The just, p.35
The Just, page 35
Until late 1949, they could hear gunfire and the occasional loud boom every evening on the other side of the hill. Was it the sound of mortars? Or grenades going off? Their house was halfway down the hillside. Pa said to Robbie, ‘Let’s agree that we’ll never stick our heads up over the hilltop.’ They had a good laugh about that.
The rumour went around that the communists were stealing children. According to this story, they sent them to Bulgaria and Romania, and they returned to Greece as fully trained revolutionary fighters. The question was whether Robbie could go to school on his own. His parents said, ‘Just don’t go off with any strangers.’ He was about the only child in the neighbourhood allowed to go to school on his own. But he wasn’t scared in the least. He knew that as long as he didn’t go off with any strangers, nothing could go wrong.
His father’s attitude was always that everything was fine. Meanwhile, the Greek Civil War claimed 160,000 lives, and they learned afterwards that 28,000 children really had been kidnapped.
Robbie was sent to an unusual school, the Anavryta Lyceum, that had only thirty-three pupils, and where everything revolved around the children from the royal family. Three special classes had been formed for the education of Crown Prince Constantine and Princesses Sophia and Irene. The classes comprised a cross-section of Greek society: shipowners’ children, but also a boy from a shack with a corrugated-iron roof at the foot of the Acropolis; the son of a communist leader alongside the children of military officers; the daughter of a teacher; and the son of a foreign businessman – that one was Robbie. He was in the boys’ class with Constantine, with whom he got along well from the start.
Erni, Jan, and Rob Zwartendijk at the Acropolis, Athens, 1950.
At first, the little school was in the wealthy suburb of Psychiko. Robbie could ride his push scooter there and back. During the second year, the boys’ class moved to a castle on an estate in Kifisia, about fifteen kilometres away. Robbie would receive the remainder of his primary education there, in Constantine’s class.
It was a boarding school, and a fairly strict one. Robbie stayed there from Sunday before dinner to Saturday after breakfast. His father would pick him up at the end of the morning on Saturday, and make him sit in the back of the car because he ‘reeked to high heaven of garlic’. By Sunday evening, he was back among his friends, gabbing in Greek again. It became his first language.
When Robbie turned twelve, his parents sent him to the Netherlands for his secondary schooling, because he was having more and more trouble expressing himself in Dutch. He went to the Lorentz Lyceum in Eindhoven, like his brother and sister before him, and lived with teachers. But he spent the Christmas, Easter, and Whitsun holidays and the whole summer in Greece, helping out his father as an interpreter.
Whenever conflict was brewing at the factory, his father would bring in Robbie, who would find out exactly what was wrong. Rob Zwartendijk’s success years later on the board of the complex Ahold corporation can be traced back to those formative years in Greece, when he learned the fundamentals of management from his father.
According to his youngest son, Zwartendijk was constantly asking himself, What is good? What is evil? His thinking was never black and white. People less tied to their conceptual schemes are more considerate of others, Rob believes. When his father had a hard time with an employee, his first response was never dismissal. Instead, he would ask himself how he could have a serious conversation with that person. Then he would make a plan for the two of them to resolve their differences:
My father always wondered what that was: a good person. Others could rattle off an explanation, but not him. To him, there was nothing so complicated as a good person. A bad person, a thief or collaborator, is easy enough to figure out. But a good person? Gentle people can be cowards, and sharp thinkers can be so ambitious that they give no thought to anyone else. At the radio-tube factory in Athens, there was a new employee who soon turned out to be a communist. You should fire him, the factory manager said to my father. He asked, Why? Is he a bad person? Well, no, it wasn’t that … What, then? That man never left his job at the factory.
Many, many years later, Frits Philips, who lived to be one hundred, would tell Rob Zwartendijk that he had tried many times to persuade his father to come to Eindhoven and become a company director. In fact, that had been the main reason for Frits’s visit to Athens; he had hoped to persuade Zwartendijk, in a series of conversations, to join the Presidium, the core group within the board of management.
