The Boy Between Worlds: A Biography

by Annejet van Der Zijl

  Most of the Vught women came from an educated background. They read the newspaper, had been quick to recognize the dangers of fascism, and had earned their spurs in the Resistance. But they had always assumed that they were risking their freedom to save Jewish people from hard labor camps—even the most cynical among them would never have imagined that the Germans, even with all their ideological nonsense, would have been capable of such a deliberate and large-scale annihilation of innocent people. The realization devastated them; one after the other, they started to break down—physically, but even more so in terms of morale.

  Over time, the young and strong usually managed to recover. They banished every thought of the past and future from their minds and focused on one thing—survival—from hour to hour, day to day, without ever doubting they’d pull through: “Giving in is giving up.” But some abandoned hope, and with it their life force. In mid-December, the pianist’s mother, with whom Rika had developed a close friendship, died. At fifty-three years old, Rika was now the oldest in their group, but her spirit hadn’t been broken. She remained, as a fellow prisoner would later recount, “immensely cheerful.” With the same nearly desperate optimism that had carried her through so much misery in the early 1930s, she now clung to hope for a quick and happy end and a safe return to her children and her two Waldys.

  Meanwhile, Rika’s family in The Hague waited in vain for news about their oldest daughter and sister. But all that arrived was a letter addressed to Rika from a former cellmate in Scheveningen who had also been with her at Vught. Even she had been set free by then, and she clearly assumed that “Aunt Riek” had been released as well:

  I was shocked when I was suddenly greeted by you and Aunt Lena in Vught; I had thought you were already free. I was so incredibly happy to receive your congratulations and the chocolates. That was a truly sweet idea of yours. Is it true that your husband was transferred to Germany? How terrible that must be for you. And how is little Waldy? He must have been so thrilled to have his mother come home. Fortunately, you still have him. And your other family has surely been very dear to you in these difficult times. I still remember all the letters you got in the cell and how they sympathized with everything.

  The war is lasting forever, isn’t it? Do you remember how back in February we expected the end every day with Wil and Ria? Now here we are, almost a year later. But I don’t let it get me down. Keep smiling, right! I still laugh. We have to stay just as strong when the men come home. And what a day that will be! That’s something we can really long for! We never would have thought that everything would be so horrible, but I’m even more amazed by the fact that people can endure so much. You get knocked down again and again, and you stand back up and keep going. Will we ever know truly happy times again, Aunt Riek? Yes, despite everything, I’m still sure of it, and that’s what keeps me going.93

  In mid-December 1944, Hitler launched the Ardennes Counteroffensive, later known as the Battle of the Bulge. It was a campaign doomed to fail, just like the bloody, human-life-devouring, last-ditch attempt that had cost the German armies their momentum on the Eastern Front. But the counteroffensive brought the Allies’ advance to a halt, the war was put on hold, and the prisoners in the concentration camps were still not home by Christmas. They held secret Christmas services above the barracks, where they could hear the flocks of geese honking to each other overhead so as not to get lost in the fog. But for all the people who had been scattered around ravaged Europe, all efforts to communicate with the outside world were in vain—by the last winter of the war, all postal lines had been cut off.

  Neither Ravensbrück nor Neuengamme was designed to exterminate people. The concentration camps were built in a time when the Third Reich was running like a well-oiled machine, and the goal was to punish people, reeducate them in the Nazi ideology, and use their labor to benefit the empire’s growth. It was a time when vision, order, and clarity were among the most attractive qualities of National Socialism, making it appealing to people with a strong sense of duty, people who would rather blame their actions on a system than have to take responsibility themselves. But in the winter months of 1945, the Nazi empire found itself in the throes of death, lethally wounded and thrashing its giant claws around in an attempt to ward off attacks from all sides. The brain had gone insane, but the limbs were still trying to carry out the tasks they had once been intended for.

