Lily opens her mouth, shuts it again and lowers her head. In the distance, a camp police officer is approaching; they must finish their conversation.
‘I understand,’ she whispers at last, barely audible.
Lien nods gratefully. Then she turns around and walks back to her mother.
12
The Last Train
At the beginning of August 1944, the cell doors finally open. It is early morning when, for the first time in weeks, Janny is led outside. The cold of the night is still lingering, but the fresh air in her lungs is a delight. Amsterdam is still sound asleep and the sun is slowly warming the streets. Janny looks around; the Vondelpark starts over there – she knows this neighbourhood well. Guards escort her group of people to a tram that will take them to Centraal Station. She stares out of the window, watches Amsterdam-South passing by, the canals, the centre, the beautiful city. Everyone is quiet, afraid of what is coming – only squeaking steel and crunching switches disrupt the silence. She engraves the images on her memory, absorbs every detail – step gables against the blue sky, cobblestones on the pavement, a coot floating on the water.
The station square, get out, side entrance, to the platform. A cold shadow tumbles over Janny as they enter the dark building. At the exact same moment another group is led inside and walks to the platform too. In silence, they shuffle in the same direction; one-way traffic at Centraal Station – it all feels very surreal.
Old and young, men and women, parents with children. Janny sees a family in sportswear, the parents looking dejected, two teenage daughters carrying rucksacks as if they are going on holiday. Closed in by walls, guards, companions in misfortune. The trap. All those years she tried to keep people away from here, from the gates of this trap, as many people as she could. She climbs the final steps to the platform and slowly emerges from the stairwell. The passenger train is already waiting, its doors opened wide.
Get off the train. Hot air hits Janny in the face. The camp is large, much larger than she had expected. A village on desolate heathland. People everywhere. Men, women, children; seen through narrowed eyes, this place is almost normal – a village square in a Western. But reality is in the details. Everything is angular, wooden, compartmentalized. The terrain is square, enclosed by deep trenches and tall fences with barbed wire on top. Watchtowers like lifeguard platforms on long legs. Large barns in straight rows. Wooden hangars enormous enough to house actual aircraft, standing side by side with smaller versions. The soil is dry and dust clouds rush across the grounds, wriggle between the slats of the sheds, give everyone’s skin a dull shine.
Uniforms are waiting for them. Caps pulled down deep, cigarette butts glowing where eyes should be. To her astonishment, Janny does not hear a word of German, only Dutch. Some guards seem to be Jewish, not Dutch Nazis or police officers. She is taken from the central part of the camp to an isolated section behind the tracks. A prison within a prison. The punishment block.
Finally, Janny joins her family. The reunion is tearful but quiet. Twelve out of the seventeen permanent residents of The High Nest are now in Westerbork. Father, Mother, Lientje, Jaap: the entire Brilleslijper family is here. Red Puck is with them too. The other six have ended up in the family barracks on the other side of the fence; Jetty and Simon, the whole Teixeira de Mattos family: Bram, Louise, their daughter, Rita, and her husband, Willi. When she sees the faces of her family, tense but unharmed, Janny’s shoulders drop.
The open wounds on her legs are starting to heal, the bruises on the rest of her body have turned from bright blue to deep purple to yellowy brown. But her ankle is smashed and she can barely put her weight on it. It is clear to the rest of the family what Lages and his men did to her after she helped Eberhard to escape.
Janny tells them the great news she received in prison, that Bob and the children are safe – she assumes he meant all three of them. Apparently, the police officer in Huizen warned Bob at work. These are sparks of hope; the idea that some of them have kept one step ahead of the Germans, as well as knowing there are still people brave enough to think and act autonomously.
Lien refuses to accept that Eberhard is safe. The scenario is too rosy to be true and naive optimism is a luxury they have not been able to afford themselves for years now. Lien believes he was caught while he ran from the police, or was unable to find shelter, or was betrayed once more – she is convinced it did not end well and Janny cannot make her see the opposite is true.
