Great Feeling of Quality

Arie M. Broers (1906-1976) was a fruit grower to the Dr. de Vriesstraat 23 in Benningbroek, where now Peter Feld has his company. Arie thought that the persecution of the Jews by the Germans in the 1930s and 40s was wrong. He went into the resistance. Among other things, he arranged for Jewish families hiding places and ration cards in West Friesland.

Together with his wife Annie and five children, he had six Jewish people in hiding, including the Cardozo family, throughout the war. They all worked in the fruit garden during the day.

In 1944, he became the most important man alongside A. C. Graaf, responsible for the dumping grounds and weapons transports in North Holland as a 'load master' of the Domestic Government. In the Wieringermeer, the government set up a central warehouse.

In 1948 Arie van queen Wilhelmina received a special certificate for his great sense of sacrifice. People in hiding had nominated him for a knighthood, but he did not want them. He was proud that Israel planted trees for a new forest in his and Annie Cardozo's names in Israel.

Papa’s regional commandant was also an old friend of his, Arie M. Broers, of the Nederland’s Binnenlandse Strijdkracht—Dutch Interior Forces. The NBS played an essential role throughout the occupation, working against both the German and Dutch Nazis. (Oddly enough, the acronym for their arch-opponents was very similar—NSB, the Nationaal-Socialistische

Beweging.

When the Nazis took over Holland in May 1940, instead of employing a military occupational government, as they had done in other countries like France, they established their Dutch civil government. The German Nazis considered the Dutch to be their long-lost Aryan brethren and planned to annex Holland as part of Greater Germany permanently. The Nazi government was headed by one of Hitler's friends, an Austrian named Arthur Von Seyss-Inquart.

One of the first acts of this new government—while they were still pretending to respect existing Dutch law —was to take an elaborate census of the whole Dutch population, including data about religion and ethnic descent. Then, they required everyone to carry an identification card, known as a persoonsbewijs. (ID Card) Perhaps because the Dutch have always been a civic-minded people, they willingly complied with these regulations. It was a massive catalog of freely given, precise personal information—about who the Dutch were. It listed where they lived, where they worked, what they earned a living, and which religion and ethnic group they belonged to. That would later facilitate the grand Nazi plan to eliminate all Jews from Holland forever.

Thus the persoonsbewijs became an integral part of daily life in Holland. Indeed, you would need one if you were ever questioned on the street by the authorities. But you also required one to get ration coupons for food, fuel, and other necessities.

Jews had a big letter J stamped on their persoonsbewijs. Non-Jews didn't. Therefore, many Jews and resistance workers had to be supplied with false identity cards just to survive. The Ordedienst was one of the organizations that specialized in providing these counterfeit documents.

The counterfeiting enterprise eventually grew quite large, and the O.D. printed thousands of false documents. Those that needed one obtained blank persoonsbewijs cards through resistance workers who had infiltrated and gotten jobs with the population registry. Along with stealing blank forms, these workers also made efforts to unravel the existing documentation housed in these offices. Whole file cabinets full of records might mysteriously disappear—having been dumped into a canal.

Because of his involvement with the Ordedienst, Papa had a phony non-Jewish identity card from early on, bearing the Christian-sounding name Willem Bakker. But Mama still had only a card with the J. Papa's friend Arie Broers, leader of the Schagen chapter of the Ordedienst, pointed out that this was not a good situation. The Nazi laws didn't recognize marriage between Jews and non-Jews, and extramarital intercourse between the two was severely punishable. So Arie arranged to get Mama a new persoonsbewijs, using Mama’s J I.D. The O.D. removed the pictures and fingerprints to put on her new I.D. card. We lived on Waal street 109 second floor.

We lived in an area where new apartment buildings were still going up until the war brought construction to a standstill. Sometimes construction halted simply because the authorities said they first needed to collect and dispose of bomb fragments. I don't suppose my parents would have approved, but this disarray made a fascinating playground for a five-year-old. I remember playing outside all afternoon one day, fearlessly climbing in and out of abandoned concrete sewer pipes.

April 8, 1942

I was tired that night and was in bed when we had an unexpected visitor to our flat. It was Louis Stodel, Papa's cousin. I overheard that Louis decided to leave the country and collected some diamonds from my Oma Betje's savings. Louis told Papa that the Germans were making deals with Jews who had something to sell.

