The Boy Between Worlds

by van der Zijl, Annejet

  That morning, Dobbe tried to use her fake name one last time. But the sergeant on the other side of the table immediately retorted: “Certainly not. You must be Dobbe Franken.” On the table in front of him was a list of names:

  Abraham Cohn, born September 22, 1904, resident of Voorburg

  Joseph Polak, born October 18, 1898, resident of Naarden

  Herman de Bruin, born June 3, 1918, resident of Amsterdam

  Dobbe Franken, born September 1, 1919, resident of Rotterdam67

  When she saw the list, she knew they had been betrayed.

  There was no room for denial for Gerard van Haringen either. The Nazis knew everything about him: his name, where he lived, his date of birth, and his status as a deserter. When they asked him what he had done with his uniform and weapons, he didn’t dare to tell them that he had dumped them in the Bergse lake in Rotterdam. Instead, he concocted a story that he had swapped his clothes with an acquaintance at the train station in Utrecht who hadn’t passed the German medical examinations. However, when asked about his fellow residents on the Pijnboomstraat, he figured that the best strategy was to tell the truth about what he had seen: that there had always been new people coming and going in the house.

  His interrogator promptly sent word to the Jodenploeg members who had stayed behind to search the house and instructed them to keep watch for another night or two—you never know who might come by. When asked how he ended up at the Pijnboomstraat in the first place, Gerard simply answered the question—after all, he barely knew Chardon, what harm could it do?

  That evening, a little after ten o’clock, the doorbell rang at Chardon’s law office on the Spoorsingel in Delft. His family lived in the adjoining house. Kees was sitting in the living room with a few people to whom he had just issued fake documents. When he opened the front door, the Jodenploeg stormed in and took over, yet he still managed to sound the alarm across the quiet canal. His shouts were heard by someone hiding a few houses away who then proceeded to warn several people by telephone.

  Kees’s parents and two of his sisters were reading in the salon above the office and didn’t hear a thing. Only when the door was flung open and the men in leather jackets suddenly stormed into the room did they know they were under siege. The other invaders barreled up the stairs to the attic, where they found a little girl in one of the bedrooms. Although she had been instructed to state her last name as Chardon, she was so shocked that she muttered her own: Betty Springer, twelve years old. “A highly gifted child, she wrote her own poems,” one of Kees’s sisters later recalled. The agents congratulated each other: another Jew, another payout.

  Downstairs, Maarten Spaans made a few valuable discoveries of his own. In Kees’s desk, which had been left open, he found address lists, several blank and falsified identity papers, as well as ration coupons from the City of The Hague and the employment office. “The Delft lawyer Cornelis Chardon enabled the escape of Jews on a large scale,” as the SD report would later describe Chardon’s broad efforts to help Jews hide and escape.68 Kees made one last attempt to escape that evening through the sunroom door, but with his small frame he was no match for Spaans and his sidekick. As punishment, he was kicked and beaten. A little while later, backup arrived from Villa Windekind in the form of a few German and Dutch SD agents. Kees’s interrogation lasted the rest of the night, during which his arm was broken, among other things, and around four o’clock in the morning he made one last hopeless attempt to flee but was caught and beaten unconscious. Shortly afterward, the residents of the Spoorsingel were taken to Villa Windekind.

  Waldemar, Rika, and Waldy had spent the night together in their cell. The next morning—Wednesday, January 19—they were picked up. They were seated on a wooden bench in the hall and guarded by German soldiers. They were not allowed to speak to each other, but Rika still nudged her son, who was sitting between the two of them, and whispered: “Here, give this to Papa, because we probably won’t be seeing each other for a while.” She pressed Waldemar’s wedding ring into his hand; in the chaos of the previous morning, she had managed to snatch it from the bathroom table. Waldy managed to pass the ring to his father, even though it got him a snarl and a threatening gesture from the guard. A little while later, one of the agents beckoned Waldy from the bench and led him toward the exit. He was shoved outside, back into the free world.

