“Almost without hope.”
Thirteen diaries by Jews hiding in the Netherlands, 1940 – 1945
Katja Grosse-Sommer
Thesis submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master in History – Holocaust and Genocide Studies
April 2017
University of Amsterdam Advisor: Dr. Karel Berkhoff Second reader: Dr. Bart Wallet
Abstract
This thesis examines thirteen Dutch-language diaries by Jews in hiding from 1940 to 1945. These diarists differ in age, social background and in the living conditions they experience during hiding. Their writings indicate that daily life in hiding was generally characterized by strong emotions, influenced by a variety of factors. Diary writing served as an outlet to record and could help diarists cope with emotionally straining life in hiding. As a link to the world outside, receiving news of war developments and particularly about Jewish persecution was very important. Diarists’ expectation of persecution ranges from harsh living conditions to systematic extermination of European Jewry. Fear rather than certainty of death leads diarists to express hope that their friends and family will survive deportations, although the majority is aware of the mortal threat Nazi persecution posed to them. Diarists identify primarily as Dutch and construct their identity in opposition to the Germans. Although Germans are described as perpetrators most responsible for diarists’ suffering, some diarists are strongly condemnatory of Allied forces’ military inaction, said to prolong their suffering. This thesis indicates the necessity of a larger quantitative study of the Dutch hiding experience. It also suggests that victim responses to persecution during the Holocaust should be examined per nationality, the strongest category of identification, rather than as part of a monolithic “Jewish” experience.
Table of contents Introduction ………... 9 1. Onderduik ………..…….. 23 2. Information ………..…… 44 3. Identity ………..………... 69 Conclusion ………..…………. 89 Bibliography ……….... 92
Acknowledgements
This thesis took quite some time longer than was originally planned. For accepting this without question and supporting me not only throughout its writing process, but in the years leading up to it, I want to first and foremost thank my family.
My deepest thanks to my supervisor Dr. Karel Berkhoff for his constant support, availability, and new research incentives. Above all, I thank him for his patience and attention to detail in many aspects of his supervision, as well as his support beyond the thesis.
My second reader, Dr. Bart Wallet, I want to thank for his enthusiasm for my topic long before he agreed to be officially involved in this thesis. Thank you for providing me with material, inspiration, connections, and above all for enthusiastic encouragement, and the motivation to continue further in this field.
I am deeply grateful for all the individuals who went beyond their job to help me in my research. In the Jewish Historical Museum, thanks in particular to the Kenniscentrum staff. Their interest, patience, and willingness to take the time to discuss my thesis and inform me about the JHM’s collection practices are greatly appreciated. In the NIOD, thanks in particular to the library staff, who tolerated my ordering of countless files and my general presence day in and day out. Thanks also Katrina Cooper and Elderd Harder, whose friendly greetings always brightened my long days at the library.
Thanks to the staff at the Onderduikmuseum in Aalten, who have shown much interest and have provided connections to surviving relatives of the family hiding Weyel-Aleng, making clear that the stories of onderduik are still important today.
I am grateful to those who took the time to speak to me about their work and gave general advice, among which I would particularly like to mention Dienke Hondius, Johannes Houwink ten Cate, Barbara Schieb, and Amy Simon, who provided new directions in research and rekindled my enthusiasm for the topic.
While it often felt like my life centered around this thesis, I am eternally grateful that there are individuals that provide balance, distraction, and entertainment in Amsterdam, Berlin and beyond. Thanks to all of you, I am so happy you are all in my life.
“Gelukkig is de mensch die de humor van de dingen kan zien. Met bijna geen
hoop, en toch hoop, dat is de hoop, hoop uit wanhoop.”
“Happy is the man who can see the humor of things. Almost without hope, and still hoping, that is the hope, hope from despair.”
Max Israel, 2 December 1944.1
Introduction
Despair and hope are two of the many emotions that characterized the event we know as the Holocaust. National Socialist persecution of Jews throughout Europe impacted individuals’ lives and provoked a variety of responses. Examining contemporaries’ accounts can individualize the Holocaust, allowing later generations to approach their thoughts, experiences and emotions, valuable particularly in a time in which first-hand witnesses are disappearing.2 The proportionally large collection of wartime ego-documents3 in the Netherlands represent an opportune source base to examine individuals’ experiences, thoughts and emotions in a time of immense insecurity. Such testimonies can give us insight into how Jews understood and attempted to make meaning of the persecution they experienced.
What is described as the “Holocaust” comprised a variety of experiences and provoked different responses from those persecuted. Egodocuments such as diaries allow insights into daily life and the emotions that characterized the experience of going into hiding. In the Netherlands, individual published testimonies of life in hiding, most notably the diary of Anne Frank, have captured readers’ interest up to the current day.4 However, generally speaking, the Dutch experience of going into hiding, called onderduik, literally meaning “diving under,” has
1 Israel, 2 December 1944, JHM D16021.
2 Frank Bajohr, “Das ‘Zeitalter des Tagebuchs’? Subjektive Zeugnisse aus der NS-Zeit. Einführung,” in “… Zeugnis
ablegen bis zum letzten.” Tagebücher und persönliche Zeugnisse aus der Zeit des Nationalsozialismus und des Holocaust, eds. Frank Bajohr and Sybille Steinbacher (Göttingen: Wallstein, 2015), 10.
3 Bart van der Boom, “Wij weten niets van hun lot”: Gewone Nederlanders en de Holocaust (Amsterdam: Boom,
2012), 108.
4 Recently published diaries include Corine Fonteijn, Een gekooid dier. Oorlogsdagboeken van Corine Fonteijn (s.l:
Partij voor de Dieren, 2016); Carry Ulreich, “’s Nachts droom ik van vrede.” Oorlogsdagboek 1941 – 1945 (Zoetermeer: Uitgeverij Mozaïek, 2016).
been insufficiently studied. It is clear that living circumstances could differ greatly: some individuals lived in relative freedom or with false papers; others were confined to small spaces and spent years indoors. Some went into hiding with people they knew, others were hidden alone or with people they had never met before, in both rural and urban areas. Access to the outside world differed greatly: while some could listen to the radio and follow war news, others lived in a state of news scarcity. Individuals keeping a diary while in hiding differ in regards to age, gender and general background, circumstances which influence both the content and shape of their diaries.
In order to open up a new source base and contribute to our understanding of what life in hiding could entail, this thesis analyzes thirteen unpublished and virtually unknown Dutch-language diaries of Jews in hiding, kept from 1940 to 1945. Held at the collections of the NIOD Institute for War, Holocaust and Genocide Studies and the Jewish Historical Museum in Amsterdam, it will analyze these individual narratives and experiences. The first chapter examines diarists’ daily life in hiding, showing what issues were important and placing a special focus on the function of diary writing during hiding. The second part shows what news diarists had access to, in particular information regarding Jewish persecution. It will integrate diarists’ news reading into the larger discussion on “knowledge” of the Holocaust in the Dutch context by analyzing diarists’ reactions to news of persecution. Lastly, the thesis will focus on descriptions of different identity groups pertinent to diarists’ lives, thus closely examining identity construction carried out within the diaries. It will also explore which groups diarists perceived as perpetrators and as responsible for their suffering.
While offering overarching conclusions and a quantitative analysis of diaries is difficult, this thesis can articulate individual voices that have been not been examined closely, thus laying the basis for a potentially detailed quantitative analysis of the onderduik experience. In using Dutch-language diaries in an English-speaking context, the thesis also aims to open up the self-containment that characterizes much of Dutch Holocaust historiography.5
5 Dan Michman, “The Place of the Holocaust of Dutch Jewry in a Wider Historical Fabric: Approaches of
Non-Dutch Historians,” in Non-Dutch Jews as perceived by themselves and by others: proceedings of the eight international
symposium on the history of the Jews in the Netherlands, eds. Chaya Brasz and Yosef Kaplan (Leiden: Brill, 2001),
390; Guus Meershoek, “Driedeling als dwangbuis. Over het onderzoek naar de vervolging van de joden in Nederland,” in Met alle geweld: botsingen en tegenstellingen in burgerlijk Nederland, eds. Conny Kristel et al. (Amsterdam: Uitgeverij Balans, 2003), 147.
