The Sisters of Auschwitz

by Roxane van Iperen

  One of them follows her.

  The pharmacy is at a little square – Bob’s office is on the other side. Janny is walking around the square, leading Robbie by the hand and with the man right behind her, when suddenly it starts pouring with rain. Within a minute, the summery shower gives the dull cobbles a dark shine.

  Janny dives into a doorway and waits until the policeman rushes past in the rain. A door opens across the street and Janny sees Bob leave his office. He stares at his wife and child in the doorway, a surprised look on his face. He walks around the square, straight past the policeman, without either of them realizing who the other person is, and gives Janny and Rob a kiss.

  ‘What are you two doing here?’ he asks. Then he notices how upset she is. ‘What on earth is going on?’

  ‘You must get the hell out of here. Now!’ says Janny.

  Bob turns around and jumps on a passing tram without looking back. From behind the wagon the policeman appears. He had been looking for her on the square.

  ‘You were on your way to the pharmacy, madam?’

  ‘Yes, sir, I was just taking shelter.’

  Janny collects the medicine and she and Robbie return to the house to which Bob will never come back again.

  The agents turn almost every item in the house upside down; they even chase Janny out of bed to cut open her mattress. Most books from their collection are taken, almost all of them Bob’s, but also a book Janny had loved as a child. One of her friends, a bookbinder, had bound it in beautiful red leather for her – enough reason for the Germans to be suspicious.

  The books are gone, all the kitchen cupboards emptied, but no one has looked in the pans on the shelves. As dusk falls and not a single thing in the house is where it was, except for the party archive, the men leave.

  The tension makes Robbie cry terribly; he howls and screams until he develops a fever and Janny worriedly puts him to bed. Then the bell rings. Downstairs in the dark, a boy is at the door. Conspiratorially, he says he has heard what happened.

  ‘Give me the keys,’ he whispers.

  Janny answers that she does not know what he is talking about.

  ‘I have to contact our go-between; can you give me the address?’

  ‘No,’ says Janny, ‘I can’t. Meet me at Noordeinde tomorrow, in front of the Willem the Third statue.’ And she slams the door shut.

  With her heavy belly she runs up the stairs, wraps up Robbie, who is almost too tired to walk and glows like an electric heater, puts him on the back of her bicycle and rides to Joop’s place.

  There, gasping for breath, she consults Frits Reuter. What to do? It is obvious they are in trouble; someone has given them away. Bob’s name is on a list and probably theirs are too. How much do they know? Who was that boy at the door? Do they know about the printer or are they just randomly searching?

  They have not found anything incriminating Janny in the flat and Bob, as far as she knows, has got away safely. She and Frits decide that Janny will go to Noordeinde the next day. He will stand by at a distance to see if they are good people or not.

  After a restless night, both for little Rob and Janny, she leaves for Noordeinde in the morning, exhausted and tense. She can tell as soon as she approaches and remembers what she promised Frits: ‘When there are Krauts, give me a sign, so I can get the hell out of there.’ Janny signals. She is stopped and plays ignorant. She keeps silent, even when they put pressure on her and Robbie starts to cry. The Germans have come upon her address because one of their contacts has talked, so Janny has set one firm intention: keep your mouth shut, always.

  The Germans let her go but make it clear that they are watching her.

  From that moment, Bob goes into hiding with Haakon and Mieke at Johannes Verhulststraat, Amsterdam. Janny stays behind in the flat in The Hague with little Robbie and a big belly. She burns all the valuable papers in the stove.

  Soon after, Liselotte is born.

  6

  Axis of Resistance

  Janny had been an active member of the resistance from the very start of the war. All the while, Lien, Eberhard by her side, was still focused on the arts. She was a welcome guest at the Keizersgracht artists’ commune in Amsterdam. But as the occupation wears on, the demand for dance performances weakens and, besides, Lien is expecting.

  Then Mik van Gilse enlists her help: people in hiding are in urgent need of forged identity cards. Thanks to her itinerant existence, Lien knows a lot of people in different cities. Mik suggests she visit as many friends as possible and persuade them to report their identity card as lost. They can apply for a new one at their local council, while the ‘lost’ identity cards enter the underground circuit.