Of all the Zwartendijk children, Rob had the most illustrious career. He studied economics in Manchester, staying with Edith and her husband, Henk, and became involved with the only Dutch girl in the city, an au pair, Marijke, with whom he would spend the rest of his life. His career got off to a flying start at Unilever: he and Marijke were sent to Milan, the first of many foreign postings. He worked for Polaroid in Belgium and the Swedish firm of Molnlycke in France, and ended his working life as an Ahold executive board member for nineteen years, and the president and CEO of Ahold USA. Rob Zwartendijk earned great respect in business circles by leading Ahold through uncertain waters after the kidnapping and murder of his fellow board member Gerrit Jan Heijn. When he retired, twelve companies asked him to join their supervisory boards, and he said yes to all twelve.
When Frits Philips asked why Jan Zwartendijk had not aimed for an equally illustrious career, Rob told him that his father would have preferred to remain in Greece. According to Rob, Jan felt that he had taken enough risks in his lifetime, and lacked the boundless ambition of people who consider their lives a failure unless they attain the absolute summit of achievement. He believed truly intelligent people are contented with less. His brother, Jan, he said, was also too intelligent to have much ambition – just like his father.
In 1956, at the age of sixty, Jan Zwartendijk retired – reluctantly. In fact, he blamed his brother, Piet, and told Rob that his uncle had been such a troublemaker over the years that Philips had been eager to dump him. And if they pensioned off one of the Zwartendijk brothers, then wouldn’t they have to do the same to the other? But that was a misunderstanding. In the final years of his career, Piet had pleased everyone at the company and earned high praise by putting in place a well-functioning signal system along the Nieuwe Waterweg ship canal. The brothers’ compulsory retirement was simply part of a general measure at Philips. To keep the company alert and innovative, senior executives were asked to leave by the age of sixty at the latest, and neither Piet nor Jan could do anything about that.
Having to retire may not have mattered much to Zwartendijk, but it was hard for him to say goodbye to Greece. Less than six months after returning to the Netherlands, he drove back to Greece for a few weeks’ holiday with his brother and Rob in Piet’s brand-spanking-new Peugeot 203.
The brothers took turns at the wheel, driving for two hours at a stretch. Somewhere in Yugoslavia, Jan drove much too fast over a pothole, and the chassis banged into the cobblestones. Piet swore at Jan, and Jan got so angry he wouldn’t say another word to his brother. Rob, almost seventeen by then, looked on from the back seat in growing astonishment at the two retirees’ behaviour. For three days, the brothers gave each other the silent treatment, even during a late-night card game at a roadside inn.
There was only one place where Jan Zwartendijk wanted to grow old: his hometown of Rotterdam. He bought a home in the Kralingen district, near where he had grown up. Erni didn’t object, even though her memories of Kralingen were less sunny. But of all the gloomy corners of the Netherlands, the elegant home at Oranjelaan 24a was far from the worst, and her husband claimed he could smell the Maas River from there. In fact, they were much closer to a pond, the Kralingse Plas.
Never before had Jan led such a calm life. It went on until 1963, when he received a telephone call from a woman at the foreign ministry in The Hague, who asked whether he was the Angel of Curaçao.
Jan and Erni on the balcony of their home in Rotterdam.
39
The reprimand
The letter Zwartendijk received from the archivist at the foreign ministry on 4 April 1963, sent on behalf of the minister, was not very friendly in tone. With no salutation, L.J. Ruys wrote:
Please find enclosed a photocopy of a letter with an enclosure that I received from the consul general in Los Angeles. I have learned from studying the ministry records that, after Dr Tillmanns was discharged in 1940, you were temporarily assigned the role of acting consul in Kaunas. I was given your address by the Stichting tot Behartiging van de Belangen van de Beambten der N.V. Philips’ Gloeilampenfabrieken.
This was the Philips pension fund. Zwartendijk’s details must have no longer been in the foreign ministry’s system:
Following your confirmation on the telephone that you are the individual known as the ‘Angel of Curaçao’, I hereby request that you draw up a report on the assistance you offered at that time. It is rather peculiar that this tale is still in circulation after so many years, and it strikes me as worthwhile to hear the true story from you yourself. I will subsequently send the report to the consul general in Los Angeles with the request to forward it to the weekly newspaper B’nai B’rith Messenger.