  And so, the trains were still running off and on, and prisoners were still being transferred by the thousands from the occupied territories to northern Germany’s concentration camps. In furious attempts to make use of the fresh supply of labor, the Nazis continued to establish new subcamps, only to abandon them again. The big, unwieldy machine that had swallowed Waldemar and Rika alive faltered, held fast, and churned on as furiously as ever, even though there was nothing more to be gained. The enormous army of weak and hungry prisoners was nothing more than dead weight for the doomed empire, and their labor did nothing but postpone the end of a pointless war.

  Hitler’s pseudo-Darwinist theories about the Aryan people’s need to fight for Lebensraum were now being manifested daily in the camp in the most atrocious ways imaginable. People were dying not because of the Nazis’ sadism or their desire to murder individuals per se but in a battle for survival in a world where there simply wasn’t enough to go around. Order had deteriorated into chaos, and the people who had been running the camps for years with discipline lost all control. Some turned to drinking or other forms of excess as a means of escape, while others suppressed their fear by resorting to even crueler methods of keeping the prisoners in line. Executions and abuse escalated. In the end, even those who managed to hold on to their humanity could do little to help the prisoners who were being crushed in the Third Reich’s fight to the death.

  Although Neuengamme was still reasonably well organized compared to Ravensbrück, its living conditions began to deteriorate dramatically in the fall of 1944 as well. There were around fourteen hundred people living in the main camp. Soup was still being served, but the ladlefuls were getting smaller by the day. Blankets were still available, but not everyone got one. The showers were still running, but prisoners hardly ever got to take one and were eventually deprived of them altogether. And then there was the cold. Winter set in early and with a vengeance, and during roll call, they often stood for hours up to their knees in snow. In many cases, the newcomers were so paralyzed by the situation that many of them didn’t survive more than a few weeks, and there were so many deaths that the SS deemed it necessary to build a second crematorium on-site.

  Camp veterans like Waldemar had a better chance of survival. They understood the camp’s underlying structure and its unwritten rules, and their morale was strengthened by the mere fact that, thanks to their position, they were more than a face in the camp’s anonymous masses. For Waldemar, the camp’s general filthiness was abhorrent, and he’d never had a high tolerance for the cold, but he had inherited his father’s tough constitution and was still in reasonably good shape. The worst part for him was the fact that he hadn’t received any news from Holland or Rika in months. In a letter sent to the Netherlands on January 7, 1945, his despair seems to creep between the lines:

  Dear Jo,

  First of all, a happy new year 1945 to you, Mother, Father and everyone. Everything’s well at home, I hope. Have you heard anything from Rika? If so, please don’t forget to send me her address, number, and camp, so I can write to her. It’s depressing to not receive any letters at all.

  And Waldy, my boy, how are you? Work hard and do your best in football. And Jo, you must have also had a hard time under the current circumstances. I’m doing fine and fortunately, I’m healthy. It can get extremely cold here, but I’m coping. Please write back as soon as possible. You too, Waldy, I’m waiting.

  Greetings to everyone, especially Jo.

  So long, your Waldemar94

  Five days later, the Soviet troops dealt a major blow to the Eastern Front. Hundreds of thousands of
citizens fled. By then, most of Germany, from children to old men, had joined the fight. They believed they were giving their lives for victory, but in fact they were in a battle for ultimate destruction, a battle that their dictator, isolated under four meters of armed concrete in his Berlin bunker, had chosen over all forms of surrender.

