The Sisters of Auschwitz

by Roxane van Iperen

  There is a good reason for the increasing paranoia: the stories about labour camps at home and abroad, where arrested Jewish men are taken, become more and more persistent. But the rumours of people dying there are blamed on the harsh conditions: the cold, disease or hard work. Jews are now banned from visiting cinemas, cafés or markets, and in Amsterdam they have to state exactly how many houses and shops they own, where their children attend school, which tram or bus routes they take and which cultural organisations they visit. Travelling is almost impossible for them.

  The next goal of the occupying forces is to round up as many Jews as possible, first from Amsterdam, then from all over the Netherlands, at one central location. The Jewish Quarter, cut off from the rest of the city, seems ideal, but the blockade doesn’t last; there are too many Jews in Amsterdam to fit in that small area and at least 6,000 non-Jewish Amsterdammers live behind the drawbridges. Forcing them to leave is not that easy. Also, they want to keep receiving guests and go to work elsewhere in the city. The barriers are removed, but the signs stay: Judenviertel/Joodsche Wijk.

  Jews are not allowed to move house any more. With everyone stuck in their place, mapping out the entire community can begin.

  One night in December 1941, Lien has given a dance performance. As she packs her bags she discusses the current situation with her close friend Ida Rosenheimer, who played the piano during the show. Lien is optimistic and she cannot imagine the occupied countries will allow Hitler to press further ahead with his plans – the logistics of transporting tens of thousands of people alone seem almost impossible to her – but Ida is far more downcast. Her family told her that Jews in Poland and Czechoslovakia are rounded up in ghettos and that anyone offering the least resistance is moved to newly built concentration camps. Ida finds her friend naive and tries to warn her: for twenty years Hitler has been saying he wants to destroy the Jews. He has already started in the east and there is no doubt they shall see the same thing happening in the Netherlands.

  Lien’s younger sister does not need this warning; Janny is rapidly expanding her underground activities. Bob works at the Central Food Supply, which will prove to be of great value later, and Janny, in addition to printing and distributing underground resistance newspapers, is also involved in other ways to save people’s lives. If necessary, their little home provides shelter for people in danger – political refugees and members of the resistance who have already caught the attention of the Germans.

  Soon, the first communists knock on their door. Among them is Kees Schalker, former member of the Lower House. He is one of the leaders of the illegal CPN and is on a German list. Dressed as an old man, with a hat and a grey beard, he tries to transform himself, but like Alexander de Leeuw, who hid with them previously, Schalker will not live to see the end of the war.

  All Robbie knows is that sometimes there are friends who stay for a while, and when Lien visits her sister and yet another stranger is reading the newspaper in the tiny kitchen, she no longer asks any questions.

  Forging and stealing identity cards has become a matter of urgency too. False documents are of vital importance for those who seek shelter – when they are stopped on the street, during a raid or when they travel, they must be able to identify themselves as not Jewish, or prove they are officially resident at the hiding address they pretend is theirs. The call earlier that year for Jews to report for additional registration has been very successful: over 160,000 Jews in the country have registered – people with a large J stamped on the left page of their identity card, next to their passport photo. Only a few – like Janny – have no J there.

  The identity card has thus become a powerful instrument, a small piece of paper which, in crucial moments, can make the difference between life and death. A forged card could help a Jewish man, woman or child get through inspection, travel to family and friends, find safety at a hiding place. The personal details on the right page of the identity card are often forged too; from a distinctly Jewish name to a Dutch-sounding one, from Simon Wallach to Hendrik Akkerman.

  In addition to the forged identity cards, a second important market develops: the trade in coupons and rationing cards. Because of the occupation, international trade is almost entirely at a standstill, with shortages of goods and provisions as a result. Every household needs a registered distribution card to record exactly which distribution coupons have been issued. On the left side of the card various categories are listed – provisions, shoes, birth, illness, fuel, miscellaneous – with boxes behind them to cross what and how much has been distributed.

