Idealists

After the Second World War, antisemitism in the Netherlands was higher than before the war. During the occupation years, most of the Dutch only had access to information supplied by (supporters of) the Nazis.
People love to hate and there was a direct connection between the one-sided reporting and the antipathy towards Jews.

Fast-forward to the Netherlands today. Recently a grande dame of Dutch journalism published an op-ed. She wrote that in her forty years of journalism she had never witnessed such one-sided reporting as the current anti-Israel reporting.
"Coincidentally", Jew-hatred has exploded in the Netherlands. As a reaction, 13 political parties in parliament (that is 94% of parliament) made a joint statement against the rise of antisemitism.

I read about the recent al-Shifa battle on the largest Dutch news site, that has 8 million visits per month.
The emphasis of the report was on the X account of a "Palestinian journalist" who wrote about witnessing "hundreds of bodies outside the hospital, there wasn't one full body all the bodies were either pieces or heavily mutilated."
He also wrote that "many had their hands and legs tied behind their backs."
The "Palestinian journalist" is a Hamas operative who daily publishes blood-libels against Israelis. 

Yet this propaganda was presented as facts without any qualifications.

How do people react to such daily reports? 

I think, with righteous indignation. It is obvious that the blood-libels stimulate verbal and/or physical attacks on Jews, because Jews are identified with Israel.
The Jew-haters now consider themselves to be idealists, fighting the Israeli demon who randomly murders and tortures the innocent.

Where can all this lead?
Some years after the Second World War, a son in a family of Dutch Nazis wrote a book about his family. For the book he interviewed his mother.
He asked her, what went wrong, how could such atrocities be committed in your name?
She replied, "we were too idealistic"

Live Jews do not count any more

There was much criticism of the amount of violence used by police to disband demonstrations against corona policy in the Netherlands.
After two demonstations in the Hague and Amsterdam, Nils Melzer, the UN Special Rapporteur on Torture, lashed out at the actions of Dutch police officers: ".... the most disgusting scenes of police brutality I have seen since George Floyd!”

Femke Halsema, the Green Left mayor of Amsterdam is responsible for the police there. She defended them.
According to her, they were "humane, disciplined and decisive."

During the corona period there was also an anti-racism demonstration in Amsterdam in support of Black Lives Matter. 
Halsema supported the demonstrators, who were from her political family. At the beginning of the demonstration she mingled and joked with them.

Too many people arrived and the demonstrators could not keep the required distance from each other. She should have disbanded the demonstration, but she did not.
Her argument was: emotions were running high and if the police had tried to disband the demonstration there would have been a riot.
Surprisingly enough, lots of emotions and danger of a riot were not a problem when the police violently disbanded the demonstrations against government corona policy.

And now the demonstrations surrounding the opening of the Holocaust Museum in Amsterdam on Sunday March 10, 2024. According to one Jewish dignitary: the darkest day for Dutch Jews since the Holocaust.

Once again the demonstrations were supported by her party and all left-wing and Muslim-affiliated parties in the Municipal Council.
Together a large majority in a Council that, up till now, has shown no particular empathy for the welfare of live Jews.

How did she justify letting the screeching demonstrators get so close to the Holocaust survivors and their descendants? 
This time she used the argument of the right to demonstrate. (A right that did not apply to the opponents of government corona policy).

She stated that, according to the law, they had the right to demonstrate within sight distance of president Herzog, who they were demonstrating against, and at a distance near enough for him to hear them.
This is vague terminology and she used it as an excuse to put the demonstrators, some who had megaphones, very near to the opening.
She added that this kind of demonstration was perfectly acceptable "even if it grates, hurts and offends people”.

She forgot to mention that she meant "offends certain people".
Commemorations of dead Jews like the Anne Frank House - the second most popular attraction in the city - are at least good for tourism.
Live Jews do not count in her Amsterdam.