  Occasionally, a scrap of news would make it out of the concentration camps and find its way to Holland. That’s how, after several anxious months without news, the Chardon family finally learned on February 11 what had happened to their Kees, who had been transferred from Vught to Germany as well. An escaped prisoner had met him by chance in one of Neuengamme’s subcamps, where he had apparently been transferred from the Heinkel factory in Sachsenhausen. Elated, Kees’s sister in Delft wrote in her diary:

  He worked in a village near Helmstedt (Morsleben?) between Hanover and Magdeburg. The food was good and no trouble with bombings. Maybe, just maybe, word from Kees himself will make it through from there. At least we know where he is now. The Russians are close. He will be home before we know it!95

  But meanwhile, she had no idea that, according to his fellow prisoners, her brother, with his small frame, had very little chance of survival in the salt mines in Helmstedt. “It was evident that he was neither psychologically nor physically fit for life in the camp,” as one of them later wrote.96 Nevertheless, Kees endured it surprisingly well at first. Like Rika, he held on to his deep-rooted faith, and like her, he had a close-knit group of friends from his Vught days around him for support. Only when his best friend finally succumbed to the hardship at the end of February did his spirit finally break. For days, he didn’t work or eat, and he wandered around the camp with vacant eyes. Even the harshest guards left him alone. “He seemed to have lost his will to survive,” said one of his fellow prisoners later.

  At the end of the summer of 1944, pressing letters were sent to Berlin about the growing abuse in the concentration camps. The reply of the Nazi elites was consistent with the simple, ruthless ideas that formed the basis of their entire ideology: the weak must disappear to make room for the strong. In September, Himmler ordered a gas chamber to be built in Ravensbrück. That fall, the building was constructed on the Schwedtsee, right next to the camp’s crematorium, and in Uckermark, located just outside of the main camp, a hospital was set up. Previously, this subcamp had served as a division for underage girls, and thus became known as the Jugendlager, the youth camp.

  That December, the gas chambers were put into use. Originally, they were intended for hopeless hospital patients, who up until then had been killed via poison injections, but the chaos had gotten so out of hand that it was soon decided that the “natural” death rate needed to be accelerated. That winter, selections were made every day at four o’clock in the work barracks: anyone who appeared too sick, too weak, or too old to work was sent either to “Mitwerda,” as the gas chamber was called in campspeak, or to the Jugendlager. The latter was nothing more than a delayed execution, for prisoners sent to the Jugendlager were given hardly anything to eat, and there were no blankets or medical services to speak of. At the end of the day, the Kapos dragged the dead to the crematorium and the most miserable cases to the gas chamber, or—if there wasn’t enough room—to the trucks reconstructed for gassing purposes. The bodies were burned, and the ashes were dumped into the waters of the Schwedtsee. Only the very few who managed to recover on their own strength had any chance of making it out of the Jugendlager alive. They were allowed to return to the normal barracks.

  It wasn’t long before the entire camp realized that being selected for the Jugendlager was something to be avoided at all costs. When it came time for selection, they did everything they could to make even the sick look as healthy as possible. The women pinched each other’s cheeks, smeared blood to add color to the skin if necessary, and secretly propped up anyone who was truly no longer able to stand. But in February, when daytime temperatures barely climbed above twenty degrees below freezing, the snow was more than three feet deep, and the Baltic Sea was practically frozen solid, a dysentery epidemic broke out in Rika’s barrack. This exceptionally infectious intestinal disease ravaged its victims in weeks, eating away both their bodies and minds.

  On a cold day at the end of the month, eighty more women were selected for the Jugendlager. Among the dirty, emaciated souls who, with the casual flick of a finger were sent staggering to the dreaded hospital, was number 67001, the woman who in another life had been Rika Nods, wife of Waldemar, mother of Waldy. A few weeks later, twenty of these women managed to make such a healthy impression that they were sent back to the main camp. Rika wasn’t one of them.

  A couple hundred miles to the west, Waldemar was still hanging on—filthy, hungry, and colder than he ever could have thought possible in his life. After the postal lines were cut off, the post office was discontinued, and Waldemar was transferred to an administrative position in the camp’s weaving division. He was moved to Barrack 4, which was still one of the better ones. His compatriot and fellow ocean swimmer Anton de Kom, the man who had once preached from the De Waag balcony on Paramaribo’s Waterfront, hadn’t been so lucky, however. He had been arrested in August 1944 for his activities with the underground press and transferred from Sachsenhausen to Neuengamme at the start of the year. And even though he and Waldy looked so much alike that they were often mistaken for each other—both were tall and thin, and in the absence of hygiene, both had grown a wild head of hair—De Kom had arrived during a period when the SS guards no longer had any time to amuse themselves with a black man. Thus, he’d been forced to join the regular masses.