Theoretical considerations
Alongside letters and autobiographies, diaries are what Dutch researchers call “ego-documents,” texts in which the author both describes and reveals him- or herself.6 The turn towards microhistory and narrative history in the 1980s7 has led to a growing popularity of the study of ego-documents for Holocaust historiography, producing what has been termed “the era of the witness,”8 in which contemporary testimony is valued highly. Their study can open up new perspectives on events established in historical discourse and facilitate the discovery of previously unknown events in a historiography primarily based on documents authored by the perpetrators.9 Historians such as Jürgen Matthäus et al. have emphasized the importance of ego-documents written by victims:
When it comes to understanding the Holocaust, however, contemporary documents, particularly those stemming from the hands of victims rather than perpetrators, have a significance and expressiveness […]. They can recover the agency and subjectivity of those too often seen merely as the recipients of Nazi policy […]. And they can bring to life the uncertainty, confusion, and disbelief of those confronted by measures and processes that only in retrospect have become an irremovable part of our mental landscape.10
A focus on victim’s voices can thus break the dominance of the perpetrator narrative and help reconstruct the effects of persecution and the reactions to it.11 Saul Friedländer’s highly lauded integrated history of the Holocaust was pioneering in using victim testimony, in particular diaries, and in transcending the image of passive victimization that dominated in early Holocaust historiography and remains influential today.12 Studies that focus on diaries include Alexandra
6 Arianne Baggerman and Rudolf Dekker, “‘De gevaarlijkste van alle bronnen’ Egodocumenten: nieuwe wegen en
perspectieven,” Tijdschrift voor sociale en economische geschiedenis 1, 4 (2004): 7-8.
7 Rudolf Dekker, introduction to Egodocuments and History. Autobiographical Writing in its Social Context since
the Middle Ages, ed. Rudolf Dekker (Hilversum: Verloren, 2002), 10.
8 Annette Wieviorka, The Era of the Witness (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2006). 9
Omer Bartov, “Setting the Record Straight,” PastForward: The Digest of the USC Shoah Foundation Institute for
Visual History and Education, 2001, 24.
10 Jürgen Matthäus, Alexandra Garbarini and Mark Roseman, introduction to Jewish Responses to Persecution,
Volume I, 1933 – 1938, eds. Jürgen Matthäus and Mark Roseman (Lanham: AltaMira Press, 2010): xiv – xv.
11
Susanne Heim, “‘Beim Schreiben habe ich immer noch ein Funken Hoffnung.’ Tagebücher und Briefe verfolgter Juden,” in “… Zeugnis ablegen bis zum letzten.” Tagebücher und persönliche Zeugnisse aus der Zeit des
Nationalsozialismus und des Holocaust, eds. Frank Bajohr and Sybille Steinbacher (Göttingen: Wallstein, 2015),
82.
12 Tony Kushner, “Saul Friedländer, Holocaust Historiography and the Use of Testimony,” in Years of Persecution,
Years of Extermination: Saul Friedländer and the Future of Holocaust Studies, eds. Christian Wiese and Paul Betts
Garbarini’s pan-European study of Eastern European, German and French Holocaust diaries.13
Other authors have focused on the large amount of diaries written in Polish ghettos.14 Dutch Jewish diaries have been analyzed by Bart van der Boom and Ies Vuijsje.15
Diaries are relevant for historiography not necessarily to reconstruct exact events, but to examine how these were perceived and interpreted.16 Some historians have ascribed a high degree of reliability to them as sources “because [the diary] was often secret, the author could write down emotions without shame.”17 Yet, as subjective documents, diaries both shape and are shaped by its subject. James Young emphasized that ego-documents written in close temporal proximity to events they record are no more “real” or “authentic” in terms of factual accuracy than those written retroactively:
While the exigencies of time and memory may weigh heavily on the factuality of a given report, they are in other ways no less mediational than the linguistic, cultural, and religious patterns of mind and expression that frame a writer’s narrative moment by moment, during or after the Holocaust [….] As raw as they may have been at the moment, the ghetto and camp experiences were immediately refined and organized by witnesses within the terms of their Weltanschauungen.”18
In general, the Holocaust gave the impetus to write a particularly large amount of ego-documents in general and diaries in particular.19 (Auto)biographical narration likely increased through the realization that one was living through a time of historical significance.20 Impulses to keep a diary differed per diarist, though Garbarini has roughly categorized them into familial, ethical, theological and historical.21 Some diarists acted on internal motivations, others saw diary writing
13
Alexandra Garbarini, Numbered days: diaries and the Holocaust (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006).
14 For example, see the works of David Engel, Amos Goldberg, Robert M. Shapiro, Amy Simon, Feliks Tych and
Alexandra Zapruder. Compare also Susanne Heim, who has compared diaries written by German, French and Polish Jews, concluding that the geographic origin of diarists influences their hope of survival: Polish Jews tended to be certain of their extermination, while German and French Jews expressed constant fear of death but also expressed instances of hoping to survive. Heim, “‘Beim Schreiben,” 93-4.
15 Van der Boom, “Wij weten niets”; Ies Vuijsje, Tegen beter weten in: zelfbedrog en ontkenning in de Nederlandse
geschiedenisschrijving over de Jodenvervolging (Amsterdam: Uitgeverij Augustus, 2006).
16
Bajohr, “Das ‘Zeitalter des Tagebuchs’?” 9; Selma Leyesdorff and Nanci Adler, introduction to Tapestry of
Memory: Evidence and Testimony in Life-Story Narratives, eds. Selma Leyesdorff and Nanci Adler (New
Brunswick: Transaction Publishers, 2013), ix.
17 “Omdat het veelal geheim was, kon de auteur zijn emoties zonder schaamte opschrijven.” Anna Voolstra and
Eefje Blankevoort (eds.), Oorlogsdagboeken over de jodenvervolging (Amsterdam: Uitgeverij Contact, 2001), 9.
18 James E. Young, Writing and Rewriting the Holocaust: Narrative and the Consequences of Interpretation
(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1988), 414-6.
19
Saul Friedländer, The Years of Extermination: Nazi Germany and the Jews, 1939 – 1945 (London: HarperCollins, 2007), xxiv.
20 Bajohr, “Das ‘Zeitalter des Tagebuchs’?” 7. 21 Garbarini, Numbered days, xi.
as an obligation to bear witness or to document the times of upheaval they were living through.22 Diaries can also be seen as a medium for their writers to retain their humanity in the face of destruction, asserting themselves through writing in times where self-identity and life itself are under threat. Victoria Stewart has written of diaries as “a means of self-validation, a testament to […] survival day by day.”23
Young stated that producing literary testimony may have become, for some diarists, “the sole reason to survive.”24 Ascribing a life-affirming function to diary writing can logically lead to viewing diaries as a form of resistance.25 Functions of diaries can also be used to categorize them. For example, Amos Goldberg has recognized three tendencies in diaries written during the Holocaust: that of crying out in pain, documenting for the future and questioning the impossibility of experienced reality.26
Audience and place of creation of a diary relate to its function and influence its form. One can differentiate between external and internal diaries: while the former are written with an audience in mind and can function as a chronicle, the latter are mostly introspective and only serve the diarists’ individual purposes.27
Their different places of creation, such as ghettos, camps, hiding places, and so on also influence the form, function, and content of diaries.28
Whether a distinct category of the “Holocaust diary” as genre can be established within
22 Amos Goldberg, “Jews’ Diaries and Chronicles,” in The Oxford Handbook of Holocaust Studies, eds. Peter Hayes
and John K. Roth (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), doi: 10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199211869.003.0027, para. 8.
