much later that there was risk of death, said Leo Ullman. 'Rather, the risk [in 1942] was transport to a work camp in Germany, and people thought that this might be tolerable and that life would go on.'
Myrtil didn't think so. Neither did Otto Frank, and neither did a relatively small proportion of Dutch Jews. They had a hunch, in their case informed by previous experience with the Germans, that something life threatening awaited them and their families at Westerbork, or after Westerbork - and they preferred not to find out exactly what.
Fortunately for Myrtil, the various things he needed to go into hiding fell into place - or perhaps more accurately, he caused them to fall into place - just in time. When the moment came for him to act, after his family were warned, he would be able to do so.
The requisite monies came at this time from the payment he received for the sale of the Rubens painting which he and Flory owned, the one with the whirling, dancing peasants which used to dazzle visitors to their Berlin home. Fortunately Myrtil had been able to take the painting, the family's most valuable asset, with him when the Franks left Berlin, one of the advantages of the family's early exit. Now the seventeenth-century masterpiece would prove its true worth.
Exactly, or even roughly, how much the unknown buyer paid in the illicit transaction, which took place sometime during the winter of 1941, is unclear. No doubt Myrtil preferred it that way, as presumably did the buyer. Myrtil was almost certainly only able to realise a small fraction of the painting's value, which even in 1942 would have been in the tens, if not hundreds, of thousands of guilders. Nevertheless the forbidden sale of the unregistered painting - also a crime at that point - was a major coup.
Who purchased the painting, which Myrtil left behind in The Hague with friends, is anyone's guess. Outside of a few extremely wealthy private collectors and the German officers and Nazi officials stationed in Holland who might have been interested in bringing a Rubens home to put on the mantel next to the de rigueur portrait of the Führer, it is hard to think of many people in occupied Holland who would be interested in such an expensive, unique and easily identifiable work.
Most likely the sale was effected through an intermediary, possibly through L., an art dealer in The Hague whom Myrtil knew from before the war and whose gallery would later become an occasional hang-out of his after the family dived under.
But he did tell them about the sale. He couldn't help it. 'I remember that he came into the studio in Amsterdam after he sold the painting, Dorrit recalled. He was so happy.' Myrtil also confided the sale to Jeanne Houtepen, a pre-war schoolmate of Sybil's who had lately also become a good friend of Dorrit's, and who now was working as a bank teller in The Hague.
With this money,' she recalled him saying, 'I can get through the war.'
He was nearly right.
Now that he had these life-saving monies in hand, that still left the matter of finding the other things Myrtil needed to take the family under. To wit: a physical hiding place, and one or more people to help support the Franks after they had hidden themselves, both of which were also difficult to come by in the densely populated, closely watched, thoroughly cowed Holland of 1942. These components coalesced after Myrtil had a conversation with Annie van der Sluijs, Dorrit's former Dutch teacher and the sister of Tine, his secretary - and his former girlfriend - some-time during this tense and murky 'twilight zone' period (as Dorrit described it), before the deportations began.
Perhaps Annie approached Myrtil. Or perhaps Tine broached the subject with her sister. Without Myrtil's testimony, it is hard to say; years later, both his wife and daughters were unsure about the exact sequence of events. Clearly, Myrtil was playing his cards very close to his chest.
In any case, sometime during this period the conversation took place and the idea of going into hiding was formulated, fleshed out and put
into motion.
While novel, the idea was certainly not original. By this point, two years after the invasion, a small number of Jews, perhaps a few hundred, perhaps a few more, had already dived under, along with known Communists and other political fugitives. Eventually, by the end of the war, the total number of onderduikers of all kinds - including the estimated 25,000 Jews who ultimately dived under - would reach the hundreds of thousands. However, at that point of the occupation it certainly required some imagination, as well as daring, not to mention the other aforementioned qualities, to do so.
In any event, sometime during this fraught period Annie offered to let Myrtil use a pied-à-terre she maintained in The Hague for teaching her Dutch students, should the time come for making the decision to take the family into hiding. The flat, located on a short street - Pieter van den Zandestraat - was small, tiny really, merely three rooms. Perhaps it would do.
It would, Myrtil decided. Of course, neither Myrtil nor Annie had any notion of how long the war would last. If he had known that the Franks
would have to dive under for as long as they did - nearly three years he might have baulked at the notion of subjecting the family to confinement in such a small space.
As the time for making the decision to dive under approached, Annie's sisters Tine and Ans also volunteered to help the Franks. Dorrit's friend, Jeanne, said she would help too.
Myrtil probably made the decision to commence the physical preparations for diving under sometime between February and April 1942. In February, as we have seen, Edgar and his parents were forcibly sent to Westerbork, the first enforced shipment of Jews within Holland proper, an event that upset and concerned Myrtil, for its import both for Dorrit and for the whole family.
'Dad was very disturbed when the Reichs were sent to Westerbork, said Sybil. 'He didn't trust the Germans. He said we're not going there.’
Then in April, the Franks received the order to move to Amsterdam, and it was at this point that it became a matter of not if they should dive under, but when. Unlike the September 1940 edict ordering them to move from the coast, there was no leeway in interpreting this directive: not only were the Franks specifically told to move to Amsterdam, they, along with several hundred other Jews living in Hilversum, were ordered to move to one of three areas of the city designated as Jewish districts.