Miss Ruys was requesting this information on behalf of her boss, the foreign minister, Joseph Luns. He had held that office since 1952, and would remain there for many years more, until 1971. At the time the letter was sent, Luns was part of the De Quay government.
Both Luns and prime minister Jan De Quay had serious stains on their wartime records: Luns had belonged to the Dutch Nazi party, the NSB, from 1933 to 1936 (he later falsely claimed that his brother had signed him up without his knowledge), and De Quay had, in 1940 and 1941, been part of the triumvirate that led the Nederlandsche Unie (Dutch Union), a political movement that sought closer cooperation between the German occupying regime and the Dutch authorities to prevent the NSB from gaining complete political control. The Unie took it as a given that Germany had won the war, and had no compunction about discussing the ‘Jewish problem’ with the occupiers. In December 1941, the occupying regime banned the Nederlandsche Unie, because the group had not supported Operation Barbarossa wholeheartedly enough. By then, the Unie had 600,000 members.
The De Quay government fell on 15 May 1963, but the correspondence with Zwartendijk continued, and Luns remained the foreign minister in the next government under prime minister Victor Marijnen.
The brief article in the B’nai B’rith Messenger of Los Angeles asked just one question: who was the ‘Angel of Curaçao’? One refugee believed he remembered the name of the man who had written the note in French in his passport, the man who had saved the lives of thousands of Polish Jews: Philip Reyda. This was probably a blurred memory of ‘Mr Radio Philips’. The refugee also claimed that the man had been the Dutch consul; that was why the Dutch consul general in Los Angeles had requested clarification.
In a typed letter sent to The Hague on 9 April 1963, Zwartendijk explained. The contents of the article and the title ‘Angel of Curaçao’ had left him ‘extremely surprised’. ‘I do not deserve such credit. It should go to Her Majesty’s Envoy, His Excellency L.P.J. de Decker.’ He explained that he had acted on De Decker’s instructions.
Zwartendijk went on to write that, to his regret, he no longer recalled the exact words he had written in French in the visas. Nor could he look them up, since he had seen to it that all the consular paraphernalia were destroyed when he left Lithuania in September 1940. It had not been a true entry visa in any case, he explained, but something more like a note to officials in the Dutch West Indies. The provision of the note had led to an unanticipated chain reaction; many Lithuanians and, most of all, Poles had then asked for an identical note in their travel documents. But Zwartendijk rejected the estimate of ‘thousands’ in the B’nai B’rith Messenger. ‘As far as I remember, the figure was 1,200 to 1,400.’
Zwartendijk sensed trouble; that much is clear. He played down his own role, making it seem almost insignificant. All credit was due to the envoy, he wrote, because De Decker was fifteen years dead by then and beyond the reach of official reproach. He spoke of the note in the passports in hazy terms, claiming he hadn’t realised it was incompatible with consular regulations. The words he had written in more than two thousand passports were etched indelibly into his brain, but he hoped to let sleeping dogs lie. Furthermore, he knew perfectly well that he had issued more than 2,000 ‘pseudo-visas’ (his own term), because, with the help of Van Prattenburg and De Haan, he had kept a numbered list. But, no, ‘as far as he remembered’, there were only 1,200 to 1,400. He wanted to avoid the impression of a mass exodus. Finally, he described the recipients as Lithuanians and Poles rather than as Jews, and avoided mentioning that some had come from the Netherlands or at least had Dutch nationality.
But at the end of his two-page letter he could not resist adding how much he would appreciate it if the consul general in Los Angeles could tell him how many Lithuanians and Poles had taken the Curaçao route to the United States and made a new home there.
On 23 April 1963, Zwartendijk received a note from the archivist thanking him for his reply. Miss Ruys’s tone was considerably friendlier than in her first letter. ‘The fact that so much work was done in the brief period when you were acting consul and so many people were saved, even if you were hardly aware of that at the time, must give you great satisfaction in retrospect. It is good for these matters not to be forgotten, but to be entered into the record in a timely fashion, so that the true story is known.’