  And so in 1941, Lien’s underground work begins. First, she goes to the young sculptor who does the masks for her shows. He hesitates at her request, but then his father enters, asking what they are talking about. When Lien explains, the old man bursts out laughing.

  ‘Are you saying you haven’t lost your ID yet, son? How embarrassing! Hand it to her right now. There. Off you go then, apply for a new one at city hall. They can’t very well refuse you, can they?’

  He winks at Lien, and from that moment her business is up and running. Lien is quick on the uptake; she may not be as experienced as Janny, but they share the principle requirements for this work: they fear no one and both realize that these are desperate times.

  Lien’s career as a dancer is on the back-burner, but her agility serves a more important purpose than ever. Quite often, for example, she will go and swim a few lengths in the public pool, ignoring the ‘No Jews Allowed’ signs. Afterwards, she squeezes herself into other people’s changing cubicles via the floor, her big belly in a bathing suit touching the slippery tiles, to steal identity cards from various pockets. When she grows too big to slide underneath, she scrambles over the top. The walls are so thin that she fears one day they will give way under the load.

  First, she takes all the identity cards she can lay her hands on. It becomes harder when she has to find very specific documents, such as one for a fifty-five-year-old woman with black hair. A number of Jews has already been caught with forged papers, so the resistance must deliver better and more detailed work. The Dutch identity card is one of the most difficult documents in Europe to forge; it contains both a passport photo and a fingerprint, and, to prevent forgery, the cards are linked to a central register as well. The ink is hard to counterfeit; with a chemical reaction it is fairly easy to trace changes on the paper, and once you remove the photo from the document, an invisible seal on the back, carrying the fingerprint, is broken.

  Lien consults Mik, who has already come up with a solution. Their graphic designer has developed an ingenious technique to separate the passport photo from the identity card while leaving the back and the fingerprint intact. The new paper-thin photo is stuck on the card and the seal then repaired. The team has skilfully forged hundreds of identity cards already. Although the fingerprints don’t match, the document is safe enough for random street checks.

  One day Mik gives Lien forged identity cards to take to the food office at Laan van Meerdervoort in The Hague. He tells her she will find an ally from the resistance there. Mik describes him in great detail. ‘Remember: only when it’s him, because he works for us. If it’s someone else there, you turn around instantly.’

  The man will give her rationing cards for the following month to distribute in the underground circuit. The rationing cards in turn can be traded for coupons.

  That first time Lien walks to the small office, her heart is beating fast. Once inside, she recognizes the man and hands him the false documents. When he looks up at her, she briefly fears it will all go wrong. But the man doesn’t bat an eyelid and hands Lien the cards. She will remember this moment for the rest of her life. Two people who don’t know the other person but simply have to trust them. Two people acting casually despite the risk they are taking by helping others – who are at even greater risk.

  In the f
irst months of her pregnancy Lien still does some shows and gives classes alongside her underground work. In Amsterdam, she performs at music and cabaret nights for Jewish audiences. She is onstage with Jewish artists who are no longer allowed to work. It’s a prominent group with many well-known actors and cabaret artists who fled Germany, such as Max Ehrlich and Otto Wallburg. Max Hansen, the Danish tenor, is part of it too. In 1932, he wrote a satirical homoerotic song about Hitler: ‘War’n Sie schon mal in mich verliebt?’ (Have you been in love with me yet?), invoking the eternal wrath of the Nazis. Another member of the group is Dutch cabaret artist Henriëtte Davids, known by her stage name Heintje Davids from both the musical and the film De Jantjes.

  Lien is widely admired for her rendition of Yiddish songs and people know her from all the great revues she starred in. She loves performing with such a prominent company; it upsets her greatly when her pregnancy becomes too advanced for her to keep doing the shows. ‘Finally, we have this gifted young artist,’ Max Ehrlich teases her, ‘and then she decides to have a baby!’

  Lien withdraws from the company, a disappointment that will soon prove to be tragically good luck. The entire group, with the exception of Heintje Davids and Max Hansen, is rounded up and sent to Westerbork transit camp. They all end up in Auschwitz; not one of them returns.

  Contractions start on 8 August 1941. Eberhard is away, performing somewhere with an orchestra. Lien sways her big belly over the crossbar of his bicycle and peddles to Volharding hospital. Her friend, Joop Moes, delivers the baby and when Eberhard calls for an update during the interval of his concert, Joop proudly tells him he has just become a father.

  On 12 August 1941, Eberhard writes to a friend in New York:

  It’s a daughter, Kathinka Anita, 7 pounds 8 ounces, dark hair, light eyebrows, dark blue eyes, her mother’s nose and her father’s mouth. Thankfully, all went well. Lien is spoilt by all our famous and wealthy students – flowers, fruit and chocolate truffles (really very good ones!).

  It is the last letter he will write to his friend: postal traffic overseas stops first. When on 7 December the Japanese attack Pearl Harbor, and the United States become directly involved in the war, any other connections to the rest of the world are broken too.

  Janny is glad she and Lien had a daughter at the same time; they are a great comfort to each other. First, she worried about Lien’s new underground activities, but now Janny is grateful to be working with her sister. Bob is still in Amsterdam, hiding with Haakon and Mieke Stotijn, so she operates the underground press on her own from their upstairs flat, toddler Robbie by the hand and baby Liselotte on the hip. Janny now keeps part of the underground newspapers at Lien’s place, in the body of Eberhard’s Bechstein grand piano – which both sisters find amusing. The owner of the eminent grand piano brand, Helene Bechstein, is a well-known friend and sponsor of Hitler, whom she regards as a son and affectionately calls ‘mein Wölfchen’. If only the lady knew how her instruments were treated.

  Janny is proud of Lien crossing the entire city with newly born Kathinka in the pram, the mattress underneath the baby bulging with piles of the illegal magazines her sister prints: Signaal, De Waarheid, De Vrije Katheder. Lien prefers to meet at the child health clinic, where she meets with a friend and her baby. They talk about the development of the children, pick the little ones up from their prams, exchanging their thick woollen blankets, filled with packs of stencils and magazines to be distributed later. After the examination, the babies are put back on the smuggled goods and each of the women goes her own way.

  But the work is not without risk; they are starting to lose more and more friends. Lien’s friend from the child health clinic is arrested too; she and her baby are transported and do not survive Auschwitz.

  Although Janny is on her own now, fortunately she sees a lot of her family. Father Brilleslijper and brother Japie often visit and then spend the day with Lien, Eberhard and little Kathinka in Janny’s flat on Bazarlaan. Her brother Jaap is the apple of her eye. He’s five years younger than Janny and as dexterous as a Swiss clockmaker. When Fietje gave birth to Janny, the midwife called that she saw the head of a little boy. When she fished out a girl, after all, Joseph, who was convinced he would have a son, was so upset he gave the woman a smack on the head. Of course he was soon blissfully happy with his daughter.

  Japie looks a lot like his sisters. High cheekbones, full lips and black bushy eyebrows; it’s no surprise many people think Jaap and the girls are from the Dutch East Indies. But where his sisters have a round face, Jaap’s is elongated – and with his round metal glasses he looks just like an inventor. The boy has his father’s imagination and his mother’s work ethic. For as long as they can remember, he invents and designs the strangest creations, and actually puts them together with his own hands.

  According to Janny, Japie is the inventor of the very first bicycle radio. He spent weeks in his room until one day he had built a real radio. The thing creaked and crackled, but there were indeed voices. They sounded scrambled and nasal but intelligible, and when he got hold of England they all had to come and listen. Daventry calling! From a plank, a few caps and a crystal, Japie fabricated the radio that he then mounted on the front of his bicycle. The contact was on the handlebars, the aerial was a thin copper wire and the power was supplied by a dynamo. And so he cycled to school, singing along to the music from his handlebars.

  While his older sisters have homes and children of their own, Jaap, at twenty years old, still lives with his parents in Amsterdam. There was no money for him to finish his secondary education; it was during the crisis and Father had been off work for some time because his sight had got so bad. Jaap had started an evening course in business correspondence, but at the end of August 1941 all Jewish students were expelled from school.

  Several years before, Jaap had set up a bicycle parking business opposite his parental home to make some extra money. Entirely in the spirit of his sisters, he now begins an underground distribution centre there. With the parking as a cover-up, he accepts post, packages or messages from the resistance and distributes them throughout the country.

  While the Jews become more and more isolated and the rest of the population withdraws further and further, turning a blind eye, the underground network of the extended Brilleslijper family reaches an ever-larger part of the Netherlands. At the risk of their own lives, they solder an axis of resistance between Amsterdam and The Hague.

  7

  The Starvation Cure

  As it was, it was neither the Jewish sisters, nor the German deserter, who was forced into hiding first, but the Dutchman. It almost makes them laugh, but they do realize either one of them can be next.

  Their worry is justified when Eberhard is conscripted for military service. He and Lien have barely spent a fortnight with their daughter, Kathinka, when a letter arrives, summoning him to report at the German army office in The Hague four weeks later. If he passes the medical examination this autumn, Eberhard will have to join the Wehrmacht in January 1942.

  That evening, the young parents want to talk about the letter and what to do next. They ask Jolle Huckriede, the clarinettist in the room next door, to help get Kathinka to sleep. Jolle is happy to play for the little one; it’s in his own interest that she stops crying. Everyone in the house is over the moon with the arrival of new life, but the girl has inherited her mother’s temperament. Only once before has Kathinka been quiet for a few consecutive hours; this was when Lientje, before breastfeeding the baby, emptied a bottle of sparkling wine to celebrate her birth.

  As soon as Kathinka is asleep, Jolle leaves and Eberhard and Lientje start discussing the options. Does he have to go into hiding? But where? Or should he just report and see if he passes the examination? Perhaps if he fails, he can just come home. They cannot work it out and for the first time in a long while their positive spirit fails them. When Eberhard goes to the front, it could be the end of him – which perhaps would be justifiable if he were fighting his own battle. Not
the enemy’s one.

  ‘Go see Rhijn,’ Lien finally says, ‘he’ll know what to do.’

  Rhijn is dear friend Rhijnvis Feith, whom they know through Janny and Bob. A son of the wealthy Feith family and a neurologist in The Hague, he has been a pivotal figure in the Dutch resistance from the very beginning. A man marked for life by polio – stooped, hunchbacked, an enormous head on his narrow shoulders – but mostly known for his flawless moral compass.

  Rhijn is also the one who, with Gerrit Kastein, set up the Solidarity Fund to collect money for underground purposes and redistribute it where needed. It makes sense for Lien to send Eberhard to him: he helps many in need. His practice serves as a contact address for people working in the resistance, simply registered as ‘patient’, and he had also been a great help to Janny when Bob had to go into hiding some weeks before.

  The morning after Janny’s nerve-wracking house search, Rhijn walked all the way to Bazarlaan from his practice, carrying a cup of ground coffee in one hand and a pack of cigarettes in the other. He climbed the stairs to her floor and said to the heavily pregnant Janny: ‘So. Here I am. Now, you make us some fresh coffee and then we’ll discuss how to go about this.’

  As Rhijn smoked and Janny slurped the hot coffee, he asked her directly how she would pay the bills with Bob gone, a child by her side and a baby on its way. She was unable to answer. She hadn’t even thought about it yet, but if Bob didn’t show up at work, they would obviously not receive his salary, either.

  ‘How much did he make, this Bob of yours?’ Rhijn asked.

  Janny did not know exactly, but she told him how much money, more or less, they had to spend. Rhijn wanted to know the number of their account and whether she herself had access to it. Then he left.

  A few days later, Janny got paid Bob’s entire salary into her account, not from Bob’s office but from a certain P.G. Jonker – pseudonym for Rhijnvis Feith Esq. Until Bob earned money again, she received the equivalent of his salary from Rhijn, who came by her house each morning, drank a cup of coffee, smoked exactly two cigarettes, left for his practice and got to work.