  Waldy’s uncle Bob, his mother’s youngest brother, was waiting for him, looking as white as a sheet. When Rika hadn’t shown up for a family birthday party the day before, he had called the house. When the phone was answered by a complete stranger, they immediately knew that something was terribly wrong. Two of Rika’s sisters went to the Pijnboomstraat the next day and found that the house had been sealed. They heard from the neighbors that the Nodses had been detained. Bob called and received permission to come pick up his nephew. He took Waldy to his grandparents’ house. In the meantime, Bertha, who had been transferred to Nijmegen six months earlier, found out what happened. She sent word to her brother Henk and their father in Groningen. The next day, Henk buried the thick stack of letters and cards he had received from his mother over the years under a tile in the bike shed behind the garden. You never know—perhaps the Nazis would come looking for evidence.

  On Friday, January 21, an official report was issued stating that Rika and Waldemar had been incarcerated in the deutsche Polizeigefängnis, also known as the Oranje Hotel. It was decided that Waldy, who was still staying with his grandparents, would return to school the following Monday. That weekend, he went back to the Pijnboomstraat to collect his schoolbooks and some clothes. The front door of the house had been sealed off, which made Waldy’s house key useless, but he was still able to climb in via a side window. Once inside, he wandered through his parents’ house. Never had it been so still. His footsteps echoed through the empty rooms. Most of their household items had already been packed up and placed at the top of the stairs, ready to be picked up. Only then did it occur to him that his parents probably wouldn’t be coming home for a long time.

  The next week, Waldy showed up at the gate of the Oranje Hotel with a basket full of treats in the hopes that he would be able to give them to his parents himself. But the guard refused. He could leave the basket, but he could not see his parents. The two people who made up Waldy’s entire world—his mother with her soft arms and his calm, strong father—were swallowed up in that giant stone building.

  On Thursday, January 27, 1944, nine days after the raid on the Pijnboomstraat, a train bound for Westerbork left from the Scheveningen prison. Inside was a week’s worth of bounty collected by The Hague’s notorious Jew hunters—about seventy-five people in total, of whom fifteen had been rounded up thanks to the Chardon raid. Among them was fifty-three-year-old Leopold Nabarro, a Jewish man who, along with his Dutch protector, had been captured the night after the Nods raid.

  At Westerbork, Dobbe and Herman were awaited by her parents and sister. They had heard the bad news via the underground information network and hoped that the couple would still be counted among the hard-labor-exempt Barneveld Jews. However, like everyone captured in the raids, Dobbe and Herman were taken to the barracks marked S for Strafe, or punishment. From there, they would be among the first to be sent to the East. Not even two weeks later, on Tuesday, February 8, their trains arrived. Among the many hundreds of people who were loaded into the freight cars were Dobbe, Herman, and the other Jews picked up at the Pijnboomstraat, as well as Betty Springer, who had been reunited with her little brother at Westerbork.

  The trains were overcrowded and unheated, and the only sanitary facilities were two big barrels per car: one for drinking water and the other for human waste. On February 11, the train arrived at the station of the Polish town of Auschwitz. Outside, everything was frozen, and there was a peculiar odor in the air that no one could quite put their finger on. When Dobbe clambered out of the car, a fellow passenger asked her to grab a small child who was still on the train. With the toddler in her arms, Dob
be walked toward the camp, until they reached the checkpoint, where an SS officer was assessing the newcomers. He took one look at Dobbe and pointed to the right, to the side for the elderly, sick, and mothers and children, including Betty Springer, the little girl who wrote such good verse. Instinctively, Dobbe set the child down and explained to the officer in her best school German that she was not the little one’s mother. Gut, muttered the SS agent and motioned for the child to go right and her to go left.

  Only then, at that place and in that moment, did Dobbe begin to realize that she and Herman had been running from something far worse than being robbed of their freedom or being forced to do heavy labor, that her father and his colleagues at the Jewish Council had been much more naive than she ever could have imagined, and that, with that impulsive choice she had just made, she had saved her own life. For the first time, she realized that something inconceivable was going on, something entirely unprecedented: the systematic annihilation of human beings. Hitler was dead serious about his plans for the German people to take over the entire world, and it turned out he was equally serious about his deranged plan to rid the world of Jews. This was not where life went on, this was where it stopped.