In a sense, the Franks were lucky. By mid-April, when the order came down, Kamp Westerbork was filled to capacity; otherwise, the harrowing scene that Dorrit had witnessed at the Utrecht station would have been repeated at Hilversum, and their fate, like that of the Reichs, would most likely have been decided then and there. Not that they felt particularly lucky as they stood on the platform of the Hilversum train station, sniffling and miserable in the cold. They were even less reassured when they arrived in Amsterdam and saw what the Nazis were doing.
'This, clearly, was different,’ Flory said after she saw the barbed wire and signs with which the Germans were isolating Jews from their Gentile neighbours. 'The Germans were dividing the city into ghettos.’
After another feverish round of flat-hunting, which was becoming something of a family ritual by now, Myrtil decided to move to the nicest of those 'ghettos', the Rivierenbwurt, or River Quarter. Ever since the traffic of Jewish émigrés from Germany had begun in 1933, this
District of Amsterdam wid had been the preferred destination for German Jews.
As the Franks later learned - and in one of the numerous coincidences between the two oddly parallel family sagas - one of those who had already settled in this district was Otto Frank. By the time Myrtil and his wife and daughters arrived, Otto Frank, his wife Edith and daughters Anne and Margot had been living in an apartment on Merwedeplein, in the center of the comfortable, if not especially attractive quarter, since December 1933.
There, Otto's family had been able to begin life anew. In 1933, the River Quarter as a good place for German-Jewish émigrés to start, linked as it was to the city center by the fast and convenient Amsterdam trams - on which the conductors often spoke German - as well as being with one's own people; in 1937, a synagogue was built on Lekstraat to cater to the burgeoning Jewish population. The middle-class area also boasted its own Hebrew bookshop, an up-to-date playground, where the children of the restricted neighbourhood - including Anne Frank - often played, as well as its own street market, where clothing and produce, including ice cream and chocolate, could be had. It was here that the paths of the two Frank families came closest to intersecting.
However, by the time Myrtil Frank moved to the area, in April 1942, he was not looking to begin life anew, as Otto had done nine years before. He was simply looking for a temporary abode for his family, before he found a way to take them under.
It was not easy to find. When Otto's family had moved into the River Quarter, he had had a wide of choice of vacant apartments from which to choose. However, by the spring of 1942, with the Germans consciously concentrating the Jewish population in the increasingly crowded quarters, there were few apartments to be had and Myrtil was not at first able to find one large enough to house both him and his wife, their daughters and his mother-in-law.
As always, Myrtil's first concern was for the health and safety of his daughters. So the Franks did something they only did once during the entire war: they split up. After making enquiries, he was able to place Dorrit and Sybil in the large canalside house of friends of his who owned a large department store in the city. The well-to-do couple, named De B., could be relied upon to give the girls the best of care. Sybil's still fragile health - she had been ill with pleurisy - was also a factor in the decision.
After the shocks and privations of the previous months, the girls revelled in the luxuriously appointed house, a world which in the surviving Franks' collective retrospect resembles that of the Finzi-Continis, the wealthy Italian-Jewish family later portrayed in The Garden of the Finzi-Continis, the poignant memoir-cum-novel byGiorgio Bassani that captured the lost idyll of Italian Jewry.
The De B.s' magnificent house created a sense of déjà vu for the two girls. Like their former home on Brückenallee, the residence boasted a capacious, well-stocked kitchen, something not easy to achieve in those lean times, as well as a library where they could rummage through the hundreds of leather-bound volumes. Most of all they had something else that the Franks were not to experience for a while: space. 'It was so nice and reassuring to be in this big house,' Sybil remembered. Like the hermetic Finzi-Continis, their hosts also seemed to be innocent of or oblivious to the nasty goings-on just beyond their knockered door - which, of course, was fine with the girls, especially Dorrit, who was still preoccupied with thoughts of Edgar in distant Westerbork.
While Sybil and Dorrit luxuriated in the temporary sanctuary of the De B. house (where Sybil also recovered her health), Myrtil found his mother-in-law, Leontine, a place in a pension in another part of the River Quarter. He and Flory, meanwhile, stayed at the flat of other friends in the district.
Although Flory and Myrtil were pained to be separated from their daughters, the temporary split was advantageous in that it allowed Myrtil
to focus on making preparations for the anticipated dive. In the meantime, he continued to look for an apartment large enough to house the whole family. After weeks of searching, he finally found one, a drab but serviceable two-bedroom apartment, set amidst a typical 'new housing' block of attached two-storey apartments at 9 Eendrachtstraat, near the southern perimeter of the district, and at the beginning of May, after collecting his daughters from the De Bs' and extending his thanks for their hospitality, the four of them moved in. Apart from Leontine, the Franks were a family unit again.
Meanwhile, they did their best to cope with the most traumatic of all of the restrictions the Germans had hurled at them: the yellow so-called Jewish' star (ster).
On 29 April 1942, the Foodsche Weekblad carried the thunderbolt announcement that the Germans had passed on to the foodsche Raad,
which was that 'as of Sunday next, a so-called "Jewish star" will have to be worn by every Jew. A maximum of four stars is available per person. The price of a star is four cents.'
Every feature of the humiliating star had been thought out by the
German authorities, including - and especially - the colour, which was ordained to be a sickly, lymph-like yellow. The Jewish Council protested: couldn't the sterren at least be a different, healthier shade of yellow, perhaps like that of the life-giving sun, or a bright orange? No. The Germans didn't want the sterren - which resembled the stigmata that Jews in Poland and other parts of the Greater Reich had already been wearing for months - to be badges of pride; they wanted them to be badges of shame. The sickly shade of yellow stayed.
