A Chosen Few

by Mark Kurlansky

  The tough measures of the British Labour government did not prove to be much of a deterrent to people who had survived the worst of the Third Reich. They walked or rode across Europe to wherever they could link up with the Haganah. Many of the refugees were drawn to the lowlands, Belgium and Holland, because of their busy ports and liberal immigration policies. The Belgian government allowed Jewish organizations to bring in thirty thousand Jewish refugees at a time. If they re-emigrated, another thirty thousand could be brought in.

  One of the Haganah operatives in Antwerp was Sam Perl, the diamond sawer. Between 1945 and 1948 he helped move thousands of refugees clandestinely to Palestine. It was not a systematic operation. With a seemingly inexhaustible demand, they took as many refugees as they could whenever it was possible. They used two houses to hide and prepare Palestine-bound immigrants until the night when a Haganah agent would come and take them by train to the town of Kortrijk, in southern Belgium, then across the French border through France to a ship in Marseilles. Sometimes they would instead be taken across the Italian border and down the peninsula to Ban.

  Meanwhile, a nagging theological debate was inflamed. A strictly religious Jew prays three times a day, and each time, among the prayers recited is the hope to someday return to Israel. When a religious Jew dies, a small sachet of soil from Israel is placed under the corpse's head. Every Passover, Jews pray that they will be next year in Jerusalem. This had been a central part of diaspora culture for nineteen hundred years, ever since the Romans conquered Jerusalem and destroyed the temple. Someday a Messiah would appear and all the Jews throughout the world would return to Israel. In seventeenth-century Amsterdam the building of the Esnoga had been delayed a number of years because the community was convinced that the Messiah was about to appear and that they would all be momentarily leaving for Israel. Now, after the Second World War, the real possibility was being raised that they could be “next year in Jerusalem.” The problem was that—in Europe—it was quite clear that the Messiah had not come, and thus by strict interpretation, it was not yet time for Jerusalem. Moreover, the Zionist movement was not particularly religious. Many of the Jews who were now building the new nation were from a secular leftist tradition—the same tradition as the unknown angry Jew who in the late 1930s had scribbled “Down with Passover. Long live May Day!” on Antwerp's Van Den Nestlei synagogue. Some Orthodox felt that it was better to have no Israel than to have one that did not follow the laws.

  Antwerp was a center for the Haganah, but it also had a higher percentage of traditional religious Jews than any other Jewish community in the world. The subject of Israel's nationhood became particularly tense in Antwerp. A small number of the Jews there were actively opposed to the creation of the State of Israel. Not all of them were Orthodox. This was not a conflict between religious and non-religious Jews. There were all kinds of Jews on both sides of the issue for a variety of reasons. The sight of homeless Jewish refugees made some religious opponents accept the idea of the Jewish state in spite of their misgivings. Sam Perl, for all his Haganah activity, was a deeply religious Orthodox Jew.

  Struggling to hold together their new, fragile postwar unity, the Antwerp Jewish leaders tried to get all the rabbis to agree not to talk about Israel at all. It was a political issue and should just be left alone. But it is not in Jewish tradition to avoid debate, and the agreement did not last long. Rabbi Chaim Rottenberg, for one, could never resist criticizing Zionists, and after Israel was created in 1948, he extended his attacks to the government of Israel. “Stop —it's not your business. Don't mix with it,” Sam Perl told him.

  “You couldn't get to him. He wouldn't stop,” said Perl. The community finally fractured into two groups, both of them Orthodox, both of them traditional, but with separate Chief Rabbis and separate central synagogues. Rottenberg, who otherwise might have been a Chief Rabbi like his father, was kept away from the important rabbinical posts.

  AT THE LE-EZRATH HA-JELED ORPHANAGE in Amsterdam, Isaac Lipschits, a small teenage boy from Rotterdam, found his new family of fellow orphans, the people he would always think of as his brothers. Near the diamond exchange, across the street from a home for the elderly that had been reopened as a home for ill camp survivors, le-Ezrath Ha-jeled, which in Hebrew means “help for children,” was home to twenty-three boys who had no home and no family but each other. They became their own family, and bonded together in both sadness and secrecy, they worked for the Haganah. In fact, the top floor of the orphanage became the Dutch headquarters of the Haganah.

