The Heart Has Reasons (34 page)

It sounds like your relationship to God is sometimes stormy.

He’s the only one I can swear at and nothing happens. [
chuckles
] He’s a very dear friend. I feel Him all the time. He’s with us right now.

Ted paused, and took a worn card out of his breast pocket, the kind they sell at Catholic
bookstores that contain prayers or poems.

Let me share with you something I always keep with me. It’s what I’ve lived by for many, many years.

He read aloud this short paragraph by Etienne DeGrellet:

I know I shall pass this way but once. If there is any kindness I can show, or any good thing I can do, let me do it now. Let me not defer it or neglect it, for I shall not pass this way again.

ELEVEN
THE HEART HAS REASONS

A history is required that leads to action:
not to confirm, but to change the world.

—Paul Thompson

Jewish tradition holds that a small number of truly righteous people are born in each generation. Though unknown to the world, they are the ones who ensure its stability and even its continuation. This is the way I think of the rescuers: though few in number, their existence changes everything. Had there been more of them—ten times as many, a hundred times as many—there might never have been a Holocaust.

But who are the rescuers and what makes them “tick”? How how did they become the people they are, able to express the “better angels of our nature,” the goodness they assume exists in humanity when they say their actions were “ just the human thing to do”?

Karl Popper, a philosopher of science, has written that if you observe thousands of white seagulls, you can’t conclude all seagulls are white, since you haven’t seen every seagull in the world. However, if you see one black seagull, you can conclude that not all seagulls are white. Likewise, it’s difficult to generalize about altruism in human nature, but the existence of even a single rescuer enables us to draw one very hopeful conclusion: at a crossroads where ethical action and rational self-interest lay in opposite directions, not everyone chose the latter.

Scholars have speculated about the rescuers in an intellectual way, but the impetus behind the rescuers’ behavior was often transrational. As one rescuer remarked, “the hand of compassion was faster than the calculus of reason.” Though the world’s great spiritual teachers and
traditions have called us to it, how many people are prepared to lay down their lives or others? Can we fully understand such people with the intellect? To borrow from Saint-Exupéry, what is essential about these people is invisible to the eyes; it must be looked at with the heart.

In fact, what I discovered about the rescuers is that they seemed to rely on a fundamental intuition, and tended to act without much deliberation. Often they told me that if they had thought too much about what they were doing, they might have talked themselves out of it. Not that reasoned determination didn’t sometimes play a part, but so did sheer courage and even blind impulse. Their high purpose tended to keep fear at bay, but even when it didn’t, they didn’t let fear stop them. Some said they were too busy to be paralyzed by fear. But the long hours of the night surely provided ample opportunity to imagine all that might transpire if one fell into the Nazis’ clutches. The positive, often gutsy, attitude of the rescuers went a long way in helping them to carry on.

Empathy was also a key ingredient. All of the rescuers told me they grew up around someone who cared deeply about others and went out of his or her way to help people. A surprising number had parents who had taken in malnourished Germans and Austrian children at the end of the First World War. So part of the answer to the question of how the rescuers became who they are is simply that they learned altruism at home. Many even had parents or siblings who were rescuers. Home was also where they had learned to not draw the kind of lines between “us” and “them” that would exclude certain groups from their circle of concern. This later immunized them to the attempts of the Nazis to devalue and demonize the Jews.

Did growing up in such families mean that the decision to rescue made itself? No, it still took initiative. Mieke Vermeer’s parents, though they were saving dozens of Jewish children, objected when their teenage daughter wanted to take on some serious responsibility in the NV group. Hetty Voûte, who came from a “Resistance family” if ever there was one, quoted her father as having said, “If I had known what you were doing, I would have locked you in your room!” Many children didn’t know about the rescue activities of their parents, and many siblings kept what they were doing secret. Usually, it was only
after
an individual became involved in helping Jews that he or she came in contact with other people who were also taking action. Such a decision was so dangerous that it often had to be made without a word of advice from family or friends.

Those who looked outward for a clue as to how they should respond to the Nazis’ treatment of the Jews would have thought that everyone seemed to be minding their own business—if not collaborating with the Germans. The instinct to conform would have led them to do the same. Everything depended on one’s ability to disregard the apparent ways of the world and move forward independently.

Rescuer Catherine Klumper was ninety-eight when I first met with her. When I asked her to tell me about the war, she asked, “Which one?” for she was already a teenager during the First World War. She recalled lively family discussions around the dinner table while she was growing up during that first decade of the twentieth century; each family member would argue his or her own point with guests she characterized as “Marxists, artists, philosophers, and an occasional anarchist.” In her words, “That dinner table debate taught me to make up my own mind and stand on my own two feet.” She later drew on that capacity for independent thinking when World War II came along: after deciding to hide her Jewish neighbor’s children, she went on to help hide many other Jewish children after making contact with Piet Meerburg.

What motivated the rescuers to do what they did? Only Piet seemed primarily motivated by political convictions; his early understanding of the Nazi ideology led him to steadfastly oppose it, which he did by forming the Amsterdam Student Group with the aim of resisting Nazi policies. His group soon gravitated towards saving Jewish children after Piet came in contact with members of the Utrecht Kindercomité.

The Utrecht Kindercomité, on the other hand, was formed in the wake of the July ’42 razzia in Amsterdam when many Jewish parents were torn away from their children. Seeing those orphaned Jewish children wandering the streets, one young woman hastened to help them, and soon she and her friends were having a political as well as humanitarian impact.

Before she began to rescue Jewish children, Hetty Voûte took every opportunity to defy the Nazis; her daredevil personality was well suited for the Resistance. However, she explained her efforts as a member of the Utrecht Kindercomité by saying: “You just did it for the children. You can’t let children be taken away.” When people such as Hetty came into direct contact with the victims and began to take action, their concern over the plight of those victims became a more powerful driving force than even their most deeply felt political convictions. In that moment when Hetty took a child by the hand, and indeed, held that child’s life in her hands, political abstractions gave way to humanitarian exigencies.

Overall, the rescuers rarely framed what they did in political terms. Does this mean they acted with no thought to the political implications? Far from it. They realized, to varying degrees, that by saving Jews they were directly opposing and subverting the racial imperialist agenda of the Nazis.

All of the people I interviewed are what I would call
spiritual
, but this adjective tends to resist specific definition. One broad quality I associate with spirituality is love for humanity, and this I witnessed in abundance among the rescuers. Put simply: to them, people are the most important thing. From that core value emerges a feeling of responsibility for the welfare of others, including that of strangers. As Hetty said, “You can’t let people be treated in an inhuman way around you.”

This love of humanity extends beyond any abstract principle, as was easy to see from the photographs they have around their homes—not only of the people they rescued, but of the children and grandchildren of those people. The many affectionate anecdotes they told me about the people they helped, and, undeniably, the way the rescuers treated me personally, left me with the overwhelming impression that the ethos of these people is their love of people. Ted Leenders even seemed to have a warm spot in his heart for the impetuous young singer, who, after he had risked his life to hide her, threatened to report him to the authorities!

The rescuers’ insistence on putting people first leads them naturally to turn away from materialism and consumerism. “Human values, not material things,” as Clara Dijkstra said. They don’t measure their worth or that of others by possessions or social status and are content to live simply, finding satisfaction in their relations with family and friends.

Most of the rescuers I interviewed are religious, and they felt challenged by the occupation to put their faith into action. Certainly, the ideal of resisting tyranny lies deep within the Calvinist heritage to which many of the Protestant rescuers trace their roots. That the entire resistance embraced that ideal is evidenced by one of its most famous sayings: “The country that yields to tyrants loses not only its life but its light.”

Two of the most religious rescuers, Heiltje Kooistra, a Calvinist, and Ted Leenders, a Catholic, believed that God had guided them in their rescue activities, and Heiltje even felt that God said or did things through her at critical junctures. The faith of these transcendentalist rescuers seemed to be more a personal matter than one connected with church affiliation.
Each of them could be quite critical of their church, a further indication that they are capable of standing apart from the group and thinking for themselves.

The nonreligious rescuers are a colorful bunch, some of whom have a touch of the mystic. Catherine Klumper has believed in reincarnation since she was a child, and she mentioned having had prescient dreams and telepathic experiences. Kees Veenstra quipped that he is a “nonpracticing agnostic,” but added that he believes in God when he listens to Bach’s
St. Matthew’s Passion
. Henk Pelser distances himself from conventional religious beliefs but articulated a highly developed life philosophy “ just a shade different from that of Spinoza.”

Piet Meerburg feels no need to speculate about a supernatural authority or the existence of a hereafter, as he believes that humans must take full responsibility for themselves and that the good we do here on earth is its own reward. (Interestingly, his present wife, who lived as a hidden child during the war, is now an “energy healer” with an international practice.) Rut Matthijsen shares Piet’s humanistic approach, believing that each individual must develop his or her talents to the utmost, for “each life is a unique event in the evolution of the world.” Some of the rescuers, like Gisela Söhnlein, aren’t much interested in religion and philosophy and seemed to have simply acted from the heart in accord with their personal values. Certainly moral and caring behavior need not be coupled with any theistic belief, and these rescuers amply demonstrate this. The cooperation between the secular and religious rescuers also demonstrates that there need not be conflict and polarization between secular humanists and “true believers” in pursuing a shared humanitarian goal.

Some of the rescuers I met had a special feeling for Jews, either through personal contact with Jewish people or because they had developed, through their study of the Bible, a respect for Jews as “the chosen people.” However, helping Jews solely because they were Jews was not given as a reason by anyone I interviewed, and several made the point that, whatever their special feeling for the Jews, they would have done the same for another group in need of help. (Of course, for those who had Jewish friends before the war, the transition into rescuing was a natural outcome of the caring and friendship that already existed.)