The just, p.41
The Just, page 41
Nothing stays the same, not even the memory of the dead. We find wisdom only when we search, but we often don’t take the trouble. ‘I know so much more now about the old days,’ Edith said to me, just over a year after our first trip to Kaunas. ‘Even about the things I saw with my own eyes, smelled with my own nose. I didn’t know the background, and then you can’t feel the impact of the events.’
Jan Zwartendijk lies buried in a spot that surprises me. The graveyard is on a small strip of land between the two lakes known as the Bergse Plassen, on which Jan and Piet Zwartendijk rowed with their father in their clinker-built canoe. To the east was the Rotte River, the final destination of their Sunday outings. After a little more strenuous paddling, the boys would dive into the peat-brown water. It’s as if I can hear the distant splash.
To the Zwartendijks, Hillegersberg was an integral part of Rotterdam. But when I look around, I see a village. A peaceful village that the big city has forgotten. The Protestant cemetery is behind the Hillegondakerk, which – just like all the other Protestant churches in the area – was built on a sandbar in the river-streaked landscape, a first step in the quintessential Dutch practice of land reclamation. It was not until the early twentieth century that this community was absorbed into Rotterdam. The place is permeated with the smell of brackish water.
As I walk to his grave, I realise that Jan Zwartendijk strove all his life to be part of a tradition. He wanted to be buried in the family grave, above his father, Jan, and his mother, Johanna, and next to his sister, Didi. And he wanted to make sure that when he was laid to rest there he would have a clear conscience. A Zwartendijk was supposed to see to it that he would never have any reason to be ashamed of the family name.
His sister-in-law, Mary, and twin brother, Piet, were later placed in the same family grave. They, too, were loyal to the family tradition all their lives. Piet outlived his twin brother by ten years, which was a great comfort to Edith, Jan, and Rob. Whenever they saw Uncle Piet, it was as though their father was alive again. He had not only the same facial features, but also the same voice.
Piet lived to the age of ninety, and mourned his brother every day. There were so many things he’d have liked to ask him – about Kaunas, say, or Aletrino. One day, he admitted to Rob that he had underestimated his brother. Rob said, ‘It was mutual, Uncle Piet.’
It is a very simple grave; a traditional flat, grey stone bearing only the family name. No personal names, no years of birth or death. Just ‘Zwartendijk’. Like a brand. And, of course, it was a brand of pipe tobacco and tea.
On the dark-grey stone I see light-grey pebbles, not in the centre but against the lower edge, and I feel a lump in my throat. It’s an old Jewish custom. Each pebble stands for a memory of the departed. Family and friends leave them as signs that they visited the grave, that they remember and honour the deceased.
The family grave.
One of many explanations for this ancient tradition is based on very early Jewish history, when the Jews were a desert people. To protect a grave in the sea of sand from carrion-eating vultures, jackals, and hyenas, they laid as many stones on it as possible. Passing nomads would add to the pile in respect for the dead.
Stones can endure wind and weather, as unchanging as love, as eternal as faith. Flowers wilt, while pebbles remain.
Behind each pebble is a story. All those stories together form the vast edifice of history. Jewish graves are held in perpetuity. So is the Zwartendijk family grave.
The pebbles stand for permanence, everlasting respect, and our bond to the dead.
Zwartendijk would have appreciated this tribute. It’s plain and simple, but impressive, because the people who left the pebbles had travelled so far.
He had given the refugees the chance to escape life-threatening danger. They had seized the opportunity. What awaited them was uncertain; their journey was a leap in the dark. But they had the courage to go.
I pick up a pebble from the grave. I don’t know why. Maybe because I’ve investigated so much evil in my books that I’ve come to see good as a rare phenomenon. The pebble in my hand, with its sharp edge, gives me the courage to believe there will always be hope. Act when action is called for, Jan Zwartendijk reminded his loved ones. Don’t shut your door, don’t turn away. I put the pebble back on his grave.
Sources and Acknowledgements
In the late spring of 1983, I took the Trans-Mongolian Express from Beijing to Moscow. From Lake Baikal westwards, it follows the same route as the Trans-Siberian Express. I spent the seven-day, seven-night journey in a soft sleeper, the communist equivalent of a first-class compartment. I shared the washing facilities with the passengers next door, an Australian woman in her forties and her two sons, seven and eleven years old.