Visiting Berlin, the American diplomat George Kennan described in his journal the traumatic effect the enforced wearing of stars had already had on the approximately 40,000 remaining Jews of the Franks' former home town, as well as the surprising sympathy shown them by other Berliners, who, one would have thought, might have been hardened to such sights by now:
The major change has been the wearing of the stars by the Jews. That is a fantastically barbaric thing. I shall never forget the faces of the people on the subway with the great yellow star sewed on to their overcoats, standing, not
daring to sit down or to brush against anybody, staring straight ahead of them with eyes like terrified beasts - nor the sight of little children running around with those badges sewn on them. As far as I could see, the mass of the public was shocked and troubled by the measure, and such demonstrations as were provoked were mostly ones of friendliness and consideration (for the victims).
Unfortunately, as Kennan noted, the surprising sympathy of their fellow Berliners (or at least some of them) doesn't seem to have done Jews much good - in fact, the opposite: Because of this fact, he writes, the remaining Jews are now deported in large batches and very few are seen any more.’
In Holland, a number of non-Jews went further, insisting on wearing makeshift sterren themselves to show their solidarity with their forcibly starred neighbours and turning them into veritable badges of courage.
'I remember seeing obviously non-Jewish people wearing the yellow star;' Dorrit said. 'There weren't very many of them, but we appreciated them all the same.'
‘Measure against Dutch Jews foiled, The Times reported in early May, observing - rather hopefully - that 'the Dutch people have responded magnificently to the suggestion by Radio Oranje' - the London-based radio station of the government-in-exile which used the facilities of the BBC - 'that they wear a similar sign and thereby frustrate the German plan of creating a division among them'
This, unfortunately, was propaganda: the measure was not "foiled' Jews continued to wear their stars on pain of arrest; a few Gentiles who were found to be wearing them were sent to prison. In fact the Jewish population was further alienated and demoralised, just as it had been in Berlin and elsewhere - just as it had been in twelfth-century Germany, when the Jewish star had first been used.
Indeed, as Dienke Hondius, the historian of the Anne Frank House in Amsterdam, observes, insofar as it further alienated the Jewish population from the non-Jewish one, thereby making it easier to detach and deport the former from the latter, the yellow star edict was a considerable success. The awareness that the Jews were different from non-Jews and the slightly increased feeling of distance between these groups was perhaps all that was needed at the time; observes Hondius.
********
What then, it is reasonable to ask, was the mood of the Dutch as a whole at this time, as the cat-and-mouse game that the Germans had been playing with the Dutch Jewish population approached its climax? It depends on whom you asked.
'The Dutch are defiant, not despondent,' averred A.J. Barnouw, Queen Wilhelmina Professor of the History, Languages and Literature of the Netherlands at Columbia University, in a sulphurous article published on Sunday 10 May 1942 - the second anniversary of the German invasion - in The New York Times Magazine. 'They are firmly convinced that Nazi tyranny cannot last. And that conviction gives them strength to endure the present hardships and trials. They are looking forward to the day of reckoning. They call it Bijljesdag, Hatchet Day', referring to the dramatic day, 140 years before, when the workmen employed in the Amsterdam shipyards broke out in open revolt against the French, who were then ruling Holland.
In fact, the revolutionary flame to which Barnouw alluded had died down considerably over the year since the Februaristaking. Although a few brave Amsterdammers may have puckishly worn black - or sterren - to mark the sad occasion, most went about their daily business, just as did the populace of occupied Prague or Budapest. The remnants of
Holland's once formidable navy had just been annihilated in the Battle of the Java Sea by Germany's Axis ally Japan, and while Berlin continued to tighten its control on the Continent, most Dutchmen were more or less resigned to the prospect of indefinite German rule.
Despite the brave talk out of London and Washington about creating a Second Front, it was fairly clear to Dutchmen in the spring of 1942 that the Allies were losing the war, whether they got their news from the BBC or the NSB mouthpiece Volk en Vaderland. Two years after Dunkirk, the British and their American allies hadn't set foot on the Continent in any significant numbers; nor would they until the British-Canadian raid on the port of Dieppe, later that year (which, of course, was a disaster). Even the Allies admitted that Berlin was winning the 'tonnage war in the Atlantic; this was the 'happy time' for Dönitz's U-boat marauders, who sank US and British freighters with virtual impunity, threatening Britain's lifeline and making even the indomitable Churchill worry. The year-old invasion of Russia was going well, as the Wehrmacht inexorably advanced through the steppes toward Moscow.
These were facts. Whether one looked at the globe through Axis or Allied eyes, it seemed to be a fascist world. As Moore observes,’There was no hope in the medium term [in early 1942], or in the long term, that the Germans might be driven out of the Netherlands.' All other things being equal, this "hopeless' view, which certainly describes the Franks' thinking - 'It looked like the Germans were going to be in charge for ever, as Flory put it - would have been a factor in deciding to submerge for the duration.
This pessimistic, or brutally realistic, point of view could also work the other way, deterring some prospective fugitives from going forward
with their plans for diving under. After all, what was the point? some would-be Jewish onderduikers no doubt said to themselves as they looked at all the swastikas around them.
While the mass of Dutchmen - like the mass of Frenchmen or Belgians or Greeks or Norwegians - continued to be willing to cooperate, if not actively collaborate, with Seyss-Inquart and his underlings, a growing number of individual Dutchmen had taken up the hatchet in recent months. Some did so literally by joining the fighting resistance, which
was responsible for a small but growing number of 'actions', including individual assassinations and attacks on railway lines, like those being carried out in occupied France by their resistant brethren, the Maquis; or they joined the burgeoning underground Dutch press.
