In early February 2019, Pieter drove 226 miles to the German town of Bad Arolsen, which is renowned for two things: the impressive Arolsen castle at its heart and the International Tracing Service （ITS）， now known as the Arolsen Archives. The archives are a center of documentation, information, and research on Nazi persecution and the Holocaust. The collection has more than 30 million documents, from original concentration camp records to accounts of forced labor, transportation lists, records of death, health and social insurance documents, labor passports, and more. It also stores all letters and requests from people who want to know more about the fate of their next of kin and loved ones. Bad Arolsen belongs to UNESCO’s Memory of the World Programme.
When Pieter arrived, he was surprised to find that the archives were stored in a nondescript storage facility in an industrial area on the outskirts of town. Upon entering, he was handed a mandatory helmet and protective overshoes, gear more appropriate for a factory than an archive. Clearly, the archives did not have the funds for a more suitable building. Such is the world’s care for the Memory of the World, he thought.
The enormity of the collection was overwhelming, but he was able to retrieve digital scans of the Camp Westerbork archive and several relevant transportation lists to and from Westerbork. On that trip he also found out that someone made inquiries into the whereabouts of Ruth Weisz after the war. With the assistance of the archivists, he discovered that a Ruth Weisz-Neuman survived the war and boarded a ship in Shanghai bound for the United States. She was registered as living in an area near Chicago. That was, of course, thrilling, since it might mean that the Cold Case Team had found a living witness. Unfortunately, Pieter discovered that it was a different Ruth Weisz. In the end, he learned that the Ruth Weisz they were looking for had been sent to Auschwitz and died in February 1945, possibly in Flossenbürg concentration camp.
The greengrocer, Hendrik van Hoeve, survived a number of camps and was eventually liberated. Thinking he might have information about his father’s wartime experience, Monique decided to search for Van Hoeve’s son, Stef, to ask about his father. She was able to locate Stef in Amsterdam and interviewed him at his home. He said his father had never spoken about the betrayal of the Annex and had been traumatized by the war, which he was continually forced to confront. After the war he was called on to answer questions about camp prisoners who were still missing.27 He was also a witness at the trial of Johannes Gerard Koning, one of the Amsterdam policemen who’d arrested him and the Weiszes.28 In the 1950s, he played himself in the film adaptation of The Diary of Anne Frank.29 Stef said his father had been haunted by his camp experiences his entire life, telling one newspaper reporter in 1972, “While inside the camps I thought of nothing but the fact that I wanted to see the liberation. Then after the liberation I thought: now I want to become seventy; out of anger alone I must! I am seventy-seven, and I still think: they won’t catch me!”30
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The Jewish Council
Shortly after the German occupation in May 1940, the Jewish community felt it needed a representative body in order to somehow arm itself against any anti-Jewish measures that they rightly feared. It established the Jewish Coordination Commission （Joodse Co?rdinatie Commissie; JCC）， which was meant to function as an overarching organization that would represent the community as a whole. The commission advised, organized cultural activities, and sometimes provided financial assistance. However, it refused to engage directly or negotiate in any way with the German occupier. Doing so, they believed, was not up to them but solely up to the rightful Dutch government of which they were citizens.
The Nazis wanted to isolate the Jews from the rest of society, but in order to do that, they needed direct access to the Jewish community. They mandated the establishment of an alternative body, the Jewish Council （Joodse Raad）。 The council, led by the joint chairs, David Cohen, a well-known academic, and Abraham Asscher, the director of a diamond factory, included such leading citizens as the chief rabbi of Amsterdam, Lodewijk Sarlouis, and the prominent notary Arnold van den Bergh. As decrees forbidding Jews from participation in Dutch society accumulated, the council took over more and more aspects of Jewish life, providing employment, accommodations, food, and special support for the elderly and the infirm.1 At its height, the council had 17,500 members.
Beginning in July 1942, the council was ordered to help organize the selection of Jewish deportees from the Netherlands to Camp Westerbork and on to the internment camps in the east. Then, on July 30, the Germans authorized the general secretary of the Jewish Council, M. H. Bolle, to give safe-conduct passes, or Sperres, to the council’s own staff and other “indispensable” people. A stamp on their ID card read “Exempt from labor service until further notice.”2