David lee jones, p.19
The Just, page 19
While Zwartendijk kept the people’s commissar preoccupied, Van Prattenburg managed to pack up all the important business documents so that they could be taken back to Eindhoven. He was also able to empty the safe before the people’s commissar found out its code.
The radio-assembly plant was slow to resume production. The stockroom was relocated to the Aartsengel Michaelbasiliek in Kaunas, the blue-domed church that Zwartendijk had passed every afternoon on his way home. The accounts and records were moved to the Church of St Michael the Archangel in Vilnius. This type of thing drew no protest or complaint from the Lithuanians, because they hoped to avoid worse; if Moscow saw no practical use in a church building, it would be demolished.
On 13 January 1941, Lietuvos Philips would be incorporated into the Russian State Radio Trust Pamprekyba. The brand name would be changed to Banga, and the parts would come from Leningrad.
If the Soviets had asked permission to continue using the brand name Philips, the answer from Frits Philips would have been no. Frits was a religious man, a member of the Moral Re-Armament movement, and a staunch opponent of communism; his world stopped at the Iron Curtain. Any cooperative initiatives took the form of joint ventures, and the products were marketed under other brand names. Yet they sometimes found their way through Asia into the Soviet Union and into the Banga assembly factories in Kaunas, Vilnius, and Riga.
Once production was in full swing, from 1946 onwards, Zwartendijk, Van Prattenburg, and De Haan’s little company grew into a colossus. In the 1960s, Banga produced millions of transistor radios for the entire Soviet Union.
For the Dutch expats in Lithuania, the process of leaving was difficult and chaotic.
‘The best idea is every man for himself,’ Jan Zwartendijk said. From deciding to leave, it was a long road to actually leaving. Van Prattenburg knocked on the doors of one Soviet official after another until he found a lieutenant colonel who called himself a people’s commissar. A fierce anti-German, he couldn’t imagine why anyone would want to return to the Netherlands, which after all was occupied by the Nazis. After a lot of back and forth, Van Prattenburg hit on the winning argument; he said he planned to join a Resistance cell. ‘Ah, a partisan,’ the officer said. Van Prattenburg received an exit visa for himself and his wife, who was expecting to give birth to a son on 9 September.
They departed on 27 August, travelling by way of Königsberg, Danzig, and Berlin – from Lithuania and East Prussia through part of Poland, and then all the way across Germany. At every border crossing, the currency and the papers in the suitcases caused trouble. But Mrs Van Prattenburg saved the day. She would almost lie down instead of sitting, with both hands on her belly, and she was hot – so hot that she could hardly breathe. The border guards took pity on her every time.
On 29 August, Koen de Haan was allowed to leave with his wife and son. The Zwartendijks were the only ones not to receive an exit visa. The Soviet authorities gave no reason. Erni had to remind herself ten times a day not to panic and not to show her children any hint of her fear and anxiety.
On 2 September, Edith and Jan began the new school year in Lithuania. It was Jan’s first year in secondary school, and Edith’s second. In the afternoon, they were all led to a field just outside Kaunas, and each student had to plant a tree. They had done the same thing once before the summer holidays; they didn’t really understand why. During that September field trip, Edith sank deep into the mud. It would be her last memory of Kaunas.
On 3 September, Jan Zwartendijk was finally informed that he could pick up his exit visa. On 4 September, he and his whole family boarded the train. They stopped for the night in Berlin, in the hotel where Erni and little Robbie had always stayed on their way to the Netherlands and on the return trip to Lithuania.
The next day, they continued their journey. Edith remembers only one thing about it: ‘You would get so dirty. The windows were open the whole way, and you could hear the locomotive puffing. Wisps of smoke blew into the car, and by the end of the day you were black all over. The dust covered your forehead, your cheeks, your hands.’
On the platform in Utrecht, their cousins, Piet and Mien, were waiting for them. Zwartendijk had called from Berlin to ask if the family could stay with them for their first night in the Netherlands. Dr Piet Nieuwenhuijse, a pathologist, was an eminent man of medicine. He looked them up and down – first the children, then Erni, and finally Jan.
