163256: A Memoir of Resistance

Introduction: Words at the Ready

xi this story of resistance is a modest account of bravery and heroism in a time of tremendous anguish. The time of my resistance is the time of the Holocaust; and although the environment shifts, my roots are in the Netherlands, and in Amsterdam in particular, where Dutch Jewry was very active in the underground movements to free Holland and end Hitler’s hold on its peoples. There are too few memoirs about the Holocaust in Holland, and even fewer autobiographies or testimonies by Dutch Canadians who immigrated to Canada after the war, and fewer still by writers who would call themselves Jewish Dutch Canadians.1 I hope this memoir will be a welcome contribution to our understanding of the Holocaust in the Netherlands. It is a testament to one man’s journey through that period in modern war and genocide history that evokes what Dan Bar-On referred to in 1999 as “the indescribable and the undiscussable.”2 In 163256: A Memoir of Resistance, I describe and discuss what cannot easily or even directly be remembered or spoken. I try to clearly depict my memories of youth, which seem quite ordinary on the surface: I was athletic and played many sports, I went to a Jewish day school, I struggled in school because I was left-handed and left-handedness was considered abnormal, and I was devoted to my home and my family life. The tragedy is that not one member of my immediate family survived the Holocaust years. Like many youths, I developed close friendships as I matured into adulthood, and as a prisoner in Hitler’s camps. Max and Rika Pels lived INTRODUCTION Words at the Ready across the road from my wife, Henrietta, before we were married, and they had two children, Katy and Philip. As I explain, and in so doing foreshadow , that “Yettie [Henrietta] and I became close friends with the Pels family. We knew their children … from the time they were born” (12–13). My sister Esther was related to the Pels family by marriage.Also important to this particular narrative is the fact that I had long been a close friend of Rika Pels’s brother, Aaron, so the connections between the Pels and the Englishman families ran deep and long. What may astonish readers is that I remained true to my dear friend Max Pels, even after the torment, even while I nursed my own wounds, even after losing all I had known as home before Auschwitz. This book revolves around a promise: I never forgot my promise to Pels, a memorable promise , a generous promise that likely ensured my own survival after the war. This promise is tied to friendship and loyalty, two concepts that would in great measure determine who #163256 would become and how my life would continue after my incarcerations in two prisons and five concentrations camps. I survived numerous beatings and other methods of torture, starvation, and extreme mental anguish; I speak on many occasions of the dire feeling of utter loneliness caused by my experiences, a feeling that finally began to fade when I began a new family. The circumstances under which I built this new family are a testament to the quality of my friendships and my promise. They also stem from my sense of loyalty and my perseverance , and within and between my words, I think you’ll find a quiet need to have faith in the goodness of my people. This quiet need permeates the memoir and brings both sadness and joy to the various short tales that interrupt the larger narrative of suffering and overcoming, of regeneration ,of immigration and new life.My tale about my new family and how it came to be may seem to readers as a near-mythic story, and yet in my eyes it is all so ordinary—just the way things turned out. Yettie’s and my parents and siblings, and other family members, were rounded up for deportation in August 1942, just after Yettie and I were married (for names and dates, see the appendices). During these horrific round-ups, or razzias, Max and Rika Pels would hide their children in Yettie ’s and my basement “between two piles of coal” (23). Because Jewish children were most vulnerable during a razzia, the Pels parents eventually reasoned that their own children must be sent away in order to increase their chances of survival (23). The Dutch underground arranged for Katy xii Introduction [3.133.12...