  Although the card seems a simple administrative matter, this, too, is an important weapon. The First Registered Distribution Card, introduced at the start of the war, is followed in 1943, as the deportations are well under way, by a Second Registered Distribution Card, only available to ‘ordinary’ Dutch people. This excludes all the people in hiding or with a forged identity card. Numerous families with people hiding in their homes – sometimes just one person, sometimes an entire family – lay down the condition that those people don’t eat from their distribution card but arrange their own card and coupons. An effective way to continue starving people who have not yet reported for transport, or to flush them out of their hiding place.

  And so distribution cards and coupons, too, are stolen and circulated on a wide scale by members of the resistance. Janny has an entire network of permanent, reliable contacts with whom she arranges this. She travels back and forth between The Hague, Amsterdam and Utrecht, with papers hidden in her bra or underneath her skirt.

  The fights with the blackshirt squads as well as the first raids have made clear that both the DNP and the occupying forces have stopped showing mercy. But it still takes time for Janny to realize how dangerous it is, what she and Bob do.

  The hunt for communists is on. People working underground for the CPN are arrested and disappear without trial. The next target is the Dutch volunteers who fought against the Fascists in the Spanish Civil War. Among these former ‘Spain Fighters’ are many friends of the Brilleslijper sisters. Most of them are again or, rather, still active underground – there is good reason the Spanish Civil War was called a dress rehearsal for the Second World War. Former Spain Fighters contribute to illegal newspapers such as Het Parool, Vrij Nederland and De Waarheid and form new resistance groups together.

  Janny is in each of the Fascist enemy categories and three times at risk: she is Jewish, communist and was, although stationed in the Netherlands, also involved in the Spanish Civil War.

  In May 1941, it is announced that all registered former Spain Fighters will be interned in Germany. From that moment onwards, they shall be considered stateless criminals. They will be transported from all over Europe to Dachau concentration camp, where special barracks are set up: the Interbrigadistenblock.

  Janny learns this news from her friends and it begins to dawn on her what consequences her actions might have. It doesn’t stop her from continuing her work; helping Jews and other people in need becomes more and more urgent and she expands her network as much as she can, with people she trusts. To remove the J for ‘Jew’ from identity cards she travels, for instance, to Hans Verwer in Amsterdam. Hans is a ballet dancer and a close friend of Lientje – they danced with Lili Green together until the war started. The fine motor skills and gracefulness that made her such a good dancer come in useful during the war; Hans and her husband are top forgers.

  Useful contacts come via Janny’s parental home too; although her father often expresses his concern about her work. Above Joseph and Fietje on Nieuwe Achtergracht live their friends Leo and Loes Fuks. Leo has a large network of Jewish intellectuals and puts Janny in touch with people she needs for her underground work. She has, for instance, a contact at city hall, who prints out papers from the municipal register for her, and another who supplies her with real identity cards with authentic stamps. Janny trades them for false ones, which are then used for newborns.

  In the summer of 1941, prepa
rations for rounding up and mapping all Dutch Jews are in full swing. As well as being registered, their freedom of movement is limited and they are no longer allowed to visit markets, swimming pools or beaches. Companies have been taken, radios have been confiscated.

  Civil servants in Amsterdam, where more than 80,000 Jews live, have been ordered to make a ‘dot map’ – a map of Amsterdam, where dots, accurate to within a few feet, show where Jews live and how many; each dot representing ten Jewish inhabitants. At a single glance it is now clear how much work there is to do: some areas are swarming with dots, others show a calmer pattern.

  Little by little and with no significant opposition from the Dutch government, an entire population is deprived of its rights and dignity, isolated from the rest of society and charted in great detail.

  And yet, for most, life goes on. Imagining a better future after the war, without Nazi terror, is what keeps many people going and among the sisters’ acquaintances, several couples are even expecting a baby.