Mary was under severe strain. I ran into her in the corridor one night and looked into eyes that must have seen many dangers, maybe even horrors. I overheard her confused words to Josh and Job, as if she were trying to share some story too bitter to fathom and too wide-ranging to grasp. She seemed to be on an impossible mission.
As we approached Moscow, I realised that she was following the same route, in the opposite direction, that she had taken with her parents in 1941 to escape the Shoah. She wanted to show her sons where she had come from, how Poland looked, how far it was from Australia, and what route she and her parents had taken to escape. Her husband, who wasn’t Jewish, had decided not to join them.
It was from Mary, whose full name was Miryam, that I first heard about the escape route from Kaunas to Moscow, the 9,287-kilometre railway journey to Vladivostok, the boat trip to Tsuruga, the stay in Kobe, and the crossing to Shanghai. For Miryam and her parents, the final step led from Shanghai to Australia.
In 2007, I went to Lithuania in search of stories for my book Baltische zielen (Baltic Souls, Amsterdam, 2010). There I learned a great deal more about the thousands of Jews who had escaped, on the Trans-Siberian Express, from certain death in a concentration camp. What was news to me was the decisive role played in the rescue operation by the Dutch consul, Jan Zwartendijk. The professor of Yiddish at Vilnius University, Dovid Katz, took me to the Jewish Museum and showed me photographs of the consul and his family. I considered including the consul’s life story in the book I was then writing, but Zwartendijk had grown up in Rotterdam and spent only three years in Lithuania – there was no way I could turn him into a Baltic soul.
I first met ambassador Bert van der Lingen in December 2013. He had bought the original of the cover illustration for Baltische zielen. Ever since then, that photograph by Antanas Sutkus has hung in the entrance hall of the Dutch ambassador’s residence in Vilnius. Ambassador Van der Lingen invited me to come and stay with him, organised a concert-lecture about Baltische zielen in the former house of the composer K.M. čiurlionis in Vilnius, and asked me if I wouldn’t like to write a book about consul Zwartendijk, a man he described as ‘a true inspiration to me and countless other diplomats’. I realised he wasn’t exaggerating when he put me in touch with the Dutch consul general in Shanghai, Anneke Adema; her assistant, Timo de Groot; the Dutch ambassador to Japan, Aart Jacobi; the cultural attaché in Tokyo, Ton van Zeeland; the consul general in Osaka and Kobe, Roderick Wols; his successor, Gerard Michels; the Dutch ambassador to the Russian Federation, Renée Jones-Bos; and the Dutch ambassador to Latvia, Pieter Langenberg. Zwartendijk was a shining example to all of them, and I could count on their help when gathering information.
Ambassador Van der Lingen told me that Zwartendijk’s youngest son was still alive and that the two of them were on good terms. Back in the Netherlands, I made an appointment with Rob Zwartendijk in Blaricum. When I entered the house on the sandy, tree-shaded path, I was struck by the tall form of an elderly woman standing by the window. ‘I’ve asked my sister to join us. She’s come up from France.’ At the age of eighty-nine, she had hitched a ride with a lorry driver from Dordogne, just as I used to do in my hippie years.
In the summer of 1940, Edith was thirteen years old. I spent the whole day talking to her and Rob – ‘Robbie’ to Edith. A couple of weeks later, I looked through all the photographs from Lithuania with Rob; another time, I gathered together all the letters and documents that Rob had found among the belongings of his late father and his brother, Jan. In December, I visited Edith Jes-Zwartendijk in her home in the Dordogne, a remote farm where she has lived alone since the death of her husband, Henk. I had an overwhelming list of questions for her in preparation for my planned trip to Lithuania with Edith and Rob. In April 2016, we spent seven days visiting all the places in Kaunas and its surroundings that are mentioned in this book.
Ten months later, I travelled to Shanghai to see where the hundreds of refugees with visas issued by Zwartendijk had ended up. On the wall of the Jewish Museum, I hoped to find Miryam’s maiden name. I had a vague feeling it was Wiener, but couldn’t find it anywhere in my notes. I did find an Ascher Wiener on the wall, and later learned more about him, thanks to his daughter Deborah Wiener in Melbourne. But no Miryam Wiener.
I’m sure I’ll find out more about her someday. Her visa had saved her from the Holocaust, but she had never shaken off her bewilderment at being such a rare exception. In her own way – diffident, but no less impressive for that – she wanted to share something of that perplexity with her sons.
