105
Jodenbuurt
Nieuwe Kerkstraat Amsterdam
IN A FLAT LOCATED on Nieuwe Kerkstraat in the center of the Jodenbuurt, or Jewish Quarter, Lars von der Haas lifted his head from the pillow. He blinked himself out of his sleepy trance and tried to focus on the words coming from the street outside.
“Alle Joden moeten zich voorbereiden op hun vertrek!” a male voice bellowed.
Lars looked over at his wife, Annika, who had not stirred. In the corner of the room, their eleven-year-old daughter, Dahlia, also remained in blissful slumber.
Lars moved to the window in the den and pulled the curtain that looked out from their ground-floor flat onto the street.
A truck rolled slowly by with a loudspeaker on top.
Walking alongside it were men carrying rifles and automatic weapons.
The Ordnungspolizei—the Order Police, shorthanded as Orpo by some, by others as the Grüne Polizei or Green Police for their uniform color.
“Niemand mag zonder begeleiding op straat zijn!” blared the voice through the loudspeaker. “Alle bruggen in de wijk zijn verhoogd!”
Lars felt something sink in his chest. It was happening.
He always knew it might. The Jews, already confined within the Jewish Quarter, were now being rounded up for departure to labor camps.
And though the entire Jewish Quarter was enclosed by a fence, the Nazis were announcing that they’d pulled up all the bridges, too, to prevent any escape.
Lars craned his neck to see the end of the street, where he confirmed that the Magere Brug, the narrow bridge over the Amstel River, was raised to nearly ninety degrees.
“What’s happening?” asked Annika, pulling on a housecoat.
Lars tried for a grim smile. “It’s time.”
The door to the other bedroom opened. Lars’s father, Diederik, his wispy white hair standing on end, squinted at his son. “They’ve come for us? This is it?”
“It will be all right,” said Lars, trying to convince himself as much as the others. “We have made this decision.”
The decision was not to run, not to hide.
Jews who tried to hide, when caught, had met with certain death, when the Nazis invaded and easily captured the Netherlands in 1940.
And running and hiding with their young daughter—not to mention his parents, who’d already fled Germany following Hitler’s rise to power ten years earlier in 1933—would be exceptionally difficult.
His mother, Verena, had terrible asthma and needed considerable medical attention.
And his father was not in the best of health, either.
The decision, instead, was to keep their heads down, draw no attention to themselves, and try to live a normal life—as normal as one could while wearing yellow badges on their arms with the Star of David, being forced from their chosen occupations (Lars, a university physics professor; Annika, a pediatrician), remaining locked in a ghetto, forbidden from driving to work or using telephones, not to mention enduring daily insults and occasional beatings.
They’d decided that if the Nazis deported them, they would do their best to survive the labor camps. The men would do hard manual labor. The women would work in munitions factories or in cleaning jobs.
But they would live—live in the hope of a better future. Not an easy decision, but there were no easy decisions for Jews in Nazi-occupied Europe.
They’d long ago packed their rucksacks for this contingency. Lars’s contained three sweaters, two pairs of trousers, underwear, and a canteen. He now stuffed a pair of shoes in the side compartment and a rolled-up wool blanket under the flap on top.
“This is my fault,” Lars’s father said to him as they readied their luggage. “If you did not have your mother and me to worry about, you could have fled.”
“Nonsense, Papa.” Lars cupped his hand behind his father’s neck. “We made this decision as a family. And we will endure it as a family.”
As Lars filled a sack with bread, apples, and some sugar cookies that Dahlia liked, he heard pounding on the outside door of the tenement building. He opened it to the Green Police.
Clutching his wife and daughter, his mother and father behind them, Lars marched with the other Jews to the corner of Weesperstraat.
They were put on trams to the Muiderpoort railway station and loaded onto trains.
“We will stick together,” Lars von der Haas whispered to them. “We can handle anything together.”
They were taken to a camp in Westerbork, a facility that had been set up originally to house Jewish refugees emigrating to the Netherlands.
The Nazis, now in control of the country, announced that they would repurpose it as a hub for deporting Jews to labor camps in the east. The camp was roughly 120 acres in size, surrounded by fences of barbed wire, with watchtowers at each corner.
For four days, Lars and his family were kept in a cottage with two rooms (a bed in each), a bathroom, and a hot plate.
They ate rations of soup broth and chunks of bread.
They went outside but avoided interaction with any of the other detainees, wanting no trouble from the guards patrolling on horseback.
In the evening, Lars would play the guitar he brought, the best rendition he could muster of “Korenbloemen blauw” (“Cornflower Blue”), “Breng eens een Zonnetje” (“Sprinkle a Little Sun”), and whatever other upbeat songs he could remember.
The fourth day, Lars awoke to a banging on the cottage door. He opened it to an SS guard. “You shall leave by train in one hour,” said the guard.
“Yes, sir. Where are we going?”
“Sobibór,” he said. “Eastern Poland.” He put out his hand. “Your card?”
“Ah, yes.” Lars pulled out his Dutch identity card, marked with a black capital letter J on both sides, and handed it to the guard.
The guard nodded and handed back the card. “All right, Lars von der Haas,” he said. “Be at the train with your family in one hour.”