Dov is Hebrew for bear

We were visiting friends of my wife in Amstelveen. An older couple, retirees like us.
Both came from poor working class homes. The husband had started his working life as an assistant to a watchmaker. The wife had started work in a hat store after leaving school.

They had worked themselves up the career ladder. He had become an adviser (for what I do not know) with the Dutch Ministry of Education. She was the craft teacher at the primary school where my wife had also worked.

They were loyal lifelong supporters of the Dutch Labour Party. The husband was (he died later of bowel cancer) the dominant half. It was such dominance that I mused about the possibility of kinky sexual behaviour.
That probably says more about me than about them.

He was sitting on the couch smoking his pipe, a glass of whisky in one hand, listening to some avant-garde cacophony of sounds. That was conform the image he always tried to project.
We were sitting around a table with my wife's girlfriend. She had drunk a bit too much wine and was in a happy mood.

My wife told her that my name Dov is Hebrew for bear and then proceeded to tell the story of the first time she saw me on my kibbutz:
She was sunbathing near the swimming pool with her travelling companion. The swimming pool, like the rest of the kibbutz, was built on strategically higher ground. They looked down and saw a big cloud of sand approaching.
What is it?
At a certain moment the cloud started to fade and the surrounding air began to shimmer, like it does in the desert.

The first thing they saw emerging from the shimmering air was me, riding without a saddle and stirrups on a black Arabian horse. I was only wearing shorts and sandals.
Behind me was a large flock of sheep.

They looked at each other and said, “I want him”. They made a bet about it.
My wife ends the story with, “I won”, and I usually smile sheepishly.

After my wife had finished the story, her girlfriend turned towards me wide-eyed.
She pointed at me, shouted “you?” and burst out laughing.

It must have been some 45 years ago that I met Gidon again. He said he had spoken to Shmuel (who later became some kind of guru in Australia) who had mentioned me.
I asked, what did he say?
Gidon replied, he said he had heard you had become a Dutch teddy bear.

A moral stain that taints us all

When I was in the Israeli paratroopers there were restful periods when we had lessons.

The lessons were about strategy and the values of the IDF. I remember one lesson on how we should treat prisoners.
In my time the Palestinians did not exist, and Israel's enemies were the armies of Egypt, Syria and Jordan. They were also existential enemies.

We were told to treat prisoners in a humane manner.
One of the reasons was: we were not the German army. As we were the first generation after the Holocaust, that was a good enough reason for us.
At that time we were expected to live up to the values of the Jewish state. The values of the prophets and the Declaration of Independence.
It was not about right-wing or left-wing. These were shared values, a clear moral compass.

Nowadays it is different.
Where was the Israeli government's clear and unequivocal condemnation of the settler rampage in Arab villages? They beat up random Arabs, torched cars and houses and ripped up Muslim holy books.

Yet the language of government disapproval was euphemistic. Two parties in the government were full of understanding for these actions. One minister even called the thugs, "sweet boys".

Corbyn could never condemn antisemitism without condemning all forms of racism. Israeli prime minister Netanyahu could not condemn the settler rampage without condemning Druze protests and civil disobedience against the government-proposed judicial overhaul.
Everybody must obey the law, he said.
Hedging his bets, not taking a clear, moral position. Comparing violent, pogrom type attacks to civil disobedience by his political enemies because they were both unlawful.

There were some positives. The heads of the army, Shin Bet and police did unequivocally condemn the rampages, that they called terrorism.
A government minister was so incensed with this condemnation, that she (initially) compared the non-political heads of security to the Wagner Group.

Netanyahu once again hedged his bets. He objected to the minister's criticism of the security heads.
However, he also added that he had ordered an investigation into “allegations of the use of excessive force by the security forces” against settlers in the West Bank.

Eventually there did come a clear moral message - from a settler rabbi.
Rabbi Mosheh Lichtenstein, the co-head of the prestigious Har Etzion religious seminary in the Alon Shvut settlement in the West Bank, issued a vehement condemnation of the settler attacks.