It is probably an exaggeration to say that there was a bona fide resistance movement by spring 1942, especially since the dozens of ad hoc groups that comprised the insurrectionary forces continued to disagree on their war aims, or on coordinating their actions, a situation that would worsen before it improved.
But there definitely was a resistance, and Hitler and his SS chief, Reichsführer Heinrich Himmler, were determined to stamp it out by whatever means, including the generous use of the firing squad and noose. On 13 April, the first major Dutch resistance leader, Henk Sneevliet, was executed. Three weeks later, on 3 May, seventy-two more resistance fighters were executed after being found guilty at one of the first mass-resistance trials. The following day 460 well-known Dutchmen were taken hostage against acts of resistance. It didn't have much of a deterrent effect: that same day a confiscated arms factory in Arnhem was put to the torch. A grim pattern of resistance and reprisal had been set. On 11 May the Germans executed twenty-four more resistance workers.
This cycle of resistance and reprisal was avidly reported in both the Nazi-controlled and the underground press. Whether it had an incendiary or intimidating effect on the Dutch populace as a whole is difficult to gauge, but it must have given courage to those who were thinking about resisting, including those who, like Myrtil and Otto, were contemplating diving under. For - make no mistake about it - diving under was a form of resistance; passive resistance, but resistance nonetheless. The Germans certainly considered it as such.
In May 1942 Adolf Hitler was concerned enough about the security situation in the Netherlands to dispatch Himmler to see what his designated chief enforcer could do about it.
Thus, on 15 May, while Dorrit was en route to visit her imprisoned fiancé at Westerbork, a party of SS was headed from Berlin to Amsterdam. Amongst the visiting jackboots was Himmler's second-in-command and protégé and one of Hitler's personal favourites, forty-two- year-old Reinhard Heydrich, the up-and coming head of the Gestapo and the SD, who the previous November had taken on the additional title and responsibility of Reichsprotektor of Bohemia and Moravia (what
the Germans called what was left of Czechoslovakia after they annexed the Sudetenland in 1939). Widely seen as Himmler's heir-apparent, Heydrich had gained high marks in Berlin for the robust and demonstrably effective manner with which he had tamed the recalcitrant Czechs, simultaneously quashing the indigenous resistance - in the first two months of his 'protectorship' he had ordered more than 500 executions, as well as over 5,000 arrests - while coercing cooperation from Czech labor and industry with productivity-based incentives - the carrot-and-stick method.
From the Reich's point of view, Heydrich's administrative philosophy had worked marvellously. Overt Czech resistance had virtually died. Factories had sprung back to life. Bohemia and Moravia were marching forward. This was why Heydrich had been dispatched to Amsterdam. Despite the accelerating rate of arrests and executions in Holland, evidently some in Berlin were beginning to wonder whether their man in The Hague, Seyss-Inquart, was really up to the job of keeping the Dutch in line. Perhaps, it was thought, some of Heydrich's 'magic' might rub off on Seyss-Inquart and Rauter.
For the same reason the diehard Nazi - like the manager of a show-mcase department store who is bussed around to other less successful branches to boost morale - was also scheduled to make similar uplifting visits to his fascist confrères in Brussels and Paris. Busy man, that Reinhard. In addition to his duties as Himmler's No. 2 and chief German proconsul at Prague, Heydrich, one of the architects of the Final Solution, had also chaired, the past January, the top secret Wannsee Conference, at which the blueprint for the extermination of European Jewry was agreed. No doubt another one of the reasons for his inclusion in Himmler's party was to bring the staff of Referat IV B4 (IVB4), the secret department of the SS in Holland charged with carrying out the Final Solution (Endlösung), and the select few who were also in the know, up to date on the latest developments; particularly now that the SS "branch offices', Auschwitz, Sobibor, et al., were ready, or nearly ready, to shift into action.
Most of Himmler's and Heydrich's work in Holland was, of necessity, behind-the-scenes. But on 17 May, the two men, together with a covey of assorted Nazis, including Seyss-Inquart and an appropriately fawning NSB delegation headed by Mussert (the latter had been led to believe that the real purpose of Himmler's mission was to make him titular head of the Netherlands, equivalent to his black-shirted Norwegian counter- part, Vidkun Quisling, a hope in which he was to be disappointed), lent their combined eminence to the swearing-in of 800 Dutchmen to the SS at the Durentsin, an auditorium in The Hague. Hands clutching their new SS hats, each topped off with a shiny skull-and-crossbones, right arms raised, throats distended (a Nazi news photo of the moving ceremony survives), the ready-and-eager fascist recruits, the vanguard of the 50,000 Dutchmen who would put on German uniforms during the war,
bellowed the SS pledge in Dutch:
Adolf Hitler
Germanisch Führer
Zweer ik hou en troun
U en aan de door U gestelde gehoorzaamheid tot in den dood
Zoo helpe mij God!
Adolf Hitler
German Führer
I pledge my life to thee
To fight for the great cause until my death if necessary
So help me God!