Arlette Schellenbach-Pollet lived in Kaunas from July 1925 to July 1944, and, like Edith and Jan Zwartendijk, attended the German primary and secondary schools there. Arlette’s parents – her Dutch mother and her Belgian father, who was building an electrical plant near Kaunas – were friends of Kees and Lenie Stoffel’s. Arlette was never in contact with the Zwartendijk children, although she does have vague memories of consul Zwartendijk. But the information she gave me about Kaunas was crucial to my research. In September 1940, the Zwartendijks left Lithuania. Arlette stayed until the Red Army had reached the Lithuanian border once again. I spent a full day talking to Arlette Schellenbach in her home on Rooseveltlaan in Amsterdam.
The Stoffel family has a richly informative digital family archive. Engbert Stoffel showed me how to use it, and supplied important information about Kees Stoffel and Lenie Stoffel-Barnehl, who lived in Lithuania until the end of the Second World War. He even gave me a few photos of Kees and Lenie in their Lithuanian days, so that I would have an image of the couple and their children. Kees and Lenie were Jan and Erni Zwartendijk’s best friends in Kaunas.
Ingrida Gustienė, the owner of the Perkūno Namai Hotel in Kaunas, and her mother, Gygaja Vidmantaitė Žekieni, a childhood friend of Edith Zwartendijk’s, welcomed Edith, Rob, and me to Kaunas as if we were part of the family. The moment when Gygaja and Edith saw each other again after seventy-six years was one of the most moving experiences I’ve had in the Baltic countries.
In Vilnius, I received valuable assistance from Mantvydas Bekešius, the deputy minister of foreign affairs; Faina Kukliansky, the leader of the Jewish community in Lithuania; Emanuelis Zingeris, a member of parliament; and Linas Venclauskas, the chairman of the Sugihara Diplomat for Life Foundation. Faina Kukliansky saw to it that I received copies of all documents about Zwartendijk in the Lithuanian state archives, including the KGB files and documents from the Soviet era – a very difficult task at times.
On 25 April 2016, Emanuelis Zingeris, who was then the only Jew in the Lithuanian parliament, Edith Jes-Zwartendijk, Rob Zwartendijk, and ambassador Bert van der Lingen laid a wreath at the stone in front of the Jewish Museum in Vilnius that is inscribed with Jan Zwartendijk’s name. During the brief ceremony, Emanuelis Zingeris addressed the Zwartendijk children. ‘Your father was the light in the Jewish darkness. He possessed the best qualities a person can have. Every Jew who survived the war has taken your father’s name into his heart.’ Sixty-four members of the Zingeris family were murdered. He added, ‘In Lithuania, we have two hundred Jewish cemeteries and two hundred mass graves.’
The deputy mayor of Kaunas, Simonas Kairys, pointed me to a well-documented article by Modestas Kuodis, ‘Kaunas, mid-June 1940, Lithuanian memories’, published in the Kaunas Historical Yearbook, no 16 (Vytautas Magnus University, Kaunas, 2016), which contains eyewitness accounts of the Soviet occupation of Kaunas on the evening and night of 15 June and Sunday 16 June 1940. Kuodis confirms Edith and Jan junior’s impressions.
The wife of the Dutch ambassador to Latvia, the historian Mieke Langenberg-Tissot van Patot, did archival research in Riga for me, and located the grave of Jenny Heyer, ambassador De Decker’s wife, in the Great Cemetery in Riga. I also received help and support from her husband, ambassador Pieter Langenberg.
At the Dutch foreign ministry in The Hague, I benefited from the expertise, historical knowledge, interest, and assistance of Bert van der Zwan, the coordinator of the Historical Unit in the Office of the Secretary-General. It was Bert van der Zwan who made it clear to me that the Netherlands had not had ambassadors before the Second World War. After the Congress of Vienna in 1815, the Netherlands had the status of a minor power. The international diplomatic system established by that congress included rules of protocol under which the head diplomat at a minor power’s mission was not an ambassador, but an envoy extraordinary and minister plenipotentiary. Like an ambassador, such an envoy was a direct, personal representative of one head of state to another. Smaller countries such as the Netherlands began appointing ambassadors only after the Second World War. This is why L.P.J. de Decker was the envoy extraordinary and minister plenipotentiary of the Kingdom of the Netherlands to Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania before the war, and the ambassador to Greece after the war.