Louis' sister, Nanny, was married to a musician named Harry Mock, who played violin in the orchestra of a cruise ship—it may have been the Holland-America line. Harry traveled back and forth between Amsterdam and New York, where he would invest the money of his Dutch relatives, just as some people did with the Swiss.

Many Jews had already arranged to have anonymous holdings in America, Switzerland, Great Britain, and Sweden. Businessmen in search of capital penetration were moving in on Holland, offering to maintain the capital of Jewish stockholders "until things would get settled." Our visitor told Papa that every country was going to stick their finger into this apple-tart. We had no real friends, said he. These people would wait until the day of final destruction, then raise themselves as the redeemers of our blood and money.

Toward the end of April, the RAF and the Luftwaffe were having vicious air battles over our heads almost every evening. The heavens were bursting with shells, and the flak fire from the ground left wiry trails of light reaching up deep into the sky.

It isn't easy for human beings to try and live without sleep, and it's tough for a boy of five. These nightly bombings had my family waiting out the nights, sitting or standing in the doorways in our flat, in the hope that we might survive if the building should crumble around us. There were flashes like lightning and a terrible, percussive bombing all through the late hours of the night. Our terrible dread that bombs would strike our neighborhood had us holding onto each other for dear life; in some cases, my Mama's fingernails dug right into my skin; she was holding me so protectively.

We could not wait for daylight to come. Some days, there was black smoke in the sky at dawn. The English had sent bombers to destroy some of the oil reserves that the Dutch still stored in tanks at the mouth of the North Sea Canal. The North Sea Canal had the most significant sea lock globally, and it was always a prime target.

The fierce bombardment always targeted some critical strategic installation. Then, we'd learn the next day those whole neighborhoods had been razed. But to our surprise, there was very little damage to the area where we lived— primarily broken windows.

The air raids would usually knock out our electricity. Papa always had a flashlight in his pocket. He had a little one called a "cat's eye." You squeezed it, and a tiny battery would come on. I think that was the only "weapon" my father ever carried. We also had oil lamps and candles. We had a gas stove, but we usually cooked on a kerosene burner because the gas was out so often. We stored containers of kerosene on our rear balcony.

On Wednesday, April 29, 1942, a notice appeared in the newspaper.

From the Jewish Council for Amsterdam

Nieuwe Keizersgracht 58

Amsterdam CLS

As of Sunday, next, every Jew will be obliged to wear the so-called Jewish star. The Jewish Council will distribute these. Every person will temporally receive a maximum of four stars and will give one textile coupon in return. The price of one star is 4 cents. The star should be cut and folded so that the six-pointed star, complete with a dotted line, is visible on the clothing. The place where the Jews should wear the star is indicated in the newspaper.

Yours faithfully,

The Jewish Council for Amsterdam

Asscher, Prof. Dr. D. Cohen, Presidents.

Think about what was going on at the time I was born. We were all taxed, robbed, beaten, arrested, and jailed for no reason other than for the fact that we practiced our religion. And we were shipped off to labor or concentration camps. Adolf Hitler and the Nazis seduced a nation, bullied a continent, and attempted to exterminate the Jews of Europe.

At that same time, my Papa had already made his plans with his nephew, Harry Stodel, for us to procure Portuguese visas. We wanted to escape from Holland. We were of Portuguese descent, and recent events led us to believe that we could look to Portugal for our escape. Between 1940 and 1941, Aristides de Sousa Mendes, a Portuguese diplomat, issued visas enabling Jews and their relatives of Portuguese descent to travel from England to Portugal.

Harry Stodel was a diamond merchant, and he had his car. My Papa worked for him as a part-time driver. Papa and Harry planned to rent a vacation house near the coast of Holland. But as time went on, it became more dangerous to reach Portugal because of the mines, spikes, and nails the Germans had begun to lay along the roads. Although passage to Portugal through France and Spain was no longer possible, we hoped to reach Portugal by sea. There, we would wait for visas sponsored by Papa's friend to go to America.

Although the plan seemed perfect, we were unable to get our visas in time. Papa and Harry scrapped their scheme, and we returned to Amsterdam, never having seen the beachfront. We would spend the next three years in hiding. Harry died in 1943 at the Sobibor Concentration Camp in Poland. As the war continued when I was a child, the so-called "Nuremberg Laws" once again expanded their scope.

