by Michael Dean
So that was why he couldn’t find a chauffeur. Rauter can’t have known anything about it; he would surely have said something on the phone. No wonder the shipyard engineers hadn’t turned up to be sent to Germany. He still needed to get to the shipyard, but he must phone Rauter from his office first.
Foxy face smiled, with real charm. ‘Well?’ he said. ‘With us or against us? And don’t look so scared, comrade. We’re not the fascists. We don’t beat people up.’
‘I’m with you,’ Hirschfeld said, forcing a smile. ‘Good luck to you.’
He doffed his Fedora at the communists, got off the tram, walked back through the near deserted streets to his office, and phoned Rauter.
*
Rauter had by now been told about the strike. Hirschfeld had never heard him so at a loss. He half expected a summons to the Colonial Building, but no, Rauter still wanted him to go to the shipyard, and get all the shipyard workers back to work – not just the missing engineers.
‘How am I supposed to get there?’ Hirschfeld said, the freedom of the telephone allowing him a grimace, rather than his usual wooden expression when dealing with Rauter.
‘I’ll send a car,’ Rauter said, and hung up.
While he was waiting for the car, Hirschfeld decided to find out if his own department was on strike. He walked through the still deserted outer office, along the corridor where the senior clerks had their glass-fronted cubicles. Not more than one in five had anybody in it, working.
As he approached the large light room where the girls of the typing-pool plied their trade, there was no clatter of typing. He pushed the door open, fearing to find the typing-pool deserted. It was not as bad as that, but only half-a-dozen of the girls – just over a quarter, Hirschfeld estimated – had turned up for work. They were all sitting at their desks, but none of them was doing any work. The murmur of conversation stopped when he appeared.
He spoke to a brunette, with shoulder-length hair, who was meeting his eye. ‘Where is everybody?’
The head of the typing pool, mevrouw van Weezel, a calm, pleasant woman in her forties, said ‘They are obeying the call to strike, meneer Hirschfeld.’
‘And you are not? You, all, here?’
‘That’s exactly what we were discussing,’ mevrouw van Weezel said. ‘None of us has done any work yet. We were thinking of going home.’
‘This strike is futile,’ Hirschfeld said, looking from one to the other. ‘Does anybody seriously think the strikers will not go back to work, eventually? Today? Tomorrow? The next day? What does it matter? And what will it accomplish? Can it undo the attack on the Jewish Quarter? No. Will it cause the Occupying Authority to release the hostages they have taken - quite wrongly in my view, and certainly illegally? Again, no. Not a chance. All that we accomplish by unfocussed, ill thought-out resistance of this nature, is to make life more difficult for ourselves.’
There was a deep silence. It was obvious to Hirschfeld that he was not winning them over. He tried again. ‘I tell you bluntly, ladies, there will be reprisals. These may well involve loss of life. I say that sadly, knowing the more hot-headed elements in the Occupying Authority, which unfortunately I do. And, arguably, those who provoke the Germans into those actions bear a share of the responsibility for the consequences.’
Some of them were shaking their heads. They were staring at him now, angrily.
‘That’s a council of despair,’ the long-haired brunette murmured.
‘What would you recommend that we do, then, meneer Hirschfeld?’ mevrouw van Weezel said.
Hirschfeld paused, making sure he had their full attention:
‘I have just been on the telephone to the Occupying Authority,’ he said. ‘The strike is already coming to an end. Anybody who goes back to work now will not suffer any reprisals. I cannot defend the jobs of those who do not. I suggest you all resume your tasks of the day.’
He paused again, to let that sink in. ‘I also offer a bonus of one day’s wages to anybody prepared to help a colleague by telephoning them, from our ministry here, telling them the strike is over, and bringing them back to work. A list will be kept of the date and time of returning to work of all employees in this ministry. Mevrouw van Weezel, you will kindly start this list now. Putting your own name at the head, recording that you did not take part in the strike.’
Mevrouw van Weezel looked at him. Her eyes were sad. ‘I was at school with a girl called Leesha Cohen,’ she said, speaking slowly. ‘Apparently, Leesha was out shopping, in the Jewish Quarter, when the attack came. The soldiers beat her. She’s in hospital. She’s lost an eye. Meneer Hirschfeld, this isn’t right. Come to think of it, I think I’ll go and visit Leesha now.’
‘They probably won’t let you through, to the hospital in the Jewish Quarter. Not yet, anyway,’ Hirschfeld said. ‘I’d try later, if I were you.’
Mevrouw van Weezel shook her head. ‘I’m not educated, meneer Hirschfeld. Not like you. But I know what’s right and what’s wrong.’
She took a black patent-leather handbag from her desk, took her coat from the coat stand and walked out, buttoning up the coat as she went. Two of the other women followed her.
Hirschfeld turned on his heel. On his way back to his office, he stopped at the cubicle of the senior clerk, Pieter de Haas. He fully expected to find de Haas at his desk, working, and he was.
‘Ah, de Haas,’ said Hirschfeld, with slightly strained joviality. ‘I knew I would find you at your post - at your tasks.’
De Haas was in his early forties, a mediocrity who rose by persistence, a modicum of plodding diligence, and a knack for the skilfully-timed betrayal of colleagues. He stood, as Hirschfeld came in; a shabby figure in a shiny black suit and old-fashioned celluloid collar. He pasted on a smile and awaited instructions.
‘Emotions are running high, over this attempt at a strike,’ Hirschfeld said, in what he hoped was a light tone. He then outlined the scheme for getting workers to telephone their colleagues, and the keeping of a list of returning workers, that had just been rejected by mevrouw van Weezel.
‘Put your own name at the head of the list, de Haas,’ Hirschfeld said, ‘in a column for those who did not take part in the strike. In due course, this information will be transferred to personal files, flagged to be considered in the next round of promotions.’
Pieter de Haas beamed. ‘Thank you, Dr Hirschfeld,’ he said. ‘I’ll make a start immediately.’
As Hirschfeld closed the door behind him, de Haas’s face froze. He took out his gold NSB party pin from a drawer in his desk and kissed it. He glared at the door which had just closed behind Hirschfeld.
‘You wait, Jew boy,’ he said, through gritted teeth. ‘You just wait.’
*
Hirschfeld got back to his office only a couple of minutes before the car sent by Rauter arrived. To protect Hirschfeld from possible civic unrest, Rauter had sent two Orpos, armed with rifles and side-arms. Hirschfeld, wincing, sent them back down to the car, then followed, after a decent interval.
The car had a swastika pennant on the bonnet. As Hirschfeld opened the back door, the chauffeur saluted and confirmed that he wished to go to the NSM shipyard.
‘Yes,’ Hirschfeld said. ‘Yes, that’s right.’
Hirschfeld guessed the black Mercedes was Rauter’s own. It purred through the near-deserted streets of Amsterdam. Hirschfeld, peering out the window past his Orpo guard, noticed there were still no trams running. But there was no military presence on the streets either. And he did not see one NSB or WA uniform, which was very unusual. Clearly the Occupying Authority and its acolytes had no idea how to react. A strike gave them nobody to shoot at, Hirschfeld thought.
He tried to dismiss his driver and escort when they reached the NSM shipyard, but one of the Orpos politely told him that Obergruppenführer Rauter had ordered them to stay with him, until his business was concluded. Hirschfeld wondered whether he was being guarded or put under guard, but he put the thought out of his mind.
Lambooy, in his office, was self-satisfied to the point of smugness. Having carried through the policy of the transfer of skilled specialists to the Reich, without Hirschfeld’s knowledge, he obviously thought that any problems posed by the strike, including the non-appearance of the skilled specialists, could be laid at Hirschfeld’s door. Lambooy was beginning to behave like a superior dealing with an underling.
‘Ah, Hirschfeld! We were expecting you a little earlier. Better late than never, I suppose.’
‘I’ve been in discussion with Herr Rauter,’ Hirschfeld said, crisply, nodding backwards at his Orpo guard, who were waiting outside in the car, visible through the office window. ‘How many workers have reported for work, today?’
‘I didn’t count them at the gates, but …’
‘How many, approximately. Don’t be flippant, Lambooy. This is a serious situation.’
Lambooy shot him a look. ‘There are about a hundred, in and working. Fifteen of the specialists have now reported for transfer to Germany. That’s out of three hundred.’
‘Never mind the specialists for now ...’ Lambooy smirked at that, Hirschfeld ignored it. ‘Get all the others into the canteen for a meeting. ‘Then go to the bank. Get ...’ Hirschfeld calculated rapidly. ‘Get twenty thousand guilders in small notes and bring it to me, here.’
‘What on earth for?’
‘We’re going to offer the workers who are here money to contact the strikers, and bring them back. They won’t believe the offer unless we pay up front. We’ll get them to sign for the money. They’ll be ours for life, once they’ve done that.’
Lambooy nodded, impressed. ‘Alright.’
As soon as he left, Hirschfeld checked the time. He could still reach Westerbork today, if he could somehow locate Hendrik, his chauffeur, and persuade him to drive there.
Lambooy was back more quickly than Hirschfeld expected. Without a word, he handed over a brown manila bank envelope. Hirschfeld rapidly counted the money inside, and put exactly half in his inside jacket pocket.
‘Put the rest in the safe, for now,’ he commanded Lambooy. ‘We’ll keep that in reserve.’
Lambooy nodded. Now came the trickiest part of Hirschfeld’s plan: ‘I’ll make the offer to the workers alone. Rauter wants you kept out of it, so we can deny the offer was ever made, after the strike is over.’ Hirschfeld sighed. ‘I think he’s got plans for you …’
Lambooy smirked. He put the bank envelope with half the money in the safe. Hirschfeld left Lambooy’s office. He told his Orpo guards to stay put, in the car. Then he walked over to the canteen. The workers filed in, sullen and silent.
Hirschfeld made a brief, deliberately muddled, deliberately half-hearted speech, criticising the strike in general terms. His speech would not have persuaded anybody to do anything – he did not intend it to. At no point did he mention money, a strike-breaking scheme, or any inducement to bring strikers back to work.
After ten minutes of this, he left the bewildered workers to resume the work he had interrupted. Hirschfeld went back to his car, and asked to be driven back to the ministry. There, the Orpos were finally persuaded to stop guarding him. Relishing the silence in his office, he put the last page of his report to Rauter in his typewriter, and added a paragraph to it. He then signed it, dated it with the day’s date, and left the completed report prominently on his desk, sealed in a plain envelope, with Rauter’s name on it.
*
Staff records were kept in a card-index in a room off the typing pool. As he walked along the corridor again, he could hear, before he saw, that no work was going on. He put his head round the door. The typing pool was deserted.
He found the Employment Card of Hendrik Vandenputte, chauffeur, and prayed aloud that his home address would be within walking distance. It was. Hirschfeld left the ministry. There were troops on the streets now - SS. They were opening fire at passers-by at random, threatening to shoot everybody they came across, if work was not resumed by tomorrow at the latest.
Hirschfeld made his way cautiously along, ducking into doorways. He reached the Singel canal. A young woman hurried toward him, pushing a child in a pushchair. She was holding her arm; blood was oozing into her coat.
‘Can I help you?’ Hirschfeld called out. ‘Have you been hit?’
‘It’s alright. I live just here,’ the woman gasped. ‘It’s only a flesh wound.’
Hirschfeld lifted the pushchair over two steps up to the doorway of a block of flats.
‘Thank you,’ said the young woman. ‘They’re mad, these strikers. What do they hope to achieve? If it wasn’t for them, I wouldn’t have been shot.’
‘I suppose so,’ Hirschfeld said. He touched his Fedora, then made his way cautiously down Spiegel Straat, where Hendrik lived.
As he rang the doorbell of Hendrik’s flat, he realised he knew nothing about the man who had driven him around for two years. Hendrik could be in the NSB, or even the WA. But Hendrik was the only way he could get to Westerbork, right now, in the middle of a strike. And there was no time to lose. Bruyns had said the hostages from the Jewish Quarter were being shipped out of Holland within twenty-four hours of arrival at
Westerbork, to avoid them becoming a focus for discontent.
A tall, dignified-looking old woman opened the door. She smiled at him.
‘Dag, mevrouw Vandenputte. Ik ben …’
‘I know who you are. Hendrik! Meneer Hirschfeld is here.’
Hendrik appeared behind her, stroking his white moustache, an impressive figure even in a cardigan and carpet slippers. ‘Come in, meneer Hirschfeld. Do come in. Please take a seat, make yourself comfortable, do.’