‘You look dog-tired. The first thing you need to do is sleep for days. And cut down on the smoking. You’ll give yourself a heart condition. Your face is rigid with tension.’
‘It can’t be as bad as all that,’ Zwartendijk said. ‘Nothing much out of the ordinary has happened to us.’
‘Oh, no?’ said Jan junior.
‘No,’ his father said, bringing the conversation to an abrupt halt.
It was the first time Jan had ever caught his father lying. He got the message right away: they weren’t supposed to talk about Kaunas anymore. Nothing had happened – full stop.
Two days later, the Zwartendijks travelled on to Eindhoven. There they stayed with Jan’s brother, Piet, who had already applied to Philips for a house for them. They were able to move before the end of the month.
The last thing to arrive in Eindhoven was the grand piano. The instrument had been sent in early August. As if there were no war, it had travelled from Kaunas straight across Poland and Germany to the Netherlands, and arrived in Eindhoven in early October 1940, still packed neatly in its box, along with the lace cloth crocheted by Grossmaman that had always been draped over it.
The piano would remain in the sitting room in Eindhoven until 1944, when they had to trade it for food.
22
The Swedish route
De Decker closed the Dutch legation in Riga on 17 August 1940, under the watchful eyes of two Russian officers and four soldiers. He stepped into a government car commandeered by the Red Cross, which took him straight to the airport. The envoy was accompanied by his Dutch assistant, Archibald van der Stal, chancellor first class, and Stal’s wife. They had been permitted to send off their personal possessions to their first destination, Stockholm, a few days earlier.
When Leendert de Decker stepped into the aircraft, a Douglas DC-3 in the fleet of the Swedish airline SILA, he could see he wasn’t the only diplomat who had been ordered out of the country by the Soviets. A quick scan of the cabin revealed eight others, most accompanied by their wives.
He had thought he might be put on a boat to Sweden; the sea voyage from Riga to Stockholm took twenty hours. The coasts of Courland and the Gulf of Riga were under Russian control, but German submarines had been reported in Baltic waters, so it was safer to fly to Sweden. At the airport, he heard that this was certain to be one of the last passenger flights to Stockholm, but the mail flights to and from the Baltics would continue for the time being. He made a mental note of that last fact.
Leaving was difficult for him. The years in Riga had been the hardest of his life, but even after his wife’s death he still loved the Baltic states: the atmosphere, which always reminded him of Christmas, and the scent of pine trees, even in the middle of town.
The evening before, he had called the consul in Kaunas – his last act as envoy. Zwartendijk had sounded tired and tense, although he did his best to stay businesslike. ‘I don’t know why the Russians want to hold me here,’ he had said. ‘It’s starting to seem a bit odd, to say the least.’
This news had worried De Decker, too. All the diplomats had been told to leave, except for Sugihara and Zwartendijk. Still, he felt certain the Russians wouldn’t find any evidence against the Dutch consul. Zwartendijk’s hints had made it clear to him that all of the consulate’s papers and documents had been destroyed. Of course, this didn’t mean all traces of the operation had been erased. After all, every visa issued was proof of what Zwartendijk had done.
In Stockholm, De Decker stepped into the middle of a huge mess. None of the Dutch officials there could handle the situation any longer. The government in exile in London was sending conflicting orders, while the Swedish government tried to avoid any appearance of sympathy for occupied countries. Diplomats and secret agents from Nazi Germany kept a critical eye on the situation. Gestapo agents tapped telephone calls to and from the foreign embassies day and night to find out whether Sweden was as neutral as it claimed.
For the time being, De Decker was between assignments. The Netherlands already had an envoy in Sweden, who had been there since 1934: Baron J.E.H. van Nagell. And besides De Decker, another envoy had fled to Stockholm: Dr G.A. Scheltus, from Norway. There was also a consul general, appointed in 1938.