Soon most of these impassioned Nazi associates would be dispatched to Russia, where the Wehrmacht was just then approaching the Don, and where ultimately many would die in the snows of Stalingrad. But for the moment all was sweetness and gezelligheid as the new skull-and-cross-bones men celebrated their induction along with their jackbooted heroes. The New York Times took note of the SS men's flying visit to Holland in a vitriolic editorial on 21 May. 'Heinrich Himmler has taken a modest pride as Germany's official murderer, it began:
He has more corpses to his credit than any man alive. Now Hitler has sent him to Holland. The Germans there have just shot ninety-six people and taken 460 hostages. But Himmler will try to do better. By gibbet, block and rifle he will attempt to restore a terror the Dutch have not known since the Duke of Alva [the cruel sixteenth-century Spanish proconsul who administered Holland for King Philip].
Defiance will not die. Himmler and his pupil, Reinhard Heydrich, have done their best; but the very victims they have slain seem to rise up and oppose them. The Himmler system, which worked so well in Germany, can never subdue people who have once known freedom.
Although the newspaper's partisan estimate of the state of resistance in the German-occupied territories, including Holland, was somewhat over-optimistic, it was prescient in one respect. On 27 May, six days later, shortly after his return to Prague from his triumphant tour of the provinces, and feeling confident enough to ride in an open car (something that the more cautious, less headstrong Seyss-Inquart rarely did), the Reichsprotektor was set upon by a two-man Czech assassination team
as he motored from his villa to Prague airport. Recruited and trained by the British and the Czech government-in-exile for the express purpose of removing the Reich's most successful proconsul, the two men botched the job somewhat, lobbing a hand grenade at Heydrich's car and spraying machine-gunfire without quite finishing him off. The wounded Heydrich was even able to chase them before collapsing.
Nevertheless, the agents, Jan Kubis and Joset Gabchik (who must have known that they were doomed when they took on their high-risk mission), did well enough. After lingering for ten days, while his devoted wife and son kept a stern bedside vigil, Heydrich, 'the perfect Nazi', was dead.
Hitler's vengeance was swift, terrible and sure. While the S were successfully tracking down the fugitive assassins with the aid of a Czech turncoat, cornering them in the basement of a Prague church, then flooding it, moving Kubis and Gabchik to commit joint suicide, another party of Germans was assigned to carry out a reprisal raid on the tiny
Czech town of Lidice, population 567, which the incensed Hitler ordered to be completely wiped out. (The town may have been selected because several of its men who had escaped to England were serving in the RAF.) And so it was. After the 173 men of Lidice were taken out and shot, the remaining women and children of the village were shipped to concentration camps, most never to return. After Lidice was depopulated, all buildings were razed. Then, as Radio Berlin proudly reported, 'The name of the town was eliminated.'
Although the Nazis had committed mass atrocities before, the erasure of Lidice was something different: a wholesale killing of innocents specifically intended to terrorise the populace of an occupied territory - and by promulgating it the way the Germans did, the rest of the Reich. And this time, unlike the terror bombing of Rotterdam, the Germans didn't pretend to have made a mistake.
The Czechs got the message. Shortly after the vanishing of Lidice and a wave of other lesser reprisals, several hundred thousand Czechs, brought together by nothing more - or less - than shared terror and a desire to prevent more such killings, gathered abjectly in Prague's main square, Wenceslas Square, to publicly reaffirm their loyalty to the Reich and the Führer.
Hitler was appeased, more or less. After an ornate state funeral for Heydrich, at which The Leader himself appeared (while privately excorating the martyr for his carelessness), Heydrich was replaced by a lesser star in the Nazi firmament, Ernst Kaltenbrunner, an efficient, ruthless German functionary who could be counted on to keep the Czechs under
control, as his predecessor had done, as well as to crack the whip when necessary. And so he did.
As intended, word of the Germans' instructive terror at Lidice also carried to the other corners of the Greater Reich - not to mention the rest of the world - including Holland, where the Dutch duly noted the latest Nazi atrocity.
Holland was not Czechoslovakia. Demonstrations of mass fear and fealty such as Wenceslas Square had just witnessed were neither required nor expected from the Dutch. There would be no Lidices in Holland. Seyss-Inquart and Rauter knew that that would be going too far. Besides, as Seyss-Inquart frequently professed (and would continue to profess right up until Nuremberg), he liked the Dutch, whereas Heydrich never pretended to like the Czechs.
In the meantime, behind the scenes at IVB4, somewhat incongruously installed in a mansion in the centre of The Hague, and throughout the
Greater Reich, at the vast, newly constructed death camps at Auschwitz and Sobibor, those who were involved with the preparations for the Final Solution that had been sketched out at the Wannsee Conference were determined to step up the pace as a testament to the martyred Heydrich. The camps, the electrified fences, the crematoria, all would be ready even
sooner than was planned. His will be done!
Already, by May, the first few "experimental' trainloads of French Jews, mostly unlucky "stateless' Jews from Germany, had been shipped to the Auschwitz station, ordered out of their trains and herded into the ovens
without major difficulty.
Within weeks, it would be Dutch Jewry's turn.
June saw a hailstorm of new restrictions rain down upon the Jews of Holland. By this point, 80,000 Jews - just over half of the total - had been concentrated in the three areas of Amsterdam that had been set aside for them, while about half of the remainder continued to reside in The Hague and Rotterdam. The rest were scattered in small towns and villages around the country.
Although the Amsterdam Jews, in their ghettos, were more aware of their newly segregated status, the basic parameters of what it meant to be a Jew in Holland in 1942 - the routine of having to affix the Jewish star to one's clothing before venturing outside, of having to read Het Foodsche Weekblad to learn about the latest anti-Jewish edict, of not being
able to do this and not being able to go there, of having to put on a brave smile for one's wife and children or grandparents or friends - were the same for Jews everywhere. In some cases, the details of a particular restriction varied from locality to locality, but the community-wide effect of the decrees issuing from Seyss-Inquart's offices at the Plein, in The Hague, was cumulative and uniform.
