A Chosen Few (20 page)

Alex’s eyes widened. He had never been on a trip to anywhere.

“I’m going away forever,” Isaac said with breathless excitement. “You want to come?”

Alex nodded his head eagerly and said “Yes!” and fifteen-year-old Isaac Lipschits took off with little Alex to join the Haganah and fight for a Jewish state.

Their first stop was Putte, a Dutch town on the Belgian border that has a Jewish cemetery for the Antwerp community. The Belgians dig up graves when enough years have gone by and the relatives have all died off, whereas the Dutch don’t. Because Jewish law requires that graves remain undisturbed, the Antwerp Jews bury their dead across the Dutch border in Putte. Between 1945 and 1948 the Haganah led recruits into a house in Putte, through the house, and out another door, and then they were in Belgium, from where they took a tram to Antwerp. Isaac and Alex stayed overnight in Antwerp’s Jewish orphanage, which was also a Haganah center. They spent the next day there as well, too excited to do anything but talk. That night, they were taken by train to Kortrijk. On the way they passed through Brussels, where Alex, full of curiosity on his great adventure, pointed at a pile of yellow tubular things someone was selling. “What’s that?” he asked his brother. Alex could not remember having ever before seen a banana.

A car was waiting at the Kortrijk train station to drive them over the French border. A pre-arranged hand signal was flashed at the French customs agent, and they drove through without being asked a question. The car drove the boys to Lille, where they boarded a train to Paris. A taxi at the Gare du Nord took them to another orphanage, where they slept. The next night, they were put on
another train for Marseilles, and from there they went to the nearby town of Cassis, where there was a Jewish sports camp. What would a Jewish sports camp be doing on the Mediterranean coast in late 1946? There Isaac and three hundred others received their first military training. Then they boarded a ship for Palestine. At the port a French official was handed a stack of fifteen passports for the entire group of three hundred. The official did not seem troubled by this discrepancy, and with an appropriately bored expression he stamped the passports one at a time until he had been through the pile about a dozen times and decided that was enough stamps. The French had never liked the British Mandate for Palestine and did little to obstruct either Jewish Zionists or Arab anti-Zionists from operating in the area.

A few months later, the British agreed to give up the Mandate, and on November 29, 1947, the United Nations voted by a margin of three votes for a partitioning of the area, thereby creating the State of Israel. It was a small state that lacked defendable borders, and the Arabs vowed to drive the Jews out by force of arms. Azzam Pasha, secretary general of the Arab League, promised to wage “a war of extermination.” As has so often happened since, his words, perfectly chosen to arouse his Arab constituency, also served to better mobilize his adversaries. Young European Jews like Isaac Lipschits were not going to sit tight and hope for the best in another war of extermination. That had been their parents’ mistake. The Haganah was frantically bringing in survivors from Europe. By the end of 1947, about forty thousand recruits were ready or in training, although they had only rifles, Sten guns, and machine guns. After the British abandoned the Mandate, the Haganah could bring in thousands more. It needed fighters. The Arabs had also recruited a Liberation Army, but in addition had almost thirty thousand regular army troops from Arab states.

Isaac, along with seventeen others from the Amsterdam orphanage, was assigned to a Dutch-speaking border unit. Its commander, who came from the northern Dutch town of Groningen, had served as a demolitions expert in the British Army during the war. Alex was left in the hands of an organization called the Youth Aliyah, which was placing children in homes and even operating entire villages. Aaron Waks was working for this same organization in DP camps.

While fighting on the border, Isaac lost track of his brother. When the Arab-Israeli war was over, he and a friend traveled
through Israel looking for Alex. Now Isaac began to reflect on what he had done. The Germans had forced Alex to separate from his father and mother when he was two years old. Then when he was seven and had another father and mother, Isaac had done the same thing to him. Isaac was starting to feel guilty when he thought of Alex alone in this ungentle new country. You ask a seven-year-old if he wants to take a trip with you and leave forever. What a question. It was crazy. Along with guilt came panic: What if something had happened to him? More than a thousand Jews had already been killed.