  7

  Rika’s Eyes

  Waldemar and Rika celebrated their seventh wedding anniversary in Scheveningen, albeit in the deutsche Polizeigefängnis, where Waldemar was being held in cell 403 and Rika in cell 382. Paula Chardon, Kees’s sister, was imprisoned in that same cell on January 20, 1944. After undergoing interrogation at Villa Windekind, Paula, with her other arrested family members, was brought to the Oranje Hotel, “walking by empty houses through empty streets,” as she wrote in her diary.69

  Hardly had the door been opened, and you were shoved in without a word and the door was closed behind you. Inside, I saw an old lady, two young Jewish women and a woman with fiery eyes. I was exhausted and sat right down. They asked where I was from. “From Delft,” I said. Suddenly, the woman with the black eyes jumped up and exclaimed, “Are you a Chardon?” “Yes,” I replied. She hugged me and cried, “I’m Mrs. Nods!” How happy I was.70

  Rika and Paula’s Jewish cellmates were two good friends from Limburg. “They were always happy and in good spirits. They took care of everything,” Paula wrote.71 Thanks to them, the new residents of cell 382 managed to adjust to daily life in a space designed for one: six and a half feet by about ten feet in surface area and thirteen feet in height. The lights came on at six thirty in the morning. They would wash up as best they could in a makeshift sink, clean their cell, and have breakfast. Then it was a matter of making it through the long day. One of the Jewish women cut thirty-two pieces from a bit of cardboard and drew figures on them with a hairpin, so Rika could read her cellmates’ fortunes.

  Another daily activity was reciting names and addresses. “Each newcomer received one or two addresses from each cellmate. Whoever got out first would send their news and greetings,” Paula wrote.72 Beyond that, they read whatever they could find and scratched words into the already message-covered wall with a spoon:

  No rabble

  In this can

  Only Dutch glory

  I’ll be damned.

  And:

  However trying the day,

  Or hard the separation,

  We’re one day

  Closer to liberation.

  To the wall, Rika added: “Improving the world starts with improving yourself,” a motto inspired by the radio priest Henri de Greeve, which she liked so much she had it on a tile on the wall at home.

  Around eight o’clock in the evening, the cellmates got ready for bed. Their beds consisted of thickly packed straw mattresses on the floor and a folded coat as a pillow. Then the lights went out and what Paula referred to as “the cozy part” began.

  Until ten o’clock the prisoners would sing their hearts out, pass around letters, exchange news. Every cell had something to talk about. It was like a boarding school. Around 9:30 it would start to quiet down and at 10 the tapping would start. It went like this: on the other side of the wall, someone would tap the Morse code. Aunt Bep, our Morse code expert, would go to the wall and tap back. The first question was whether new people had arrived. That was the case in our cell and in cell 383: Wanda, Mrs. Nods and me. Then they would ask where we were from and if there was any news.73

  The only breaks from the daily monotony of prison life were showers and moments of fresh air—each once a week—and the distribution of packages from the International Red Cross, which contained food products that hadn’t been seen in the occupied Netherlands for years, like real chocolate. But there were terrifying moments as well, like when the air raid siren sounded on January 23 as thousands of Allied planes thundered overhead, and the entire prison prayed that the base in Scheveningen wouldn’t be the target that night.

  The next morning, Rika was taken by a guard who was known among the prisoners as “das germanische Edelweib,” the “Germanic noblewoman.”

  Around 11:30 (interrogation time), the door opened. The Edelweib shouted, “Nods!” And off went Aunt Riek. Oh, how her eyes were filled with dread. We kept her rations in the “hay chest” (two mattresses we used to keep food warm) and turned to our reading. She came back around three o’clock: completely pale with an ice-cold expression on her face. She was in total panic. What an interrogation it had been! She needed to clean up before she could talk about it. She was so shaken that she’d had an accident. It turned into a happy washing party.

