Such Good Girls (24 page)

And twelve years after that, Valent was still describing it as “one of the most unusual, historically unique gatherings I’d experienced. It was like a family gathering where I could sit down and talk to anybody there and it was like talking to a family member. We talked the same language, could understand each other’s stories. We were very tolerant, resonating with each other in a way that had never happened to me before.”

Flora was overwhelmed. “I was somebody finally! I had a specialty. But it was not the specialty I wanted. I wanted to be famous for something other than the Holocaust.” At least the Gathering enabled her to feel suddenly that she was no longer a hidden hidden child, that she could finally share her knowledge, wisdom, and even her gallows humor with others.

Twenty years later, Carla still got goose pimples just thinking about it. After the Gathering, Ed and Carla got their car out of the Marriott Hotel garage and drove right into the teeth of a tremendous thunderstorm spiked with lightning bolts—a storm of biblical proportions, Ed thought, as if God himself was showing him the significance of what had just happened.

What Sophie remembered twenty years later was “crying for three days as I realized the scope of it all, with all these other professionals crying. It was only at the convention that I realized I belonged. I was overwhelmed, on top of which Newsday ran an article with a photo of me in my communion dress at the age of seven.” Colleagues of Sophie who had worked with her for years saw the photo—perhaps never has a Jewish child looked more angelically Christian—but they didn’t know the full story or what to say. It was hard for her. Like Flora, she felt pursued by the Holocaust. “I’m very empathic, but it’s very hard for me to accept kindness and sympathy.” Yet when one coworker, an American Jew, came into her office a few weeks after the Gathering to discuss the Newsday article and sat down, something happened that had not happened before the Gathering, not even with her own mother: Sophie cried.

It took many hidden children until the Gathering in 1991 to confront their pasts head-on. But memory, like faith itself, can be a mirage. One buries a memory, remembered in great detail, and finds, on digging it up, quite another.

Sophie, of course, had learned something about this at the age of eleven, when she found out that her conscious identity had been largely counterfeit. The discovery in 1948 that she was a Jew became a greater trauma even than the hazily recalled losses of her father and other relatives. In fact it would be another thirty years before she was able, with her mother’s help, to unearth the emotional reality of her childhood.

In the late 1970s, when Laura was taking a course on European history at Hunter College, she mentioned her wartime experiences, and her professor asked her to put her memories down on paper and present them to the class. She balked, worried that it would give her nightmares. Why revisit all of it now, when she was in her late sixties and doing fine? She had friends and grandchildren. Sophie and her husband, David, however, thought it might be good for Laura and encouraged her to write the essay. Sophie knew that the experience pressed on her mother’s consciousness, that she felt a need to talk about it. Maybe if she wrote it down, she would stop trying to engage Sophie in conversation.

So Laura sat down and handwrote twenty pages. It was a staccato montage of scenes, some only a sentence long. It was eerily free of emotion. The mentions of persecution and atrocities spoke for themselves.

Sophie and David went to hear Laura deliver her paper to her class. Afterward Sophie wondered what she had been thinking.

“First I used to throw my daughter across the ventilating shaft,” Laura addressed the class, reading from her manuscript. “I had to save my child, no matter how… . The Germans came three times to get me to the gas chambers, but every time I pleaded with them in German and they left… . It was much harder the fourth time, they insisted I come with them, then they changed their mind and asked for the child only, they said the Führer loved children, he would take good care of her.”

Sophie thought, How had she made the Germans change their minds, not once, but four times? The mother and daughter she was speaking about were them. Sophie had always regarded herself as a fatherless war orphan, not a survivor of the Holocaust. Without really being aware of it, she had put the memories away on a shelf, along with her only surviving toy from childhood, Refugee the bear.

“On my way home from work I had to walk outside the Jewish ghetto wall but there was a space through which you could see the ghetto inmates,” Laura went on. “I could never pass by without fear, though sometimes I envied them, my life was so miserable, if not for my child I would have gone in there to be done with.”

For a moment, Sophie felt as if she no longer knew her mother, just as she hadn’t really known her then, or known herself, or understood the unfathomable forces of history that had murdered 90 percent of the Jews in Poland and left them with only the smallest amount of space in which to breathe.