The fact that Van Nagell had been sidelined on 1 May 1941 – placed en disponibilité, in diplomatic jargon – made little difference for De Decker’s purposes. Van Nagell had fallen seriously short in keeping the government in exile up to date – though he claimed the problem was that Eelco van Kleffens, the foreign minister, regarded his messages as ‘impolite’. The envoy was also said to have been too cautious in his dealings with the Germans. ‘He’s worse than the Swedes,’ said Stockholm’s first Engelandvaarders – Dutch refugees who planned to travel on to England as soon as possible to join the Dutch Resistance. Van Nagell was no Nazi sympathiser; he did go to the trouble of arranging a passage to England – by way of Vladivostok, Kobe, and Batavia (present-day Jakarta) – for his own son. But the eminent Dutch war historian Dr Loe de Jong investigated the baron’s Swedish period, and rendered a devastating judgement: ‘Not without occasional good impulses, but otherwise a diplomat of minor accomplishment, despite nineteen years of experience in five different missions.’
Van Nagell was replaced by Scheltus, who decided that it would be more sensible to speak to the relevant ministers in person in London, so that at least the Gestapo could not listen in to their conversatioins or intercept their messages. But the aircraft that took him to England was unheated; he contracted a lung infection and, three weeks later, drew his final breath.
Just before his death, Scheltus made a huge blunder. After the American invasion of North Africa, he made it clear that he expected an immediate protest from the Dutch government in exile, because he considered it equivalent to the German invasion of the Netherlands. Four decades later, Loe de Jong could still work himself into a lather about Scheltus: ‘This statement evinced no great understanding of what was at stake in the Second World War.’
After Scheltus’s sudden death, De Decker filled in for three months as an interim chargé d’affaires. Then a replacement was found: a diplomat who was much younger but stemmed from an old aristocratic line. Willem Constantijn, Count of Rechteren-Limpurg, came from Washington. In the dead of night, he was flown from London to Stockholm.
De Decker remained active behind the scenes. So did the former envoy Van Nagell, a situation that led to great confusion about who exactly was responsible for what. Meanwhile, the Engelandvaarders were arriving in Sweden by the dozens, and Van Nagell didn’t seem capable of doing much to help them. Their business was handled by the consul general.
A.M. de Jong in his hardware factory, seated in a ball bearing, Malmö.
Less than a week after his arrival, De Decker had figured out that only one Dutch official in Stockholm was keeping a cool head: consul general Adriaan Mattheus de Jong, a businessman who reminded De Decker very much of Zwartendijk. Forty-three years old – more or less the same age as the consul in Kaunas – he hated fuss, and was fast and efficient. De Jong came from Sliedrecht, a centre of the dredging industry along the Merwede River. He had emigrated when he was nineteen and, at the age of twenty-one, married a Swedish woman. He was a hardware wholesaler in Malmö, selling nails, bolts, and screws. He had turned a sleepy little shop into a flourishing business. In 1938, he had been appointed as Dutch consul in his southern Swedish city. In 1940, he opened a second branch of his business in Stockholm, moved to the capital with his wife and two sons, and was promoted to consul general.
De Jong laid the foundation for a robust company that remains in operation, managed by the third generation of De Jongs. As a consul, he was at least as effective, showing more resolution than all the career diplomats put together. But in 1943 he made an excruciating mistake.
My advertisement in the weekly Australian Jewish News (‘Dutch author looking for testimonies on “The Angel of Curaçao”’), led to a response within two weeks from a barrister in Melbourne, Deborah Wiener. Her father, Ascher Wiener, had used a Curaçao visa.
The name Zwartendijk meant nothing to her, as her father’s visa had been issued by the Dutch consulate in Sweden. At my request, she sent a copy. The note in the passport, written in French (!), is identical, word for word, to the formula used by Zwartendijk. The visa bears the clearly legible signature of A.M. de Jong.
The date of issue is surprisingly late: Stockholm, 17 January 1941. Underneath that is a number I cannot explain: 274/211. Was this the 274th visa in note form that De Jong issued?
In 1941, Abram Wiener used his mother’s maiden name as a pseudonym. The visa is in the name of Erazm Übersfeld. The address: Gedimino 9, Vilnius.
Gedimino Prospektas, a broad boulevard, was and remains the main shopping street in Vilnius. Department stores stand side by side with ministries, banks, and the parliament building. The historic building at number 9 dates from the nineteenth century. It could never have been the home address of Ascher Wiener, alias Erazm Übersfeld.