Early on the morning of Sunday, May 3, 1942, Mama packed a big bundle of food for Papa and Uncle Ams to take "to a friend in the country." The two men left on a bicycle at five in the morning and didn't get back until late that night. When they returned, my Uncle Alphons was with them.

I heard them talk about the success of their trip. With forged I.D. cards, a bundle of food, and a few boxes of cigars, Papa and Uncle Ams had taken their bicycle to the train station, bought tickets, and carried their bike right onto the train to Hoogeveen. (They were not yet wearing their yellow Jewish stars, confident that it would take at least till Monday for the authorities to begin checking for compliance.)

Arriving at the gate of the Hoogeveen camp, they were greeted by surly guards armed with rifles and advised that this was a dangerous place to be. Papa and Uncle Ams boldly announced that they would like to see the commander: they had to bring him some cigars. So, the guards lifted the gate and let them in. A short while later, after briefly inspecting their pass, the guards lifted the gate again, and the two visitors left the camp—now with Uncle Alphons riding on the back of Uncle Ams' bicycle. Looking back, it seems an object lesson in pure chutzpah. Two Jews walked into a Nazi labor camp, armed with a box of cigars—and three Jews walked out. I see now just how brave my Papa was.

In the latter part of May, the Allied bombing in Holland got worse again. On Sunday the seventeenth, there were low-level RAF bombings all day long. On the eighteenth, they came at night, and the air raid sirens were wailing. Then, on the night of the twenty-first, I thought there must have been a thousand bombers in the air. By the twenty-seventh, U.S. and RAF bombers were making raids both day and night. Not long after that, the Noah family moved to a hiding place in the Spuistraat, and we did not see each other again until 1945.

On July 1, 1942, I overheard, in conversation, that Papa was thinking of going into hiding. The very next day, people were moving some of our furniture, including Mama's piano, into the shared balcony closet—and then straight through into our neighbors' flat.

Later, I would come to understand what was going on that day. When a Jewish family was deported or disappeared, all their personal property was confiscated by the Reich. That's why Jews were not allowed to remove furniture from their homes. But with the help of our neighbors and the adjoining closets, our family could secretly remove valuable possessions for safekeeping without appearing to break the law.

The next day, Friday, Papa came home and rushed up the stairs. Mama embraced him, and they immediately went into their bedroom to talk about something. By now, every night was full of air raid sirens, bombs falling, lights flashing all around. It made me a nervous wreck. On Friday, July 24, Papa took me to visit Oma Betje at her home in the Louis Boterstraat, who had lost her husband, and I had seen him with my Papa in the hospital; I still remember in my dreams the white hospital beds in a huge room. I cried to my Oma. I told her I'd had enough of the bombings and sirens every night. Oma Betje took me in her arms and said, "Maxje, just a little more time, and things will be back to normal; don't worry."

Oma Betje lived in a neighborhood where there were now daily roundups of Jews. But the Jewish Council had assured her that because of her age, she would not be deported. Only people between the ages of sixteen and forty were "called up."

She told me, "See, Maxje, I'm a widow, over sixty years old—I'm not good for anything; I'm just an old lady!" I threw my arms around her and wept. Papa went home and left me to stay over with Oma Betje that night. All night long, Oma Betje and I talked and played checkers together. What a splendid grandma I had! I wish I could explain to you just how much I loved her. But there are no such words.

Oma Betje had a unique way of banking. She had one jar for electric bills, one for gas, one for rent, and on and on. However, she had one jar of quarters, and when I would visit, I would get a quarter. That was a lot of money in those days. I didn't know it, but this was the last time I would ever see my Oma Betje.

Later on, I learned that the Germans were not only deporting sixty-year-olds but were pulling people out of Jewish hospitals and nursing homes, even taking children from Jewish orphanages. People had begun to wonder just what kind of labor service the Germans expected to get from old maids and toddlers. And no one received any more mail. I believe that the whole neighborhood was emptied of all inhabitants. It had become a ghetto.

"Are we going to have to leave, too?" I wondered. "No, Maxje," Mama reassured me. We would not leave—we would stay here, with Ido and Papa, until the bombings stopped. And then, we would all go for a few weeks to the ocean resort at Egmond aan-Zee. She knew that would make me happy. I loved to play in the sand and build sandcastles.