23 Victoria Stewart, “Holocaust Diaries: Writing from the Abyss,” Forum of Modern Language Studies 41, 4 (2005),
426.
24
James E. Young, “Interpreting Literary Testimony: A Preface to Rereading Holocaust Diaries and Memoirs,” New
Literary History 18, 2 (1987), 406.
25 Rachel Feldhay Brenner, Writing as resistance. Four women confronting the Holocaust: Edith Stein, Simone Weil,
Anne Frank, Etty Hillesum (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1997).
26
Amos Goldberg, Holocaust Diaries as “Life Stories” (Jerusalem: Yad Vashem, 2004), 23. Goldberg sets up three categories of diaries: the documentary, synecdochical and the reflective diary. Goldberg, “Jews’ Diaries and Chronicles,” para. 1.
27 Renata Laqueur Weiss, Writing in defiance: concentration camp diaries in Dutch, French and German, 1940 –
1945 (Ann Arbor: University Microfilms International, 1971), 9. Presser similarly differentiates between an
“external” and “intimate” diary, in Dick van Galen Last and Rolf Wolfswinkel, Anne Frank and After: Dutch
Holocaust Literature in Historical Perspective (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 1996), 152. Garbarini has
emphasized that external diaries, even if a neutral tone is attempted, often reveal information about the authors’ internal life. Garbarini, Numbered days, 18.
28 For example, Weiss has argued that concentration camp diary writers used their diary writing as a life-saving
the larger framework of European diary writing is a matter of contention. David Patterson has differentiated between wartime diaries and Holocaust diaries: 29
[…] while other diaries seek to record and preserve the experience of the world, Holocaust diaries seek to recover the world itself. While other diaries offer an account of life in the “completed precipitate of each day,” the Holocaust diary struggles to recover a life despite the day’s destruction. While other diaries are projected toward a future yet to be realized, Holocaust diaries are written in the shadow of a doom that is certain to come. While other diaries contain the individual’s interrogation of himself or herself in the pursuit of meaning, the Holocaust diary includes an interrogation of God and humanity after the loss of meaning. While other diaries are written for the diarist, the Holocaust diary is written for others, living, dead, and yet to be born […]. They are included through the diarist’s conscientious engagement in a testimony for the sake of a future.30
Thus, for Patterson, a necessary criterion for a Holocaust diary is the identification with the Jewish community and concern for its survival. The diary, as a continuation of Jewish tradition, thus testifies to an individuals’ own suffering as well as that of the community and struggle against the loss of meaning that the Holocaust represents.31 Jewish identity is also relevant for scholars such as David G. Roskies, who sees diaries written during the Holocaust within the line of traditionally Jewish responses to persecution.32 In contrast, Garbarini has placed Jewish diary writing during the Holocaust in a larger European context, arguing that it stems from a wide variety of both Jewish and non-Jewish literary and cultural traditions.33 Similar to Goldberg, she has examined diaries written by Jews persecuted in the Holocaust without explicitly calling them “Holocaust diaries.”34
The question of what constitutes the “Holocaust experience” had influenced the categorization of diaries. Frank Bajohr, for example, has questioned regarding Victor Klemperer’s diary as a Holocaust diary, for “the Holocaust did not appear in the diary”.35
This argument can be made in similar form about the diary of Anne Frank, which does not describe
29 David Patterson, “Through the Eyes of Those Who Were There,” Holocaust and Genocide Studies 18, 2 (2004),
285.
30 Patterson, “Through the Eyes,” 278.
31 David Patterson, Along the Edge of Annihilation: The Collapse and Recovery of Life in the Holocaust Diary
(Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1999), 21-4.
32
David G. Roskies, The Jewish Search for a Usable Past (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1999), 17. See also Ibid, Against the apocalypse: responses to catastrophe in modern Jewish culture (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1984); Ibid (ed.) The literature of destruction: Jewish responses to catastrophe (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 1989).
33 Garbarini, Numbered days, 11.
34 Goldberg, “Jews’ Diaries and Chronicles.”
the experience of deportation, imprisonment and death. This thesis, however, follows Stewart’s definition of a Holocaust diary as one written by Jews during the Holocaust “when subjectivity is perceived to be under threat.”36 Such diaries therefore include those written in onderduik, a state where individuals are “unregistered, with no official recognition that they are alive” and thus “neither living nor dead.”37
Sampling
The diaries used in this thesis are held at the NIOD Institute for War, Holocaust and Genocide Studies and the Jewish Historical Museum (JHM) in Amsterdam. As of November 2016, the former includes 1.631 files in its collection 244, European ego-documents and diaries (Europeese dagboeken en egodocumenten). In July and August 2016, I conducted a search through the collection’s document descriptions and recorded those files in which the diary writer was described as Jewish. From the 109 remaining files, retroactively written texts were excluded, retaining only those written (partially) before the liberation of the Netherlands in May 1945. Selection took place for diaries that were (partially) written in hiding, thereby excluding, for example, all diaries only dealing with the experience of concentration camps.38 Diaries that have been published as well as those not written in Dutch were also excluded.39 Finally, two remaining diaries were excluded due to difficult legibility or extreme length. This sampling method left ten diaries from the collection of the NIOD.
Sampling in the Jewish Historical Museum functioned with the same exclusion criteria through a digital search through the JHM’s document collection, refined by the years 1933 to 1945, and produced a total of three diaries. Figure 1 gives an overview of the diaries and their writers.
36 Stewart, “Holocaust Diaries,” 419. 37
Ibid, 424.
38 For studies of Dutch concentration camp diaries, see Bettine Siertsema, Uit de diepten: Nederlandse
egodocumenten over de Nazi concentratiekampen (Vught: Skandalon,2007) and Weiss, Writing in defiance.
39
The diary of Weisz (NIOD 244/827) begins in Dutch, switches into German and later switches back into Dutch. The diary of Hes-Swartenberg (JHM D5380) is originally written in Dutch and is partially present in both the Dutch typoscript and her own English translation. Latter parts of the diary are present at the JHM solely in her English translation.
Figure 1: The diary writers40
Name
Bio-graphical dates
Diary kept from Hiding place Signature
Andriesse Mau 1900 - 1977 May 1940 - April 1943 Veghel NIOD 244/1786 Blitz Isidore 1884 - 1950 July 1943 - May 1945 Krommenie NIOD 244/1242 Bonette-maker Vrouwkje 1907 - 1999 June 1944 - February 1945
Den Haag NIOD 244/1840
Citroen Sophie 1911 – unknown (survived)
August 1944 - June 1945
Tiel, Leiden, Amsterdam, Landsmeer, Eindhoven NIOD 244/1518 Cohen Abraham 1925 – unknown (survived) October 1942 - April 1944 Hilversum, Amsterdam, Bussum NIOD 244/823 Goudsmit Samuel 1884 - 1954 November 1941 - October 1943 Amsterdam NIOD 244/1205 Hes- Swarten-berg Hindle S. unknown (survived) August 1942 - February 1945 Zwolle JHM D005380 Israel Max 1916 - 2001 July 1943 - 1945 unknown JHM D016201 Koeken-heim David 1915 – 2004 August 1939 - August 1944 Amsterdam NIOD 244/1208 Löwen-dorff Werner 1927 - 1993 1944 - 1945 Hilversum JHM D014517 Polak Jo Alexander 1908 - 1944 August 1939 - June 1942 Naarden-Bussum, Barneveld, Hermelen, Utrecht, Maartensdijk NIOD 244/1131 Weisz Géza L. 1904 - 1944 May - September 1943 Amsterdam NIOD 244/827 Weyel-Aleng Fientje 1920 – 2011 September 1942 - March 1945 Aalten NIOD 244/668 Weyel Jaap 1914 - 2004 September 1942 - March 1945 Aalten NIOD 244/668
40 Spelling of the diarists’ names is adopted from their NIOD or JHM files. To my knowledge, Koekenheim and
Weyel also spelled their names as Kukenheim and Weijel. Polak is also known as Joost van Merwede. Information on the hiding places are taken from the file descriptions.