The only Jews who perhaps felt more immune from the palpably escalating persecution because of their artificially elevated position within the Jewish community were Asscher and Cohen, the deluded leaders of the foodsche Raad, and their vast 17,500 full and part-time 'staff', about one out of eight of all Dutch Jews - the Germans were quite indulgent in this respect - who had persuaded themselves that by their ministrations they were tempering the Nazi terror and keeping the Jewish community together.
Of course, as would soon become all too clear, the Raad was not tempering the Nazi terror but helping to broker it. Soon enough, too in fifteen months, to be exact - it would also be consumed by it. Anne Frank, still unaware of the secret counter preparations her father had been making, wrote of the numbing effect of the seemingly endless decrees in her diary on 19 June 1942.
The thirteen-year-old diarist, then living five blocks away from her namesakes on Eendrachtstraat, described the long list of edicts and concomitant humiliations in the past tense, even though several had only just been promulgated by the Joodsche Raad in Het Joodsche Weekblad, its weekly mouthpiece. ‘After 1940, the good times were few and far between,' she confided in Kitty', the name that she had given to her new journal. First there was the war, then the capitulation and then the arrival of the Germans, which is when the trouble started for the jews.
Then, telescoping the recent, accelerated repression, the young diarist
continued:
Our freedom was severely restricted by a series of anti-Jewish decrees; Jews were required to wear a yellow star; Jews were required to turn in their bicycles; Jews were forbidden to use streetcars; Jews were forbidden to ride in cars, even their own; Jews were required to do their shopping between 3 and 5 p.m.; Jews were required to frequent only Jewish-owned barbershops and beauty parlours; Jews were forbidden to be out on the streets between 8 p.m. and 6 a.m.; Jews were forbidden to attend theatres, movies or any other forms of entertainment; Jews were forbidden to use swimming pools, tennis courts, hockey fields or any other athletic fields; Jews were forbidden to go rowing; Jews were forbidden to take part in any athletic activity in public; Jews were forbidden to sit in their gardens or those of their friends after 8 p.m.; Jews were forbidden to visit Christians in their homes; Jews were required to attend Jewish schools, etc.
You couldn't do this and you couldn't do that,' she summed up. But life went on.'
It did, perhaps, at least for an upbeat thirteen-year-old. However, by June, it was getting harder for even the most hopeful adult to maintain the illusion that all was well. Something was clearly about to happen.
Dorrit, for her part, had been shocked out of her half-daze by an encounter with the NSB, which still had the run of the city, while she was out in the neighbourhood one evening in late June. 'You better be in by eight o'clock, you Jew!' the diminutive blackshirt snapped at her. 'Or else!'
The next day Dorrit was still shaking. Her nerves were not helped by a photo of Edgar she received in the post. Dated 23 June, the photo showed him in the camp outfit of workmen's trousers and clogs, with a shovel. He looked fit, as he leaned against the side of one of the barracks and stared at the unknown photographer, presumably another inmate of Kamp Westerbork. But he looked grim. ‘To Dorrit,' it read, 'yours for ever.'
By this time, both Myrtil and Otto Frank had made the decision to take their respective families into hiding as soon as the opportunity to do so presented itself.
For some months, Otto had been preparing and provisioning a secret annexe - or achterhuis - in the rear of his canalside business offices, at 263 Prinsengracht, in the Jordan district, a mile or so to the north-east of the River Quarter, in the heart of Amsterdam. Because he owned the building in which the annexe was located, Otto didn't have to worry about rent, as did most onderduikers, who often wound up being forced to pay high rents, and in a few cases were turned out when their funds ran out. However, this arrangement did entail either active or passive complicity from Frank's staff and their families. Upon them his own family would ultimately depend for their supplies, and their safety. In this respect, Otto
realised, he would have to chance it. Any way, there was no such thing as complete security for an onderduiker. All things considered, he calculated, his family would be safer underground.
Equipped to house himself, his wife and daughters, as well as an undetermined number of friends once they reached the same decision that he had - ultimately there would be four others - the relatively capacious, six-room onderduiladres (hiding place) that Otto, a capable and resourceful man like his Amsterdam neighbour Myrtil, had carefully and
stealthily constructed that spring was cleverly concealed behind a false bookcase.
While Otto hurried to stock up his hiding place, Myrtil pressed on with his arrangement to take his family under in Annie's flat back in Den Haag. Even though all plans for going into hiding were risky, several things made Myrtil's unusual, and, seemingly, riskier than most. Firstly, his projected hiding place was located not in Amsterdam but in The Hague. As a consequence of the new complete ban on travel by Jews, the process both of preparing his onderduikadres and of ultimately getting the
family there meant having to take the now officially forbidden railway and not wearing the compulsory Jewish sterren for the duration of the trip, so exposing both him and his family to considerable, prolonged danger. It was an additional risk, Myrtil decided, he would have to take.
It turned out to be a good risk.
Myrtil's sang-froid and fearlessness came in useful during the two trips he made to The Hague in June and early July to prepare for the dive. With the Dutch police on the alert for fugitive Allied airmen and other illegal passengers, including prospective onderduikers, Myrtil had to be prepared for the probability that his papers would be checked, or 'controlled' as it was called, at least once during the hour-long trip from Amsterdam to The Hague and back.