The following Sunday morning—July 26, 1942—a visitor showed up at our flat at eight o'clock. I didn't know who he was. Papa wasn't home.

Mama told Ido and me to hurry up and get dressed—not just the usual way, but with four sets of clothing, one over the other—and to pack even more clothes in a bit of suitcase. I was very fond of my sailor suit and my football shirts, but it was midsummer, and with a blue navy suit and so many shirts and pants under that, I was soon sweating like crazy.

Our mysterious visitor accompanied us as we left our flat at Waalstraat 109. We started in the direction of the Centraal Station. I was excited. Nobody had said so, but I was pretty sure we were going on holiday to Egmond-aan-Zee.

I also noticed that for some reason, Mama and Ido were not wearing their yellow stars today. Something was a little odd about this.

We stepped right up onto the tram. Mama was nervous—she said she was worried about air raids. On hearing an air raid alarm, everyone was supposed to clear the streets and take shelter. Mama held onto Ido and me so tightly; there was no way we could even open our mouths.

The team arrived at the Centraal Station, which I'd never been there before. It was a unique, massive, ornate building from the nineteenth century.

Mama took us inside the station, past the coffee shops, past the many people in uniform, and those with Red Cross buckets collecting money. People filled the station, who all seemed to me like scary ghosts. Most of the skylight windows overhead were missing or broken—there had been a bombing of oil tanks not far away, at the harbor's edge; its percussion had shattered the glass, and no one had bothered to replace it. There were very noisy steam engines, lots of black smoke, and many soldiers with helmets and big boots and guns.

We climbed aboard a train bound for the town of Hoorn, which is north of Amsterdam, on the eastern coast of a peninsula called West Friesland. There were still more scary-looking people on the train. Mama was a nervous wreck the whole time. Ido and I had to be very quiet.

Arriving at Hoorn, we were met by Papa’s old friend, Arie Broers. Arie got us all to climb into a milk truck, and then he jumped in and got behind the wheel. He started up the car and began driving a while; we arrived in a town called while we arrived in a city called Heerhugowaard. There was Papa, waiting for us.

Our contacts brought us to the home of a family named van Diepen, who had a dairy farm in a rural part of Heerhugowaard. They showed us to a small upstairs farmhouse. I was told this was where we were going to stay for a while. That was undoubtedly no Egmond-aan-Zee. That was no holiday place at all.

Our little bed had two straw mattresses, with urine stains on the ticking and the buttons hanging loose. From a wooden box, we pulled out some flannel blankets. These would serve as my new bed. Somehow, the four of us would eat, live, and sleep in a room about ten feet square.

Sometime later, I wondered how Papa must have felt, bringing his wife and children to a place like this. From the stellar family Gompers, his lovely, intelligent wife, grew up on the Nieuwe Keizersgracht and had a taste for all the finer things in life. Now, here she would live. Here, in an upstairs room of a farmhouse. But then, the facts were simple. Our accommodations, albeit humble, were better than a boxcar.

Going into hiding in Nazi-occupied Holland was by no means a simple matter. We were putting our non-Jewish hosts at significant risk. Hiding Jews in Holland was not a capital offense—but it might also have been since those caught doing the Nazis often sent it to concentration camps. By agreeing to hide us on their dairy farm away from the city, the van Diepen family tried to do its part. But there had to be severe restrictions on our activities—mainly because there were always farmhands coming and going and who could not be trusted. We were only allowed to go downstairs between nine at night and five o'clock the following day. Our washing water came from a pitcher. Then, we had the pot. All four of us used the pot as a toilet during the day for emergencies. If the coast was clear, we could use the outhouse.

Ido and Papa would sit at a bit of table, playing cards and chess during the daylight hours. Papa got some bicycle-wheel spokes to keep us busy and sharpened the ends—and Mama taught us, boys, how to knit.

There was a narrow hallway just outside our room, where we could sit and eat. Here we ate our breakfast, before five in the morning, of course. Usually, we had some hard-homemade bread, butter, and jam. And then at night, once the farmworkers were gone, we would get some hot potatoes, rice soup, and a vegetable. Sometimes we would even get a little meat stew. But we had to be very careful not to leave any crumbs behind.