On my next visit to Vilnius, I walk over there. The post office is at number 7. It was already there in 1941, I am told, and the poste restante could be picked up at number 9. Refugees who stayed in the Vilnius ghetto used this address.
Without a transit visa, Ascher Wiener could not travel to Japan. Consul Sugihara could no longer issue him one, since he had left for Königsberg and, by 17 January 1941, was already on the way to his following post, Prague. Wiener must have got hold of one some other way. I can’t ask him how; he is no longer alive. His daughter can’t tell me either. Apart from the visa issued by A.M. de Jong, no other travel documents have been preserved.
Abram Wiener’s Curaçao visa, signed by A.M. de Jong.
In Go, My Son: a young Jewish refugee’s story of survival, published in 1989, Chaim Shapiro described the different escape routes taken by the refugees. He presented an even more detailed overview in the 3 February 1998 issue of Jewish World Review. Shapiro, who became a rabbi in Baltimore in the 1960s, has no doubt that the main issuer of Curaçao visas was Zwartendijk. As he tells it, the idea for these visas arose from the friendship between Zwartendijk and Nathan Gutwirth. They knew each other before the war, and exchanged the sports sections of Dutch newspapers.
Shapiro does not mention Peppy Lewin. According to him, it all started with Zwartendijk and Gutwirth. Zwartendijk got De Decker involved, and Gutwirth told Warhaftig, the lawyer from Warsaw who tried to persuade as many Jewish refugees as possible to leave for Japan on Curaçao visas. But after the Dutch and Japanese consulates in Kaunas were closed, the refugees had to find alternative routes. The first was the USSR–Palestine route, which led either through Turkey and Syria or through Iran. An underground printery in Vilnius supplied forged British entry visas for Palestine, barely distinguishable from the real thing. This operation was organised by Jabotinsky’s Zionist Revisionists, a group that later became part of Israel’s Herut party, which in turn was absorbed into Likud. The Revisionists distributed the British documents to their members and to halutzim, ‘pioneers’ who migrated to lay the groundwork for the state of Israel.
After a protest from the British government to the Soviet Union that a remarkable number of refugees were entering Palestine through Syria with forged British papers, the underground printshop in Vilnius was shut down, and the printer banished to Siberia. He was released ten years later, and spent the rest of his life in Jerusalem.
After that option was eliminated, the main route was through Sweden. Very soon after De Decker arrived in Stockholm, in September 1940, he was contacted by the German rabbinical student and refugee Shlomo Wolbe. Wolbe had heard about De Decker from Gutwirth and Warhaftig, who were still in Lithuania.
De Decker provided Wolbe with the wording of the Curaçao visa, and sent him to Adriaan Mattheus de Jong. Without a moment’s hesitation, De Jong went to work – without informing the Dutch envoy. Wolbe delivered the applications, and sent the visas typed and signed by De Jong back to the main post office in Vilnius, from which they were distributed among the applicants.
The problem was the transit visa. On De Decker’s recommendation, Wolbe sent the applicants to the Japanese embassy in Moscow. But they were rejected and returned. The Japanese consul in Moscow had submitted the Curaçao visas to the Dutch consul in Moscow for examination. He called them false documents, because the wording suggested that you could easily enter Curaçao or Suriname, which was not the case.
Shlomo Wolbe then went looking for another Japanese consul, one in a city without a Dutch consul to spoil things. After some searching, he found a consul in Chita, eight hundred kilometres east of Irkutsk, on the Trans-Siberian Railway. Furthermore, the Japanese consul in Chita proved to be a man of action; he sent the signed visas back by return of post.
Chaim Shapiro’s story is not entirely accurate. In 1941, the Netherlands had not yet established diplomatic relations with the Soviet Union. After the Bolshevik revolution, every country in Europe had taken that step – Germany first, in 1922, and then all the others – with the sole exception of the Netherlands. Serious attempts kept running up against ethical objections from a majority in the nation’s lower house of parliament. For the confessional and liberal parties, the ‘original sin’ of the Soviet Union, ‘born in blood’, and the ongoing religious persecution there ruled out any possibility of normalising relations. And this is not to mention another formidable opponent: Her Majesty the Queen.