With the arrival of the new transportation, barracks fill up again on both sides of the fences. It is easy to spot who is new. Large eyes in tight faces, people dressed in clean clothes with carefully packed bags and suitcases searching for an empty bed, their eyes nervously moving back and forth as they take in the barracks, the site, the Jewish camp police. Some newcomers have been in hiding for months, or years even, and they stand out with their bloodless faces, their rubbery and yellow skin.
The journey, to them, was the first time they had been outside, in fresh air, for a really long time. They had sat on the seats of the passenger train, stretched their legs and watched the Dutch landscape pass them by. Reality only kicked in when the train reduced speed, the sound of joints beneath the wheels slowly fading, and passengers on either side were staring out of the window anxiously. No-man’s-land as far as their eyes could see. And then a watchtower, announcing the first corner of the camp as the train entered Westerbork station.
The people who, only a few days before, were discovered by the SD behind the bookcase at the grand building on 263 Prinsengracht end up in the punishment block too: father and mother Frank with their two daughters, Anne and Margot. The girls and their mother, Edith Frank, are put to work in the battery barracks. Janny is placed in this workshop as well.
And so the paths of two Jewish hiding families cross and their faces collectively grow black with the tar dust flying around in the shed. Because the work is so simple and mind-numbing, it allows them to chat. Edith voices her concerns about the fate of her daughters. She tells Lien they have been hiding in the annex of a large building for two years and one month, eight of them staying in five secret rooms. On the ground floor was a warehouse where employees knew nothing, so in the daytime each shift, each cough, each object that was moved could be the end of them. A maddening thought, particularly for her young girls, only fifteen and eighteen years old. They had almost made it and the raid had come as a complete surprise – just as it had in The High Nest.
Then two things happen that give the entire family, Lien in particular, hope. First, a letter is delivered to her name in which, to her surprise, she finds a copy of an official English marriage certificate.
Eberhard Rebling and Rebekka Brilleslijper, 26 and 25 years old, married on 28 March 1938 in London
Signature, stamp, everything. She turns the sheet of paper over and over, as if she does not trust it, but it really says so. Not only the Huizen police officer, but also the Amsterdam tram driver has risked his life to help a complete stranger: he delivered the letter to Haakon and Mieke. The document is trembling in her filthy fingers, her black nails contrasting with the spotless white. She will never be able to thank this man, does not even know his name. And how can she ever thank Lily, who has given her the name of the lawyer with this administrative trick up his sleeve?
To assist with the ‘Final Solution to the Jewish problem’, the Germans had set up a department for disputable cases. When someone thought he was wrongly registered as ‘Jewish’, he could lodge an appeal at the Abteilung Innere Verwaltung (General Internal Administration). The head of the department is Hans Calmeyer, a German lawyer, who has to deal with thousands of appeals – often a matter of life and death. Lawyer Nino Kotting and his co-worker supply all sorts of false documents for their clients – they believe that unjust laws need not be observed – and Calmeyer turns a blind eye when checking the papers. In a remarkable dance between these two lawyers, one Dutch, the other German, thousands of people are thus ‘un-Jewed’.
Another package for Lien is delivered at the gate. As soon as she arrived in Westerbork, she had written a letter to Mieke, urgently requesting her to send blankets, towels, toiletries and a few Yiddish songs. She cannot believe her friend has responded so soon and quickly tears the paper from the box.
Fietje is sat beside her on the bed, curious to see what will appear. Indeed: blankets, some other things she had asked Mieke for, and then, at the bottom: written sheets with lyrics and notes. Lien snatches the papers from the box, then carefully holds them up, her hands completely still as if she’s weighing gold. She reads the scribbles; her mouth tightens and her eyes widen as she mumbles the Yiddish words: ‘Rajsele, wer der erschter wet lachn.’
Lien briskly turns her head to Fietje.
‘It’s Eberhard!’ Her finger presses into the paper. ‘Eberhard has written this! It’s his handwriting, he is safe.’