It's funny how in my mind, it now seems those days and nights passed quickly. I know they must have been agonizingly tedious. To lay low—to stay out of sight—means having very little to keep you stimulated. Of course, for someone whom the Nazis were set on murdering, an uneventful day was a good day. But the things that stand out in my mind are those few moments when we had some excitement—usually moments of jeopardy.

It's funny, the kinds of things that pose a danger when you're in hiding. For example, you wouldn't think that children playing could pose a grave risk, but they did. On Sunday, the van Diepens invited some of their extended family over for a hot lunch, so naturally, we were obliged to hide in our room and stay completely silent. The visiting children once left on their own, began to play together. They came up the stairs, and we heard them fooling around just outside our door. There was no lock on this door.

So, my Papa very quietly got up and put his hands on the doorknob in case they tried to open it—which, of course, they did. The door held fast. The kids would go, then they would come, and someone would try the door again. Maybe they were playing some sort of game of hiding and sought—but on our side of the door, only the "hide" part counted. Papa didn't dare let go of that doorknob nor even shift his weight lest a creaking floorboard gives us away. It would take but a second for one of these youngsters to pop the door open and abruptly find himself staring wide-eyed at four strange faces—faces of people who frankly weren't supposed to be there. Were that to happen, there would be some explaining to do in the family— and later, in town, someone might say something to someone else, and we might all lose our lives.

So, for what must have been an hour, Papa held that doorknob firmly in his two hands, in a way holding on for dear life. At last, the man of the house noticed something was going on and came up to intervene. He explained that the children mustn't open that door because he kept his furs and skins in that closet—and daylight would damage them. So, this sent the children downstairs, and we were left alone again.

On another day that summer, a prominent German army truck pulled up and stopped right before Petrus and Agatha van Diepen's house. The driver got out and rang the doorbell. My Mama, already terrified of these familiar heavy boot-steps, turned white as a sheet. And judging from the sound of her voice, I guess Mrs. Agatha van Diepen must have been terrified, too, when she opened the door. We heard the German soldier asking for directions.

Then, he asked our landlady, "Are you all right, madam? You're shaking."

"Oh, just a little cold," she said.

The soldier said, "Cold? But it's summertime!" Then, he walked away.

That night, we were all expecting the soldiers to return. Mama and Papa told my brother and me to be brave—and you know, that did make us strong. My Papa said, "The strong will always remain and never go under." I was afraid for my parents—yet I felt proud of their courage. But the soldiers didn't come back that night. Life went on.

One night, around midnight, the airplanes with their heavy bombs returned—and then came a genuinely terrific explosion.

We were very much afraid to leave our hiding place to see what was going on because we knew that the German secret police would follow shortly—so Papa calmed us down, and we stayed inside. The following day, we learned that a bomber had gotten hit and dropped his bombs—and they'd fallen right on the next house down the road.

The days ticked on. Outside, summertime swelled and passed across these pastures and polders of West Friesland, so unfamiliar to a city boy. I didn't spend much time outdoors. Sometimes at dawn, we would all go downstairs to the empty cow stalls, and Mama and Papa would try to tidy us boys up a little.

However, one day at about seven in the morning, I had to pee so badly, I decided to go outside and use the sewer. Well, as luck would have it, I glanced up and saw one of the farmworkers watching me.

At first, I didn't apprehend what kind of trouble I'd caused; but apparently, this hawk-eyed dairyman had noticed that I was circumcised. Hence, he knew I must not be a Christian. And he went, with that story, to our hosts. After that, our hosts suggested that we'd better be leaving soon.

People were working very hard in the resistance movement, trying to save as many Jews as possible by finding them hiding places with various families in the towns and the countryside of Holland. A division of the Ordedienst was dedicated to this challenging task; it was called the L.O., or Landelijke Organisatie. Unfortunately, it was usually impossible to find room for a whole family to live together in hiding. Very often, they could only persuade a host to take one person into their homes. So, my family came to split up in September 1942 and live in different homes.

Gently, carefully, Papa explained to Ido and me why it would be safer for the four of us to stay in separate places, just until the war was over. We just had to play this game of make-believe for a while. Besides, where I was going, now I'd get to play with other kids. And it wasn't as though we'd never see each other. He promised to visit whenever he could. As a bonus, I would even be given a new name—Dickey Kramer.

Even living underground, one needed a false identity because, without a persoonsbewijs, no one could obtain food ration cards on your behalf.