Ten of the diarists are male, four are female.41 The youngest diarist, Werner Löwendorff, is in his late teens during the German occupation, while the oldest, Isidore Blitz and Samuel Goudsmit, are around 60 years of age. Abraham Cohen, Fientje Weyel-Aleng, and Hindle S. Swartenberg are in their early 20s. David Koekenheim, Jaap Weyel, and Max Israel are in their late 20s, while Sophie Citroen is aged around 30 at the time of writing. Jo Alexander Polak is in his mid-thirties, while Vrouwkje Bonettemaker is in her late 30s. Mau Andriesse and Géza L. Weisz are in their 40s at the time of writing. Five diarists go into hiding in rural environments, while seven are in hiding in urban spaces, and two diarists have hiding places in both spaces. The diarists Citroen, Cohen, and Polak are forced to change their hiding places a number of time, although this is not evident from their diaries. The diarists Andriesse, Blitz, Cohen, Hes-Swartenberg, Israel, Koekenheim, Weyel-Aleng and Weyel are in hiding with one or more members of their family or their partner. Citroen and Löwendorff live with a false identity card and are not confined to a hiding space. As the reader will see, the diaries by Koekenheim, Polak, and Weyel-Aleng in particular are more informative and lengthy than the others and are quoted often.
Retroactively ascertaining a diarist’s “Jewish” identity is inherently problematic. Individuals may not have self-identified as Jews, even though they were defined as such by National Socialist racial laws. But doubts as to whether the diaries of Anne Frank or Etty Hillesum can be classified as “Jewish”42 have been dismissed by Rachel Feldhay Brenner: “[t]his self-righteous position of the critics implies that there was a pattern of ‘correctly Jewish’ responses to the Nazi persecution, which some of the Jewish victims failed to follow. […] It is difficult to dismiss either [Frank’s or Hillesum’s] genuine identification with the fate of the Jews or their sincere expressions of Jewish pride.”43
This thesis follows the approach taken by Friedländer, treating the diarists who identified as Jews, or were identified as such, as individuals and with personal experiences,44 rather than describing their role within an overarching Jewish history. It thereby positions itself against
41 The diary sample consists of thirteen diaries but fourteen diarists because Fientje Weyel-Aleng and Jaap Weyel
(NIOD 244/668) contribute to the same diary.
42 Compare David Barnouw, Het fenomeen Anne Frank (Amsterdam: Uitgeverij Bert Bakker, 2012), 43; Denise de
Costa, Anne Frank and Etty Hillesum: Inscribing spirituality and secularity (trans. Mischa F.C. Hoyinck and Robert E. Chesal) (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1998), 16; Rudolf Dekker, “Jacques Presser’s Heritage: Egodocuments in the Study of History,” trans. Diederik van Werven, Memoria y Civilización 5 (2002), 33; Patterson, “Through the Eyes,” 285-7.
43 Brenner, Writing as resistance, 99-100.
44 Compare Amos Goldberg, “The Victim’s Voice and Melodramatic Aesthetics in History,” History and Theory 48,
approaches such as that of Patterson, for whom only a clearly expressed personal commitment to the Jewish community by the writer can allow the classification of a diary as Jewish.45 This thesis treats the sampled diaries as Jews defined by National Socialist racial criteria to draw attention to their experience as a persecuted group exposed to great suffering, in full awareness that it is defining the victims under Nazi racial laws.
The difficulty of ascertaining “Jewish” identity is mirrored by that of determining Dutch identity. For instance, Anne Frank was born in Germany and had no Dutch citizenship, although her diary tends to be seen as a Dutch experience.46 In this thesis’ sample, Werner Löwendorff was born in Germany but had lived in the Netherlands since age 12 and writes his diary in the Dutch language. Calling for use of the analytical category of “ethnicity” in the study of Jewish victims,47 historian Anna Hájková differentiates between niederländische Niederländer (“Dutch Dutch”), who were born in the Netherlands, and deutsche Niederländer (“German Dutch”), refugees who fled to the Netherlands between 1933 and 1939.48 In her study of the Theresienstadt ghetto, she makes clear that Jews themselves disagreed on these categories: while
deutsche Niederländer self-identified as Dutch, and were also identified by other prisoners in
Theresienstadt as such, the niederländische Niederländer rejected this categorization and regarded the deutsche Niederländer primarily as German.49
Unpublished diaries such as the ones used in this sample can offer a reading uninfluenced by the readers’ preconceived notions or expectations about the authors. They can uncover new
45 Garbarini, unlike Patterson, has not spent much time or space dealing with the question of authors’ Jewish
(self-)identity as a criterion for her diary sample, simply exploring texts by those “identified as Jews by German racial laws.” Garbarini, Numbered days, 17.
46 See Ian Buruma’s description of Anne Frank as “the Dutch Joan of Arc”. Ian Buruma, “The Afterlife of Anne
Frank,” The New York Review of Books, February 19, 1998, http://www.nybooks.com/articles/1998/02/19/the-afterlife-of-anne-frank/.
47 Anna Hájková, “’Poor devils’ of the Camps. Dutch Jews in Theresienstadt, 1943 – 1945,” Yad Vashem Studies 34,
1 (2015), 2-3.
48 Anna Hájková, “Spezifika im Verhalten der niederländischen Juden in Theresienstadt,” in Abgeschlossene
Kapitel? Zur Geschiche der Konzentrationslager und der NS-Prozesse, eds. Sabine Moller, Miriam Rürup, Christel
Trouvé (Tübingen: edition diskord, 2002), 96.
49 Hájková, “Spezifika im Verhalten”, 97-8. Going by Hájková’s criteria, one can classify diarists Löwendorff and
Weisz as deutsche Niederländer, the former having fled to the Netherlands in 1939 and the latter in 1933. The difficulty of assessing national identity is also applicable to “German Jews,” and salient for famous diarists such as Victor Klemperer, who struggled with the interaction between his German and Jewish (self-)identities. Compare Amos Goldberg, “Jews’ Diaries and Chronicles,” para. 17-9; Michael Wildt, Rezension zu: Dörner, Bernward: Die
Deutschen und der Holocaust. Was niemand wissen wollte, aber jeder wissen konnte. Berlin 2007 / Bajohr Frank;
Pohl, Dieter: Der Holocaust als offenes Geheimnis. Die Deutschen, die NS-Führung und die Alliierten. München 2006 / Longerich, Peter: “Davon haben wir nichts gewusst!. Die Deutschen und die Judenverfolgung 1933 – 1945. Berlin 2006, in: H-Soz-Kult, 12.03.2008, http://www.hsozkult.de/publicationreview/id/rezbuecher-9771.
and previously un- or underrepresented voices in Holocaust history.50 The diaries stored in the NIOD and JHM archives thus present an understudied database, yet not completely ignored, for the diaries of Cohen, Goudsmit, Blitz and Weyel-Aleng are included in the analyses of Van der Boom and Vuijsje.51 Passages from Weyel-Aleng’s diary are also cited by historians Loe de Jong and Jacques Presser,52 and included in the collection of diary fragments published by the
Rijksinstituut voor Oorlogsdocumentatie.53 The diaries of Blitz, Goudsmit, Koekenheim and Polak are cited in A. E. Godfried Jacobs’ doctoral dissertation on sounds in Amsterdam in a historical perspective.54 The other diaries, to the best of my knowledge, have not been studied before extensively. I found additional information on the sampled diarists’ biographies in other (online) sources.