“I never knew what to expect, coming home from work,” her mother continued, clutching the pages in her hands. “My child started hating me, running away whenever she saw me coming. I realized one day I was on the way to becoming insane, I was driving both of us to a lunatic asylum. On that day I changed completely, I tried to regain the confidence of my child, gradually she started trusting me again.”

And all this, Sophie thought, while her mother was coping with the loss of almost everyone she had loved, and working for the Nazis.

Her mother had been the difference between having memories, however painful, and being other people’s memories, although she wondered if there would have been anyone left to remember them.

Finally, after seventeen pages, it came to an end: “I am not sure I did the right thing digging in my past,” her mother said. “There are still nights when I wake up screaming. I cannot forget the sound of German boots, it still makes me shudder. This account should be called the ‘story of a miracle.’”

In the early 1950s, after five years in Israel, Carla and Ed Lessing lived in Holland for a year and saw the van Geenens often, either at their house in Delft or at the Lessings’ near The Hague. Now that they were no longer forced together in close quarters, they became genuinely close. Mrs. van Geenen, once moody and frightened, was very loving, and Walter van Geenen was especially attentive, as was his married eldest daughter, Corrie, who took after her personable, liberal father. She didn’t seem in the least resentful that the overcrowding in the house during the war had pushed her to marry early. When Ed, now thirty, was suddenly called up by the Dutch army, Walter actually offered to hide him—again. Ed and Carla, however, used their U.S. visas to return to the New York City area, where they have lived ever since.

Every five years or so they would visit Holland and see the van Geenen family. When Walter died in the late 1960s, Carla remained close to his daughter Corrie. When Corrie died of a brain tumor, Carla stayed close to her daughter Mieke and her daughter. She now knew four generations of the family that had protected her. It was only after both the elder van Geenens were gone that any of the children expressed regrets about hiding Carla, her mother, and brother. In the late 1990s, one of the van Geenen sons, now in his sixties, spoke up to Carla, saying, We suffered too. We also had a horrible time. He was under the mistaken impression that Carla’s mother could have paid his parents more money after the war to compensate them. In fact, Carla’s mother had little—during the war, she sold off her wedding presents in order to pay the van Geenens anything at all—and was being subsidized herself by her businessman brother.

Walter neither sought nor wanted official recognition for hiding Jews during the war, but he received it posthumously in 1979 when Yad Vashem, the Israeli memorial to the Holocaust, granted him and his wife the status of Righteous Among the Nations. Today the van Geenens are among five thousand Dutch so honored, second in number only to Poland’s rescuers of Jews.

For Carla’s husband, Ed, the postwar revelations were nothing short of stunning. In 1992, he and Carla, still freshly invigorated by the Gathering in Manhattan, flew to Holland for Amsterdam’s Hidden Child Congress. In advance, Ed wrote the Netherlands Institute for War Documentation to obtain the contact information for Margrethus Oskam, the unsmiling Dutch chief of police who had saved his life during the war, and whom he hoped to see again and thank personally. Oskam had defied more than the Nazis; he came from a family of ardent Jew-hating, Nazi-sympathizing Dutch people. That fact may have allowed him to escape German suspicion, but keeping a secret of that magnitude from loved ones couldn’t have been an easy task. Moreover, Ed found out that Oskam had personally hidden thirty Jewish men, women, and children.

The Institute for War Documentation wrote back that both Oskam and his wife had died, but they were forwarding his letter to their son, Margrethus Oskam Jr., a retired plumber, who invited him to visit.

After Oskam Jr. received Ed at his home in Holland, Ed recounted the events of December 29, 1943, and his narrow escape from the German raid that claimed the lives of the other Resistance fighters. “Listen,” Ed asked him, “do you know if the men had any sisters or brothers with whom I could speak and tell them about these last moments?”

Oskam Jr. smiled. He obviously took after his mother, not his poker-faced father. “My father wasn’t a very talkative man,” he replied, “but, Mr. Lessing, there is one thing he told me that I’m sure of: none of the men in the hut were arrested that morning.”

“It can’t be!” Ed said.

“Some people came to warn them. They all escaped.”

“That was me and my friend,” Ed said, dumbfounded.

Ed’s cousin suggested that Ed go on a popular call-in radio show, Address Unknown, on the Catholic network, hosted by a Jew, Hans van Willegenburg, to see if he could reconnect with the survivors of his Resistance cell. They rushed him on the air, where he told his story about the miraculously surviving group, thinking to himself, Who the hell’s going to care about this?