Lien leafs through the sheets searching for another clue from Eberhard. She finds an old satirical Yiddish song they rehearsed together at The High Nest – sadly, she never had a chance to perform it in front of an audience. She reads the first lines out loud:
Wos bistu Katinke barojges,
Wos gejstu arobgelost di nos?
Un efscher wilstu wissn majn jiches
Un fun wanen un fun wos.
She quickly reads on:
Si is baj di fun ’t hof,
Di mame ganwet fisch in mark . . .
These lines are new to her – they don’t belong to the song. She glances at Fietje, who shrugs her shoulders. Lien narrows her eyes; what is Eberhard trying to tell her? Si is baj di fun ’t hof. She is with the people from the court. The court of justice? De la Court! Their friends Albert and Cilia de la Court from Wassenaar with their five children. Kathinka is the sixth child in their house. Lien presses the paper to her chest, closes her eyes and breathes out.
Since she said goodbye to Kathinka, she had forced herself to think about her as little as possible, afraid that otherwise she would not be able to get up in the morning. If she allowed but a fraction of the thought that her little girl was taken from the doctor in Huizen by the Nazis, she went weak at the knees. Then she would shake her head, press her nails into the palms of her hands until she almost bled, and focus on the continuous crying and coughing around her until she had driven her daughter out of her system.
But now that she knows both Eberhard and Kathinka are safe, a strength returns, which helps her to believe again: we are going to make it.
It is a fact that the Allies are making progress. Since D-Day, their troops have moved up towards the east and the north and in August 1944, they free several major French cities. The Red Army is victorious in Romania, reconquers Belarus and the east of Poland. On 25 August, an important victory follows when Charles de Gaulle marches into Paris and declares the French capital liberated.
Sobibor, a small camp on the right side of Poland, exclusively designed for extermination, is closed by the Germans after a large prisoners’ revolt in October 1943. But not before at least 170,000 people – including most of the 34,313 Dutch deported to the camp – were killed in a highly mechanized process, in less than eighteen months’ time. There will never be an exact number of victims, because almost no one has managed to leave Sobibor alive.
Each new day the Brilleslijper sisters, just like the Frank sisters, walk from the Strafbaracke to the workshop, where they count the number of batteries they split, hoping these will be the last ten, twenty, hundred before the liberation.
In the meantime, they talk a lot. Someone speaks about the victory march from Paris to Belgium, says the British troops are almost in Arnhem now. Someone is certain the transportations have stopped and someone else claims to have heard that if another train leaves, it will not go to Auschwitz but to Wolfenbüttel, another labour camp. Sam Polak tells them that even camp commander Gemmeker is getting nervous, because the Allies are said to have reached Limburg.
The only one who refuses to be carried away by all the optimism is Joseph Brilleslijper. Their father is not well, neither mentally, nor physically. His bad eyesight has depleted him, he has lost weight and he barely endures the stay in the sweltering hot barracks, with the presence of so many other prisoners. When, one night, he hears his daughters building castles in the sky about the imminent liberation again, he has suddenly had enough.
‘Stop that nonsense, stop fooling yourselves! Do you really think they will just let us go when the Allies turn up? That there won’t be revenge before they arrive here at the gate?’
He snorts and shakes his head, frustrated by the naivety of his daughters – or perhaps by his own incapacity to change their situation.
Joseph is not alone in his nervousness; the entire camp is in the grip of the forthcoming liberation. At night, when the prisoners are piled onto their triple bunk beds and the dust settles in the barracks underneath the starry sky, most are wide awake on their straw mattresses. They are kept from sleeping by the heat burning between the wooden slats, by the stench of sweat, by the crying of children. They worry about deported family members and about what might be awaiting them. They wonder how they ended up in this situation, or what they have done to deserve this fate. They are wide awake because they keep counting the days that have passed since the last trains left Westerbork on 31 July on their fingers as if, with each extra day, they drift further away from the final verdict, and instead float towards a new horizon.
One of those last trains ran to Theresienstadt and took Jetty Druijff and Simon van Kreveld, who lived in The High Nest with them. A second, with destination Bergen-Belsen, had Lily Biet-Gassan and her daughter Anita on board.
It is Saturday, 2 September when the verdict is passed – 1,019 names are called for transportation.
Except for Willi and Rita, they are all on the list.
Brilleslijper, Joseph
Brilleslijper-Gerritse, Fietje
Rebling-Brilleslijper, Rebekka
Brandes-Brilleslijper, Marianne
Brilleslijper, Jacob
v.d. Berg-Walvisch, Pauline
Teixeira de Mattos, Abraham
Teixeira de Mattos-Gompes, Louise
Frank, Otto
Frank-Hollander, Edith
Frank, Margot Betti
Frank, Annelies Marie
The last train to Auschwitz will leave Westerbork the following morning.
13
Kidnapped
The villa on the hill looks forlorn. Inside, nothing is the same; furniture has been moved, mattresses are turned upside down, curtains pulled off their rails. In the kitchen, a plate covered with crumbs and a knife with some butter testify in silence to the impertinence of the police.
Doctor van den Berg was not prepared for the arrival of three young children. He asks the SD if he may transfer two of them to Doctor Schaaberg, one of his colleagues in the village. He promises to keep the Kathinka girl and watch her closely. Van den Berg also asks permission to gather some children’s things from the house. The SD approve, and he takes Robbie and Liselotte to the other address.
While their wives mind the children, the two doctors go to The High Nest to collect the children’s beds and some clothes. While they lug the stuff back home, they discuss the situation.
‘Those officers made me swear I’ll keep the children until they are certain they aren’t fully Jewish,’ Van den Berg says pensively. ‘Make sure those two don’t run away, or else the SD will come after me!’
Schaaberg nods in silence. He understands what is at stake. They hold still in front of Van den Berg’s house and rest. Inside the house is little Kathinka, exhausted by the events of the day. She is waiting all alone for that strange man to retur
n. Schaaberg picks up his stuff, says goodbye to his colleague with a wave of his hand. Then he walks to his own place, a quarter of a mile further along, where Robbie and Liselotte are quietly sitting on the sofa in the living room.
As soon as Jan Hemelrijk learns that The High Nest has been betrayed and the children, for the time being, have been accommodated elsewhere, he knows that every minute counts. Robbie and Liselotte, both half-Jewish, are safe, but it is only a matter of time before the SD figures out that Lien and Eberhard are not married and Kathinka is fully Jewish. Which means she will be deported.
Hemelrijk instantly contacts Doctor van den Berg and asks him to hand the girl over to him as quickly as possible. Van den Berg refuses. He has given the SD his word and knows what awaits him when he helps a Jew go into hiding – even if she is barely three years old.
Jan Hemelrijk calls upon two friends of the Brilleslijper family who live close to the doctor. The first is Karel Poons, the peroxide-blond ballet dancer. When he and Lien trained each week, Karel became a close friend to Eberhard and the rest of the family as well. The second is a young woman named Marion van Binsbergen.
The war brought Karel and Marion together by chance. He was hiding in Huizen, in the garden house of Cecile Hanendoes, and Marion, a recent graduate from Amsterdam in her early twenties, moved into the house next door in 1943. Daughter to a free-thinking judge and an English mother with authority issues, Marion was encouraged to think for herself from a very young age. When the German occupation began, she studied Social Work in Amsterdam. A few encounters with Fascists made such an impression on her that she quickly joined the resistance.
One of those decisive events took place on a beautiful day in spring 1942. Marion cycled past a Jewish orphanage just as it was cleared out by the Nazis. The raid was in full swing when she stopped on the street. All the children of the home were crying. Marion saw them being chucked into a truck one by one. Babies, toddlers, eight-year-olds – they were literally thrown into the trailer, flung over the tailgate like bags of potatoes, by an arm, a leg, a ponytail.
The Sisters of Auschwitz Page 21