Isaac served on the Israeli border for thirteen months. Then, unaccustomed to the lack of water in the desert, his kidneys gave out. This young survivors’ country intended to keep its forces at a lean fighting weight. Isaac was told that Israel did not need kidney cases, and he was sent back to Holland to recuperate.

But before he left, he learned of a Dutch-speaking kibbutz and there he found Alex. Now he realized that he had no home to offer him. Alex could have a home in Israel. Isaac went back to Holland without him, and Alex, the little Jewish boy from Rotterdam who had become the little Christian boy from south Holland, was now called David, part of a new generation of Israeli citizens.

A
NTWERP WAS ABOUT TO LOSE
its first postwar Jewish couple. After more than a year of traveling between Israel and Antwerp, Sam Perl and Anna had bought an apartment in Tel Aviv. In 1950 they shipped their furniture and prepared to move there. But they never went. Sam wanted to raise his children in a traditional Jewish world. He didn’t like the religious schools in Israel and the schools in Antwerp were getting good again—the very schools in the very buildings that he had gone to before the war. Antwerp still seemed to be his home. He never knew exactly why he didn’t leave. “Maybe I lost the guts,” he sometimes speculated.

Many Jews did leave Antwerp in 1950. Europe was once again looking dangerous. The old wartime alliance had broken up, and the world was dividing into the Soviet and Western sides. In 1947, General George Marshall gave a commencement address at Harvard about a new policy directed “against hunger, poverty, desperation, and chaos.” The Marshall Plan promised to rebuild Holland at a point when the Dutch were becoming desperate. Shortly before Marshall’s address, the Dutch government, faced with
continued shortages of food and basic materials, had been developing wild contingency plans for survival. One such plan called for people to sleep longer and spend more of the day in bed.

The Soviet bloc chose not to participate in the Marshall Plan, however, and from 1947 on there were two Europes. While people in the eastern bloc continued to struggle for basic materials, the western bloc after a few years began to experience spectacular growth under the Marshall Plan. Soon, used tires were no longer in demand in Amsterdam, and Mauritz Auerhaan, the Bucharest piano player turned Amsterdam tire salesman, switched to importing used West German televisions. The new West Germany was developing so quickly that it was far ahead of the old European Allies in new industries such as televisions.

The creation of the State of Israel was one of the last things the old Allies did together. It was with the enthusiastic backing of the Soviet Union along with France and the United States that the close UN vote was carried. With the Soviets’ backing, Czechoslovakia trained pilots and devoted an entire airfield to sending weapons to the new Israeli Army, playing a critical role in Israel’s survival in 1948. But that same year, the joint occupation of Germany began to break down. In 1949, with tensions mounting and Soviet and Western foreign ministers no longer even meeting, the West created a separate Federal Republic with a capital in Bonn. The Soviets responded by establishing the German Democratic Republic with its capital in Berlin.

The following year, the first East-West shooting war broke out in Korea. This drove the West to do what had been up to then unthinkable: It rearmed the Germans. West Germany, which had been banned from military activity, was now once again to have an army, though only to operate on German soil. The Soviets responded by doing the same with East Germany. Meanwhile, the Korean War was causing such economic instability in Europe—inflation and shortages—that it threatened to undo all the progress of the Marshall Plan.

Many Jews thought a new war was coming, once again brought on by economic chaos and a rearmed Germany. It was all happening again. Thousands of Jews, many of Eastern European origin, decided to leave Antwerp, for the United States and Canada. They sold off their property and abandoned the diamond trade, which, as the world grew less secure, was rallying. In Paris there was a great deal of talk in the Pletzl about the new war and about moving
again to safety. Most of the Jews there were still alive because they had left when the last war started. Icchok Finkelsztajn was convinced that World War III was about to erupt and seriously thought of moving as far away from Europe as possible. He kept talking about Madagascar, a place so far away—“the end of the earth”—that a Jew could survive the next war. Ironically, before the Third Reich decided on the Final Solution, Adolf Eichmann had contemplated deporting Jews to Madagascar.

Victor Waterman, whose family had been Amsterdamers for more than three centuries, remembered how long he had waited last time, how he almost hadn’t made it out, how his brothers and sister and mother had stayed and died. He was worried about the Russians and about the soon-to-be-rearmed Germans and about what the Dutch, who had acted so badly before, would do this time. He concluded that he couldn’t trust anyone in Europe anymore. He was still in the chicken business and still had contacts in the United States. In 1951 he and his wife and children moved to Union City, New Jersey, where he began working again in the kosher chicken industry. When people asked him why he had moved, he would say, “When you’ve experienced the Germans, you trust nobody.”

W
hile thousands of survivors were waiting in Germany to arrange for a ship to take them away out of Europe so they could be far from Germany, a small number of German Jews went to English ports looking for ships to get back to Germany. Most of them had barely managed to get out only a few years before.

From the time Mia Lehmann left Antwerp for Berlin until she finally escaped to England in the late 1930s, moving to Germany had been for her a nearly fatal choice. Mia was a small woman—it seemed almost by design. She could lean close to people, ask them about their troubles, and then turn her head to listen so that her ear would be exactly at the level of the other person’s mouth. Her strong and determined jawline contrasted with her soft and sympathetic eyes. An activist by nature, she did not think that Nazis coming to power and ruling the streets with brown-shirted bullies was any reason for her to be quiet. To her, it was all the more reason to speak out. She spent two years, from 1934 to 1936, in a Nazi prison in Silesia, accused of plotting to overthrow the government. She always laughed about the charge, because she thought it gave her undue credit; all she had really been doing was getting aid to families of political prisoners. She was one of six Jewish women in her cell block, all of whom served their sentences for political crimes and were released. The Nazis had not yet decided to
murder every Jew. Maybe they would just send them to Madagascar. After her release, Mia had to report to the police once every week. She had no grasp of the extent of what the Nazis were planning, but as she watched Jews near the Oranienburgerstrasse synagogue being rounded up in open trucks and taken away, she understood that she would not survive if she stayed in Germany.

To leave, another country had to agree to accept her as a refugee. She had to have a sponsor to get a permit. It all took money. The Jews who had money were leaving, and those who didn’t were being rounded up in trucks. Between 1933, when Hitler came to power, and 1938, half of the 500,000 Jews in Germany got out. Finally in May 1939, Mia’s international Communist connections landed her a permit to go to England and work cleaning houses. Three months later, the war started and it was impossible to escape.

W
ERNER
H
ÄNDLER’S FAMILY
were German Jews who suddenly found themselves living in Poland when the borders were redrawn after World War I. Shortly after Werner was born in 1920, the family moved to the mountains a little to the west so that they would be in Germany again and not Poland. Eighteen years later, in November 1938, Werner and his father were among the twenty thousand Jews arrested during
Kristallnacht
, the night Jews and Jewish buildings throughout Germany were simultaneously assaulted. The Händlers were taken to Sachsenhausen.

In those days Sachsenhausen had no gas chambers or crematoriums. Werner, 18 years old, could not really understand what this place was, this strange triangle of barracks in Oranienburg. He and his fellow inmates were marched and worked and abused, and it seemed like some sort of prisoner-of-war camp, but there was no war. It was still peacetime. The camp had been set up for six thousand political activists and criminals. But Händler and his father were among another six thousand men who had been brought in, all Jews rounded up on
Kristallnacht
. Werner did not understand what the Nazis were doing in this place, but with twelve thousand men it was now very crowded. Their clothes were not warm enough, and there were not enough blankets. The inmates found sleeping mates to keep each other warm on the straw where they slept. There were beatings, and disease, and overworking, and the one
thing Werner did understand was that “anybody who lives in these camps can be dead in ten minutes.” The political prisoners taught the Jews how to survive there, what to do and not to do.