  The family that Isaac Lipschits had lost had been in Holland since at least the eighteenth century. Like many Jewish families in Rotterdam before the war, they had worked in the central market, in their case selling bananas. Like many poor people they were concerned about being buried well and they had taken out a policy to insure their funeral and burial. Once a week, an insurance man came to collect a few cents in payment. The six Lipschits children always called the man Uncle Pete. Not much was known about Uncle Pete other than that he was some kind of Communist. When the Germans occupied Holland, Uncle Pete hid the Lip-schitses with their three younger children.

  Uncle Pete, his wife, and daughter were not as poor as the Lipschitses, but they did not live so well that they had space for five extra people. Uncle Pete would come home late at night with a few other men to his crowded apartment. They would arrive breathless and excited, armed with machine guns, grenades, and large quantities of the kind of fresh, well-stacked money found in banks. But his little group took orders from a Communist organization that told him it was foolish to be hiding Jews while doing this work, and the Lipschitses were sent away. Isaac went to a childless Rotterdam couple who pretended he was their son. But they were extremely nervous and would panic if he walked near a window. Then suddenly one day a stranger came, stared at him grimly, and without explanation moved Isaac to another house. In the next two weeks the boy was moved by strangers to twelve different homes. The strangers were always whispering to each other, and Isaac would catch a few words such as “orphan” and “poor thing.” He realized that the Germans must have found his parents.

  In the flat north region of Friesland, the city boy had his name changed and lived the life of a rural Dutch boy going to school in a two-room schoolhouse and ice skating after school. He never even noticed a sign on the village cafe that said “Jews forbidden.”

  When the war was over, Isaac returned to bombed-out Rotterdam. The tiny two-bedroom house where his family had lived was still standing, but none of the family possessions were in it and other people now lived there. Isaac went to see Uncle Pete, who told him what he already knew: His parents had been caught, and killed at Auschwitz. His oldest brother and his family were also deported and killed, as were his sister and her husband. “I am one hundred percent sure they are not alive now,” said Uncle Pete. “The same thing for your brothers Maurits and Jacob.”

  Isaac was stunned. He had been braced for almost all of this, but not Jacob. Jacob was supposed to be safely hiding in Amsterdam but he had been caught on a train while trying to visit Rotterdam and had been deported to Sobibor, where the entire train of people had been unloaded and immediately killed.

  Isaac had one relative left—his baby brother Alex. Uncle Pete gave him an address on one of the little islands in Zeeland, in southern Holland. When Isaac went to this flat polder farming region, he found a working-class Dutch family, followers of the Dutch Reformed Church—tidy, hard-working, and very religious. And there he found little Alex, now six years old, without much of an idea who Isaac was and with little memory of any other life. “Look,” he said to Isaac, pulling out a small color print of Christ on a cross. “It is Jesus, the Messiah. He died to save us.”

  Alex explained the story he had learned in his Christian Bible school. He was very proud of the print because he had won it for doing well in arithmetic. Isaac, not knowing what he should do, returned to Rotterdam and settled in with Uncle Pete and his wife. Peacetime was v
ery hard on Uncle Pete. He drank a lot of beer, argued a great deal with his wife, and reminisced with his old gang. All the beer and reminiscing led to an idea—to hit one last bank. They had gotten good at their work, but had neglected to ever keep any of the money for themselves. Why not do just one last job for themselves? The idea grew until it became irresistible. The robbery went as smoothly as it always had in wartime, and they would have gotten away with it had the government not decided to change the currency. Wartime money, it was announced, would no longer be legal tender but was redeemable at a portion of its value for new guilders. Uncle Pete, sitting on a fortune in stolen wartime guilders, thought it was worth some risk, and he turned the cash in for new guilders. But the stolen money had registered serial numbers. He was sentenced to a year in prison and lost his job with the insurance company.

