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196 The Haul in the Wall Henry Stark I knew that something big was up. Mrs. Kappendijk, the lady in whose house we were hiding, was in an agitated celebratory mood. I didn’t quite know what to make of it. The fear that was—until then—our constant companion had lifted, to be replaced by a kind of nervous, but not unhappy, expectation. It seemed that everyone knew what was going on except me. The year was 1944, the place was the outskirts of Antwerp, and as I later found out,itwasthefirstweekofSeptember.Myparents,fatherPaul,ageforty-five,mother Anna, age forty; my sister Edith, age thirteen and seven years my senior; and I had been in hiding since the end of 1941, or maybe early 1942. Mrs. Kappendijk, an elderly Flemish widow, had been our last hope to escape from the Gestapo and the SS. Until recently, Carl deFuchs, a former colleague of my father’s in the diamond industry in Antwerp, and his new wife had been hiding us in a small house in the town of Boom, an industrial backwater of Antwerp on a tidal estuary of the River Schelde. As far as I know, Boom was of little interest to anyone, except possibly the regional employees of the big Agfa-Gevaert factory complex. At that time AgfaGevaert , a leader in the production of photographic film and imaging technology, was owned by the notorious I. G. Farben Company and was considered an enemy institution. Its assets in the United States were seized by the American government. We lived on the top floor of a creaky, otherwise silent house that had a ceiling trapdoor that could be opened to admit fresh air and give us a rooftop view of the surroundings. From the outside the upper floor of the house looked deserted. Allied airplanes regularly bombed the area at night, their target presumably being the Agfa and Minerva plants. The Minerva plant had been taken over by the Germans to repair and service Luftwaffe airplanes. Faulty Allied bombing killed hundreds of local civilians, including over two hundred children in one raid alone. After these bombing raids the various fires around the region would color the sky a glowing red, a color that to this day I associate with night and danger. Our “toilet,” such as it was, was a version of a short steel barrel, the kind they might use for shipping chemicals, paint, and other material. It was obviously not easy to use, and I “held it in” for as long as possible rather than have to climb on it. Campers have a word for such a contraption; they call it the “groover” because it tends to leave grooves on tender behinds. When the barrel was loaded, or the smell became unbearable, my sister, father, and mother emptied the thing in the mudflats adjacent to our house. At low tide the mudflats became exposed, ready to accept our family “gift.” As the tide went in, the waste made its way to the sea. Giving in to the daily threats made by the Germans against those hiding Jews, deFuchs ordered us to leave. His wife was terrified that they would be exposed as Jew hiders and bear the dreadful consequences of such a crime. Who could blame deFuchs for throwing us out? The Germans were good at using terror as a weapon Aftermath 197 and deFuchs was no hero, nor a moralist; just a guy seeing an opportunity to make some money in return for providing bread and board or, putting it more accurately, leasing out a dump with bread and margarine and some soup for sustenance. I suffered my share of illnesses due to malnutrition. It is very difficult to judge other people fairly unless one has been in similar circumstances . To my father, deFuchs was a crook who deserved to be vilified. Years later, when we talked about our years of hiding, it came out that I didn’t share my father’s view of deFuchs. I saw what deFuchs was doing as risky for himself and his wife. He stood to lose everything, possibly his freedom, even his life. He may have exploited the situation, but at least he didn’t sell us out. The Jews of Holland should have been so fortunate! Even as the war was lost, the Germans went on an insane murder spree against Jews. They used all strategic means at their disposal to kill as many Jews as possible. On the...

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