He was able to bluff his way through; or at least he never mentioned it later. Then again, like most risk-takers, he didn't discuss many of the risks he took. He just took them. Still, he must have worried what would happen when the day came when his wife and daughters would also have to take their sterren off and run the same risk.
Once he got to The Hague, Myrtil was pleased with what he found. He especially liked the address itself, Pieter van den Zandestraat. A small street located at the end of a maze of similar streets in the centre of the city, it was as out of the way a destination as could be found within The Hague proper. A fifteen-minute walk from the Binnenhof and German headquarters, Annie's flat was located right under the Nazis' noses. The moffen - the derogatory term the Dutch had come to use to describe their occupiers - would never look for the Franks there, Myrtil gauged as he surveyed the immediate area.
At the same time, he also apprehended another major potential problem - which was that Annie's apartment at number 14 did not contain any hidden compartment, cellar or attic where the Franks could further secrete themselves in case of a raid (as, for example, his name-sakes did). His family, he quickly discerned, would be hiding in plain sight there, their safety dependent on the collusion or ignorance of people he didn't know, notably the several dozen families who lived on this one-
block street, and who were bound to be suspicious of the comings and goings there.
So Myrtil decided to employ verbal camouflage, devising a false double identity for himself and Flory for the benefit of their nosy soon-to-be-neighbours. Walking into the only commercial establishment on the street, the corner grocery at number 2, the apparent focal point of the compact community. He struck up a conversation with the proprietor and in a loud voice - loud enough for the other customers in the store to hear - announced in German-accented Dutch that he was a German-Swiss doctor.
This ruse was quite brilliant. Famous, amongst other things, as the place where the German novelist Thomas Mann wrote The Magic Mountain, the eastern, German-speaking region of Switzerland was, despite Swiss neutrality, known to be sympathetic to German interests; injured German soldiers were encouraged to take the cure there, where they were treated by local doctors.
And so, in a very short space of time - hours, probably - the hundred or so residents of Pieter van den Zandestraat learned that a German-Swiss doctor would soon be moving to their street.
The mystery physician coupled that clever piece of disinformation with another disturbing bit about his unseen partner. 'My wife,' he informed the wide-eyed grocer, pointing to his own head, 'is not all that well?
Myrtil had no idea whether it would work, but it was worth a try.
The final sequence of events which led Otto Frank and Myrtil Frank- who, though neither related nor acquainted, certainly shared similar
instincts - to activate their respective plans for going into hiding began in Berlin on 23 June 1942 with a phone call from Adolf Eichmann to
Franz Rademacher, his contact man at the Foreign Office in Berlin. From the middle of July, Eichmann told Rademacher, the deportation trains from the West would run every day according to the schedule he had made up, transporting in all some 90,000 Jews - 40,000 from Holland, 40,000 from France and 10,000 from Belgium.
The wheels had begun turning in March, when Willy Zopf, an official from IVB4 in The Hague, and his SS colleagues from Paris and Brussels,
Theodor Dannecker and Kurt Asche, respectively, met with Adolf Eichmann at the latter's office at 116 Kurfürtenstrasse in Berlin. It was at that meeting, Asche later recalled, that Eichmann told us that on the basis of an order from the Führer the Jews were to be deported from occupied western Europe. Large petroleum and Buna rubber factories had been set up in Auschwitz and the Jews were to work there.' Dannecker was ordered to have 40,000 Jews sent from France, Zopf 15,000 from Holland and Asche 10,000 from Belgium. The new revised 'extermination manifest' with the 25,000 additional Dutch Jews was duly passed on to Willy Zopf at IVB4 in The Hague, and his co-workers at the Zentralstelle für judische Auswanderung, or 'Office of Jewish Emigration', the office that was charged with coordinating the entire operation and moving the selected Jews to Westerbork and thence to the East.
Three days later, on 26 June, the head of the Zentralstelle, Ferdinand Aus der Fünten, called the Jewish Council and informed them, encoding his words in the agreed-upon German doublespeak, that an indeterminate number of Jewish men and women between the ages of sixteen and forty would soon be sent to work under police guard' to perform 'labour service' in Germany. The Dutch-Jewish Joodsche Raad was once again assured by the smooth-talking German that those called up would be 'stateless', i.e., German Jews, playing on the undeniable and unfortunate divide between Dutch Jews and foreign ones. Jews who lived in the Riverienbuurt were far less assimilated in Dutch culture and society than
the long-standing [sic] Dutch Jewish population,' notes Leo Ullman, and this division was also seen in neighbouring Belgium, where native Jews tended to look askance at their more recently-arrived brethren. The authorities in both countries worked to their advantage. No need to worry, Aus der Fünten said, in so many words, this doesn't affect you.
Still, there was concern. Even if they themselves were not affected by the new plan, the Council were not entirely oblivious to the fate of foreign Jews. More importantly, the raids and deportations that had taken place - most notably the one in 1941 in which Dorrit's friend Ed Weinreb had been caught up - however horrible, had taken place only incidentally, as punishment or reprisal for some "act of terror' in which the hapless victim had taken absolutely no part. Now they were to take place systematically.
This was new.
After twenty-six months of playing cat and mouse with the Jewish population, the Nazi cat was about to strike. A fresh surge of fear and tension rippled out into the Jewish population. To add to the general discomfort, a heat wave descended on the country.
Nine days later, on Sunday 5 July, the first groups of German Jews received their summonses by special post to report for ‘labour deployment'.
