That was one of the issues that had drawn Pieter van Twisk to the cold case investigation in the first place; he wanted to understand why that had happened in such large numbers in the Netherlands. One long-held theory was that the structure of Dutch society, namely, its separation into groups by religion and associated political ideas, had worked against the protection of the Jewish population. The Dutch called this “pillarization.” There were four main pillars: Catholics, Protestants, socialists, and liberals. Each pillar (the Dutch word is verzuiling) had its own trade unions, banks, hospitals, schools, universities, sports clubs, newspapers, and so on. Such segregation meant that people were tightly knit within their own group and had little or no personal contact with members from other pillars. Yet Pieter said that was too easy an explanation. Pillarization is too vague and generalized a notion to explain the Netherlands’ actions during the war, he said.
The historians Pim Griffioen and Ron Zeller have a more complex explanation. They point out that the Dutch method of civil registration helped the Nazis. Municipal registration cards listed name; birth date; place of birth; nationality; religion; names and birth dates of spouses and children; date of marriage; date a person died; addresses within the municipality where people lived from start date to end date; whether a person had a passport or ID. Officially, religion was listed since religious groups received government funding based on their membership. Jews were identified by the initials NI: Netherlands Israelite. Thus, when the Nazis’ roundups began in the summer of 1942, Dutch Jews were easy targets. Given the country’s geography, flight was not an option. To the east was the long border with Germany; to the south, Belgium was occupied; and to the west and north, the sea was closed to shipping. There was virtually nowhere to go.6
It is also true that the experience of the Netherlands during the war was different from that of other countries. The Netherlands was, in effect, a police state. Whereas, for example, Belgium and occupied France were ruled by the Wehrmacht, and Denmark came under the control of the German Navy, the Netherlands was initially under a civilian government led by the Austrian lawyer Arthur Seyss-Inquart, whom Hitler had appointed Reich Commissioner. A power struggle ensued between Seyss-Inquart and the Dutch Nazi Party (Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei; NSDAP), which was under the influence of Hermann G?ring, the commander in chief of the Luftwaffe, on the one hand, and Police Commander Hanns Albin Rauter, the highest-ranking SS leader, who reported directly to SS Commander Heinrich Himmler, on the other. As G?ring’s power waned and Himmler’s was in the ascendant, Rauter’s influence increased. He oversaw the deportations of 107,000 Jews, the repression of the resistance, and retaliation for assaults on Nazis. Initially the death of one Nazi called for the execution of several Dutchmen; the ratio increased over the course of the occupation.
In addition, the Dutch endured brutal repression after any dissent from the Nazi dogma. A national strike organized by the Communist Party in Amsterdam on February 25, 1941, in response to the Razzias, or roundups, of Jews is considered to be the first public protest against the Nazis in occupied Europe and the only mass protest against the deportation of Jews to be organized by non-Jews. At least three hundred thousand workers in and around Amsterdam took part.7 German repression was immediate and brutal. The strike organizers were rounded up and executed. It took a long time for the resistance to recover. “Only in the spring of 1943 did another strike take place, but . . . the protest came much too late for the vast majority of Jews who had already been deported” to the death camps.8
Still, there were many different groups and individuals who worked on behalf of the Jews. There were four networks dedicated to the rescue of Jewish children. Henri?tte “Hetty” Vo?te, a young biology student, joined one group calling itself the Utrecht Children’s Committee. It set about finding hiding places for several hundred young Jewish children who’d been separated from their parents. Hetty cycled around the countryside, literally knocking on doors.9
It is impossible to estimate the exact number of people who helped Jews hide, but an approximate number would be at least twenty-eight thousand and probably more—an extraordinary figure, given these people were putting their own and possibly their family’s lives on the line, often for strangers.
6
An Interlude of Safety
By December 1933, Otto Frank found his family an apartment at 37 Merwedeplein in the River Quarter of Amsterdam. It was a modest three-bedroom, upper-floor apartment in a complex of row houses built around 1920.* The River Quarter was filled with hundreds of newly arrived Jewish refugees from Nazi Germany. The poorer Dutch Jews envied their middle-class comfort, while the locals warned the newly arrived not to speak German in public lest they be identified as immigrants. Otto thought he’d found a safe refuge for his family. Anne loved the area, calling the Merwedeplein “the Merry.” For the first five or six years, the Franks felt at home in Amsterdam, and the children were soon integrated into their schools, spoke Dutch, and found friends. What was happening in Germany was tragic but remote.
In the Netherlands at that time, anti-Semitism was not overt. When it did rear its head, it was usually through verbal assaults. But a different kind of intolerance was growing. As refugees fled from Germany, then Austria and Eastern Europe, anti-refugee sentiment began to build slowly among the Dutch. The refugees came to the Netherlands in three waves: first after Hitler’s ascendance to power in 1933; then with the promulgation of the Nuremberg Laws in 1935; and finally, after Kristallnacht, the Night of Broken Glass, in 1938, when Jewish shops were vandalized and an estimated thirty thousand Jews were arrested and six hundred seriously wounded. Accused of inciting the violence, the Jews were fined millions of marks as punishment. When truth could be so distorted, it was time to flee. Between 1933 and 1940, an estimated thirty-three thousand refugees entered the Netherlands.
The Dutch government voted to treat the refugees as “undesirable elements.”1 In 1939, Camp Westerbork was set up to house both legal and illegal Jewish refugees, and private Dutch Jewish organizations were forced to finance it. Located in a remote northeast corner of the country (Queen Wilhelmina had vetoed a more central location that she felt was too close to a royal residence), the camp was made up of crude barracks and small huts. Initially, it was an open camp where people were supposedly being prepared for emigration. Eventually, Westerbork was ready and waiting for the German occupiers to convert it into a transit camp for Jews en route to the concentration camps in the east.
In the midst of all that, Otto Frank managed to establish his Opekta business with a loan from his brother-in-law, Erich Elias. The profits were slim, but by 1938 he formed a second company, Pectacon, specializing in herbs, spices, and seasonings to sell to butchers and other tradespeople, which meant he could carry on business in the winter months, when the fruit used to make jam was scarce. He’d tried to establish a branch in England, traveling to London and Bristol in October 1937, which of course might have meant his family’s eventual emigration to England and freedom, but the plan had fallen through.
Looking back at the family’s first years in the Netherlands, Otto could say that after the horrors in Germany, they had recovered their freedom and life had been peaceful. In the summers Edith and the children often traveled to the spa city of Aachen just inside the German border, where her family had rented a large town house in 1932. It was there that she and her children stayed for four months while Otto found them the apartment in Amsterdam. Otto also took the children to Basel to visit his mother, Alice, and his sister, Leni, along with the extended family of cousins.