  Then Aunt Riek started to tell us what happened: it was horrible, and, in the end, she got hit by Kappie from Windekind with a long curtain rod! We looked and saw a big mark by her right ear—that sadist almost bashed her head in. He hit her arm too. Imagine hitting a woman, a mother of five children! Aunt Riek was upset the entire evening and for days after. She laid down and prayed for hours (she was a good Roman Catholic) that she would never be taken into interrogation again.74

  To a certain extent, those who had been so certain that the occupiers would never resort to the most primitive forms of terror had been right. For just as the disciplined German soldiers preferred not to dirty their hands with hunting Jews themselves, they left the interrogations about “Judensachen”—or Jewish matters—to the Dutch in their service. One of the most famous among them was twenty-eight-year-old Kees J. Kaptein, also known as “Kappie.” As a child in the Dutch East Indies, Kaptein had been systematically humiliated and abused by his father, and now the former fighter on the Eastern Front took great pleasure in the fear of those in his custody and enjoyed the power he had over them. Later, he would brag about the fact that he got 99 percent of his victims to talk within a month. He described his method as follows: “First I’d simply ask—then I’d threaten—then deep knee bends—then a few punches, taps as I like to call them.”75

  Sometimes Kaptein would go so far in exercising his power that even his German superiors would tell him to take it easy. But he was proud of his reputation and of the fact that Radio Oranje had specifically warned people about him in one of their reports. He liked to introduce himself to his new victims with: “I am Kees Kaptein, the greatest Jew crusher in the Netherlands!” Women had it particularly rough with him. From the younger ones, he would try to solicit sexual favors while preaching about his role as a “patron of humanity.” And the older ones he would humiliate, especially if they were guilty of what he considered “racial disgrace,” in other words, consorting with Jewish men. He would shout and hit, force them to do hundreds of deep knee bends or to walk around a pillar until they literally fell to the floor. For the ones who talked, Kees harbored a kind of satisfied contempt, and it wasn’t unusual for him to let those who had done favors for him go free or to relieve them of a few months’ punishment. But the few who refused to recognize his omnipotence by pleading and praying for mercy would make him so furious that he would vent his rage on them with his bare fists, the butt of his gun, or an iron curtain rod.76

  Rika belonged to the last category
of victims. She wasn’t trying to be heroic, it was simply her nature. Never had she given in to pressure, threats, or fits of anger—not from her parents, not from Willem Hagenaar, and not from the world. And she certainly wasn’t about to give in to a man like Kaptein, who was young enough to be her own son. Just as she had done on the day she rode by her parents’ house in her wedding dress, and just as she had done as she waved to her husband after picking up her children at The Hague station, Rika looked her interrogator straight in his pale blue eyes. And the more he tried to intimidate her and insult her about her relationship with a black man, the more adamantly she refused to answer his questions. The only thing she wanted to tell him was that she, and she alone, was responsible for hiding people in the house on the Pijnboomstraat—her husband didn’t even know about it. And Kees Kaptein was racist enough to believe her—surely such a “dumb nigger” could have been nothing more than this woman’s plaything.

  The interrogation that Waldemar endured that same morning was child’s play compared to what Rika had faced. When he saw her that afternoon in the waiting room at Windekind, he was deeply shocked. “I would have never thought they would treat you like that, Rika,” as he later wrote.77 That evening Paula noted in her diary:

  But for Rika, what made up for everything was that she had seen her husband! They were escorted from Windekind to the jail together. He was a dreadful sight. He was West-Indian looking and now, with such a long beard and no collar, he looked like a bushman.78

  After all that Rika and Waldemar had been through, they never would have thought that they would have the chance to walk through Scheveningen side by side like they did that day. Together, they traversed the map of their shared history, the sea murmuring in the background and the seagulls screeching overhead. But this time, they were both handcuffed and surrounded by armed soldiers. Over Scheveningen’s iconic Kurhaus Hotel was a red swastika flag flapping triumphantly in the wind.