Limitations
Collection practices of the NIOD and JHM influenced the sampling method used and the sample created in this thesis. The high number Dutch wartime ego-documents in archival collections55 can be attributed partially to radio broadcasts sent out by the Dutch government in exile in March 1944 as well as bulletins by the newly founded Rijksinstituut voor Oorlogsdocumentatie (RIOD) shortly after liberation, calling on the Dutch population to preserve and donate material illustrating everyday life under occupation, including diaries.56 A special collection for diaries
50 Compare Garbarini, who has focused on unpublished diaries “in an effort to make audible new voices from the
past, thereby enlarging the breadth of source material upon which existing historical and literary studies of Holocaust diaries have been based.” Garbarini, Numbered days, xi.
51
Vuijsje has included Goudsmit’s diary in his sample, while Van der Boom analyzes the diaries of Cohen, Goudsmit, Blitz, and Weyel-Aleng.
52 Louis de Jong, “Help to People in Hiding,” Delta 8,1 (1965), 51; Jacques Presser, vol 2. of Ondergang: De
vervolging en verdelging van het Nederlandse Jodendom 1940 – 1945 (s’Gravenhage: Staatsuitgeverij, 1965), 266.
Presser also includes a photo of Weyel-Aleng’s diary entry of 30 March 1945 recording her liberation, 248.
53 T. M. Sjenitzer-van Leening, (ed.), Dagboekfragmenten 1940 – 1945 (‘s-Gravenhage: Nijhoff, 1954). 54 Anna Elisabeth Godfried Jacobs, “Het geluid van gisteren. Waarom Amsterdam vroeger ook niet stil was.”
Doctoral dissertation, University of Maastricht, 2014. Compare also Annelies Jacobs and Karin Bijsterveld, “Der Klang der Besetzungszeit. Amsterdam 1940 bis 1945,” in Sound der Zeit: Geräusche, Töne, Stimmen – 1889 bis
heute, eds. Gerhard Paul and Ralph Schock (Göttingen: Wallstein Verlag, 2014), 254-61.
55 Van der Boom, “Wij weten niets,” 108; Voolstra and Blankevoort, Oorlogsdagboeken, 11. 56
This radio message presumably encouraged a number of diarists, including Anne Frank, to preserve or rewrite their work. See also Bart Wallet, “Achtergronden bij het dagboek van Carry Ulreich”, in Ulreich, “’s Nachts droom
ik van vrede,” 241. For a history of the early years of the RIOD, see Jaap Cohen, Het bewaren van de oorlog. De roerige beginperiode van het Rijksinstituut voor Oorlogsocumentatie, 1945 – 1960 (Amsterdam: Boom, 2007).
was begun there in March 1946.57 While it seems that initially, all material was accepted, with the growing amount of material handed in, in later years a selection took place, according to “quality,” which depended on the subjective assessment of RIOD employee T. M. Sjenitzer-van Leening.58
The Jewish Historical Museum’s selection practices are similarly not formally set out. In general, the JHM tends to accept any material offered to it, as long as it concerns Jewish history in the Netherlands.59
Public knowledge of the respective collection’s focus may have created another sampling bias: in the case that potential donors are aware of a collection’s purported wartime focus, parts of diaries that deal exclusively with experiences during war years may be handed in, excluding potential previously written work.60 The earliest diary analyzed here begins shortly before the German occupation of the Netherlands. It is unclear whether the diaries sampled here are preceded (or succeeded) by material not included in their archival file.61
A number of JHM files include information on the acquisition of the diaries, such as correspondence with the donor. Other information is not available publicly.62 Some NIOD files include similar correspondence or other information on the sources.
Insufficient contextual information further constitutes a limitation in the analysis of the diaries. Current scholarship postulates that testimony becomes more valuable and may indeed only be analyzed correctly when embedded in a life-story approach.63 Prewar cultural
57 Annemieke van Bockxmeer, De oorlog verzameld. Het ontstaan van de collectie van het NIOD (Amsterdam: De
Bezige Bij, 2014), 18, 315.
58 Van Bockxmeer, De oorlog verzameld, 317-19. A quantitative assessment of the initial 1.000 diaries in the
collection was attempted by Sjenitzer-van Leening through detailed questionnaires the donators were asked to fill out as well as descriptions of the diaries themselves, in which she assessed the (subjective) quality of the diaries. Excerpts of some of these diaries have been published in Sjenitzer-van Leening, (ed.), Dagboekfragmenten. Looking at the file number of the NIOD diaries, one can assume that the diaries of Cohen, Weisz, and Weyel-Aleng were among the initial 1.000 diaries described by Sjenitzer-van Leening. Compare (presumably) her diary description of Weyel-Aleng (NIOD 244/668): “It is a good diary, especially concerning the part written by the woman. The tone is self-controlled, uncomplaining, smart. It is simple, open, written without affectation.” (“Het is een goed dagboek, vooral wat het aandel van de vrouw betreft. De toon is beheerst gevoelig, berustend, flink. Het is eenvoudig, open, zonder aanstellerij geschreven.”) Description of NIOD 244/668, n.d.
59 Peter Buijs (senior researcher JHM Kenniscentrum) in discussion with the author, 8 December 2016. 60
Bajohr has emphasized that diary writing during the war often constituted a continuation of the author’s pre-war diary writing. Bajohr, “Das ‘Zeitalter des Tagebuchs’?” 9.
61 As far as the author of this thesis is aware, Goudsmit (NIOD 244/1205) also wrote diaries before and after the
war. See also description of Goudsmit in the appendix.
62 Peter Buijs (senior researcher JHM Kenniscentrum), e-mail to the author, 13 January 2017.
63 Compare the approaches of Henry Greenspan, “Collaborative Interpretation of Survivors’ Accounts: A Radical
experiences of diarists influence their ideological background, values and ideals and thus also their responses in writing.64 Although embedding a life-story approach is impossible here, this thesis does give a background of the history of their writers as much as possible.
A limitation may occur in some sense that this author knew of the survival of the diary author. This certainly colored the reading of a number of diaries in which the fate of the diarist was known, influencing the interpretation of the diary and the attribution of meaning to certain phrases.65 Emotional biases when reading and analyzing the diaries thus cannot be completely precluded. While some scholars argue for emotional detachment in as much as possible when studying genocide,66 others believe that such detachment is not only impossible in examining testimony, but undesirable in events with amounts of human suffering such as the Holocaust.67
Linguistic limitations are a given when studying written documents. What a diary can express is constricted in the expressions and mannerisms of both the original writing, where personal background of the diarist shapes the form the diary takes, as well as by its later interpretation, which is influenced by the worldview of the reader.68 Translation limitations are pertinent for this thesis as well, as the author is not a native Dutch speaker.69 To counteract
Lawrence L. Langer, Holocaust Testimonies: the Ruins of Memory (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1991); Tony Kushner, “Saul Friedländer,” 70-1; Ziporah Valkhoff, Leven in een niet-bestaan: Beleving en betekenis van de
joodse onderduik (Utrecht: Stichting ICODO, 1992), 66.
64 Rachel Feldhay Brenner, “Voices from Destruction: Two Eyewitness Testimonies from the Stanislawów Ghetto,”
Holocaust and Genocide Studies 22, 2 (2008): 320 – 339.
65
Compare also Janosch Steuwer, in Bajohr and Steinbacher, “… Zeugnis ablegen bis zum letzten,” 237, who has argued that an “irritation of assumption” can occur when reading ego-documents with an unpredictable story line, in which unpredictable events and changes can take place and surprise the reader, potentially leading to new insights.
66 Ungur Ümit Üngör, “Studying Mass Violence: Pitfalls, Problems, and Promises,” Genocide Studies and
Prevention 7, 1 (2012): 69-71.