Consuls are not diplomats in the strict sense, but representatives of a state (with official, protected status) charged with promoting the interests of its nationals and its economic interests. The distinction between consular and diplomatic status, which was never crystal clear, still exists in formal and functional terms, but has become vaguer over the past hundred years or so. But the nitpickers are unquestionably right to claim that Zwartendijk, Sugihara, De Jong, and De Voogd, as consuls, were not technically diplomats.
Bert van der Zwan pointed me to the international law handbook Grondlijnen van het Volkenrecht by Professor J.P.A. François, which explains these distinctions.
One important source of information about the Dutch foreign ministry during the Second World War is Albert Kersten’s doctoral thesis Buitenlandse Zaken in ballingschap, groei en verandering van een ministerie 1940–1945 (Alphen aan den Rijn, 1981). Strikingly, it does not mention the consular assistance to refugees in Lithuania, Japan, and Shanghai, and Zwartendijk’s name is not mentioned, even though the thesis was published in 1981. But Kersten does offer an exceptionally clear account of the problems with which the ministry-in-exile wrestled, of minister Van Kleffens’s policies, and of the problems at the Dutch embassies in Tokyo and Stockholm.
In Jean Charles Pabst, Diplomaat en Generaal in Oost-Azie 1873–1942 (Zeist, 1997), Dr A.A.H. Stolk paints a more positive picture of the Dutch envoy to Japan. But, tellingly, consul De Voogd in Kobe is not mentioned in the book at all, and no attention whatsoever is devoted to the thousands of Jewish refugees who arrived in Japan with Curaçao visas.
Jan Paulussen, the Philips company historian, searched the corporate archives for me for all documents, letters, messages, and publications relating to Jan Zwartendijk, his twin brother, Piet Zwartendijk, and Robert van Prattenburg and Koen de Haan, Zwartendijk’s assistants in Kaunas. He also gave me a great deal of insight into the complex and precarious circumstances in which Philips found itself during the war. Using documents from the archives, Jan Paulussen reconstructed Hermann Maschewski’s attempts to save Lietuvos Philips as an independent enterprise. In one file, he found the desperate letter that Maschewski had written to Zwartendijk on 18 March 1941. Jan Paulussen also wrote Philips, familie van ondernemers (Zaltbommel, 2016), from which I took a few facts.
The interview with Robert van Prattenburg, the financial director of Philips Lithuania and the general director of Philips Norway after the war, was published in the Philips Koerier on 23 October 1969 under the revealing title of ‘Werken als sport in een woelige wereld’ (‘Work as sport in a turbulent world’). Van Prattenburg creates the impression that he wrote a significant number of the visas himself, claiming to have replaced ‘the preoccupied Zwartendijk’ and ‘confronted’ him with his ‘status as consul’. He then lays out the Curaçao route as if he had come up with it himself, saying Curaçao was chosen for its proximity to South America.
In my research, this version of events was not confirmed by anyone. After Van Prattenburg became the head of the Philips office in Norway, he had a penchant for exaggerating his role in wartime Lithuania, although in 1969 he still imagined that only a few people he ‘had helped as consul’ had ‘managed to reach a freer world by that long and difficult route’.
Zwartendijk was never absent from Kaunas in the summer of 1940, nor did Van Prattenburg ever substitute for him.
I found information about Philips in the war in I.J. Blanken, Geschiedenis van Philips Electronics N.V., vol. IV, Onder Duits beheer (Zaltbommel, 1997); L. de Jong, Het Koninkrijk der Nederlanden in de Tweede Wereldoorlog, vol. 7; F.J. Philips, 45 jaar met Philips (Rotterdam, 1976); and Sanne van Heijst, Philips-meisje van Kamp Vught (Amsterdam, 2016).
In Het Philips-Kommando in Kamp Vught (Amsterdam, 2003), socioeconomic historian P.W. Klein and Justus van de Kamp try to answer the question of whether Frits Philips (1905–2005) collaborated with the Germans during the occupation of the Netherlands. They concluded that Frits ‘played along’ in the interest of protecting as many Jewish Philips employees as possible. The survivors unanimously agreed that if it were not for Frits, they would all inevitably have been murdered. In 1995, Yad Vashem awarded Frits J. Philips the title of Righteous Among the Nations.