  Isaac moved to the le-Ezrath Ha-jeled Orphanage and found the boys who would be his family for the rest of his life. His one blood relative, Alex, could have joined them, and then he would truly have had a family and a home. But Alex's foster parents would not let him go.

  Child custody cases like Alex's were being fought throughout Western Europe. The most famous of them was the Finaly case in France. The directress of a Grenoble municipal nursery had sheltered ten Jewish children during the war, then decided to keep two boys whose parents had been deported and killed, in spite of the fact that a surviving aunt wanted them back. When the Grenoble court ruled in favor of the family, the nursery directress enlisted the help of a Basque priest in kidnapping the boys and taking them to Spain. The case became what is known in France as “an affair”— an issue argued daily in the press. Some thought the Jews were being ungrateful after Catholics had risked their lives to save Jewish children. The Catholic Church asserted that the boys had been baptized and were therefore under Church authority. The Cardinal Primate and the Grand Rabbi entered into negotiations, and the children were eventually returned from Spain. But the debate never really stopped until the aunt finally took the two boys and moved them to her home in Israel.

  In Antwerp a committee that included Sam Perl and Jozef Rot-tenberg had a list of forty Jewish Holocaust orphans who were being held in Belgian Catholic institutions that would not release them. Many of these children were like Alex Lipschits in that they were so young that they had little memory of being Jewish or of having another family. Some of them were older, such as two teenage girls in a Catholic convent whom Sam Perl tried to relocate. He helped one to move in with relatives in the United States. The other girl refused to leave. She was 19, her entire family had been killed in concentration camps, and she now considered herself a Christian. “I have nothing to do with Jews,” she angrily told Perl. He left her his address in Antwerp in case she ever changed her mind.

  One afternoon six months later, Perl was surprised to see the girl walk into the Jewish agency with tear-shined eyes and a small suitcase in one hand. He asked her what was wrong. She and a Flemish boy had decided to get married, she told him, and he had taken her to meet his family. The parents had smiled at the girl icily, but at the first possible moment the father put his arm around the son, led him to a far corner, and whispered too loudly, “I did not work my whole life to have a Jew in my home.” Perl helped the girl connect with the Haganah, and she moved to Palestine.

  In 1945 the Dutch government asked all non-Jews with Jewish children to report them to the Committee for War Orphans. Reports came in from 3,942 homes. In 1950 the Dutch, still passionate for lists, published the outcome: 1,902 had been reunited with their parents, 199 were placed with Jewish guardians immediately, another 1,004 were given Jewish guardians by a judge later, 11 died, 151 emigrated to Israel, 316 came of age… the list continued. When the items were carefully tabulated, one could see that 368 Jewish orphans had remained with Christian families. This was only among those who were reported. Logically, people who did not want to give up their children would not have reported them, but in that Dutch tradition of filling in forms and registering, 368 non-Jewish families who had Jewish wards whom they refused to give up still obligingly registered with the government.

  ISAAC LIPSCHITS wanted his only relative back, but at 15 he did not have much of an idea of what to do about it. He went to the Committee for War Orphans, but they seemed to feel that in such cases the child was better off with the new Christian family than with an uncle, aunt, or grandparent, much less a teenage orphan brother. Isaac continued to try to persuade the family in Zeeland, but they seemed to regard Alex as their own little Christian boy. Isaac did not know exactly how to respond to these religious and well-meaning people who were stealing his only surviving relative.

  Then there was a change. Isaac received a letter from them in which they suddenly agreed to turn over Alex—on condition that the Jewish community pay back every cent the family had spent on him. Now Isaac got very upset. It had been disturbing enough to him to hear his little brother talking about Jesus. But he had thought that the family was trying to teach him what they thought was right, according to their beliefs. Suddenly it was all looking very different. Isaac took the letter to the Committee for War Orphans, which sent him to a social worker, who told him to come back in a week. At last, Isaac thought, he would get some help. But when he went back, the social worker informed him that the committee had examined the letter and found it to be “a primitive expression of love.”

