The Boy Between Worlds: A Biography by Annejet van der Zijl

Author:Annejet van der Zijl [van der Zijl, Annejet]
Language: eng
Format: epub, azw3
Published: 2019-08-01T04:00:00+00:00

As the cold weather had set in during the winter of 1942, it became clear that the Nazis were no match for the Russian winter, the tough Red Army, and the stubborn British, so Hitler turned his attention toward his second goal: the fight against international Judaism. Because no matter how many “inferior people”—Untermenschen—had been forced to leave Europe, and no matter how many had been annihilated in mass shootings in Eastern Europe, the Jewish race still hadn’t fully disappeared. On January 20, 1942, a number of National Socialist leaders had attended a secret conference at an estate on the frozen Wannsee southwest of Berlin to discuss the matter. As conference leader Reinhard Heydrich stressed, it was not enough to hunt them down and starve them out—the strongest would survive and reproduce, planting roots for an even stronger race. The problem needed to be addressed systematically, gründlich. And once the Nazi leaders agreed on this fact, they had no trouble developing an efficient strategy to execute their Final Solution.

“Die Pflicht ruft”—duty calls—as the soldier had written in Rika’s guest book. With the same sense of duty and devotion, the German people once again followed their führer. On May 3, 1942, the Nazi regime in Holland ordered that no Jew over age six could leave the house without a Star of David clearly visible on their clothing. Just two months later, the Dutch newspapers published a declaration that all Volljuden (“full-blooded” Jews) would be sent to work in Eastern Europe. The calls for this massive transport came via the Jewish Council, a consultative body set up by the occupying forces that, in the spirit of democracy, tried to use negotiation to limit the damage of the anti-Jewish policies until the end of the war.

Although the thought of being dragged away from everything they’d ever known and taken to the very place their ancestors had fled from to escape the pogroms was terrifying, the large majority of the 140,000 Dutch Jews still answered the call of the Jewish Council. What else could they do? Hiding was expensive and extremely dangerous, and if you were picked up on the street during a raid, you would be transported directly to Mauthausen, a concentration camp notorious for its terrible treatment of Jews. Moreover, the Jews assumed they wouldn’t be the only ones who would have to do their part for the Nazi empire. Unemployed people had already been put to work for the German war effort, and most of the remaining Dutch men had been sent to Germany in large numbers as well. The Jewish Council had been promised that Dutch Jews would receive preferential treatment in the labor camps. And so, the people packed their suitcases with the approved items on the Council’s list, cleaned their houses until they sparkled, and locked the doors securely behind them so everything would be intact when they returned.

On July 14, 1942, the first trains left for Westerbork in Drenthe. A camp for escaped German Jews had been set up there before the war, and the Nazis were now using it as a transit camp.

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