The Heart Has Reasons (20 page)

—Elisabeth Kübler-Ross

Kees veenstra is one rescuer whose attempts to save jews during the Holocaust have remained almost completely unknown. He rarely talks about them and feels strongly that what he undertook at that time was nothing more than the human thing to do. This attitude, combined with his regret over not having done more, leads him to object when someone like myself tries to draw attention to his wartime efforts. “I won’t have it,” he wrote me recently. “Just because I risked my life a
few times does not make me a hero.” But isn’t that precisely what makes someone a hero?

I first met Kees, a tall man with a frank gaze and a time-weathered face, when I wandered into his little bookshop on Utrechtseestraat in Amsterdam, looking for a Dutch-English dictionary. His friendly manner made me want to chat, and I learned that he had been running the shop for over forty years. When he asked what had brought me to the Netherlands, I explained that I was interviewing people who had rescued Jews during the Nazi occupation. He nodded slightly, but didn’t reply. Later, as I was leaving, he suggested hesitantly, “Perhaps you might want to speak with me.” For some reason, his desire to go on record for posterity got the better of his usual reticence that day.

A week later, he came to the pied-à-terre where I was staying, ready to be interviewed for the first time ever. Lowering himself into an armchair, he said, “My, my, I’m to look into the past. Once I start, I do believe I will forget where I am.” And that was what happened.

Like other of the rescuers, Kees is still haunted by his encounters with Nazi terror, despite the passage of more than half a century. As I watched him grapple with these difficult memories, I thought about the cost of having had a loving, open heart during those horrendous times: where does that pain go after the events have faded into the historical memory?

In Kees’ case, nowhere. Some survivors find that by telling their stories and giving voice to their feelings, a healing process is set in motion. For most of his life, however, Kees has relied on sailing as a way to free his mind and calm his spirit. He told me he feels the best at the helm of his sailboat, tacking into the spray, enjoying the shimmering brilliance of water, sunlight, and sky.

At the time the Germans overran our country, my father was the managing editor of the largest newspaper in the Netherlands:
Het Volk
, which means “The People.” It had its offices here in Amsterdam, and employed about 200 people. Then, when the Germans came, the editor-in-chief committed suicide. He wasn’t Jewish, but he had always published articles against Hitler, so I guess he couldn’t face what was coming. And so my father was made editor-in-chief. The Nazis took control of the paper and my father wanted to resign, but they said to him, “You cannot resign. You must stay at your
post.” He said, “I’ll stay as long as my conscience allows it.” But then, in their very first anti-Jewish regulation on May 15, they dismissed all Jews who worked for the Dutch news agencies. A short time later, they cut off all the pensions of the Jewish people who had worked for the paper—their contracts were declared null and void. My father said, “This is the point where I quit.”

Through his connections, he was able to start his own little publishing firm, and he asked me to come work with him. That I did, but because I’d been away working in another place, I didn’t realize at first that his entire staff of about twenty people were Jews who had been sacked by the Germans. There was a Mr. Abram who was the bookkeeper, and one day at lunch I asked, “Is Mr. Abram a Jew also?” That got a big laugh. Mr. Abram was a Jew if ever there was one, but I hadn’t learned to see it yet. Now, when a Jewish man comes into my bookshop, I immediately think “Oh, a Jew.” Formerly I thought, “a human being,” but now I think, “a Jew.” Which I think is a shame, but it’s there now, and it can’t be helped.

The Germans were very clever. At first they said to the Jews, “Nothing will happen to you. You need only to register.” This didn’t seem unreasonable, because non-Jews also had to register. But when you registered, they would stamp a big black
J
on your identification card, and once that was on there, you couldn’t possibly get it off.

Here’s something remarkable: In my father’s publishing firm, there was one young woman who said, “I’m not going to register.” Her Jewish coworkers thought that was very unfair. They said, “We have to stick together; if you are a Jew, you have to have a J.” And she said, “Why should I listen to the Germans?” So she never registered; she never got a J, and she never had any trouble! Simply by refusing to take that first step. You see, until you registered, they had no definite way of knowing that you were a Jew. I must say, I know of three other cases like that, but only three. Everyone else thought, well, if that’s what we’re told to do, then we shall do it.

The Germans came up with more measures, and still more measures, and one day a Dutch Nazi was murdered in the Jewish quarter of Amsterdam. As a reprisal, the Germans arrested more than 400 young Jewish men and sent them to Mauthausen. After two weeks, you started hearing from people, “Did you know so and so? He was picked up, but now he’s died of appendicitis”—or dysentery or sunstroke, or whatever lie they had written on the death notice. After three months, nearly all those boys were dead. Now that should have
opened our eyes to what was going to happen. But someone would say, “Well, that’s amazing, that they are all dead,” and someone else would say, “That’s ridiculous. And are they dead? Or is it just. . .” So we were stupid. We didn’t want to face it. We just couldn’t believe they were being brutally murdered.

From the age of fourteen, I had been a member of a youth organization called the Nederlandse Jeugdbond voor Natuurstudie. It was a kind of nature club for boys and girls. Some of us were interested in plants; some in insects; some, like myself, in birds. But it had a unique feature: the young people ran it themselves, and when you turned twenty-four you had to leave. I was twenty at the time the war started, so by then I was one of older members.

It was run democratically, and many of the decisions were made by consensus. We would meet in nature spots all over Holland, and go on camping trips, and day hikes, and the like. Looking back, I think it really fostered independence and a keen sense of responsibility. And when we turned to hiding our Jewish friends, that all came into play.

I recall a conversation one day between myself and a few of the other boys. It was early in ’42, after the Nazis had announced that all Jews had to move into Amsterdam, and we were worried about a boy who hadn’t shown up that day. “‘Oh, didn’t you know, he’s Jewish?” “No, I never knew that.” “He has to go to Amsterdam, right?” “Yah, but wouldn’t it be better if he dived under?” “Yes, perhaps.” So we started to think about how we could help him. Han Alta, one of the other senior members of the group, had worked as a typographer, and he wanted to try his hand at falsifying an ID. So he asked one of the non-Jewish boys, “Can you ‘lose’ your ID?” “Yes, I can ‘lose’ it.” So that gave him something to work with. Later, after he was done altering the ID, the boy it was for—our Jewish friend—said, “Well, now I’ve got an ID, but we must find out whether it will work.” Can you imagine? This young Jewish boy goes straight to the Gestapo at the Utrecht Central Station to try it out! They didn’t bother with him at first, but he loitered around there looking so nervous that in the end they demanded to see it. “Move on,” they shouted.

So we were very glad that even the Gestapo at the railway station couldn’t detect that it was forged. He took a tremendous risk by doing that, and he performed a great service for the Jewish members of the group, because Han then knew he could go ahead and make IDs for them as well.

So Han made many more false IDs, using those that others had
“lost.” But after a while we had to stop doing that because the Germans caught on. If you said you had lost your ID they would harass you, maybe beat you up. We needed to get IDs in another way, and the only other way was to steal them. I remember watching a particular boy on the street and thinking: he’s about the right age; I must try to get his. I got lucky one night because there was a Christian youth meeting and they all had their coats hanging in the hallway. So, for a short time, anyway, we had a surplus of IDs.

It started out that we only hid members of the nature group, but everyone had a girlfriend, or a sister—or perhaps their whole family wanted to dive under. We wouldn’t go around asking, but if someone knew of someone, we would try to help them. On the other hand, when you were trying to find places for the onderduikers, you had to ask people, or hint somehow. But it wasn’t too difficult to perceive who might be willing.

I liked bringing the onderduikers out to the farmers, and I knew quite a few of them because I had gone on many cycling trips into the rural areas. Though there were control posts with guards on the main roads, I would take to the unpaved roads and rutted bicycle paths.

Han, who made the false IDs, lived in a cabin in the woods near Amerongen. It was a beautiful, sun-kissed kind of place, nestled away in a vast orchard along the Rhine River. It couldn’t be seen from the road, except in winter when all the leaves had fallen from the trees. If people needed an immediate hiding place, I would take them there on my bicycle. It was a long trip—85 kilometers each way from Amsterdam—and sometimes I would have to make it twice a week. When I finally got to the cabin with my “cargo,” I’d collapse on my bed like a pile of bricks.

In the morning, Han would start working on false IDs, and I would tell him any new addresses I had found where the onderduikers might go from there. Actually, very few Jewish people could remain anywhere for very long; most had to move four or five times in the course of the war; some lived in dozens of places. When something went wrong, or when conditions became too dangerous, we’d have to find them a new home.

The war was, of course, a terrible thing, but I enjoyed being out there at that cabin. We swam in the Rhine when the weather was nice, and in the fall the trees were ripe with apples and pears. To have something to do, we cultivated tobacco plants—they grew well there, and that brought in some money because tobacco was hard to come
by in those days. After dinner, we’d sing and make music. I’d play an oversized ukulele, and Han would toot on his recorder.

Kees (right) and Han, making music and hanging out with the onderduikers at the secret cabin.

On my way back to Amsterdam, if I was nearby one of the girls in hiding, I would stop by and accompany her on a walk. You couldn’t do that during the day—it would be too dangerous. But at night you went walking, arm in arm, and if anyone saw you, they thought, “Well, isn’t that’s a nice couple.” I still see one of those ladies occasionally; she’s in her eighties now. She says, “I do recall strolling with you along the dike, smelling the fresh air, and looking at the moonlight on the water.”

Not all the hiding places were in the country, though. We tried to find places in town, but that was rather difficult, and to hide there was difficult as well. If you were in an apartment building, you couldn’t even pull the toilet chain without worrying who might hear it. But sometimes we would find addresses in Utrecht or Zeist, even though that meant the onderduikers would have to remain inside all the time. Of course, if they didn’t look Jewish and had good papers, that wouldn’t always be necessary.

Once I was biking through Utrecht and I visited a family there, and the father said, “Oh, do meet our niece, Gees Gelok.” I said, “How do you do, Gees Gelok.” She was a short woman with curly hair. Two months later I was biking somewhere else, and I met a tall woman who said,
“My name is Gees Gelok.” That’s a very uncommon name, so I asked her if she was a relative of the Gees Gelok who lived in Utrecht. She shook her head no, but later I learned that the tall one had given her identification card to the short Jewish one. But the curious thing is that I met them both.

I must say, I spent most of the war on my bicycle. It was about 120 kilometers from Amsterdam to Friesland, and I became very good at fixing flat tires because I could get of them on one trip. But at a certain point, the Germans wanted rubber and took away everyone’s tires, so I had to ride on the bare rims. I was at home very little, especially towards the end of the war when I had to hide away because the Germans wanted me for slave labor. My father was often away also because they were after him, too—mainly because he had played a role in the Labor Party.