The Boy Between Worlds

by van der Zijl, Annejet

  A few days after Rika’s first interrogation, a cargo train full of Jewish people left for Westerbork.

  At 11:30 all the cells were opened, and the Jews had to get ready. It was horrible. Before they left, Aunt Riek and I split all the food we had. It was the one last thing we could do for them. And then the two of us stayed behind, both in awe of what had just happened. The prison seemed deserted. It was completely silent, even the babies and children were gone. That afternoon, we got a special treat (because the jail was Jew-free, of course)—white beans and string beans. We couldn’t finish a single pan between the two of us. That night Aunt Riek had [a] strange dream: a bunch of cats were lying on top of her. They were crawling all over the bed. I was awakened by a scream of terror.79

  On February 1, 1944, Paula was released unexpectedly. She was free to go home to Delft, where her mother and sister—both recently discharged as well—were waiting for her. Her father, her brother Kees, and the Nods couple were kept behind to await their trials. In theory, this fact alone was no reason to panic, because officially the punishments for helping Jews were fairly mild—twelve months for men, six for women—and most of them were served at Camp Vught, which was known for being relatively humane.

  Police Chief Rauter had had this camp built near Den Bosch in 1943 as a gesture to the Dutch people, so that Dutch political prisoners wouldn’t have to be sent to the infamous German concentration camps. It was a sort of model camp: the regime was strict but fair, the food was good, and abusing prisoners was forbidden. When more than eighty women were forced to spend the entire night crammed into two small cells as a punishment—which resulted in ten deaths from suffocation—those responsible were dragged before the disciplinary court. Political prisoners often held positions of power within the camp hierarchy themselves, as the best jobs in the camp were reserved for good patriots, which, especially for Resistance fighters, made the Dutch concentration camp highly preferable to the monotonous boredom, nagging uncertainty, and constant threat of further questioning they faced in prison. “I would very much like to be sent to Vught to work as early as this month,” as Kees Chardon wrote to his family.80

  On February 23, Kees, his father, and Waldemar were indeed sent to the camp in Brabant by train. “Kees was cheerful. He found Vught really quite pleasant,” recalled a fellow inmate later. The young lawyer was more worried about the people he had helped hide. “Keep watch over my sheep,” he wrote to a cousin who had taken over his work.81 Little did he know that a large portion of his flock had already been sent to the gas chambers in Auschwitz.

  Barely one hundred years after Waldemar’s grandmother had managed to free herself from the bondage of slavery, her own grandson was taken as a slave. Upon arrival at Vught, he was numbered, underwent a medical examination, and then was shaved bald and dressed in a blue-and-gray-striped jumpsuit, matching cap, and wooden shoes. He received a food bowl tied to a cord that he had to wear around his waist, and he slept on a plank in a large barrack designed to house two hundred and fifty men.

  Shortly after his arrival, Waldemar was assigned to an Aussenkommando, or subcamp, that had to dig an antitank trench on the Wouwse plantation near the Belgian-Dutch border. The forced laborers were lodged in a former agricultural college in Roosendaal and guarded by German prisoner functionaries, also known as “Kapos.” “We can skip this one,” they would say to Waldemar as they handed out the soap. He let their words slide off his back, just as he did when his fellow prisoners teased him good-naturedly. When it started getting dark, the guys would bump into him and say, “You’ve got to smile, otherwise we can’t see you!” Most of them had never seen a black man, and among themselves they had concluded that their intriguing fellow prisoner must have owned a nightclub at a fashionable seaside resort.

  Hard outdoor labor was a drastic change for someone who was used to working in an office, but Waldemar was tough and in good shape. His greatest concern was for Rika. He fervently hoped that the Germans would be satisfied with punishing him alone as the primary tenant of the house on the Pijnboomstraat, and that they would let his wife return home safely to their son.

  Vught, March 5

  Dear Riek or Jo,

  If you receive this letter, I hope you are finally back at home. Vught is a relief after the tiny cell in Scheveningen. It has been a major transition, from spending the whole day inside and now the whole day outside in the fresh air. The barracks are tidy with running water and toilets and good beds. You meet many people here. All different types, and we are occupied all day long.

  Today we received a Vught package, which makes a big difference in terms of food, because you’re always hungry from working outside. They treat us fine here as long as you stick to the rules. I’m urgently in need of the following: towel, washcloth, toothbrush, old socks, pullover, old rags for handkerchiefs, cream or Vaseline, soap, and please send tobacco or cigarettes if you can spare them and things for sandwiches, but that’s not absolutely necessary, and also my old wool scarf.

  Were you able to work things out?

  And Waldy, how are you doing? Have you been keeping an eye on my tobacco for me? Are things going well at school?

  Jo, maybe you could send me a few things if Rika isn’t back yet, the uncertainty is the worst part for me.

  Yours sincerely, Waldemar82

  But Kees Kaptein was far from through with the stubborn woman from The Hague who provoked him with her eyes. After one of the people who had been hiding on the Pijnboomstraat declared that “Mrs. Nods-van der Lans is connected to Mr. Chardon, who worked together with her to hide many Jews in The Hague and elsewhere,” he was sure he’d picked up the trail of a major underground network. And when an Amsterdam Resistance fighter confessed under torture to be under “Chardon in The Hague, head of the illegal movement there,” Kees was brought back to Scheveningen. He was promised that he would be returned to Vught within a week, but it ended up being six months, which he mostly spent in solitary confinement in the so-called death cells, where his only contact with his fellow prisoners was via heating pipes and holes in the wall.

  Kaptein did everything he could to extract information from his prisoner. He used an agent provocateur to smuggle Kees’s letters to his family from prison—only after they had been carefully scrutinized at Windekind for any incriminating information. When Kees discovered that he had been a victim of deception, he was devastated and would spend many more months brooding over the fact that his misplaced trust probably cost people their lives. It was well known in the prison that Kees was tortured on a regular basis. To his family he wrote:

  I’ll be silent to the grave. Was interrogated 3x again. My condition isn’t good, but I’m staying strong and trusting God. I still long deep in my heart for fresh air and work at Vught. And I still hold on to the hope that my other “sheep” have been spared. And that the work is progressing.83

  Kees’s Resistance friends proposed to his parents that they try to set him free, but his father considered it too risky. He thought it better to just wait—the end of the war couldn’t be that far off.

  On May 1, the primary leaders of the Chardon group were sentenced. Both Kees and Rika would serve life for conspiracy and large-scale Judenhilfe, aiding Jewish people. Waldemar, who had received a milder sentence of confinement for the duration of the war, tried to lift his wife’s spirits in a letter:

  Vught, March 7

  Dear Jo,

  Got your last letter with the letter from Riek. Yes, it’s pretty tough to be in such a small space for so long. Will you send her my greetings and tell her that she has to stay strong and that once we’re free again, we’ll most certainly visit Brabant—that’s a great idea. Nice that you were able to see her, Bob. Try again from time to time, seeing people from the outside brings courage. How are mother and father doing? Good, I hope, and are you doing better, Jo? And Bertie, have you really got as much tobacco as you said in your letter? You could catch thousands of men in here with all that stuff.

 
Dinie and Jan, thanks for your package, everything was delicious. The pineapples, in particular, were a big surprise. Sis, the rye bread was wonderful, how are things at the fire department? Greetings to Johan and Jan & Henk, I have to write in telegram style, running out of space. Got another package with homemade bread, cake, cheese, etc. sent by Mien, I think, the paper was torn. Thank you very much, you all are truly spoiling me.

  And now, Waldy, it’s great to hear you are doing so well, son, but a D- in history and a D+ in Dutch is bad. Study harder, do your book reports and make sure that you pass, otherwise I’ll come home and twist your ears.84

  On May 10, exactly four years since the start of the war, Rika was taken to Vught to serve out her sentence. Thanks to the patriotic guards at the prison in Scheveningen, her family was informed of her transfer, and Bob was able to catch a glimpse of his oldest sister on the platform of the Staatsspoor station. Rika tossed a hastily scribbled letter to him:

  Thursday, May 10, 1944

  In the train

  Hello dear children

  Hello Father and Mother

  Hello dear brothers and sisters

  A big kiss to all of you

  I’m going to Vught

  to my sweet husband

  pray for us often

  stay strong

  You know I’ll be tough

  Your loving mother

  Rika85

  Waldemar was indeed back in the main camp because the Roosendaal subcamp had been discontinued once again. At Vught, contact between the male and female divisions was strictly forbidden, but there were numerous ways to work around this. There was plenty of smuggling of letters and goods, and there were spots along the barbed wire fence where men and women could call to each other. When the female prisoners marched to their work posts in the morning, they could wave to the men still standing at roll call.

  It’s certain that Rika and Waldemar saw each other at least once this way. In the sea of bald heads in prison uniforms, Rika was able to easily spot her husband’s dark face. But though they were now at a safe distance from Kees Kaptein’s fists and curtain rod, they were not outside his sphere of influence. And, as confirmed in a statement by one of his later victims, he had certainly not forgotten about them. As another prisoner later recalled: “He boasted about the fact that he had taken down Chardon’s rotten bunch of troublemakers, and he said that he had sent Kees and the others to Germany.”

  Ten days after her arrival at Vught, Rika scanned the roll call in vain for a glimpse of that dark face. On May 19 at 5:45 in the evening, Waldemar, or the “black case,” as Kaptein had branded him, was subject to a medical examination and then loaded into a cargo train along with nine others. The train was headed in the same direction he had traveled seventeen years earlier on the SS Oranje Nassau—north-northeast.

  Five days later, on Wednesday, May 24, the small load from Vught arrived at a large concentration camp southeast of the northern German port city of Hamburg. The Neuengamme concentration camp had been set up six years earlier at an abandoned brickyard to be used as a subcamp of the Sachsenhausen concentration camp. But after Hitler ordered in 1942 that all prisoners contribute to the war effort by serving hard labor for twelve hours a day, the Reichsführer Heinrich Himmler, who as police chief was responsible for prisoner policies, gave the camp an independent status. As terror increased in the occupied zones, the number of prisoners rose, and Neuengamme expanded rapidly. It eventually established various subcamps of its own at nearby businesses. The main camp was reasonably well equipped, with a chapel, a hospital, and even a small library, but although it was designed to hold five thousand prisoners, by the spring of 1944, it was home to ten thousand. As Allied forces steadily advanced through Europe, the stream of newcomers swelled: the day Waldemar arrived, another shipment came in carrying at least 1,880 French prisoners from Compiègne.

  It was immediately clear to Waldemar that in the huge, overpopulated Neuengamme camp, different rules applied, and the place made Vught seem almost friendly. The camp hierarchy was dominated by German criminals, who wore a green triangle. They had been there the longest and had secured the best jobs for themselves as Kapos. Armed with clubs, they maintained order in the filthy, overcrowded barracks according to the rules of the underworld and the survival of the fittest. The newcomers were shaved from head to toe, deloused, and outfitted with a striped prison uniform. Waldemar’s was marked with a red triangle, signifying that he was a political prisoner. The metal plate he was forced to hang around his neck bore the number 32180, meaning that more than 32,000 people had been there before him.

  Like the slave plantations, the German concentration camps went down in history as black holes that sucked people in with no regard for them as human beings. Still, these places also had an order all their own. Individual characteristics such as age, physical condition, and social skills played a significant role in a person’s lot. The Dutch often had a relatively difficult time in the German camps because, unlike the Russians and Poles, for example, they hadn’t been tempered by hard work and too little food from a young age, and they weren’t at all used to having to fight for themselves.

