One can imagine Otto Frank walking the streets of Amsterdam alone in June 1945. How was it possible that the place could still exist when everything he had was gone: his wife, his daughters, his home, his business? He told his mother he was walking in a strange dream and was not yet normal.
Amsterdam today is a city of memory. With eighty monuments to the war, memory is part of the fabric of the present, immediately accessible. You can take a tour of the shadow city, beginning at the Anne Frank House. The bookcase, so indelible in your mind, is as heavy and imposing as you’d imagined. The stairs up to the Annex are steep. The space is so much smaller than you’d thought. In this claustrophobic place, it is impossible not to imagine the fear of occupation.
Next you can go to the infamous Jewish Theater. It is only a facade now. The original interior has been gutted, and one wall now bears a list in bronze of more 6,700 Jewish families who were deported from that location. Each day hundreds of prisoners were crammed into the small space, awaiting transport to Westerbork and then on to one of the extermination camps. People were taken to the station by tram, by truck, or on foot, always at night so there would be few eyewitnesses.
On the second floor of the theater is an interactive map of Bergen-Belsen. When I was there, I watched an elderly man step forward and point to a list. He told the friends who surrounded him that he was number 29: “Unbekannter Jude [unknown Jew]. Hamburger? Alfred?” Fifty children were found hiding with Gentiles, and the Nazis weren’t sure that they were Jews. On September 13, 1944, they were transported from Westerbork to Bergen-Belsen. Two months later, they were deported to Theresienstadt. Forty-nine of the children survived, including the man beside me. “What was it like?” his friends asked. “I was four years old. I don’t remember,” he replied.
Across the street from the theater you can visit the children’s nursery. Walter Süskind, a German Jewish refugee who worked for the Expositur at the theater, managed to establish a relationship with Ferdinand aus der Fünten, convincing him to allow the captive children to attend day care. Süskind then connected with the resistance to find places for them to hide. Day care workers would take young children onto the street when the tram stopped in front, obstructing the view of the guards at the theater just across the way. They would then walk away with the children, using the tram for camouflage. The workers also smuggled children out in backpacks and laundry baskets. The gardens of the Pedagogical School two doors down were connected with the day care center, and children were also smuggled out through the fence. The teachers and students at the school were aware of what was happening, but no one spoke of it. At least six hundred children were saved. Walter Süskind was eventually deported and died in Central Europe on February 29, 1945. Today the school is the National Holocaust Museum.10
Up the street and around the corner is the beautiful Artis Zoo. At night, during the occupation, dozens of people—Jews, members of the resistance, and those escaping forced labor—would hide there. They “hid in the hayloft above the wild animals, in the aviaries with the ibises, or in the night dens of the polar bears.”11 The manager of the zoo kept their secret. When a Razzia was under way, the keeper of the monkeys would put down a plank over the moat surrounding the monkey house to let men and women cross and then remove the plank to keep them safe.
One woman, Duifje van der Brink, lived in the zoo for a couple of years, spending her nights in the wolf house. During the day she sat on a bench near the monkey house and chatted with people, including Germans. No one knew she was Jewish. Over time an estimated two hundred to three hundred people managed to hide in the zoo. You can’t help thinking: the animals provided shelter while many humans did not.
Across the avenue from the zoo is the Resistance Museum, filled with the paraphernalia of the underground: presses for printing newspapers, pamphlets, fake ID and food stamps; examples of grotesque anti-Semitic NSB propaganda; weapons for clandestine attacks.
On the walls of the Resistance Museum are murals of NSB parades. Individual figures explain their motives for joining the Nazis:
“What attracted me was the energy, the singing, and the sense of belonging.”
“I saw only one choice: National Socialism or the chaos of Communism.”
“We couldn’t make a living from the shop and the NSB claimed things would get better for the middle class.”
“With Germany in power, membership of the NSB offered opportunities for starting a career.”
“There was enormous poverty and division in our country. The NSB was opposed to such a pretense of democracy.”
“Leadership was something we could build a national community on. With too many choices nothing gets decided and there’s always that self-interest hiding round the corner.”
Fascism counts on people’s credulity, on their craving to believe, on their fear that there is nothing in which to believe.
You might drop by Wilhelmina Catharina School, the only school from which Jewish children were not expelled. Of the 175 children at the school, 71 were Jewish. The Germans did not want Jews and Gentiles in the same classroom, but to expel the Jews would have meant closing the school. Instead, the school authorities built a wall splitting the school in two. The front side was for Gentile children, the back for Jewish children, who came to be called “Backsiders.” Eventually the wall was taken down. The children in the front were overjoyed to see the horrible wall gone, but when they crossed over, none of their Jewish friends were left on the other side of the wall; all had been deported. A plaque on the building memorializes them.12
If you walk to the old Jewish Quarter, you will see the famous statue of the dockworker. On February 25, 1941, the rolling strike to protest the mass arrest of young Jewish men began, first with workers at the Municipal Cleaning Service and Public Works, then railway workers and tram workers, and finally the dockworkers in the harbor. Shops closed. Citizens accompanied the marchers, smashing the windows of trams still running. The resistance paper asked, “Am I my brother’s keeper?” The answer was “Yes.” The strike lasted two days before the Germans, armed with guns, violently put down the protest.
You can go sit on Lotty’s bench, which you’ll find in the upscale Apollolaan district of the city. It is in the exact spot where Lotty and her friend Beppie slept after their return from Auschwitz. When the Germans evacuated the camp, they pulled out the women and sent them on a death march to Beendorf concentration camp, more than four hundred miles away. When the Allies eventually freed Beendorf, those few such as Lotty and Beppie who survived were exchanged for German POWs. When the women finally arrived in Amsterdam on August 26, there was hardly any shelter for Holocaust survivors. They were thrown a horse blanket and left to fend for themselves. “Come,” said Lotty to Beppie. “Let’s go posh.”13 They slept on a bench in a park in the fancy Apollolaan.