Amongst the hundreds of doors that the special postmen knocked on was that of Otto Frank and his family at 31 Merwedeplein, in the River Quarter. All four Franks were at home at the time.
'At three o'clock the doorbell rang,' Anne Frank wrote, recalling the blood-freezing moment. 'I didn't hear it, since I was out on the balcony, lazily reading in the sun. A little while later Margot appeared in the kitchen doorway looking very agitated. "Father has received a call-up notice from the SS," she whispered. I was stunned. A call-up, everyone knows what that means: visions of concentration camps and lonely cells raced through my head.’
The daydreaming schoolgirl had, after all, given some thought to the unthinkable.
But Margot was mistaken, as Anne soon learned: 'The call-up was not for Father, but her. I began to cry.'
Meanwhile, at the offices of the Jewish Council at Nieuwe Keizersgracht 58, 'all hell [broke loose. Although most of those on the first call-up list were, as Aus der Fünten had promised, German Jews, there were also a number of Dutch Jews on the initial manifest, causing outright panic: 'Everyone hunted for rubber stamps and exemptions, everyone was found to be indispensable, everyone had been baptised or wounded or was an invalid; everyone queued up for doctor's certificates, letters from the church, Ausweise [identity cards]; failing all these, a week's deferments [from having to report for Westerbork] were begged for.'
Over the next few days Dutch postmen bearing the dread notices continued to knock on doors around the River Quarter and the other Jewish districts.
‘Once the notices went out there was tremendous tension and fear.' recalled Leo Ullman, who was about to dive under himself.
Jacques Presser, an historian and survivor who lived to write the monu- mental 1966 study, The Destruction of the Dutch Jews, recalled a typical scene that took place at an end-of-term celebration at the Jewish Lyceum, where he was then a teacher. This began in an atmosphere of sweetness and light, as well as considerable denial, as people spoke inspiring words and ceremonial music was played. Still, one could cut the tension in the room with a knife, tension made all the more unbearable by the fact that some of the graduates, mostly fifteen- and sixteen-year-old girls, had received their summonses. Suddenly a girl from the highest class shot up and began speaking. She and her sister had each received a summons, she said, in a quiet but deliberate voice. What should we do?' she asked the adults present.
‘There stood the girl, 17 years old,' Presser painfully recalled twenty years later, 'and with her final term report full of high marks, quite alone and unprotected, directly in front of the green board [at the Lyceum] behind which the teachers were sitting. To this historian, it is as though he can still see her standing there, a kind, intelligent child, utterly decent;
he can still hear her question, a question he will never forget: ‘Ladies and gentlemen, please tell us what must we do?’
Presser concludes: 'Nobody knew, nobody could help, and they were deported.'
Otto Frank knew what he had to do. The notice for Margot was his final trigger. He knew that he had to move quickly: 'Failure to report would give a short breathing space but the address of the individuals was on file and would undoubtedly be the target of a police raid within days, or sometimes [later on] within hours' (as Bob Moore writes).
And so the morning after he received the notice for Margot, 6 July 1942, Otto, Edith, Margot and Anne Frank dived under as a family. They removed the stitched-on yellow stars from their clothing as carefully as they could and walked to the achterhuis that Otto had prepared for them in the back of the three-storey building overlooking the Prinsengracht at number 263, now better known as the Anne Frank House. The fact that Anne and Margot had walked this route to visit their father's workplace many times before made the hellish half-hour trip somewhat easier.
Myrtil Frank also knew what to do when, on 11 or 12 July - one of the dates about which the surviving Franks differ - the grim-faced postman delivered notices for Dorrit and Sybil to report for 'labour service'
That evening, at 9 Eendrachtstraat, in an emotional scene that mirrored the one that had taken place at Otto Frank's apartment and hundreds of others that would do so as the first major wave of Jewish onderduikers revealed their plans to their surprised and frightened families, Myrtil told his startled children of his plan for taking the family under. Flory had been in on the secret from nearly the beginning.
Dorrit baulked at first. She didn't want to go into hiding, she insisted. She wanted to go to Westerbork. Then she could be with Edgar. Sybil, for her part, said that she also wanted to go. That way, she felt, she could somehow 'save' her parents.
Both were noble sentiments, but, Myrtil said, as Flory nodded her assent, there were no two ways about it: the Franks were going into hiding. That was the only way they would save themselves, he said. Edgar would be OK, he assured the weeping Dorrit.
Reluctantly, the girls came around to his view.
There was just one problem: what about their grandmother, Leontine? the girls asked. Would she be going into hiding too? No, she wouldn't, Myrtil said. Leontine would remain in her pension. She would be fine. He had discussed the plan with her several days before, and she had agreed, saying she was too old for that sort of thing. Anyway, the Nazis weren't interested in bothering old people. Do what you have to do, she said to her grim-faced son-in-law and daughter at their final meeting. I will be fine.
Whether she was just saying that to make things easier for the four Franks, we shall never know. Of course, as Myrtil must have recognised, as no doubt did Leontine, bringing the frail seventy-two-year-old with them to the small apartment at number 14 Pieter van den Zandestraat would have created enormous difficulties.
Anyway, the Nazis weren't interested in bothering old people, were they?
That's what we really felt at the time, said Sybil. 'That she would be OK.’
‘Of course, if we had known what would happen, said Flory, years later, still stricken at the memory, 'we would have brought her with us. After all, she was my mother. But we didn't. We didn't know anything. We just knew that this was what we needed to do at that time to save ourselves.