When it came to getting our phony I.D. cards, Papa had had the foresight to make sure his children's false names were different from his, so there would be no record of a family connection. We could not be traced that way, even if one of us got picked up by the Germans and talked. Thus, Papa’s name was Willem Bakker—and now, my name was Dickey Kramer.

"Who cares?" Papa said. "As long as it's a Christian name, the Gentiles will be happy." Anyway, I liked the name, Dickey.

That Sunday, September 6, 1942, we said goodbye to our first hosts. I put my blue and white sailor suit back on and my leather shoes. Mama, Papa, and Ido took me to the home of a family called Schimmel, who lived in a place called De Weere. Here, I was warmly introduced to my new makebelieve "parents."

For a few minutes, everything was pleasant. It seemed like a lovely enough house. Then, it was time for my own family to move on to their new hiding places. My brother Ido turned and said goodbye to me. I broke out in tears—and, to my surprise, so did he.

At this, Mama began to weep, too. She grew hysterical. Maybe she felt this might be the last time she would ever see me. Papa tried to calm her. Mrs. Schimmel took me in her arms and promised Mama that I would be in good hands.

I sat with the Schimmel's who fed me. It grew late, and I asked Mrs. Schimmel if I might go to sleep now. She gave me a blanket and told me to lie down on the floor, right there in the front room. In Dutch, this was called the pronkkamer, or "show" room, used for special occasions. That was where they left me to sleep. I had not sucked my thumb for two years, but at that moment, I was so lonely, I lay down with my thumb in my mouth and cried until long after everyone had gone to bed.

The following day, Mrs. Schimmel came in to wake me up. Right away, I had to go to the outhouse. I'd already pooped a little in my underpants, but I could not let anybody know that—so in the outhouse, I did my best to clean them. I would have to wear the same underwear for the whole week.

That first few days with my new family, I cried night and day. I was like a puppy who my saviors had taken from their mother. Even though there were other kids in the house, nobody could help me feel better. I just had to cry myself out.

The following Saturday, I had my first co-ed bathtub experience. The tradition was that everybody took a bath on Saturday night. The Schimmels had two children of their own—a boy and a girl—and to save hot water, they put all three of us in one bath. It seemed like an okay idea at first. But then, the little Schimmel boy noticed that my penis was different from his.

Trouble again. I think it's safe to say my penis got me in more trouble when I was five than it ever has since! Of course, Mrs. Schimmel had to tell her husband, and they were worried the little boy might mention it to someone on the outside. So, within a few weeks, little Maxje (alias Dickey) was on the move again.

On Papa's birthday, October 5, 1942, Papa came and fetched me on the back of his bicycle, which had rubber-hose tires. I still remember the pure love in Papa's eyes that day, as he brought me to stay with the Koopman family in Spanbroek.

With the Koopmans, this city boy would now get a real education about life in the country— beginning in the first few moments of my arrival. We arrived at the farm in the early evening. The Koopmans' farmhouse was long and narrow, sparsely furnished, and very clean. But I didn't get a good look at the place right off, as I had to go to the toilet very badly. Wim Koopman pointed me toward the outhouse and handed me some old newspapers to clean myself. The outhouse was quite a journey away— about fifty meters from the back of the farmhouse. Wim warned me to lock the outhouse door when I was done, or else the wind might blow the door off its hinges. Having just arrived, I walked through the mud in my leather shoes and short navy-blue pants, of which I was so proud. It was slippery, and I went down—into soil that was more manure than clay. That didn't make me happy. I cried. But then, I remembered that Papa had always told me that a big boy didn't call. So, I stood up, and for a moment, I almost forgot what I was doing out there—but nature soon reminded me. And then I had to run.

The outhouse was a wooden shed built over a water hole. I went up three steps and opened the door. The door had a knob to be locked inside or the outside, with another hook and eye inside for extra privacy. Inside the little shed, I found a big box with toilet covers on top of the hole. The toilet lid opened onto a delightful vista of human and animal waste.

There were old catalog sheets, cut into four pieces, hanging on nails in the wall. Although Wim had given me my ration of newspaper, I used some of these sheets to try and get the mud off my shoes and clothing. That was not a place where I felt the urge to linger. As soon as I had accomplished my purpose there, I hurried back to the farmhouse.