  Waldemar did, however, have a few things working in his favor, such as the fact that he had arrived at Neuengamme in the spring of 1944. Indeed, the camp was already overcrowded, and most of the newcomers were sent directly to the anonymous mass units in the notorious subcamps, but the main camp was still organized enough that a person could get noticed and secure a good position. And Waldemar stood out. In an environment designed to strip people of their identity and reduce them to an amorphous mass, Waldemar’s skin color ensured that he was never just a number. He remained an individual, a person, and that fact alone provided him with extra opportunities. Even though the Nazi propaganda spewed nothing but contempt for the black race, for most Germans—their country having had hardly any colonies and thus no citizens of color—a black man was extremely exotic.

  Three Africans from the French colonies who also arrived at Neuengamme in the spring of 1944 feared for the worst, but as many survivors note, the SS men were just curious to see these beings they considered animals up close. They were, in fact, not scary beasts, they were something unusual, quite different from the other Untermenschen. They were hardly human at all. One camp survivor recalled how the SS men had rubbed the dark Senegalese man’s skin to see if the color would change. A little while later, an SS officer saw them in the shower and remarked what beautiful athletes they were. They probably reminded him of the Olympic Games in Berlin. Another time, an SS man stood in a factory for a half hour watching in utter surprise as one of the so-called “chimpanzees” turned out to be capable of reading and understanding complicated German plans and carrying them out precisely.

  One of the black Frenchmen had been famous as a boxer in Paris and was exalted as a camp mascot. On Sunday afternoons, the camp director organized boxing matches in which he would challenge people to take the Frenchman on. In order to keep their mascot’s powerful physique in top condition, they exempted him from hard labor and assigned him one of the highly desirable jobs in the kitchen. And even though the elegant Waldemar was a completely different sort of black man, he, too, must have attracted attention upon arrival with his perfect German and proper ways. He carried himself like a dancer and, even in his striped prison jumpsuit, managed to look dignified.

  On July 2, 1944, approximately six weeks after he arrived at Neuengamme, Waldemar sent his first letter home—in German, due to censoring.

  Dear Jo, surely you never imagined that you would receive a letter from me in German. A big surprise for me as well. How is everyone doing, how are your parents, and Riek and my son Waldy? How are you?

  I’m well, although I would have preferred to stay in Holland, as you can understand. It is very different here than it was at home, and I have had to start all over again. Would you please send my shaving kit with razors, soap and shaving brush, as well as some socks? Have you heard anything from
Riek? I wrote a few letters to her in Holland, and I definitely saw her once.

  Write back soon, and Waldy, you too. Many warm regards to everyone, Waldemar86

  The French boxer apparently felt so confident of his position as the Sunday afternoon entertainment that he, egged on by a fellow prisoner, was stupid enough to poke fun at a German Kapo. The next day he was transferred to one of the worst subcamps; a few months later he was dead. But Waldemar knew how to adapt—that he had learned in his first years in Holland. He wasn’t one to provoke, and, no matter the circumstances, he stuck to his good manners and proper demeanor. His red triangle and trilingual abilities came in handy as well, because there was an active shadow leadership among the political prisoners, just as there had been at Vught. These prisoner functionaries occupied a number of key positions within the camp’s administration, and thanks to the growing lack of SS personnel around this time, they managed to expand their influence and keep many of their comrades out of the rougher subcamps.

  Thanks to the influence of his fellow prisoners, Waldemar was put to work in the camp’s post office in mid-July, where he translated and wrote letters for fellow prisoners. As part of the camp’s administration, he was now a member of the camp elite. He was moved from a barrack where he had to share a bed with three men and sleep with one eye open to guard his possessions to Barrack 1, which was designated for prisoners who associated with SS guards on a daily basis. This barrack was relatively clean and safe, and he even got his own bed. His second letter, which was sent three weeks later, was noticeably more cheerful: