Amsterdam

by Russell Shorto

  On his way home from this modest victory, Joël Brommet got caught in one of the razzias, the random raids on Jews that were now being carried out as an intimidation tactic, and was taken into custody by two German soldiers, along with about twenty other Jews. But he escaped: he took a chance when the soldiers weren’t looking and made a break for it, tossing his white raincoat and running a zigzag pattern in an effort to avoid gunfire.

  The whole neighborhood was now in a panic. Jews who had not already thought or been able to go into hiding were suddenly desperate to do so. But locations were hard to find. Frieda’s uncle Louis, her mother’s brother, said he knew of a place. Her father didn’t trust Louis, whom Frieda described to me as the black sheep of the family, but they didn’t have much choice. Louis knew of a man named Jaap Schrijvers who lived with his daughter in a quiet village called Warmond, twenty-four miles away; Schrijvers had a small space above his bicycle shop that he was willing to make available for onderduik Jews (the Dutch word for going into hiding literally means “diving under”). Like most others who provided haven, Schrijvers wanted to be paid.

  It felt wrong from the start. When the Brommet family arrived, Schrijvers greeted them with: “Are you Jews? You look like ordinary people.”

  The Nazi occupation essentially channeled society into four categories. There were the hunted: Jews, Gypsies, and other “undesirables.” There were collaborators, who out of either conviction or self-preservation aided the occupiers. There was a small section of society, numbering probably in the tens of thousands, who formed the active resistance: assassinating notable collaborators, transporting guns, running underground newspapers. The most daring and wide-ranging resistance operation of the war was run by two brothers, Walraven and Gijs van Hall. They had been raised in a patrician family of bankers. When the war broke out they joined the Nederlandse Unie, or Dutch Union, which tried to find a middle ground between collaboration and resistance. As the war progressed the Van Halls figured out ways to help those who were most financially distressed, including widows and others who had had welfare payments stopped, as well as Jews in hiding. Wally van Hall used his position at the Amsterdam Stock Exchange as the base for a secret operation that collected money from wealthy Dutchmen and distributed it to those in need. The Van Halls communicated with the Dutch government in exile in London; an agreement was worked out whereby the government would repay all donors after the war. Wally van Hall concocted a bookkeeping mechanism that involved dummy stock certificates. Donors would get certificates of, say, Java Petroleum Society, which they would eventually exchange for reimbursement.

  As the war progressed and life got more desperate, the Van Halls and their team grew more daring. Their efforts climaxed with the robbery of the Dutch National Bank in Amsterdam, under the noses of both the Nazis and the bank leadership, which had been infiltrated by the NSB. They stole 50 million guilders from the bank’s vaults, the equivalent of half a billion dollars today, by substituting false treasury bonds for real ones, which they then cashed in at other banks, and distributed the money throughout the country to those in need. The other end of the Van Hall organization involved regular payments—envelopes of cash—being delivered by two thousand couriers.

  Wally van Hall was a thin, calm man who had the physical aspect of a young Jimmy Stewart. He regularly began meetings of resistance leaders by telling jokes, for he held that in order to loosen themselves for the work they were doing they had to have five minutes of laughter. The Nazi effort to get him—they knew only his code name, “Van Tuyl”—climaxed as the war did; in late January 1945, three months before the Nazis fled, he was captured, and executed by firing squad. For a long time his role in the resistance was not widely known, supposedly in part because banks did not want to advertise the breach of their system. In 2010, the city of Amsterdam erected a monument to him in front of the national bank he had patriotically plundered.

  But most people under occupation were neither collaborators nor resistance figures. Loe de Jong writes of how in 1944 the Dutch reacted uncomfortably when Queen Wilhelmina, from her refuge in England, described her people in a radio broadcast as “a nation of heroes.” As De Jong notes, “Nations of heroes do not exist.” Rather, he observes, “Most people, however anti-German their feelings, tried to protect themselves, their families, and their property, adapting themselves to the increasingly difficult circumstances of daily life.” Some Dutch people today belittle the resistance, saying the extent of collaboration and the number of people who betrayed Jews show Dutch tolerance was a sham during the war, maybe always was a sham. I think what they mean to highlight is the fact that throughout Dutch history tolerance has been less an ideal than a practicality. It was more expedient, given the circumstances, to organize their society so that different people could live and work together. And if expedience is the rationale, then when circumstances change, so can the notion of tolerance.

  Those who provided places for Jews to hide did not all fit into the same category. Some were part of the resistance. Others were extortionists. Jaap Schrijvers was an extortionist. Frieda and her parents, along with her uncle Louis and four others—eight people in all—spent two years living in a single room above Schrijvers’s bicycle shop, rarely setting foot outside. Frieda’s father paid Schrijvers a thousand guilders a month (in today’s money, about seven thousand dollars), and still the family was given so little to eat—mostly meatless stew—that they were kept close to starvation, and when they complained Schrijvers threatened to turn them in. In addition, Joël Brommet had to pay twenty guilders a week of outright extortion money to a friend of Frieda’s uncle who had helped them get to the hiding place, to keep the man from giving them up to the Germans.

  The story of Anne Frank and her family weaves in and out of the story of Frieda and her family. The two girls lived around the corner from each other in Amsterdam and interacted in their everyday lives. They went into hiding within a week of each other. The Franks didn’t have to deal with extortionists because Otto Frank had arranged a hiding place for them himself. His pectin company was located in the city center, on the Prinsengracht, just a few steps from the Westerkerk and its great tower. It was a canal house, built in the seventeenth-century heyday of the city. Above the warehouse and behind the company offices was the achterhuis, the back extension, which happened to be hidden from the view of the houses surrounding it in the courtyard, and the entrance to which was easy to conceal. This would be the family’s secret home.

  The reason the diary that Anne Frank kept in hiding became famous is that it exquisitely highlights what was under threat during the city’s occupation, and what, in a sense, Amsterdam’s history is all about: the freedom of the individual human being. Her pages reveal a complex, rounded individual, defiantly discovering herself even under the most stifling conditions. The diary is filled with sharply expressed anguish, with resolve, with freak bursts of joy. Even her bitterness is alive: her analysis of her mother’s coldness (“She’s not a mother to me—I have to mother myself.… Father’s not in love. He kisses her the way he kisses us”) was later excised by her father when he edited her diary and prepared it for publication. The diary contains bits about the Germans and what is going on in the city outside (“Night after night, green and grey military vehicles cruise the streets. They knock on every door, asking whether any Jews live there”), but mostly it’s a small, intimate story she tells—it’s a story of interiority, as much as a Rembrandt portrait of a seventeenth-century Amsterdammer is. But hers is made even more intense by the claustrophobic conditions, by the world-historic force threatening to come crashing in, and by being centered on an adolescent in the process of self-discovery: “It’s funny, but I can sometimes see myself as others see me. I take a leisurely look at the person called ‘Anne Frank’ and browse through the pages of her life as though she were a stranger.”

  Both the Brommets and the Franks were in hiding for about two years, and both periods ended with betrayal. No one knows who t
urned in the Franks. The Brommets were undone by Rebecca’s brother Louis. In the spring of 1944, when the family members had reached the limits of their endurance, Schrijvers’s daughter told Joël Brommet that she knew a man who could get them to Switzerland. Brommet (who had built up savings in the early days of the war by speculating on diamonds) paid a total of fifteen thousand guilders, or about a hundred thousand dollars in today’s money, to the supposed guide, a man who went by the name of Gerritsen. But instead of Gerritsen, Otto Kempin, the head of the Security Police in Amsterdam, showed up at the door and arrested all the Jews that had been in hiding together. It later turned out that Frieda’s uncle Louis had had an affair with a woman in Amsterdam named Adriana Valkenburg. She was the wife of the man who went by the name Gerritsen, whose real name was Joop Bom. Louis, knowing that his brother-in-law had diamonds in a safe-deposit box and that he had a friend who could bring them to him, had apparently worked out a scheme with the couple whereby Bom would bilk Joël Brommet out of a large sum of money in return for a bogus offer of escape. But Louis did not know that Adriana Valkenburg was also an informer for the Security Police in Amsterdam. Valkenburg, the mastermind of the scam, had wide experience of this sort of thing. After the war she would be found guilty of informing on dozens of Jews who then died in concentration camps. She was sentenced to death, though the sentence was later commuted to life in prison.

  Frieda and her parents, along with her uncle Louis and the others they had been living with in hiding, were brought to the Security Police office on the Euterpestraat. And here I have to pause my narrative to focus on Frieda as she sat with me in our interview sessions. We conducted them in her apartment, her calm, bright apartment filled with modernist furniture and art. It sits on Gerrit van der Veenstraat, which after the war was named for one of the heroes of the Dutch resistance. But it was formerly the Euterpestraat. Just a few doors down the block from her apartment is a hulking structure, moody in its deco darkness, with a foreboding tower. It’s a school now, but it was, during the war, the headquarters of the Gestapo and the Security Police. The SP was the intelligence arm of the SS, and it was from here that Willy Lages, the German head of the SP, ran, under Adolf Eichmann’s supervision, operations to ferret out and round up Jews in the Netherlands and send them to concentration camps. Its basement was infamous as a place of torture. It was to this building that Frieda and her parents were brought once their hiding place in Warmond had been breached. How, I had to ask Frieda, when she sought an apartment in the early 1990s, and could have found one anywhere in the city, could she have chosen to live in the very locus of her family suffering?

  She answered by saying that she had simply liked this apartment, liked the light, felt happy here, and by that time in her life she was able to put the past in place. Plus, in the curious way the mind works, while she has always remembered vividly the moment she and her parents were taken from hiding—she remembers a little black-and-white cat watching them as they got on the train with the Security Police—she has no memory of the other end of that journey: being brought here, to this street.

  Frieda and her parents were sent first to the transit camp of Westerbork, in the northeast of the Netherlands, as were the Franks. It was a processing point; from here, Jews were shipped off to Auschwitz, Bergen-Belsen, Sobibor, and Theresienstadt. Frieda told me she had been outraged a few years earlier when she was quoted in a documentary as saying “how great it was in Westerbork.” What she said had been taken out of context. Compared with the death camps, and with the two years in hiding, Westerbork was a place of some light. Jewish prisoners were allowed a bit of freedom; they put on a cabaret. There was a hospital; they had enough to eat. So after two years of cramped starvation, she arrived at this Nazi camp, an eighteen-year-old who was not aware that death awaited nearly all of them, and was relieved to hear laughter and have her stomach full. During the stay at Westerbork, Frieda Brommet and Anne Frank both put on weight and regained color.

  Everyone at Westerbork knew the plan was to send them farther east, to “work,” but there had been rumors that the war might end soon, so they hoped it wouldn’t happen. But in August 1944 what would be the last trainload of prisoners was packed off to Auschwitz; it included the Franks and the Brommets. As soon as they arrived at the Polish camp Frieda was separated from her father; she would never see him again. The nightmare of Auschwitz began. They were beaten, starved, shaved, stripped, frozen. People were led away for gruesome medical experiments. People collapsed from hunger. They were made to stand for hours holding heavy stones. They were terrorized by kapos: fellow inmates who were put in charge of barracks. People were shot at random. Frieda came down with acute diarrhea and was sent to a barracks full of women in the same condition. (“The diarrhea barracks at a concentration camp: can you imagine the smell?”) A Czech woman warned her, in French, to get better within five days because in the night the Polish women who oversaw the patients strangled the ones who lingered. Frieda told me she remembers, after she had contracted scarlet fever (for real this time) and was sent to the barracks for victims of that disease, seeing the dreaded Dr. Mengele, who has gone down in history with the moniker “Angel of Death,” enter the ward.

