Contemporary Jewish Writing in Europe: A Guide

3. Remembering or Inventing the Past: Second-Generation Jewish Writers in the Netherlands

three ‰ Elrud Ibsch Remembering or Inventing the Past: Second-Generation Jewish Writers in the Netherlands Immediately following World War II the Dutch tried to come to terms with the German occupation by emphasizing the sufferings they had endured while at the same time fostering the hope that their newly acquired freedom would change everything. The war was seen as a struggle between good and evil. Although it was impossible to ignore the fact that there had been collaborators in the Netherlands who were to be punished accordingly, the majority of the Dutch population was thought to have resisted the German occupier and National Socialism. On the whole, the Dutch conceived of their nation’s role in the war as benign. It must be granted that there was a fairly well organized resistance movement in the Netherlands which helped many Jews go into hiding and escape deportation. The countless acts of sabotage, counterfeiting identity papers, and sporadic armed resistance are well known. Postwar literature glorified the heroic aspects of the resistance movement. Most of these writings have now been forgotten, not least because authors such as Simon Vestdijk and W. F. Hermans ironically qualified the importance of the resistance movement in their fiction (Anbeek 1986; Hettema 2002). A rude awakening occurred in the sixties and seventies, when documents gradually surfaced indicating that the number of Dutch Jews who had been de- 44 elrud ibsch ported and murdered was very high in comparison to other European countries (Presser 1965; de Jong 1969–89). In his article on the persecution of Jews in the Netherlands historian Hans Blom writes: “The high percentage of Jews from the Netherlands, around 75%, who perished as a result of Nazi policies is on a par only with the figures for eastern Europe and stands in stark contrast to neighboring western European countries, where the percentages were much lower” (1989, 333). This happened despite a high level of integration of most Dutch Jewry and the fact that the Netherlands had never upheld a clearly anti-Semitic tradition. Blom offers up the hypothesis that the illusion of safety harbored by the Jewish population in the Netherlands was one of the reasons for their vulnerability. Both Blom and von der Dunk (1990) have attempted to explain the shameful situation by referring to particular circumstances, such as the legalistic tradition of the Dutch people, which was at odds with acts of sabotage; the dense population of the country; its geophysical and geographical situation; and the particularly severe occupation policy. Arthur Seyss-Inquart, who belonged to the hardliners of the Austrian Nazi elite, was nominated Reichsbevollmächtigter in the Netherlands. Moreover, recent Jewish immigrants from Germany, who came to the Netherlands after 1933, were poorly integrated and could easily be identified by their German accent. In the course of the sixties the Dutch lost their innocence. The historical cliché that they did not live in an anti-Semitic nation was overshadowed by a growing awareness that they had failed to show sufficient solidarity with their Jewish compatriots and had unconsciously placed part of the responsibility for their own sufferings on the Jews. The mechanism of “blaming the victim” was at work. As Evelien Gans (2002) has shown, many Dutchmen complained about the ingratitude of the Jews who were in hiding. The Jewish survivors of the concentration camps who returned to the Netherlands hoping for a new beginning were confronted with disappointments. Their reception was often far from cordial and the Dutch were hardly interested in listening to their experiences in captivity. In a considerable number of cases it was difficult, if not impossible, to reclaim property the Jews had left with friends and neighbors for safekeeping—not to mention the traumatic situations which arose when foster parents, who for several years had protected Jewish children, reacted with barely concealed hostility when Jewish parents reclaimed their children. After the war the Dutch population, both Jews and non-Jews alike, had the same desire, namely, to forget the past and begin a new life. For the Jews this meant, first and foremost, not to be conspicuous,, not to manifest exceptionality, of which the yellow star had been the deadly symbol. Author Andreas Burnier, pseudonym for Catharina Irma Dessaur, professor of criminology at the University of Nijmegen, recalled that “after liberation I belonged to the generation of Jewish children who had gone into hiding and developed fear and resistance Remembering or Inventing the...