  To their sorrow, Lien and Eberhard are not married – the Nuremberg Laws of 1935 determined that Jews were no longer allowed to marry people of German blood. Lien is still madly in love and is consumed by the question whether or not to start a family. Janny and Bob, despite all their underground activities, are very happy with their little Robbie, as are Haakon and Mieke Stotijn with their baby, René. Haakon, son of internationally renowned oboist and conductor Jaap Stotijn, first worked for a radio symphony orchestra in Hilversum but is offered a position as solo oboist at the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra in Amsterdam. He proudly accepts this excellent job and the family moves to 26 Johannes Verhulststraat, right behind the Concertgebouw – an address that will become of great importance to the sisters.

  And so, many people are building a life, assuming the occupation will not last much longer. When Lien visits friends in Amsterdam, her last lingering doubt disappears as soon as she holds their newborn baby in her arms.

  Shortly after, both sisters are expecting: Lien her first and Janny her second child.

  Sometimes Eberhard and Lien joke about his German father and how horrified he would be if he could see his son now. This proud Prussian officer from the imperial army, who hated all music except military marches, fathered a son who grew up to become everything he detested: Marxist, pianist, promoted musicologist, unmarried, living with a Jewish woman – pregnant even – in an artist commune in the Netherlands.

  Eberhard had loathed his father’s militaristic nature from a young age: the stories about the great German Empire, the romanticizing of the First World War, when his father was stationed in Belgium, the rousing music that came with that. Eberhard will never forget how his father tried beating obedience and his preferences into his son with a stick.

  Once, during a night with his old regimental comrades, his father had asked him to play. Each year on the Emperor’s birthday the men hired a room to celebrate the happy event with three cheers, speeches and the exchanging of glorious memories of that good old war. It was for one of those imperial celebrations that his father Rebling had asked sixteen-year-old Eberhard to play something nice on his piano and the teenager was looking forward to performing Beethoven’s ‘Waldstein’ sonata, a piece he had been practising for a long time. Father Rebling and his friends passionately stamped and clapped along with the music. Then his father asked if Eberhard, after that sonata honky-tonk, would now play a decent military march. With a red face, Eberhard dared to refuse, despite his father’s insistence. As an excuse, he argued that he had been instructed by his teacher only to play what he had studied properly.

  Eberhard was fortunate enough to be taken under the wing of conductor Otto Klemperer and he developed into a gifted pianist. Klemperer introduced him to the world of Stravinsky, Hindemith, Wagner and Beethoven. Eberhard studied History of Music, German and Philosophy in Berlin, and was increasingly drawn to communist ideas. In 1935, at age twenty-four, Eberhard obtains his doctorate on the sociological foundations for the change of musical style in Germany around the mid-eighteenth century’. During that period, he is already working for the Communist Party, and the current climate in his country and family is increasingly suffocating him.

  With the NSDAP seizing power two years before, the Weimar Republic had come to an end and Adolf Hitler had assumed dictatorial powers to set his plans for the German Reich in motion. Eberhard’s older brother, Dietrich, who, in their father’s eyes, at least did grow into an honourable son, joins the National Socialists and Eberhard makes a decision: as soon as he has paid off his student loans, he will leave the country that has set a course he doesn’t want to be part of and the family only too glad to ride on Hitler’s tanker.

  A year later, in 1936, Eberhard leaves his homeland and arrives, with his typewriter and few pennies, in The Hague, where he meets his great love, Lientje.

  The rest is history.

  5

  The House Search

  Janny and Bob’s upstairs flat in The Hague is a hotbed of underground activities. They accommodate state enemies: hunted Jews, resistance people, members of the illegal Communist Party. First the moody lawyer, Alexander de Leeuw, then the politician, Kees Schalker, and sometimes their friend Frits Reuter stays for a while, as well. Frits, too, is a prominent communist and one of the initiators of the February strike. With him, Janny runs the underground press. She keeps printing and distributing pamphlets, leaflets and underground magazines. With Robbie in the pram, her big belly in front, she walks her rounds through The Hague. Sometimes she’s alone, other times she has someone on the lookout as she sticks stencils on pillars and posts.

  She not only keeps the keys to the underground press at her home, but she also hides the entire Communist Party archive there. Gerrit Kastein, now a communist resistance fighter, placed it with Janny immediately after the occupation. So much activity from one address is too good to last and indeed, that summer, it goes wrong.

  Germans have intercepted pamphlets with anti-Fascist texts in The Hague. Someone is arrested who, probably not voluntarily, gives the names of Janny and Bob. Then he, or she, gives away the address of the apartment where Janny, panting with the heat, her ankles swollen, counts the last weeks before giving birth to her second child.

  It is Sunday, 17 August 1941, a sultry summer’s day, when a group of men bursts into the house and storms up the stairs with a lot of noise. They are agents of the SD, the German State Intelligence Service, accompanied by a handful of Dutch police officers. Janny happens to arrive with Robbie and a pram full of baby stuff; she had gone to the Home Nursing Service and collected a bedpan, a rubber sheet and bed blocks. There is no time to turn around. Thankfully, Bob is at the office. Some of the men who are still downstairs stop her.

  ‘Does Bob Brandes live here?’ one of them barks.

  ‘He used to live here, yes, but he moved away a long time ago.’ Janny says the first thing that comes to mind.

  She feels intimidated by the men and little Robbie clings to her, crying. A Dutch policeman leans towards her, his nose almost touching her face.

  ‘You are Bob Brandes’ wife.’

  Janny is too afraid to speak and silently holds up the key, like a shield. If they had asked nicely, they would not have had to kick in the door.

  The men guide Janny and Robbie upstairs, and sit her down on a chair in the tiny kitchen. Other policemen are already searching the house: they pull open cupboards, rummage through clothes, plunder bookshelves. Janny starts to panic. In great haste she tries to come up with a plan to prevent them from finding all the illegal things – it seems impossible with so many men within very few square feet. She grabs her belly, shouts that she’s heavily pregnant and asks what they want from her. When no one responds, she says her baby is coming. Not far-fetched in itself – with just a few weeks to go her belly is round as a ball. The men are alarmed; a birth is the last thing they need and when Janny begs for permission to call a doctor, one of the SD agents gives in.

  With Robbie
by the hand, she rushes across the street to the grocery shop where there’s a telephone. Janny calls her friend Joop Moes, the doctor at Volharding hospital. Joop helped to deliver Lientje’s baby one week before. She immediately understands the situation and jumps on her bicycle. Janny takes Robbie back home, manages to steal the keys to the printer, lies down in the bedroom and waits, keys clutched in one hand, Robbie’s hand in the other. As she hears the men turning everything upside down with brute force, she prays they will not find the archive: it is hidden in the tiny kitchen in several pans and a bucket.

  The weather is warm and the air is heavy between the walls of the flat. Janny listens to how the men keep going into the kitchen for water. Every time someone turns on the tap to fill his glass, she thinks of the entire CPN archive, just a few inches above his head. If they find it, that is the end of her. She presses Robbie closer and listens with bated breath how the glass is emptied with large gulps. Each time she is sure this is when the policeman spots the shelves above him. But each time again, the glass is slammed back on the worktop and the man continues his search.

  Then Joop arrives. She hurries up the stairs to the bedroom and throws out the German agents. ‘Gentlemen, the lady needs an internal examination. Would you be so kind as to leave immediately?’

  While Janny takes off her trousers, just for show, she slips Joop the keys to the printer. Janny’s partner Frits Reuter is staying at Joop’s, near the beach; the keys are safe with him.

  Joop leaves again, but not before writing out a prescription. She makes sure she is overheard when she gives Janny instructions: ‘This is a prescription for sedatives, which you must collect from the pharmacy instantly, or else the baby is in danger.’

  It is almost five. At five o’clock Bob will leave his office.

  Janny grabs Robbie and flies out of the door. The pharmacy is opposite Bob’s work and she must catch him before he walks into the arms of the policemen.