  Later, her health failing, she was put in the scabies ward, where she encountered Anne Frank, who was in equally poor condition, skeletal and covered with a rash. At this point Rebecca Brommet and Edith Frank, in a primal effort to save their daughters, set to work as a team. Their children were starving; they dug a hole in the wall of the barracks and, as one mother stood guard, the other crawled in and fed their girls whatever they had managed to scrounge or steal. Frieda Brommet and Anne Frank had become twinned by horror.

  By late October, Anne was well enough to leave the sick ward. Her improvement cost her her life. She and her sister, Margot, were sent to Bergen-Belsen, where they died. Frieda’s multiple ailments—typhoid, pleurisy, scarlet fever, diarrhea—saved her by keeping her in the sick ward until the Germans abandoned the camp in January 1945. There was a confused rush one day as SS soldiers stormed into the ward and ordered all the patients to get outside and start walking. Jeder der zurück bleibt, wird erschossen! All who stay will be shot. She staggered to her feet, made it a few steps, fell to the ground. She closed her eyes in talking to me at the memory of being trampled by her fellow inmates. The choice, she and they all thought, was to march or die, and she could not march. But again her weak condition saved her. Those who trudged off into the January snow were the ones who died. She and her mother stayed, huddled together for warmth, foraged for turnips, hung on for nine days amid the decaying bodies and the ruins of the concentration camp.

  Then, like apparitions, came huge men, all in white, on skis. Russian soldiers. The Second World War was over.

  You can see the thousands of joyous and expectant people who filled Dam Square on May 7, 1945, in another snippet of black-and-white film, which is viewable on the Web site of the Amsterdam City Archives. The German surrender had come two days before, and now the news said Canadian forces would arrive shortly to take over the city on behalf of the Allies. The square that had seen so much history, from William the Silent to Napoleon, was packed with people wearing their spring finery: women in dresses and coats, men in suits and ties. But then something happens. The film is silent, so we don’t hear what was to everyone in it a dreadfully familiar sound: the crackle of gunfire. People start to run. Within seconds, the square is empty, except for individuals hiding behind poles, a few sheltering under a barrel organ that had just been playing, and sprawled bodies.

  In fact, German troops had not yet left the city. They had previously taken over the Grote Club, a private club that looked out over the square; a group of German soldiers had sat there getting drunk as the Amsterdammers came out of their long wartime hibernation and began to celebrate. The Germans set up a machine gun and opened fire. Twenty people were killed in this grisly coda to the city’s wartime suffering.

  The Canadians did come at last.
The real celebration began, and people set about the task of creating a new city and a new world.

  Frieda and Rebecca Brommet made their laborious way back to Amsterdam in the latter part of 1945. They had a brutal homecoming. Strangers now lived in their old apartment; all their belongings were gone. Frieda spent time recuperating in a hospital. Later, her mother stole mattresses from the hospital to furnish an apartment. (“Organized,” Frieda corrected me. “In the camp we didn’t say you stole some food—you organized it.”) They tried to find out what family members were still alive. The answer was: almost nobody. Of Frieda’s extended family, two cousins and three aunts had survived. Three cousins, three uncles, one aunt, both of her grandmothers and one of her grandfathers had died in Auschwitz, as had her father. Her other grandfather had been shot to death during a raid, and an aunt had committed suicide.

  Otto Frank made the same unimaginably sorrowful return to the city. Miep Gies, an employee of his company, one of those who had cared for the Jews while they were in hiding, took him into her apartment. He learned that his wife and daughters were dead. Then Miep handed him something. He recognized the diary, with its checked cover, that Anne had scribbled in during the long months. After some months, he got it into the hands of a historian named Annie Romein. On April 3, 1946, nearly a year after the war’s end, her husband, Jan Romein, also a historian, wrote an article that appeared on the front page of Het Parool, Amsterdam’s daily newspaper, under the headline “Child’s Voice.” It began: