Dutch Treat, Part 3
Somber Tour of Anne Frank House
By Lewis Nolan
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March 14, 2005, Monday – In Amsterdam, The Netherlands
After another excellent breakfast buffet at the Carlton
Hotel (my usual bacon and ham on coarse bread with a Coke Light and for Betty
fruit and pastry with coffee) we discovered that our contemplated daytrip to
Brueggge, Belgium would require a train ride of about 3 hours, 35 minutes each
way. The cities of the Low Countries are close together. But after checking a
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map and schedule taken off the Internet by an exceptionally
bright and helpful desk clerk at the hotel (the young woman’s home was in
Chechnya, a war-torn country that once was part of the Soviet Union), we saw
that it is a roundabout ride by rail from Amsterdam to the medieval town of
Bruegge to the south. Had it been a straight shot, the distance would have been
cut in half.
We decided to regroup and consider a day trip by train to
Delft, a thriving Dutch city perhaps best known for the centuries-old
manufacture of its signature blue-and-white pottery. Our main event for today
is a tour of the Anne Frank House, one of the most visited places in Amsterdam.
Young people take universal Internet service for granted,
which is probably a good thing. I still marvel at how rapidly such ease of communications
is shrinking the planet. My grandfather was born at a time when a lot of
domestic mail went by a fast horse; international mail went by a slow ship. It
is a wonder how quickly and cheaply we can send and receive email to friends
and family back home from just about anywhere in the world. A year ago during
his MBA graduation trip to Peru, our son saw Internet cafes in remote Andean
mountain villages.
We caught Tram No. 14 at a stop near our hotel and rode
perhaps one mile to one of Amsterdam’s busiest areas, called “The Dam.” It is
where the Dutch blocked the Amstel River with a “damme” and created a small
village called “Amsteldamme.” Always referred to as “The Dam” but locally
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pronounced “dom” to rhyme with “tom,” the huge square is the
historic center of the old city. It is ringed with notable monuments and
buildings, including the Royal Palace, and is a very busy area. A huge ice rink
was in the process of being dismantled on this day – probably because the
daytime temperatures are warming well above freezing.
The historic church has a tower that is 290 feet high, which
served as the first sighting of home for returning sailors. It is not to be
confused with the “old church,” which is nearby in the Red Light District and
was built a century earlier. We walked
about 300 yards to an American Express office, where we cashed some checks and
changed most of our dollars into Euros at about $1.35 per €1. I think the
precipitous drop in the value of the dollar against European currencies (mainly
to finance an unnecessary war in Iraq and to reduce the taxes of the super
rich) is a disgrace.
We reboarded Tram No. 14, paid our €1.60 fares (a basic
ticket is good for one hour on as many trams as you care to ride) and rode a
mile or two to the stop near the Anne Frank House, one of the most visited locations
in Amsterdam. It is there that Anne and her sister, Margot, and their parents
plus four others hid from the Nazis for two years. They were ultimately
betrayed and all but Anne’s father died in concentration camps.
The “Diary of Anne Frank” is one of the most read books ever
published. It has been printed in 64 languages. The story of Anne Frank is one
of the most important stories of the 20th Century. Joseph Stalin,
the evil and murdering dictator of the Soviet Union, once callously said that a
single death can be a tragedy but a million is only a statistic. I don’t think
the human mind can comprehend the totality of the cruelty visited upon European
Jews and others during the 1930s and 1940s by the Nazis. There were 6 million
Jews killed. There were 20 million Russian deaths. There were hundreds of
thousands of Allied soldiers, sailors, Marines and untold numbers of innocent
civilians killed and maimed during World War II.
The guidebooks say the wait to tour the house can be a long
one during the peak tourist season in summer. But this being mid-March, there
wasn’t much of a line. We had plenty of room to move around inside the cramped
rooms of the house.
With the help of several of his Dutch employees, Otto built
secret living quarters in a connected annex above his warehouse and office at
265 Prinsengracht, a four-story building alongside a canal. From the street, it
looks like just another multi-story townhouse, one of thousands in Amsterdam.
In July 1942, the Frank family (Otto, wife Edith and daughters Anne and Margot)
decided to go into hiding inside the annex rather than turn Margot over for a
“work force project” in Germany.
A week later, Herman and August van Pels and their son,
Peter, joined them. Three months later Fritz Pfeffer, a dentist and family
friend, moved in. He shared Anne’s small bedroom that she decorated with
movie-star pictures clipped from magazines.
The bedrooms and sitting areas of the seven-room, secret
annex were sparsely furnished. There was a single bathroom serving eight
people. The Delft-style commode was not flushed during the day for fear of
alerting the warehouse workers beneath that people were living upstairs. The
Nazis, aided by Dutch auxiliary police and informers, regularly swept through
suspected hiding places to round up and deport Jews. Tens of thousands of Jews
were captured and sent off to camps in Germany and other Nazi-conquered lands.
A book on display carefully lists each name of the 103,000 deportees, 90
percent of whom were gassed, tortured or starved to death in the camps. The
mind can’t comprehend the terrible suffering of those people; they were less
than 2 percent of the total who perished at the hands of the Nazis.
With the non-Jewish office staff secretly supplying those in
hiding with canned foods, vegetables and other supplies, the Franks and their
friends managed to live a cloistered but somewhat normal life behind drawn
curtains. They never went outside. When the weather was right, they would open
a hidden roof vent after dark to breath fresh air. At night, they would
sometimes go downstairs into the office area and listen to a shortwave radio.
Otto kept a map showing the German retreat movements after D-Day.
Days were spent quietly reading. The children studied their
schoolbooks and did their lessons. Anne
wrote her diary, noting in one May, 1944 entry that “my greatest wish is to be
a journalist and later on, a famous writer. In any case, after the war I’d like
to publish a book called The Secret Annex. . .”
Following are some poignant excerpts from Anne’s diary,
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which are taken from an excellent brochure that comes with the €7.50 admission.
“Last night the four of us went
down to the private office and listened to England on the radio, I was so
scared.” – July 11, 1942.
“Our own helpers have managed to
pull us through so far. Never have they uttered a single word about the burden
we must be.” – January 28, 1944.
“As of tomorrow, we won’t have a
scrap of fat, butter or margarine. Lunch today consists of mashed potatoes and
picked kale. You wouldn’t believe how much kale can stink when it’s a few years
old!” – March 14, 1944.
“But, still, the brightest part
of all is that at least I can write down all my thoughts and feelings; otherwise,
I’d absolutely suffocate.” – March 16, 1944.
“One day this terrible war will
be over. The time will come when we will be people again and not just Jews! We
can never be just Dutch, or just English, or whatever. We will always be Jews
as well. But then, we’ll want to be.” – April 9, 1944.
Museum signage and brochures state the identity of the
informant is not known. I have a tough time buying that assertion. But I think
I can understand why it was made. If this former newspaperman’s suspicions are
correct, there must have been a very good reason why a police record has not
been found about the rat or why somebody has not come forward. There are hints
within Anne’s diary that speak for themselves.
Glass cabinets throughout the annex display various Nazi
documents that were later retrieved about the Frank family, their deportation
and identity papers. The Germans are among the most meticulous record keepers
in the world. The Jewish survivors of the concentration camps – and their
descendants and relatives – have combed through German records with a vengeance
for more than a half-century. With all the native intelligence, education and
resources at their disposal, Jews have tracked down and brought to justice Nazi
criminals in all parts of the world. It is hard for me to believe that the record
could not be found that would identify the Gestapo informant that betrayed the
Frank family. Maybe somebody has decided it is better than the world not know.
The family spent a brief time at a holding facility at
Westerbrook, a town near Amsterdam. They were put aboard a train for the
dehumanizing ride to Auschwitz, where the family was forcibly separated and the
horrors worsened. Records also disclosed that there were 1,019 on the last
train to leave Westerbrook (498 men, 442 women and 79 children). There were 549
helpless, human beings immediately gassed to death upon arrival. Anne and
Margot were evidently young and healthy enough to be transferred to a work camp
at Bergen-Belsen. Margot died first, in March 1945. A few days later, Anne died
of typhus and deprivation – just two months before the camp was liberated. One
of her former neighbors talked to her through a camp fence near the end and
reported that the teenager “didn’t have any more tears.”
Researchers have found Nazi records that reveal that all but one of the original eight who hid for over two years were gassed or died in the camps.
- Fritz Pfeffer, the middle aged dentist and Anne’s resented roommate, became sick and exhausted and died Dec. 20, 1944 in Neuengame.
- Edith Frank, Anne’s mother, died of disease and exhaustion Jan. 6, 1945 in Auschwitz-Birkenau.
- August van Pels, Hermann’s wife, was dragged from camp to camp and died sometime between April 9 and May 8, 1945, in the vicinity of Theresienstadt.
- Peter
van Pels, their son, died May 5, 1945 in the camp infirmary at Mathausen.
Only Otto Frank survived. He spent months traveling from
camp to camp and to repositories of German records in a vain attempt to find
his family. He returned to Amsterdam June 3, 1945 in desolation. A letter soon
reached him that was written by a nurse at Bergen-Belsen, who said she had
witnessed the death of his two daughters.
He organized Anne’s writings and turned them into what
became one of the most important books of the 20th Century. In 1979,
he wrote, “I can no longer talk about how I felt when my family arrived on the
train platform in Auschwitz and we were forcibly separated from each other.”
The Anne Frank House has obtained much film taken by the
Germans. Monitors in several of the rooms run non-stop reels showing Nazi
round-ups of the Jews, transportation in the pitiful railroad box cars, camp
life and camp death. Some of the footage is beyond gruesome. There are also
various possessions and memorabilia of the Frank family that have been
preserved, including a yellow Star of David that had to be pinned to clothing.
It is a powerful but deeply troubling series of exhibits that doubtlessly
leaves a great many viewers with precisely the feelings of anguish that the
designers intended.
After reflecting over several weeks on what we’d seen and
learned in the Anne Frank House, I arrived at a deeper understanding of Jewish
people and why many are so profoundly influenced by what Hollywood calls “the
back story.” I also have a fuller appreciation of our too-brief friendship with
an older Jewish couple.
Betty and I were befriended by this couple, Sol and Erna
Stern, when we moved to Memphis in the summer of 1970. They had hid out during
the Holocaust and World War II in a small farming village in France because of
the bravery and kindness of a French couple and their neighbors. We were
neighbors of the Sterns in an apartment building at 1220 Overton Park and were
privileged to hear their story.
We were a young couple then, relatively naïve about the
cruelty of the world and largely ignorant of the horrors the Jews faced during
the war years in Europe. I now wish we had listened closer and asked more
questions of the gentle, soft-spoken Sterns.
They didn’t talk much about those terrible years and we
didn’t want to pry. They did tell us they had worked as housekeepers and cooks
for the family that took them in. I don’t remember from whence or how they came
to that particular village or even its name. Nor do I know how they made their
way to Memphis. (There is probably a record of it somewhere in the local Jewish
archives.) The Sterns told us that neighbors of the couple who hid them as well
as other villagers knew about the secret arrangement and alerted them to hide
when German troops were in the area.
I recall Erna confiding in us that she and Sol held each
other in bed and cried every night over not having children. They were the only
ones in their family to survive the war. Their brothers, sisters, parents,
cousins, nieces and nephews perished at the hands of the Germans. Their
concealment from the Germans came during Erna’s prime fertility years. They
didn’t want to risk having children – or to expose the family that sheltered
them to any increased danger. Betty stayed in touch with Erna until Erna’s
death. She was told that Erna and Sol had received a Germans reparations
payment of about $70,000 in the late 1970s.
Betty and I also got to know two brothers who survived the
Nazi concentration camp at Dachau, Abe and Mike Kalmo. Their original last name
was Kalmowitz, which was shortened when they came to the United States and
started a business in Memphis.
Abe and Mike were outstanding tailors. Their skills saved
their lives. When the Nazis learned of their expertise with a needle and
thread, the teenage boys were put to work making uniforms for the camp
commandant and other German officers. When not sewing, they told me, they
hauled bodies of gassed Jews to the ovens. I learned about their ordeal during
my occasional visits to their clothing store, Imperial Clothiers, on Union
Avenue in the 1970s and 1980s.
Back in those days, I bought most of my suits and sports
coats at Imperial. I didn’t know it at the time, but one of their most
important customers was Abe Plough, a great man and founder of the giant
pharmaceutical and consumer product company where I later worked,
Schering-Plough.
Ironically, the company that Mr. Plough agreed to merge Memphis-based Plough,
Inc. with in 1972 was New Jersey-based Schering Corp. Schering had been an
American subsidiary of the German chemical giant Schering AG until World War
II. The U.S. unit was seized by the American government and later was sold to
the public in a stock offering.
The store closed in the mid-1990s and the brothers moved
from Memphis, to Florida I think. Their children had all done well.
I’ve read that many Jews suppressed memories and public discussions
of the Nazi exterminations because of a strange feeling that their people had
not fought the Nazis hard enough. That reticence changed over the years as the
Jewish nation of Israel took form, the Arab world focused hatred on the new
state and more and more information about the German atrocities became public.
I don’t want to over-simplify a very complex dynamic about the great awakening
in the West about what had really happened to the European Jews; I hope that
people everywhere will look into the extensive writings and scholarship dealing
with this topic.
I toured the Holocaust Museum in Washington, DC, not long
after it opened in the early 1990s. I, too, experienced the emotional
sledgehammer and felt a second-hand but nonetheless unfathomable grief when I
learned about the unspeakably cruel murders of millions of innocent people. I
believe the Nazi’s cold-blooded dehumanization and genocidal extermination of
the Jews was the greatest crime perpetuated in the history of mankind. To this
day I have haunting memories of two exhibits in the Holocaust Museum.
One is a multi-story gallery of photos taken by a single
photography firm that worked in an obscure village in Poland that was wiped out
by Nazi troops in reprisal for an act of resistance. Every man, woman and child
was killed. Negatives taken by the family photography business of virtually all
the 200 or so residents somehow survived. The Museum obtained the negatives and
made prints of photos taken during birthdays, weddings and other family
portrait occasions. They are framed in the style of the times and are mounted
on the walls of a living room sized gallery that is perhaps three stories high.
Staring down at Museum visitors are photos of dozens of innocent faces enjoying
family togetherness during happy times of their lives. I wept.
Another exhibit that still bothers me is a modest plaque
perhaps 5 feet wide by 4 feet tall. On it are inscribed the names of perhaps
4,000 non-Jews. That was the total number of gentiles in Europe that researchers
determined had taken significant actions at some personal risk in order to
shelter, protect or help Jews to escape the clutches of the Nazis.
Despite the nascent nastiness of the neo-Nazi movement, the
German government and public have been far more proactive in accepting
Germany’s responsibility for the Holocaust than have other governments. Recently,
a new memorial to the Holocaust opened in Berlin and a much-expanded one opened
in Israel, the Yad Veshem museum. Prime Minister Sharon used the opening as a
forum to rightfully shake his finger and scold the rest of the world for
ignoring the plight of the Jews in their darkest hours of need.
In an earlier travelogue, I chronicled our journey of
discovery along Ireland’s famine trail. The abandonment by their English
masters of the Irish to death by starvation in the 19th Century has
many parallels with what has happened to the Jews over the centuries. I do not
believe the Irish will ever completely forget nor forgive the English for that
genocidal inaction. Likewise, I do not believe Jews will ever forget nor
forgive what happened to them when the world idly stood by while the Germans
made them suffer and die so horribly. I’ll never forget.
I was 61 at the time of our visit to the Anne Frank House. I
was a toddler during the time when her family hid in the house, were discovered
and all but one died. The family’s story - as told in Anne’s book and
subsequent movies and other presentations - should help keep the memory alive.
I hope so.
It bothers me that
the collective memory of history's dark sides often fades when the generations
that lived through them die. When we visited the American cemetery overlooking
Normandy’s Omaha Beach on a previous trip to Europe, we were told that not
nearly as many Americans come there anymore now that the World War II
generation is all but gone. The East Tennessee Park and restored home of Sgt.
Alvin York, probably the greatest American hero of World War I, gets little
traffic. The name Robert E. Lee has been dropped from a lot of American history
books used in public schools, even in my native Southland.
Feeling somewhat shaken by what we had seen in the Anne
Frank house, Betty and I rode the tram back to our hotel, where we had a
takeout lunch of “broogies,” Dutch for sandwiches, and Coke Light (the European
name for Diet Coke). I wanted something stronger to drink. So we walked around
the Rembrandt Square area of canals, shops and office buildings and found an
open liquor store. I paid €13 for a bottle of medium-priced, Dutch gin. The
brand was Ketell, recommended by the store proprietor.
A Dutch professor of medicine, Franciscus Sylvius, has been
credited with inventing gin in the 17th Century. He distilled
juniper berries with grain-based spirits to make an inexpensive medicine having
the diuretic properties of juniper oil. It was called “genever,” from the
French word for juniper berry, “genievre.”
But the English improved it, to my mind, after their soldiers were
exposed to the low-cost alcohol in the Low Countries, brought it home and
called it gin.
Netherlands gin is made from a mash containing barley malt –
augmented by juniper berries - that produces an alcohol content of about 35
percent. English and American gin is further purified to produce an alcohol
content of 90 per cent or more. This is reduced by distilled water, augmented
with more flavor and then distilled again to produce a dry product with an
alcohol content of 40 percent (80 proof) or more. Each distiller adds a secret
combination of botanical ingredients that includes juniper berries and possibly
orris, angelica and licorice roots, lemon and orange peels, cassia bark,
caraway, coriander, cardamom, anise and fennel.
The Commercial Appeal, the Scripps-Howard newspaper in
Memphis where I worked as a reporter and editor 1969-84, put together a blind
tasting panel to test gins a few years ago. Surprisingly, one of the lower
priced gins – Ashby’s London Dry Gin, a product of Kentucky – out-pointed most
of the expensive imports from England. It was named the best value by a wide
margin. It’s what I buy when I’m in Memphis and often carry with me when I travel.
With our legs tired from all the walking the last two days,
we decided to forego walking to a restaurant. We had a satisfying, takeout
dinner from McDonald’s across the street from the Carlton Hotel. The chicken
Caesar salad was much better than those served at home. It cost more but the
portions were larger.
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