  But De Kom didn’t have to worry about being transferred to one of the dreaded subcamps: people of color were not allowed to leave the camp under any circumstances for fear that they might escape and rape German women, thereby soiling the Aryan race with their blood. Fellow prisoners would later recall how he, even in the camp, continued to tell stories about the balmy, enchanting beauty of his Switi Sranan. But not Waldemar. Imprisoned on a continent that wasn’t his own, caught up in a war he had nothing to do with, he could no longer remember the colors of his homeland. His memories of Suriname, which after years in rigid Holland had already grown dim, all but disappeared behind the German barbed wire.

  The Red Armies were advancing in the East, and millions of citizens, collaborators, and soldiers were being driven out and pushed toward Berlin. Meanwhile, the Allied bombers had virtually free rein of the skies and were dropping an inferno of fire and explosions on one German city after another. The Third Reich was up in flames, but total devastation wasn’t enough for Hitler. On March 19, 1945, he issued the so-called Nero Decree, which called for the destruction of railroads, factories, and other fundamental facilities in Germany. April came, and the chaos increased. The British tanks arrived at the Elbe, and one order was contradicted by the next. Prisoners were shuffled back and forth, either in open cattle cars or on foot, usually without food or water, and they were constantly bombarded by the Allied planes swarming Germany like flies in search of enemy soldiers on the move.

  Still, musical performances and sports matches were organized on Sunday afternoons in Neuengamme’s central square. Only now there were the ominous silhouettes of dead bodies hanging from the gallows in the background. As it became more difficult to maintain order in the catastrophically overcrowded camp, and clear that the whole system was on the verge of collapse, the Kapos and SS guards became increasingly barbaric. Some spent the final days of their supposedly eternal empire in a drunken stupor, while others took pleasure in exercising their tyranny one last time. Still others tried to cozy up to the influential prisoners, in the hope that they’d receive preferential treatment after the war.

  In mid-April, around three thousand prisoners were brought from Camp Helmstedt to the makeshift Camp Wöbbelin near Ludwigslust. The guards were thrown into such a panic that they fled en masse, leaving the exhausted, half-starved, and in some cases, dying prisoners to their fate. On April 1
6, Kees Chardon, the small man with the tremendous spirit, passed away. Together with his last surviving friend, he had managed, against all odds, to stay alive for months. A few hours after he died, his friend passed away as well.

  Their bodies were found a few weeks later by American soldiers, who were so shocked by what they found in the camp that they forced the local villagers to walk through it themselves, so they could see with their own eyes what had been going on in their backyard. But no matter what Kees Chardon had been forced to endure in the camps, the Nazis never made a beast out of him. As a French survivor wrote:

  Oddly enough, he remained soft in an environment where there was no softness to speak of. He managed, through his unique dignity, to resist the ultimate villain. He commanded respect, and one couldn’t scare him. He gave his life so as not [to] lose his humanity, without any concessions whatsoever.97

  On April 19, the Nazis’ evacuation of Neuengamme began. Outside the camp the birds were singing the arrival of spring, but inside a feverish commotion had taken over. Thousands of prisoners were marched out the gate and into the cargo trains, while behind them, in the blazing fires of the cremation ovens, were the bodies of the silent witnesses: Jewish children used for medical experiments, Communists hung by order of the Hamburg Gestapo—all thrown in with the remains of the slaughtered bloodhounds. Finally, the gallows were sawed into pieces and fed to the flames. Meanwhile, in the offices next to the SS building, administrative employees were erasing all information related to punishment procedures from the camp’s files; but this quickly became too time consuming, and hundreds of folders were tossed into the ovens at once.