67 Saul Friedländer, The Years of Extermination: Nazi Germany and the Jews, 1939 – 1945 (London: HarperCollins,
2007), xxv – xxvi. See also Bartov, “Setting the Record Straight”, 26. The personal past and situation of the reader necessarily also colors responses to testimony. Interesting is also to read Valkhoff’s comparison of the work of Dutch historians of the immediate post-war period Abel Herzberg, Jacques Presser and Loe de Jong, of whom only Presser has handled the topic of Jews going into hiding as a part of the history of Jewish persecution. His perspective expressed admiration and thankfulness to those who helped Jews in hiding, which, according to Valkhoff, is due to his own onderduik experience. One can thus extrapolate that history writing is necessarily influenced by an author’s past and their opinions, making a completely detached history writing impossible. Compare Valkhoff, Leven in een
niet-bestaan, 57.
68 Annette Wieviorka has made clear that although testimonies are unique documents, they are produced using the
language of the time and responding to questions influenced by contemporary political and ideological issues. Wieviorka, The Era of the Witness, xii. According to Young, the “language, tropes, and selected details of their texts ultimately shape our understanding of events afterwards [emphasis in the original].” Young, “Interpreting Literary Testimony,” 407.
69
Young has argued that translated Holocaust diaries lose the quality that make them “traces of the crime, as they were for the writer who inscribed them.” Young, Writing and Rewriting the Holocaust, 14-5. Patterson has contradicted this argument: “the soul and the humanity couched in the diary, the collapse and the recovery of a life reflected in it, can penetrate even the veils of a translation. Patterson, Along the Edge, 15.
problems of translation, and in order to preserve the original wording as well as to ensure precision, the original passages are provided in footnotes.
Comparing diaries and drawing generalized statements from them is inherently problematic.70 To date, qualitative analyses prevail.71 And indeed, these are valuable: it is precisely the individual variety of “this jumble of voices that – to draw on Friedländer – expresses the feeling of disbelief and that forces one to rethink presumed secured knowledge.”72
Generalization should be possible on certain elements that can be found in diaries, while others, such as the concrete perception of certain events, do not lend themselves to systematic categorization.
Excerpts from a particular diary provided here should not be seen as exemplary of the diary in its totality. Therefore, this thesis presents diary descriptions in the appendix, thus aiming to contextualize them.
The translations of the diaries are my own, while the original text is provided as a footnote. The original wording is preserved, while orthographical errors are corrected.73 Errors such as the misspelling of camp Vught as Vugt are marked with sic. The underlining of words in the original diaries is kept in the footnotes and italicized in the main text. Additions, changes or omissions to a text by this author are marked with brackets.
70 Frank Bajohr, in Bajohr, Frank and Sybille Steinbacher (eds.), “… Zeugnis ablegen bis zum letzten” Tagebücher
und persönliche Zeugnisse aus der Zeit des Nationalsozialismus und des Holocaust (Göttingen: Wallstein, 2015),
226-7; Nechama Tec, Resilience and courage: women, men, and the Holocaust (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003), 271-2; Jolande Withuis, “Zonder naam, zonder ouders, vogelvrij; ondergedoken kinderen en de complexe constellatie van verlating, woede en dankbaarheid”, in Valkhoff, Leven in een niet-bestaan, 49-50. Janosch Steuwer has argued that comparisons may be possible when examining the terms in which diarists thought and which logic was the base of these perceptions. “Man kann immer nur große Pluralität feststellen, dass Leute Ereignisse unterschiedlich wahrnahmen. Wenn man aber danach fragt, was die Begriffe waren, in denen gedacht wurde, und welche Logiken den Wahrnehmungen zu Grunde lagen, dann kommt man weiter.” In Bajohr and Steinbacher (eds.), “... Zeugnis ablegen,” 227.
71 Feliks Tych has alluded to the possibility that a quantitative analysis could take place if a larger source base of
diaries is created, for example by including more unpublished sources. Feliks Tych, “Witnessing the Holocaust: Polish Diaries, Memoirs and Reminiscences,” in Nazi Europe and the Final Solution, eds. David Bankier and Israel Gutman (Jerusalem: Yad Vashem, 2003), 175-6.
72 “Es ist das Stimmengewirr, das – um mit Friedländer zu sprechen – das Gefühl der Fassungslosigkeit ausdrückt
und das zum Überdenken der scheinbar gesicherten Erkenntnisse zwingt.” Heim, “‘Beim Schreiben,’” 96.
73
Thus following the methodology of projects such as the Editionsprojekt Judenverfolgung, for example in Wolf Gruner et al. (eds.), vol. 1 of Die Verfolgung und Ermordung der europäischen Juden durch das
nationalsozialistische Deutschland 1933 – 1945: Deutsches Reich 1933 – 1937 (München: Oldenbourg Verlag,
1
Onderduik
This chapter will deal with what diarists record on their daily lives in hiding, expanding knowledge of the various experiences of Dutch Jews in hiding during the Second World War. First introducing the Dutch context of the experience in hiding, it will examine what diarists record of their daily lives. A special focus will be placed on what functions diary writing had and what role it played in the diarists’ daily lives.
In general, the experience of onderduik by Jews, both in the Netherlands and elsewhere has not been extensively studied.74 In the Dutch sphere, a large number of onderduik diaries and memoirs and regional studies have been published,75 but these present individual testimonies rather than creating quantitative overviews.
Hiding by Jews was less common in the Netherlands than in Belgium and France, possibly because reactions to persecution generally occurred within legal boundaries. For instance, the Jewish Council and leading religious figures discouraged going into hiding.76 In addition, German authorities approached deportation of the Jewish population in Belgium more violently than in the Netherlands, which may have given the Jewish population there a more
74 Gunnar Paulsson has argued that evasion as a category of Jewish response to persecution has been unjustly
neglected, for which he gives both psychological and political reasons, such as the stigma attached to going into hiding rather than suffering alongside the majority of the Jewish community. Gunnar S. Paulsson, “Evading the Holocaust: The Unexplored Continent of Holocaust Historiography,” in vol. 1 of Remembering for the Future: The
Holocaust in an Age of Genocide, eds. John K. Roth and Elisabeth Maxwell (Houdsmills: Palgrave, 2001), 304-6.
Many issues concerning daily life in hiding so far have remained unknown, including aspects such as sexuality, pregnancy and sexual exploitation, death, going into hiding with others, and so on.
75
See, for example, Tanja van Fransecky, Sie wollten mich umbringen, dazu mussten sie mich erst haben. Hilfe für
verfolgte Juden in den deutsch besetzten Niederlanden 1940 – 1945 (Berlin: Lukas Verlag, 2016); Janneke te Hoven
and Ruud Spruit, Onderduik in West-Friesland: herinneringen van joodse kinderen en hun redders (Midwoud: Uitgeverij Peter Sasburg, 2009); Meike Jongejan and Eddy van der Noord, Door het oog van de naald: Joodse
onderduik in Friesland (Grou: Uitgeverij Louise, 2012); Marcel Prins and Peter Henk Steenhuis, Andere Achterhuizen: Verhalen van Joodse onderduikers (Amsterdam: Athenaeum, 2010); Almar Tjepkema and Jaap
Walvis, ‘Ondergedoken’: het ondergrondse leven in Nedlerand tijdens de Tweede Wereldoorlog (Weesp: De Haan, 1985). A number of works have dealt with the experience of children in hiding, for example Bloeme Evers-Emden and Bert-Jan Flim, Onderdoken geweest: Een afgesloten verleden? (Kampen: Uitgeverij Kok, 1995); Diane L. Wolf,
Beyond Anne Frank: hidden children and postwar families in Holland (Berkely: University of California Press,
2007).