At the end of the show, he was led out of the sound booth to a room where a dozen phones were ringing off the hook. Among the messages Ed was handed was one that said, “My brother was with you in the hut, but he doesn’t live in Holland anymore, but I’ll tell him… .” Another said: “Ed, I was with you in the hut and I live right around the corner from the radio studio. Come and see me when you’re done.”

It was almost too much to be believed. When Ed rang the doorbell of the apartment complex around the corner, a large woman he didn’t recognize buried him in an embrace.

“You don’t remember me, do you?” she said excitedly. “I was one of the couriers. I brought guns and newspapers, all kinds of stuff. Thank God you survived! I didn’t think you’d make it! Come, come see my husband.”

In the next room, a silver-haired man he did recognize as Louis van Tiggelen, one of the Resistance fighters from the hut, rose from his chair. They hugged and cried and reminisced, amazed again to be alive at all. Lou showed him a couple of photographs he’d taken, one a picture of Ed at seventeen in the hut with one of the others, Herman Munninghoff, and another picture of the entire group at the hut’s crude table. Ed teased Lou for taking any photos that could have been used by the Gestapo to identify them. Then Ed asked after his buddy, Jan Karman, the one who had escaped with him that day.

“I’m sorry, Ed, but Jan was arrested with two other Resistance men a couple of months later in another German raid and executed.”

“I didn’t know,” Ed murmured, bowing his head. “Oskam’s son told me everyone had escaped and I was hoping …”

After the Hidden Child Congress, but before he and Carla left for America, Ed mentioned to Margrethus Oskam Jr. that he’d like a splinter of wood or shard of glass from the hut as a souvenir. Oskam led Ed into the forest near the town of De Lage Vuursche toward the site of the Resistance fighters’ hut. What had been a dense undergrowth of brush and Christmas tree–shaped shrubs had become in the last half century a forest of stately, soaring pines that bore little resemblance to what Ed remembered. When Oskam stopped and said, “It was here,” Ed saw nothing at first. The hut was long gone. The only clue that this was the location of the hut that had been their home, and where Ed and the others had once risked their lives, was a slight depression in the ground, where they had buried their cache of stolen weapons and uniforms.

That December Ed was flown back to Holland to tape a television show, also hosted by van Willegenburg, to be aired on Christmas Day. With the Oskam family and his own cousins in the audience, Ed recounted everything for the host: the hiding, the hut, the raid, the escape, his mother finding them on a bicycle, which she then gave to Jan Karman, who didn’t make it, and how Ed had just visited his grave the day before.

“Let me tell you something, Mr. Lessing,” the host said. “We’ve got part of a diary from your buddy, in which he describes the whole thing and how it was.”

But that’s impossible, Ed thought to himself. He was executed seven weeks after the raid. There’s no way he could have written a diary. Ed didn’t want to be a difficult guest, though, so all he said was, “That’s very interesting.”

“Mr. Lessing,” the host went on, “I want you to know that your friend is here to talk to you.”

As chills traveled the length of Ed’s spine, a door to the studio opened and out walked a tall man, who took Ed’s hand and said, “Thank God you’re alive, Ed. I’m Herman Munninghoff.” Ed was in shock. “Ed, you convinced Lou van Tiggelen that you were with Karman, but it was me—not Jan. Your mother gave me her bike and saved my life.”

“Oh, my God!” Ed said, hugging Herman. “It was so long ago,” he added, by way of excusing his confusion.

“After I took the bicycle, I wasn’t more than a mile away when I was stopped by a German. He made me get off the bike and face a little pump house and spread my arms and legs, and then he frisked me for weapons. Thank God your mother made us bury them! I knew German,” Herman continued, “and I went on the offensive a bit because I could tell what the German wanted. So I said, ‘What the heck are you doing?! I’m coming from night school and my mom is holding dinner for me. What do you want? Do you want this bicycle? Do you want the flashlight? Here, take it! Just let me keep the bicycle so I can get home to my mother.’ And he asked me what I was studying and I told him I was studying to be a notary public, which was true, if you remember, Ed. And then he let me pass and I pedaled away from my third brush with death that day.”