Murder in Amsterdam (20 page)

The red-light district on one side of my street became wearisome in its relentness exploitation of human lust.
Though intrigued by its more colorful denizens, I grew tired of it and spent more time on the other side of the street, which leads to a large square, the Nieuwmarkt, one of the oldest in Amsterdam, where the open-air cafés face a scene that sometimes filled me with a far greater melancholy than the crassest sex emporium. On the far side of the Nieuwmarkt is an old section of the city whose narrow, densely populated streets were once lined with higgledy-piggledy row houses, some dating back to the early seventeenth century. Almost all those houses are gone now, replaced by buildings of the 1980s, whose slick white modernity makes them stand out in the historic heart of Amsterdam. It used to be known as the
jodenhoek,
Jews' corner.

During the war a barbed wire fence separated one side of the square from the
jodenhoek
. Amsterdam never actually had a ghetto, unlike Warsaw, even though the Germans had made plans for one at the beginning of the war. After much consideration, the idea was abandoned because it would have caused too much inconvenience to gentiles, who would have had to move out of the area. But the Nazi authorities did force more and more Jews, many of them from the provinces, to move into three overcrowded Amsterdam neighborhoods, one of which was the
jodenhoek
.

This part of the city, with its seventeenth-century Portuguese and German synagogues and its lively street markets,
had long been populated by Jews, most of them poor. Rembrandt lived there too, however, and picked the models for his biblical paintings from the streets around his studio. Before the German occupation more than eighty thousand Jews resided in Amsterdam. By the end of the war about five thousand had survived.

After the last cattle train to “the east” had left in 1943, the
jodenhoek
was like a ghost town. The houses, emptied of their inhabitants, had been looted for wood to stoke the fires of Amsterdammers during the icy “hunger winter” of 1944–45. And so for three decades after the war they remained, gutted and increasingly falling apart, often with the Jewish family names of abandoned shops still faintly showing on crumbling walls. Many of the houses were later demolished, leaving large gaps filled with rubbish. People preferred not to think about the reasons for this urban ruination. The remains of a human catastrophe were simply left to rot. The few houses that were still there in the 1970s were taken over by young squatters, until, finally, around 1974, the last remnants of the
jodenhoek
were swept away to build an underground railway station and a new opera house.

But first the squatters had to be removed from their improvised homes. What followed was a kind of grotesque reenactment of the historic drama. Not that the Dutch police, using batons and waterhoses to flush out the squatters,
had anything in common with the Nazis, or that the squatters were destined to be murdered. It was just that the spectacle of uniformed men dragging people from their homes, while we watched the action behind fortified barriers, conjured up images I had only seen in blurry photographs taken on that very spot three decades before.

Before remembering the Holocaust, in memorials and textbooks, became an almost universal Western ritual in the late 1960s, only two monuments in the
jodenhoek
stood as reminders of what happened there. One, a relief in white stone, was erected in 1950. It is called the monument of “Jewish Gratitude”—gratitude to the Dutch people who stood by the Jewish victims. The other, built two years later, is a sculpture of a burly workingman, with his head held high, and his meaty arms and large proletarian fists spread in a gesture of angry defiance. The Dockworker is a monument to the two-day “February Strike” of 1941, when Amsterdam stopped working in protest against the deportation of 425 Jewish men to a concentration camp. The men had been brutally rounded up in plain sight of many gentiles shopping at the popular Sunday market. Word spread quickly: city cleaners refused to collect garbage, mail was not delivered, trams stopped running, and the port of Amsterdam was silent for forty-eight hours.

This show of solidarity, unique in Europe, and largely responsible
for the high reputation of Holland among Jews, is certainly worth remembering, but it is also misleading. Though not exactly mythical—it really happened, after all—the February Strike was a convenient symbol to shield people from more painful memories, of having stood by and watched and done nothing. Others, to be sure, had risked their lives, and those of their families, to hide Jews. But this great story of bravery, for a time, was used to mask a larger history of indifference, cowardice, and in some cases active complicity.

I would occasionally drink coffee on Saturday mornings at a busy café on the Nieuwmarkt with a distinguished Dutch historian named Geert Mak. Mak had annoyed the Friends of Theo and other combatants in the war against radical Islam by taking a more relativistic view of the problem. A stocky man with a woolly thatch of silvery curls, Mak projects the voice of a friendly, liberal-minded small-town history teacher. He often spoke to me about the old Left, whose politics he himself largely shared; about the affronted turn of some progressives against Muslim immigrants; and about their nostalgia for “a classical Holland of the 1950s”—the Holland of Johan Huizinga,
satisfait,
enlightened, middle-of-the-road, bourgeois. Mak, in a way, personifies these solid virtues. His books on Dutch history are all bestsellers. They provide a comforting historical narrative for a people that
feels deprived of a historical identity. Like the sentimentality at celebrity funerals, this is not a uniquely Dutch phenomenon either. National histories have become popular everywhere in a world beset by corporate uniformity.

Despite the wild reputation of Amsterdam, Mak says, Holland never had a truly metropolitan culture. Learning to live with large numbers of immigrants is “going to be a difficult and painful process,” and people will just “have to get used to it.” After all, hadn't the Jews in nineteenth-century Amsterdam been integrated quite successfully by enlightened policies? Hadn't it been a good thing to subsidize schools for the Jewish poor, on condition that they be taught in Dutch and not Yiddish? The same kind of thing could work again. But this process would not be helped by anti-Muslim hysteria. Mak disapproves of Ayaan Hirsi Ali's “Jeanne d'Arc–like antics.” Van Gogh, in his view, was a “tragic Dutchman” who had been “tricked” into making the film that cost him his life. The problem, he maintains, is not Islam, or religion as such. It is more sociological. What we are witnessing is nothing new. Just the usual tensions that occur when uprooted rural people start new lives in the metropolis.

Soon after Van Gogh's violent death, Mak published two pamphlets attacking what he saw as the dangerous and hysterical intolerance of Muslims in the Dutch media and
among politicians. As Holland's most popular historian, he saw it as his role to bring common sense to the national debate. By and large, he succeeded, but even Mak, the paragon of Huizinga's virtues, could not escape entirely from the ghost of Anne Frank, from the Dutch habit of filtering the present through guilty memories of what happened in the
jodenhoek.
In one of his pamphlets he compared the narrative technique of Hirsi Ali's film
Submission
to the viciously anti-Semitic Nazi propaganda film
The Eternal Jew.

In a very narrow technical sense—the selective use of damning quotations, for instance—he may have had a point, but the comparison struck a false note. Hirsi Ali spoke out against oppression, not for it. The exclusion of Muslims, or any other group, is not part of her program. And yet to reach for examples from the Holocaust, or the Jewish diaspora, has become a natural reflex when the question of ethnic or religious minorities comes up. It is a moral yardstick, yet at the same time an evasion. To be reminded of past crimes, of negligence or complicity, is never a bad thing. But it can confuse the issues at hand, or worse, bring all discussion to a halt by tarring opponents with the brush of mass murder. This issue is not the Holocaust, but the question of how to stop future Mohammed Bouyeris from becoming violent enemies of the country in which they grew up—how to make those boys pissing on the seventeenth-century door feel that this is their home too.

3.

T
he annual Cleveringa Lecture, delivered at Leiden University on the twenty-sixth of November, is named after a brave man who never raised his voice or gave deliberate offense. He was a hero because he was decent, and said the right thing at a time when decency could have severe consequences.

The exclusion of one section of Dutch citizens under German occupation began in 1940 when civil servants were ordered to sign forms declaring whether they were “Aryans” or Jews. Most people did, often without quite realizing the implications. Then, soon after, the Germans announced that Jews would be removed from public office. At Leiden University, three distinguished academics, Meijers, David, and Gans, were dismissed. Professor Eduard Meijers was one of the most famous legal scholars of his generation, responsible for the modern civil code.

These measures were accepted, more or less grudgingly, by most Dutch authorities, but not by the dean of the law faculty in Leyden, Professor Rudolph Cleveringa. On November 26, 1940, he decided to speak in protest to the faculty and students. He chose the time normally reserved for Meijers's lectures, and began by reading aloud, verbatim, the letter ordering his colleague's dismissal. The cold pen-pusher's language was incriminating enough. Instead of addressing the obscenity of political racism directly, Cleveringa went on to praise his colleague as “a man of light” whom “a power that can rest on nothing but itself” was casting aside. Then he spoke the famous words which still resonate: “It is this Dutchman, this noble and true son of our people, this human being, this father for his students, this scholar, whom the hostile alien that rules over us today is ‘dismissing from his job.' ”

Job Cohen, in his Cleveringa Lecture of 2002, continued the story: “In the great auditorium on that memorable November morning in 1940 sat a young Jewish law student. Cleveringa's words were like balsam to her doubting soul. She had the feeling, at that moment, that ‘our soundless thoughts and moods were being transmitted through one and all in a way that everyone could precisely recognize.' And especially that one feeling, more powerful than all others: ‘I belong!' ”

Cleveringa knew what he was doing. He had already packed his bags. The following day the students went on strike in protest against the dismissals, and Cleveringa was arrested. The student mentioned by Cohen was his own mother. Speaking for her, and for himself, a liberal, assimilated Jew, Cohen hailed the tolerance of Dutch society, and the way people of all races and creeds had found a home there. But then, the shock of 9/11, the murder of Pim Fortuyn, and the “hardening” of attitudes toward immigrants had changed the social climate. He wondered: “Do ‘they' still belong as much as they did before 11 September 2001? Many Dutch citizens of foreign origin must have thought to themselves in the last few years: Is this really Holland? Do I still belong? Am I not a stranger in my own country?”

Drawing the link between his own mother's experience as a Jew under Nazi occupation and Muslim immigrants today
was bound to disturb people. How could the two be equated? Wasn't this an example of the sentimental use of Holocaust memories where they didn't apply? I actually think not. Cohen wasn't talking about genocide, but about belonging. There was no question, of course, that Cohen's mother, and Professor Meijers, felt that they belonged. Many young Muslims born and bred in Europe feel that they don't. The question is why.

There was much in Cohen's lecture about the rule of law, about norms and values, the erosion of organized faith, the problems of multiculturalism and global capitalism, but he kept returning to that basic question: how to make people feel at home in a modern, secular, liberal society in which many customs and values, and indeed collective memories, clash with their own? Cohen's answer is that this shouldn't matter, as long as people do not break the law. It is, in any case, not as clear as it was in Huizinga's day what it is to be Dutch (or French, or German). Quoting Geert Mak, Cohen suggested that “a new adhesive” was needed to “glue society together.” Without making it entirely clear what this glue should be, Cohen stressed the importance of mutual respect. This means, in his view, that we should tolerate opinions and habits even if we do not share them, or even approve of them. We tolerate the fact that women are not allowed to become members of an ultra-Calvinist political
party. Just so, we have to “tolerate certain groups of orthodox Muslims who consciously discriminate against their women.”

Cohen went further. Why not revive the Dutch idea of the pillar? Dutch citizens used to organize their lives through their religious affiliations. Perhaps Muslims should be encouraged to do the same. Then he spoke the sentence that most upset his critics: “The easiest way to integrate these new immigrants might be through their faith. For that is just about the only anchor they have when they enter Dutch society in the twenty-first century.” This was seen as rank appeasement; a reason for Theo van Gogh to compare Cohen to a Nazi collaborator.