If you walk to the old Jewish Quarter, you will see the famous statue of the dockworker. On February 25, 1941, the rolling strike to protest the mass arrest of young Jewish men began, first with workers at the Municipal Cleaning Service and Public Works, then railway workers and tram workers, and finally the dockworkers in the harbor. Shops closed. Citizens accompanied the marchers, smashing the windows of trams still running. The resistance paper asked, “Am I my brother’s keeper?” The answer was “Yes.” The strike lasted two days before the Germans, armed with guns, violently put down the protest.
You can go sit on Lotty’s bench, which you’ll find in the upscale Apollolaan district of the city. It is in the exact spot where Lotty and her friend Beppie slept after their return from Auschwitz. When the Germans evacuated the camp, they pulled out the women and sent them on a death march to Beendorf concentration camp, more than four hundred miles away. When the Allies eventually freed Beendorf, those few such as Lotty and Beppie who survived were exchanged for German POWs. When the women finally arrived in Amsterdam on August 26, there was hardly any shelter for Holocaust survivors. They were thrown a horse blanket and left to fend for themselves. “Come,” said Lotty to Beppie. “Let’s go posh.”13 They slept on a bench in a park in the fancy Apollolaan.
The Dutch government refused to give special preference to returning Jews. The logic was that “the Nazis had treated the Jews differently from the rest of the population and treating the Jews differently now again would no doubt remind everyone of Nazi ideology.”14 The Dutch were simply following the policy set by the Allied authorities, who claimed that to differentiate Jews from other displaced persons would be unfair to non-Jews and would “constitute religious discrimination.”15 In September 2017, Lotty, age ninety-six, was finally recognized for the horrors she had endured and honored with her own bench.
The bronze bust of Geertruida “Truus” Wijsmuller-Meijer, inaugurated in 1965, is now on the Bachplein in south Amsterdam. Truus was a Dutch resistance fighter. In 1938, the British government agreed to let Jewish children under the age of seventeen enter the United Kingdom for a temporary stay. The Dutch Children’s Committee in Amsterdam asked Wijsmuller-Meijer, who was known to be imperturbable and fearless, to go to Vienna to meet Adolf Eichmann, the one in charge of the forced “emigration” of Jews. Apparently, Eichmann found her unbelievable: “so rein-arisch und dann so verrückt!” （so purely Aryan and then so crazy!）。16 He promised that he would give her ten thousand Jewish children if she could collect six hundred children in six days after their meeting and get them onto a ship to England. She succeeded. On December 10, six hundred Jewish children left Vienna by train. Until the outbreak of war, she organized Kindertransporten （children’s transports）。 Several times a week, she traveled to Germany and Nazi-occupied territories to pick up children. By the time war was declared on September 1, 1939, her organization had saved ten thousand Jewish children. The Germans called her die verrückte Frau Wijsmuller （that crazy woman Wijsmuller） because she had helped Jews for free.
Since 1995, the German artist Gunter Demnig has been creating commemorative “stumbling stones.” In Amsterdam there are several hundred stones placed in front of the last known formal home addresses of Jews, Roma, Sinti, and others murdered by the Nazis. The stones are inlaid with bronze plaques. As you stumble over them, you stumble over the past; it is part of the fabric of the present. You remember.
Afterword
In the course of this investigation, I was asked many times if I thought we would be able to answer its central question definitively. I couldn’t promise, of course, but I did say that we would make a real attempt to discover the most likely cause of the raid on the secret Annex. The process took us nearly five years of scouring the globe, looking for reports that had been lost or misfiled and witnesses who had never been consulted. In the end, our talented, dedicated team of investigators, researchers, and volunteers met our goal: to figure out what happened at Prinsengracht 263. As is common in many cold case investigations, it turned out that a dismissed piece of evidence ended up being the key to solving the nearly eighty-year-old mystery.
As powerful as that discovery is, it is not the only accomplishment of our investigation. Through the years, we came upon a great deal of information that adds to the understanding of the time period as well as insights into the SD, the V-persons, and the collaborators. We also located and analyzed nearly one thousand Kopgeld receipts that shed new light on the SD’s payment incentive program to hunt Jews and other Nazi nondesirables. And we cast such a large net with our investigative research that we determined, or at least clarified, what happened in a number of other betrayal cases. I hope that our results might provide some closure to the descendants of those who were captured.