Zwartendijk would later say that this brief letter had ‘thrown dust in his eyes’.
The foreign ministry passed on the information to Dr Louis (Loe) de Jong, director of the Netherlands Institute for War Documentation (NIOD). De Jong and his wife had escaped to England in May 1940. For the rest of the war he had worked there for Radio Oranje, the Dutch-language program broadcast to the Netherlands by the government in exile. His parents, sister, and twin brother, who had stayed in the Netherlands, had been sent to an extermination camp and murdered.
De Jong was then engrossed in organising the overabundance of source materials for the first part of his authoritative history of the Second World War in the Netherlands, which would be published almost six years later. The complete work would consist of fourteen parts in twenty-seven volumes. It was a mammoth undertaking, too huge for one man, or even for one research institute for war documentation.
De Jong responded to Miss Ruys’s letter by return of post, and later contacted Zwartendijk himself to shed light on the ‘affair’.
As far as either I or Zwartendijk’s children know, De Jong never made an appointment with him. To call this a missed opportunity would be a gross understatement. In 1963, De Jong was, of course, inundated with requests to look into all sorts of matters more deeply and to contact the surviving eyewitnesses and key actors. He couldn’t do it all, although he did have the option of sending an assistant to interview an important witness.
In the end, De Jong devoted only a few lines to the Dutch consul in Kaunas, in volume nine of his magnum opus, which relates to the Dutch government in exile in London.
This version of the story begins with the Dutch chargé d’affaires in the Baltic republics (by which De Jong meant De Decker) going to Stockholm after the Russian occupation of the Baltics in June 1940. From Sweden, he grants permission to the acting consul in Lithuania, J. Zwartendijk, to issue declarations to Polish-Jewish refugees stating that they will be admitted to Curaçao without a visa.
This story is only half true.
L.P.J. de Decker granted permission not from Stockholm but a month earlier, from Riga, while still the Dutch envoy to the Baltics. In fact, besides giving permission, he also composed the French declaration.
In De Jong’s version, the declarations are issued at the urging of a young Orthodox Jew from Scheveningen, Nathan Gutwirth, a student at the Talmud school in Lithuania since 1935. With assistance from his Japanese counterpart, Zwartendijk sends more than a thousand Polish Jews, who are able to furnish dollars, to Japan by way of the Soviet Union.
Again, this version of the story shows how a few small changes can convey a completely different picture of the situation. First of all, it remains unclear whether Nathan Gutwirth or Peppy Sternheim was the first to go to Zwartendijk; but, in any case, the consul did not require much urging. Gutwirth and Zwartendijk had known each other for years. It would be more accurate to say that they looked at the situation together and discussed what should be done – with help from De Decker in Riga.
De Jong, who had never made any secret of his socialist views, then emphasised the dollars the Polish Jews were able to furnish, without revealing the actual sums involved. A casual reader might well think that the cost was in the thousands and that this route was therefore available only to the wealthy. If the historian had spoken to Zwartendijk, he would have learned that most of the refugees who came to the consulate had little money and that a Jewish-American organisation had assisted those who could not afford the $400 fee. The relatively small number given by De Jong – more than a thousand Polish Jews – reinforces the impression that only a select group of prosperous refugees were able to flee, with ‘help from the Lithuanian representative of Philips-Eindhoven’ – a company whose wartime actions had made a very poor impression on De Jong.
Stranger still is the role that Dr Loe de Jong attributed to the Dutch consul general in Stockholm, his namesake De Jong. As he tells it, Zwartendijk is expelled from Lithuania in September and then, in January 1941, the consul general in Stockholm, Adriaan Mattheus de Jong, receives ‘a number of letters with photographs from Jews in the former Baltic republics requesting the visas for Curaçao’. De Jong draws up very official-looking visa declarations, pastes the photographs alongside them, and sends the declarations to the applicants, who are then granted exit visas by the Russian authorities and can, with support from funding organisations in Sweden, reach Stockholm and travel on through the Soviet Union to Shanghai or Japan.