  At this point young Isaac's expressions of love were also getting primitive. He went to Zeeland and asked the family if he could take Alex for a walk. Alex was now seven and had gotten to like very much the attention that this fifteen-year-old who said he was his brother was giving him. As they went walking into the countryside, Isaac said, “Alex, guess what. I've planned a trip. You want to come with me?”

  Alex's eyes widened. He had never been on a trip to anywhere.

  I'm going away forever,” Isaac said with breathless excitement. “You want to come?”

  Alex nodded his head eagerly and said “Yes!” and fifteen-year-old Isaac Lipschits took off with little Alex to join the Haganah and fight for a Jewish state.

  Their first stop was Putte, a Dutch town on the Belgian border that has a Jewish cemetery for the Antwerp community. The Belgians dig up graves when enough years have gone by and the relatives have all died off, whereas the Dutch don't. Because Jewish law requires that graves remain undisturbed, the Antwerp Jews bury their dead across the Dutch border in Putte. Between 1945 and 1948 the Haganah led recruits into a house in Putte, through the house, and out another door, and then they were in Belgium, from where they took a tram to Antwerp. Isaac and Alex stayed overnight in Antwerp's Jewish orphanage, which was also a Haganah center. They spent the next day there as well, too excited to do anything but talk. That night, they were taken by train to Kortrijk. On the way they passed through Brussels, where Alex, full of curiosity on his great adventure, pointed at a pile of yellow tubular things someone was selling. “What's that?” he asked his brother. Alex could not remember having ever before seen a banana.

  A car was waiting at the Kortrijk train station to drive them over the French border. A pre-arranged hand signal was flashed at the French customs agent, and they drove through without being asked a question. The car drove the boys to Lille, where they boarded a train to Paris. A taxi at the Gare du Nord took them to another orphanage, where they slept. The next night, they were put on another train for Marseilles, and from there they went to the nearby town of Cassis, where there was a Jewish sports camp. What would a Jewish sports camp be doing on the Mediterranean coast in late 1946? There Isaac and three hundred others received their first military training. Then they boarded a ship for Palestine. At the port a French official was handed a stack of fifteen passports for the entire group of three hundred. The official did not seem troubled by this discrepancy, and with an appropriately bored expression he stamped the passports one at a time until he had been through the pile about a dozen times and decided that was enough stamps. The French had never liked
the British Mandate for Palestine and did little to obstruct either Jewish Zionists or Arab anti-2'ionists from operating in the area.

  A few months later, the British agreed to give up the Mandate, and on November 29, 1947, the United Nations voted by a margin of three votes for a partitioning of the area, thereby creating the State of Israel. It was a small state that lacked defendable borders, and the Arabs vowed to drive the Jews out by force of arms. Azzam Pasha, secretary general of the Arab League, promised to wage “a war of extermination.” As has so often happened since, his words, perfectly chosen to arouse his Arab constituency, also served to better mobilize his adversaries. Young European Jews like Isaac Lipschits were not going to sit tight and hope for the best in another war of extermination. That had been their parents’ mistake. The Haganah was frantically bringing in survivors from Europe. By the end of 1947, about forty thousand recruits were ready or in training, although they had only rifles, Sten guns, and machine guns. After the British abandoned the Mandate, the Haganah could bring in thousands more. It needed fighters. The Arabs had also recruited a Liberation Army, but in addition had almost thirty thousand regular army troops from Arab states.

  Isaac, along with seventeen others from the Amsterdam orphanage, was assigned to a Dutch-speaking border unit. Its commander, who came from the northern Dutch town of Groningen, had served as a demolitions expert in the British Army during the war. Alex was left in the hands of an organization called the Youth Aliyah, which was placing children in homes and even operating entire villages. Aaron Waks was working for this same organization in DP camps.