The Boy Between Worlds

by van der Zijl, Annejet

  As in peacetime, Waldemar left the daily household business to his wife. Still, Rika didn’t make any major decisions without consulting him, and he was well aware of everything going on in their house. He certainly wasn’t the only West Indian involved in the Resistance. Members of the Surinamese labor union in Amsterdam were particularly active in helping Jews. Despite that the Nazi doctrine considered people of color grossly inferior, they were generally left alone. There simply weren’t enough of them to devise a separate policy—and they even received extra rice rations.

  Rika ran her illegal guesthouse with as much verve and ingenuity as she had run Pension Walda. Her greatest challenge was collecting enough food without the local shops noticing that she bought a lot for someone with such a small family. She either had to spread out her shopping or only frequent stores run by patriotic shopkeepers. She also tried to procure extra fruits and vegetables on the black market through her brothers. Apparently, they weren’t totally unaware of what their sister was up to. In the summer of 1943, she asked them without batting an eye for twenty-two pounds of green beans—“not for canning.”65

  Meanwhile, Rika and Waldemar had caught on to the fact that their activities weren’t without danger. While police officers in Amsterdam, for example, were engaged in such frequent sabotage that the Germans eventually stopped trying to use them for their cause, the police force in The Hague remained remarkably law-abiding under the new order. Without protest, officers in The Hague supervised the transport of Jewish prisoners, and some even agreed to work as guards in Westerbork. The Dutch military intelligence service, which had been keeping tabs on suspicious leftist activities before the war, willingly surrendered to the Nazis’ clear-cut system after Holland’s capitulation. Most agents became members of the NSB, and their department, redubbed the Documentation Service, went to war with members of the Dutch Resistance. This was how Franz Fischer, a virulent anti-Semite and Judenreferat leader, managed to recruit several exceptionally fanatic and professional “Jew hunters” to work for him. His job was facilitated by the fact that the Dutch Resistance network was hanging by a thread: there were so many divisions within the network itself that it was easy for traitors and provocateurs to cause carnage in their ranks. There were even groups, like that of painter Ru Paré, that chose to take their security into their own hands and distance themselves from anything and everything associated with “the organized Resistance.”

  The most infamous branch of the Documentation Service was the Jodenploeg, the Jew-hunting squad, as its members proudly called themselves. The German Sicherheitsdienst (SD), the SS intelligence agency, paid them a premium for every Jewish person they delivered to headquarters, and they made a sport of bringing in as many as possible. The group consisted of a dozen men who, like most of the Dutch who sided with the German regime, had felt ignored and frustrated in the Netherlands before the war. In general, they weren’t particularly intelligent and thus easily influenced, and thanks to the unusual wartime circumstances, they suddenly found themselves wielding a power they had never had before. Their undisputed leader was the young Maarten Spaans from The Hague. Energetic and assertive, he mercilessly hunted down his prey with the pleasure of a rabbit hunter.

  When, on a lovely summer’s night, a German truck came to a grumbling halt on the Stevinstraat, right in front of the Nodses’ front door, everyone in the house woke with a start. The Jodenploeg had come for them, they were sure of it. Half-dressed, the houseguests ran for their lives, through the big backyard and up to the makeshift hideout they had built in a former sand dune. But when Waldemar opened the front door, he was met not by Dutch police officers or SD agents on the prowl, but by Rika’s daughter’s fiancé, looking somewhat disheveled after a long journey. It turned out he had run away from the factory in Germany where he had been sent to work and hitchhiked his way back to the Netherlands. Barely had the group recovered from the terrifying incident when a second one occurred, this one more serious than the first. Despite all agreements not to, one of the women hiding in the house decided to venture out onto the street. She was soon recognized in The Hague as a Jew. The residents of the Stevinstraat were immediately warned by telephone, and they quickly dispersed to various locations. It was days before the coast was clear enough to come back.

  Shortly afterward—at the end of August 1943—the evacuation of Scheveningen resumed, and the Nods family was forced to move again. After living in a shelter for evacuees in The Hague for a few weeks, they were transferred to an upstairs apartment on the Pijnboomstraat in mid-September. And so, fourteen years after they had photographed each other in the freshly fallen snow on the Azaleastraat, Rika and Waldemar returned to The Hague’s “neighborhood of flowers and trees,” which was still as bare as ever.

  Taking advantage of the fact that, officially speaking, they had five children in their household, Rika managed to secure a two-story apartment, and before long, the underground Pension Walda was up and running again at the new address. The Nods family lived on the lower floor, and the upper floor functioned partially as a transit house and partially as temporary quarters for people who needed a longer-term place to stay, such as the young Jewish couple that was brought to the house in October 1943 by Kees Chardon: Dobbe Franken and her fiancé, Herman de Bruin.

  A half-century later, Dobbe Franken would recall one period of the war that ended up being the worst of them all—even worse than the terrifying time that came after it—and that was the last months of 1943, when she lived at Pijnboomstraat 63 with her Herman. Though the autumn sunlight still cast a light glow on her red hair and she was still able to walk down the streets of The Hague undisturbed, she had become a gray shadow, a nonperson, someone no longer allowed to exist and who could trust no one.

  Once, Dobbe happened to pass by the home of painter Ru Paré, for whom she and her sister had modeled before the war. Her first impulse was to just ring the doorbell to say hello. But she stopped herself short: what if this woman, like so many others she never would have expected it from, had chosen the other side and was no longer to be trusted? If three years under the Nazis had taught Dobbe anything, it was that even the friendliest of faces could conceal a traitor. So, she walked on, unaware of the fact that Paré and her friends had shepherded dozens of Jews safely through the war, and that had she rung the doorbell, her life—and Herman’s—could have been very different.

  Dobbe, who was twenty-one years old when the war broke out, was the oldest daughter of the respected Rotterdam judge Maurits Franken and his elegant Russian wife. The Frankens were the picture of a perfectly assimilated Jewish family: enlightened in their ideas, and at the center of a large circle of artistic, intellectual friends. This circle, however, did not dissuade her father from becoming a devoted Zionist. He knew the history of his people all too well and was fully aware of the fact that Jews, no matter how well they managed to assimilate, would always be vulnerable as long as they had no place in the world to call their own. Even still, when the swastika flags were raised all over the Netherlands in 1940, he never thought that he and his family would find themselves in critical danger.

  It wasn’t long before various anti-Jewish measures were put into effect and Dobbe’s father was forced to quit his job, and she had to drop out of school. But, as they used to say to comfort each other, life goes on. Franken made himself useful as a member of the Jewish Council, and Dobbe became a nurse’s apprentice at the Portuguese-Jewish hospital in Amsterdam. It was there that she met Herman de Bruin, who was working in the pharmacy after being forced to quit medical school. Thanks to Dobbe’s father’s work on the Council, both Dobbe and Herman received a much-coveted spot on the “Frederiks List,” a list of people who had made significant cultural, intellectual, or social contributions and would therefore be exempt from having to do hard labor in the East. On March 1, 1943, this elite group was detained on the Barneveld estate in the Veluwe, where they were told they could wait out the end of the war. But at the end of September 1943, word was
received that the “Barneveld Jews” would be sent to Westerbork that same day. Dobbe’s father believed that it was best to calmly comply, but his daughter no longer trusted their so-called protectors. She and Herman tore the Star of David off their clothes, hid until everyone was gone, and made their way to their friends in Amsterdam.

  During her summer in the forests of the Veluwe, the atmosphere in the occupied Netherlands had changed dramatically. The Nazis had stopped masquerading as polite civil servants, and the vicious hunt for Jews was on. Raids, executions, and other forms of public terror were the order of the day, and Dobbe and Herman realized that they were putting their friends in Amsterdam in grave danger by staying at their house. Through an acquaintance of Dobbe’s father, the runaway couple came into contact with Kees Chardon, who put them up for one night at his home in Delft. The next day, he led them to the upper floor of the Pijnboomstraat in The Hague, where their contact with the outside world was limited to weekly visits from a Resistance worker who delivered ration cards, money, and smuggled letters.

  Herman was so noticeably Jewish that Dobbe wouldn’t let him out of the house under any circumstances, but she, with her red locks and light skin, could easily pass for Aryan. She did all the shopping and even managed to secure a job as a cleaning lady under the name on her fake identity card, Margreet Spiegelenberg. However, she realized that her new identity wasn’t particularly convincing when an eye doctor wrote her a prescription for new glasses and refused payment. “Don’t worry about it, ma’am. You have more important things to spend your money on,” he said. As friendly a gesture as it was, for Dobbe it was yet another reminder that any human contact was potentially lethal. From then on, she didn’t associate with anyone. Not with the constantly changing, albeit clearly Jewish, residents lodged in the other rooms on their floor, and not with the family living below them acting as their landlord. To what extent these people—a white woman, a black man, and their mixed-race son—knew about their situation, she didn’t know, nor did she know what their motives were for offering them shelter. And she didn’t want to know. Life in the shadows had left her terribly afraid and depressed, and she constantly had to be on her guard.

  Gerard van Haringen, on the other hand—who arrived at the Pijnboomstraat just a few weeks after Dobbe and Herman—later couldn’t recall a single moment when he felt afraid. But he was a special case in more ways than one. Not only was he as blond and Aryan-looking as could be, he had marched in the gray uniform with the dreaded SS symbol on the collar not long before he had arrived. Gerard was only seventeen, practically a child soldier, when he left home for voluntary service in the Waffen-SS. He had envisioned the life of the soldier to be like it was in the propaganda films he had seen at the movies: full of exciting, manly adventures, like jumping from moving army trucks and driving amphibious vehicles on faraway beaches. At that point, he would’ve done anything to escape the boredom of school and his father’s fire-and-brimstone sermons about his poor grades. For as good as Gerard was in physical activities, he had an aversion to anything that required him to use his brain.

  During the intense training program at the Nazi base in Munich, he discovered that the reality of serving in the German military was very different from the riveting tales in boys’ adventure books. A few of his fellow soldiers-to-be even committed suicide, but the athletic Gerard completed his training with shining colors and was enthusiastically conscripted as a Panzergrenadier in the Westland Battalion. It wasn’t until he found himself on the Eastern Front, near Kharkiv, Ukraine, that the harsh reality of the war sank in. He contracted dysentery before ever firing a shot and had to be transported back behind the lines by hospital train. The bloody scenes he witnessed in the train, the mutilated and dying soldiers, were enough to convince him to use his first furlough to escape and return to his parents’ house in Rotterdam Noord, to the father whose heart he’d broken the day he signed up for the SS.

  Van Haringen Senior went to a lot of trouble to find a safe place for his son to hide. If he were found, he would have to go before the military tribunal and would most certainly be shot. Most members of the Resistance didn’t want to dirty their hands with an SS deserter, but finally, via an acquaintance, Marcel van der Lans, he came into contact with Kees Chardon, the man who had become a magnet for hopeless cases. This was how Gerard ended up on the Pijnboomstraat. Rika’s heart was certainly big enough for such a young soul, who in all his misguided bravado had been easily swayed by the Nazi propaganda. Everyone made rash, stupid mistakes in their youth—she, of all people, knew that.

  Gerard found life with the Nods family very much to his liking. Obviously, a former SS agent couldn’t be housed with the Jews hiding upstairs, so he was put up in the side room above the stairs and adopted into the family like a son. Aunt Riek was exceptionally caring. She had a solution for everything and was an excellent cook—something a robust, constantly hungry eighteen-year-old like Gerard didn’t take lightly. In turn, with his Aryan appearance and strong arms, he was able to help her with the groceries. And he was in absolute awe of his gentlemanly black host. Though Gerard had never been particularly prone to deep thinking, a half-century later, the image of Waldemar remained engraved in his memory. He was, as Gerard later recalled, a man who made you feel calm.

  For little Waldy, who was fourteen by now and not so little anymore, Gerard was a sort of replacement for his legendary oldest brother who had never come to see him, and above all, a new friend in a time when almost everything he loved had been taken away from him. Gerard taught him to play chess and guitar, two bright spots in an otherwise far-from-happy time. Waldy missed the house on the Seafront, and he missed his buddies whom he had lost touch with since they left Scheveningen, especially since he failed his first year at the Jesuit high school—or as the priests put it, he had been “too playful and did not take it seriously”—and his father moved him to another high school. And most of all, he missed the sea, which was now blocked off by tank trenches, rings of barbed wire, minefields, and other armaments that the Germans had used to transform the once-frivolous seaside town into a stark military base.

  Gerard secretly spent Christmas 1943 with his parents at their house in Rotterdam Noord. Meanwhile, in Washington, Commander in Chief Dwight D. Eisenhower was preparing to invade Western Europe; in Italy, the British troops were planning a decisive attack on the Gustav Line in Monte Cassino; and in Russia, the Red Army had finally managed to take back Leningrad. Around that time, one of Rika’s sisters came to visit them on Pijnboomstraat with her husband and daughter. They couldn’t help but notice the shadowy figures darting out of sight on the stairs, but Rika and Waldemar acted like having these Jewish-looking strangers wandering around their house in these frightening times was the most normal thing in the world. As the visitors walked home in The Hague’s dusky afternoon light, Rika’s brother-in-law said, “Rika really ought to be more careful.”

  Early in the morning on January 18, 1944, the doorbell rang. It was six thirty, and the street was still cloaked in darkness. Waldemar and Waldy were already awake, but Rika was in bed, suffering from an inflammation of the jaw. Gerard was asleep as well. The downstairs door had been locked for the night, so Waldy went down to open it. He had hardly turned the key, when the door was pushed open with tremendous force. Men in black leather jackets stormed past him and marched upstairs. He felt a pistol pressed into his back. A few seconds later, Gerard awoke to find a large man standing over his bed. His presence filled the entire room. “Are you Jewish?” he asked. When Gerard said no, he was ordered to get dressed. Rika was already up and dressed, and even in the chaos, she still thought to grab a bag of sugar and a pack of margarine from the kitchen. Above their heads, they heard heavy footsteps, doors forced open, and shrieks. Moments later, the upstairs residents came stumbling down the stairs, trembling with fear.

  Dobbe, who had been out cleaning that morning, came walking down the street just as it was getting light. She arrived to find a group of onlookers gath
ered in front of number 63, waiting to watch their neighbors be carted off. Through the crowd, she saw Herman and the men in leather jackets, and she realized that something was wrong, but oddly enough it never occurred to her to flee. The only thing she could think about was the tin of cookies their friends in Amsterdam had sent for Christmas and how it must still be in the wardrobe upstairs. Submissively, she turned herself over to the police, who ushered her into the patrol wagon that was standing by to take them to the police station on the Javastraat. The Nods family was placed together in one cell, but Rika and Waldemar were taken for questioning almost immediately.

  For Waldy, the day in the cell was so boring it seemed to last forever. At one point, he wrote a note on the triangular back flap of an old brown envelope that he found in his pocket: “Be brave Ger and see you soon.” He folded it up and tossed it into the cell across from him that Gerard van Haringen had disappeared into. It was dark outside the cell window by the time his parents came back. He was shocked at the sight of them; they both looked terribly shaken. At the Villa Windekind, Maarten Spaans was typing up the routine arrest report from the Pijnboomstraat raid:

  In the Nods residence, Nods being the main tenant of Pijnboomstraat 63, a radio was found that was being used by Nods and his family to listen to reports broadcast by the enemy. Nods acknowledged this. Furthermore, Nods declared that he was aware that he had been hiding Jews and a Waffen-SS deserter in his home. As far as the Jews were concerned, the matter was mostly handled by his wife. His wife, H. M. J. van der Lans, refused to make a statement about this.66