76
Pim Griffioen and Ron Zeller, Jodenvervolging in Nederland, Frankrijk en Belgie 1940 – 1945: Overeenkomsten,
verschillen, oorzaken (Amsterdam: Boom, 2011), 686; De Jong, in Marnix Croes and Peter Tammes, ‘Gif laten wij niet voortbestaan’: een onderzoek naar de overlevingskansen van joden in de Nederlandse gemeenten, 1940 – 1945
salient reason to go “dive under.”77 Finally, Ben Braber has postulated that Jewish immigrants in France and Belgium tended to be recent migrants, on average less integrated than the Dutch Jews, making them more willing and able to uproot their livelihood and go into hiding.78
Estimates of how many Jews went into hiding in the Netherlands range from 20.000 to 28.000, while the number of survivors is likely 10.000 to 16.000.79 Going into hiding was difficult. Not only did individuals lose their autonomy and found themselves completely relying on those hiding them, they also had to make a choice based on assessing the risks of going into hiding versus being deported, a relatively vague and uncertain danger.80 Connections were necessary to go into “private hiding” or to hide with the help of organizations, which became very active only from mid-1942.81 Many who went into hiding privately were eventually helped by an illegal organization that supported them financially, helped organize food, and facilitated communication.82 The place of hiding influenced not only daily life, but also survival rates, and a difference between rural or urban areas has been noted.83
77
Ben Braber, This cannot happen here: integration and Jewish resistance in the Netherlands, 1940 – 1945 (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2013), 121.
78 Braber, This cannot happen here, 121.
79 Presser estimated that there were 20.000 Jews in hiding, of which less than 10.000 survived. Presser in Valkhoff,
Leven in een niet-bestaan, 60. Herzberg has estimated that 16.000 Jews were in hiding, of which half did not survive
the war, in Valkhoff, Leven in een niet-bestaan, 60. Marnix Croes and Peter Tammes have calculated that 27.995 Jews went into hiding, of which 16.100 survived. Croes and Tammes in Braber, This cannot happen here, 118. Bert-Jan Flim’s estimate is that about 25.000 Jews went into hiding, of which 18.000 did not survive. Bert-Bert-Jan Flim, “Opportunities for Dutch Jews to Hide from the Nazis, 1942 – 1945,” in Dutch Jews as perceived by themselves and
by others: proceedings of the eight international symposium on the history of the Jews in the Netherlands, eds.
Chaya Brasz and Yosef Kaplan (Leiden: Brill, 2001), 289. De Jong has estimated the number of Jews in hiding to be around 25.000, of which around 16.000 are said to have survived the war, in Withuis, “Zonder naam,” 10. For Germany, Marion Kaplan has estimated that between 10.000 and 12.000 German Jews went into hiding, of which a quarter survived the war. Marion A. Kaplan, Between Dignity and Despair: Jewish Life in Nazi Germany (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), 203.
80 Braber, This cannot happen here, 118. 81
Withuis, “Zonder naam,” 11. Flim has shown that a large amount of Jews went into hiding between May and September of 1943, relating this to what he sees as an increase in the willingness of Dutch Jews to go into hiding in this time period, also linking it to the professionalization of underground organizations that helped individuals going into hiding. Flim, “Opportunities for Dutch Jews,” 293, 297-8.
82
Griffioen and Zeller, Jodenvervolging in Nederland, 678.
83 Flim has written that privately organized hiding places, in Amsterdam in particular, seem to have been relatively
unsuccessful, attributing this to the large presence of a police force. Flim, “Opportunities for Dutch Jews,” 296. Presser also has looked at the differentiation between going as well as being in hiding in the rural versus urban areas. He has postulated that the population of more sparsely populated rural areas tended to show more solidarity with those in hiding, to be attributed to social pressure, while the higher possibility of having one’s being in hiding known meant that one was more susceptible for betrayal. Presser, vol 2. of Ondergang, 242.
Daily life in hiding
The diarists’ social surroundings influenced how, when and where a hiding place was found. Fientje Weyel-Aleng narrates going into hiding as a conscious choice “to save our own lives.”84 Asserting her agency in the decision to “dive under,” she writes: “[…] I knew what I was doing when I preferred to disappear with my husband instead of letting him go to a camp, because what the consequence thereof is, every Jew and almost every Aryan knows.”85
Mau Andriesse also records going into hiding as a choice to which the only alternative is deportation: “[we received notice] that we had to move on 10 April to Vught (or go into hiding).”86 Abraham Cohen writes that his original plan had been to flee with his family to Switzerland, but because of the high risks, he went into hiding with the help of acquaintances of his Christian sister-in-law.87
David Koekenheim’s experience shows the necessity of both personal connections and luck to go into hiding, as well as the insecurity that characterized the entire process. Koekenheim first considers going into hiding in the summer of 1941, and initially rents a room to avoid spending nights at home and risk getting arrested. He eventually decides to marry his girlfriend and attempts to find a place for them to both go into hiding. His friend Ger, who had previously offered to hide Koekenheim and his brother, does not extend the offer to Koekenheim and his wife. Koekenheim records feelings of guilt towards his brother, who no longer has a hiding place, nevertheless realizing that, should he have left his wife to go into hiding, “my conscience could never rest.”88
Three days before their planned deportation to Germany, Ger brings the news that a hiding place has been found for the both Koekenheim and his wife, which the former describes as “the nicest present that I have and will ever receive.”89
Koekenheim’s thankfulness to those who help him and his wife find a place to hide is typical for many diarists. The realization that diarists’ presence causes both stress and danger for
84 “Alweer 14 hele dagen en nachten, dat we alles achterlieten om ons eigen leventje te redden. Dat wil nog heel wat
zeggen en daar zat ook heel wat aan vast, ook al lijkt het zo eenvoudig [...].” Weyel-Aleng, 24 September 1942, NIOD 244/668.
85 “[...] ik wist wel wat ik deed, toen ik er de voorkeur aan gaf met mijn man te verdwijnen, i.p.v. hem naar een
kamp te laten gaan, want wat daar het vervolg op is, dat weet iedere Jood en zelfs bijna iedere Arier maar al te goed [...].” Weyel-Aleng, 22 September 1942, NIOD 244/668.
86
“[...] wij per 10 April moesten verhuizen naar Vught (of onderduiken).” Andriesse, n.d. (presumably April 1943), NIOD 244/1786.
87 Cohen, 26 October 1942, NIOD 244/823. 88
“Dan zou ik nooit meer een ogenblik rust hebben. En als dat later nog eens alles weer in orde zou komen, mijn geweten zou nooit meer tot rust komen.” Koekenheim, 17 July 1941, NIOD 244/1208.
89 “Zo had Ger [… mij] het mooiste cadeau te geven, dat ik ooit in mijn leven heb ontvangen en zal ontvangen.”
those hiding them evokes guilt and the feeling of being in debt. The wish not to represent a burden for the helpers is strongly expressed. Koekenheim writes: “To all these people, or better said, friends, we will be indebted to our entire lives.”90
Isidore Blitz expresses the worry that other people are in danger because of him.91
Koekenheim expresses his desire to repay after the war what he perceives as selfless help by “helping everyone as much as we are able to.”92
Blitz records the wish to express his gratitude, ending his diary with a word of thanks to his helpers: “What all these people have done for us and the way in which they have done it: I can’t find any words to express my thanks for this. But believe me that my soul is full of thanks and may the Good God give me the opportunity that I may profess my thanks to them in reality.”93
Gratitude is linked with pressure to act in a friendly manner. Koekenheim writes of having to keep up good spirits for those hiding them: “In the end, we asked to be taken up here, and we must not spread a bad mood. Then they surely would regret their kindness and our attitude must never give rise to this.”94
Diarists also realize that they are very much dependent on those hiding, causing them anxiety and fear for their personal safety. Indeed, a member of the family hiding Koekenheim repeatedly threatens to report them to the police, causing much worry to those in hiding and her family.95 Weyel-Aleng writes of being reliant on the goodwill on the person hiding them: “I don’t want to think that there may come a day that the farmer will get scared and we could be homeless.”96
She and her husband Jaap realize their vulnerability when the farmer confesses to the mayor of the town that he is hiding Jews and the mayor recommends that he turn them in to the authorities. Weyel-Aleng’s writing conveys their reliance and lack of alternative: “It is
90
“Aan al deze mensen of beter vrienden hebben wij tijdens ons gehele leven verplichtingen.” Koekenheim, 24 October 1942, NIOD 244/1208.