Hirschfeld came into a small, light flat with huge curtainless windows, overlooking the canal. The furniture was reproduction Biedermeier or French Empire. There were ornaments, bric-a brac and family photographs everywhere. The painting on the wall was a Gerrit Dou reproduction. He declined offers of coffee, beer, milk, biscuits or cake.
‘It’s urgent, Hendrik. I need to get to Westerbork camp, in Drenthe. I need you to drive me there. My nephew, Manny, is there under an assumed name. His girlfriend is a prisoner, too. I have a plan to get them out. I may be able to get at least one of his knokploeg out, with them. Maybe more.’
His life was now in Hendrik’s hands.
A clock ticked heavily in the little flat. Old Hendrik drew himself up to his full, considerable height. He was standing to attention. It could have been comic – but it wasn’t.
‘I want you to know something, meneer,’ he said, finally. ‘I was with the 41st , fighting outside Nijmegen. They tried to tell me I was too old, but I joined them anyway. We were against the best the Germans had – 9th Panzer Division. We were outnumbered – oh, we were so outnumbered, meneer. And no air support, you see. Not to mention no armour and no anti-tank guns. But we gave them such a fight, meneer. They won’t forget us in a hurry.’
Hirschfeld nodded. He didn’t trust himself to speak. He remembered the successive pacifist governments that had so weakened the Dutch army.
‘When our colonel finally surrendered, he offered his swagger stick to their general. I was there, a prisoner. I saw it all. And their general gave the stick back to him, and he said “I will not break the stick of a brave fighter like you.” And our colonel took his stick back, and he broke it over his own knee. And he looked their general in the eye. And their general saluted him. He saluted him, meneer. For the fight we had made of it.’
Hendrik’s wife spoke. ‘Oh, get on with it, you old fool! Drive meneer Hirschfeld where he wants to go.’
16
Towards the end of the journey from Amsterdam, the lorries carrying the hostages from the Jewish Quarter drove through a bleak, flat landscape, dotted with occasional withered spruce and dusty scrub. Then the meagre soil increasingly gave way to sand. Peering through the slats of the lorry, Manny saw sand-dunes - white sand to which the scrub clung. When they finally stopped, and he jumped down from the lorry, his first sight
of the camp was three scholarly-looking Jews in black suits, wheeling wheelbarrows full of sand.
The camp was obviously new, at least in its present function. Prisoners, guarded by Dutch SS, were still laying rolls of barbed wire round the perimeter. Manny knew Westerbork had been built by the Dutch government, in the thirties, as a holding point for Jews escaping Germany for Holland.
And now the Jews were back, expelled from their haven. Going in the other direction? Where? Manny didn’t think about it. He, and Joel and Ben, who had travelled with him, assumed they were going to be here for a while, at least.
He wiped his spectacles on his shirt, and peered round. It was like a gold-miners’ camp, in the last century. He had seen pictures of the Klondike in boyhood comics. But there was no gold here, just sand. As he stood by the lorry, it blew into his hair and face. When he, Joel and Ben were allotted bunks, there was sand in the straw when he put his blanket down. It had even blown into the first meal he ate, that evening.
The canteen looked like a Wild West log cabin. Inside, the prisoners ate at long trestle tables. The overwhelming majority were men, but there were some women, and a few children. The children, even more than the women, made him think of Tinie and their future child, who he would probably never see. He assumed Tinie was safe in the hideout. He knew old meneer Zilverberg, Lard’s father, would look after her. They all knew about Lard’s heroic death. Manny hoped Tinie would be a consolation to the old man.
The children here, Manny noticed, looked neglected and filthy, with matted hair. Although the new arrivals still had the clothes they had come with, most of the prisoners were wearing an assortment of ill-fitting, grimy overalls. Everybody looked dirty. He had already realised that hygiene was going to be a problem.
At a distant table, Manny saw the Jewish Council leaders, Abraham Asscher and Professor David Cohen. They were sitting together, blank-eyed. He didn’t recognise anybody else in the canteen, which surprised him.
The meal consisted of watery vegetable soup, then a tiny portion of fatty stew, with marrowfat peas and potatoes. It was doled out from clattering pans by Jewish Police, who walked up and down the aisles. As Manny began to eat, a gnarled little man in the green overalls and peaked cap of the Jewish Police, sat down next to him