91 Blitz, 19 September 1944, NIOD 244/1242.
92 “[...] waarbij wij te allen tijde een ieder zullen helpen, zoveel als in ons vermogen ligt.” Koekenheim, 31
December 1942, NIOD 244/1208.
93 “Wat al deze menschen zo anbaatzachtig voor ons gedaan hebben en de wijze waarop zij het gedaan hebben: ik
kan echter geen woorden vinden om mijn dank hiervoor te uiten. Maar geloof mij dat mijn gemoed vol van dank is en geve de Goede God dat ik nog eens de gelegenheid moge komen ons hun allen nog eens daadwerkelijk mijn dank te kunnen betuigen.” Blitz, 5 May 1945, NIOD 244/1242.
94 “Tenslotte hebben wij erom gevraagd hier te worden opgenomen, en moeten wij hier geen slechte stemming
brengen. Dan zouden zij immers spijt krijgen van hun goedheid en daar mag onze houding nooit aanleiding toe geven.” Koekenheim, 24 October 1942, NIOD 244/1208.
95 Inter alia Koekenheim, 24 September 1942, NIOD 244/1208.
96 “Ik moet er niet aan denken, dat er ook nog wel eens een dag kon komen, dat de boer angst zou krijgen en wij
difficult, but at the moment there is nothing that can be done. We need to accept our fate, however difficult it may be for me.”97
Diarists’ utter powerlessness is also illustrated by Cohen, who writes of the fear of being betrayed when the couple that is hiding them have a fight.98
Diarists sometimes record a sense of distance from those hiding them, and negative feelings can arise. Weyel-Aleng narrates how those hiding them express their incomprehension how she and her husband can tolerate a life in hiding. In response, she writes that their helpers cannot image the fear and persecution she has experienced the past months.99 Because they fear losing their hiding place, diarists cannot verbally express their disagreement with those hiding them. In moments of frustration, “it becomes clear that one is in a stranger’s house.”100 Koekenheim writes of his desire to express his feelings without fearing the consequences: “We are very lucky here and, in their own way, the people are very kind to us, but after the war I hope to be goddamn able to say ‘no’ again.”101
Conflicts between diarists and others people in hiding do occur. In his diary, Koekenheim accuses a couple that joins them in hiding of being ungrateful towards their helpers. At the same time, he emphasizes the need to keep up friendly relations with them because it is unclear how long they will be living together .It is a matter of courtesy towards the family hiding them.102 On the other hand, the arrival of additional people in hiding could also bring positive distraction from daily routine.103 Being in hiding with a relative or partner is often seen as a source of solace. Blitz writes of the comfort he finds that his daughter is in hiding with him: “It is very lucky for me that Carry is here with me […].”104
Going into hiding initially can be perceived as a relief from persecution, particularly in the first days. Weyel-Aleng writes: “[…] the moment on 10 Sept[ember] [19]42 when we stepped out of the train in Aalden [sic], I got the idea: ‘Is the war still going on? Does the persecution of the Jews exist here? Everything is so quiet here and so different from what we
97 “Het is hard, maar er is op ’t ogenblik niets aan te doen. We moeten ons in ons lot schikken, hoe moelijk me het
ook zal vallen.” Weyel-Aleng, 26 October 1942.
98 Cohen, 28 February 1943, NIOD 244/823.
99 Weyel-Aleng, 22 September 1942, NIOD 244/668.
100 “Op zulke momenten voel je weer zo echt duidelijk, dat je toch bij vreemden in huis bent.” Koekenheim, 25
Feburary 1943, NIOD 244/1208.
101 “We hebben het best hier en op hun manier zijn de mensen bijzonder goed voor ons, maar na de oorlog hoop ik
Godverdomme nog eens ‘nee’ te kunnen zeggen.” Koekenheim, 27 November 1943, NIOD 244/1208.
102
Koekenheim, 9 February 1943, NIOD 244/1208.
103 Koekenheim, 18 June 1943, NIOD 244/1208.
104 “Het is nog een groot geluk vor mij dat Carry bij mij is en dat wij bij brave goede mensen zijn aangeland die echt
were used to recently. Here we may be able to become even more at ease.’ And indeed, we are recovering here.”105 The distance from the outside world, and thus the war, can be experienced as positive. Jaap Weyel writes of a clandestine walk outside: “Could there really still be war, we ask ourselves. One cannot believe it, when one walks here so calmly.”106
At the beginning of her time in hiding, Weyel-Aleng writes: “When you heard talk of other people, who had already been hiding for some time, you would say: ‘How do these people tolerate this!’ And still, I’ll be honest, the days do pass by fairly quickly, of course not like in Amsterdam, with your work and the necessary distractions (which, recently, consisted of evacuation, deportation, work camps,
razzias and so on), but they do pass.”107
However, the relief soon fades, and the loss of freedom begins to weigh heavily: “Today, it has been a day and 7 months ago, since we left Amsterdam; it is beautiful weather today and we…. we are going crazy, insane from desire for freedom,”108
writes Weyel-Aleng. The loss of their independence is frequently lamented. Koekenheim records: “The dependence [on helpers] is something very difficult, especially for those who are used to being self-sufficient at home, something that is natural for those our age.”109
Not being able to freely go outside affects some diarists strongly. Koekenheim writes of “suffering more and more from the feeling of being locked in and sometimes I feel cramped.”110
Glimpses through the window at the outside world only worsen the situation: “[w]hat is the use if you live from day to the next, sometimes counting the hours, in your cage, seeing the sun shining outside; other people are walking around freely and you are sitting here locked in, always waiting?”111
105
“[...] want laat ik eerlijk zijn, toen wij donderdag 10 Sept[ember] [19]42 te Aalden uit de trein stapten, kwam bij mijzelf het idee op: ‘Zou het nog oorlog zijn? Bestaat hier Jodenvervolging? Allse is hier zo rustig, zo heil en anders als wij de laatste tijd gewend waren. Hier zullen wij misschien zelfs nog iets rustiger worden.’ En inderdaad, wij komen hier bij.” Weyel-Aleng, 22 September 1942, NIOD 244/668.
106
“Zou er nu werkelijk nog oorlog zijn, vragen wij ons af. Het is niet te geloven, als je hier zoo rustig wandelt.” Weyel, 14 September 1942.
107 “Als je van andere mensen hoorde spreken, die al enige tijd gedoken zijn, zou je zeggen: ‘Hoe houden mensen ’t
uit!’ En toch, laat ik eerlijk zijn, de dagen gaan toch tamelijk vlug voorbij, natuurlijk niet zoals in A’dam, waar je je werk en de nodige afleiding (de laatste tijd bestaande uit evacuatie, deportatie, werkkamp, razzia enz.) had, maar toch komen ze om.” Weyel-Aleng, 22 September 1942, NIOD 244/668.
108 “Het is vandaag een jaar en 7 maanden geleden, dat we A’dam verlieten; het is heerlijk weer vandaag en wij....
wij worden gek, krankzinnig van verlangen naar de vrijheid.” Weyel-Aleng, 10 April 1944, NIOD 244/668.
109
“De afhankelijkheid is iets heel ergs vooral als men het thuis zo zelfstandig gewend is, als wij, wat onze leeftijd vanzelfprekend meebrengt.” Koekenheim, 24 October 1942, NIOD 244/1208.
110 “Steeds meer en meer heb ik last van dat opgesloten gevoel en krijg het er soms benauwd van.” Koekenheim, 18
June 1943, NIOD 244/1208.
111 “Wat is het goede eraan, als je van de ene dag in de andere, soms de uren tellend, in een hokje moet leven, buiten
de zon ziet schijnen; andere mensen vrij ziet rondlopen en zelf opgesloten zit, wachtend, altijd maar wachtend?” Weyel-Aleng, 23 April 1943, NIOD 244/668.