He called their actions “a moral stain that taints us all.”

A nice Dutch Jewish girl.

I remember her parents.

During my university study of politics I was part of a small doctoral study group researching Arab nationalism.
Her parents were two of the fellow-students who sometimes came to listen to our lectures and discussions. They were already stalwart members of the Dutch Labour Party, continuing the rich tradition of Amsterdam Jews.
They were nice as well.

In her quiet, unassuming and friendly way she was in the news again, promoting peace and love in the Middle East.

She is not like me, she is neutral.
She does not feel at home in either a pro-Palestinian or a pro-Israel demonstration.
Though a remark like "many Jews stand behind Israel despite what is happening," does not seem that neutral.

She makes documentaries for a woke public and writes columns for newspapers who cater to that public. Her views are coincidentally tailor-made for the people who pay her.

It does not seem to bother her that Hamas calls for the murder of all Jews because, according to its covenant, that is the only way to rid the world of evil.
Perhaps she does not think it is important.

I have the impression she is constantly trying to prove to her multicultural friends she is one of the nice, "good" Jews.
A bit sad, as Hamas-supporters do not differentiate between "good" and "bad" Jews.

"I worry about both. My Palestinian friends, but also my Israeli ones from whom I get videos from the shelters."

Now that is really nice.

Audrey Hepburn and Collective Dutch Myths

Audrey (Adriaantje) Kathleen van Heemstra Hepburn-Ruston, better known as (the actress) Audrey Hepburn, was 10-years-old in 1940 when the Germans occupied the Netherlands, where she lived with her mother.
The internet in English will tell you that she was some kind of teenage anti-Nazi heroine. American sites in particular love to gush about her bravery.

According to the Airborne Museum in the Netherlands there are actually some 20 stories about her heroism. They investigated all of them.

None of them are true. They are myths.

Both her parents were active Nazis, almost from the time Hitler came to power in 1933.
Her father was Joseph Ruston, a British subject.
The British security services watched him closely from 1933 onwards. He had strong links with National Socialists in Belgium and Germany, and the security services regarded him as a potential traitor and spy.

Ruston adopted the name Hepburn-Ruston in 1939.
During the Second World War he was detained in the UK under Regulation 18B, that allowed the government to detain people who they thought were a danger for security.

Audrey's mother was Baroness Ella van Heemstra, a Dutch citizen.
She was a committed Nazi as well.
In 1935 Ella van Heemstra wrote two articles for a British fascist newspaper called The Blackshirt.
In the first one she glorified "The Call of Fascism".
In the second she glorified Hitler and Germany under the Nazis: "the Germans, under Nazi rule, are a splendid example to the white races of the world."

During the Second World War, van Heemstra's lover was a Dutch Nazi.
Witnesses have claimed there were Nazi regalia on display in her apartment.
The Dutch Resistance newspaper 'Oranjekrant" listed “Ella van Heemstra, Arnhem” as being “Gestapo.”

Yet, the Canadian officer who interviewed Audrey's mother after the war during the denazification process was lenient.
He wrote that she was "silly" and only "politically unreliable". She claimed that she had disavowed Fascism and had helped the resistance.

After the war, collaborators were tried by the Dutch government and sent to prison.
However, there were so many of them that the prisons became overcrowded and the economy was suffering.
The government decided to stop prosecuting collaborators. The incriminating documents were not destroyed but filed, and up till now nobody has been given access to them.

The collective Dutch myths that started after the war were basically a denial of the collaboration with the occupier and a denial of any involvement with the Dutch Holocaust.

75% of Dutch Jewry were murdered. 

This was the highest percentage in West Europe. One of the reasons for the high percentage was the extensive collaboration in the isolation, rounding up and deportation of the Jews by Dutch individuals and authorities,
Yet, according to the stories I have heard from people since I have lived in the Netherlands, the Dutch were not involved.
This is the first myth.

Then there is the myth about the large size of the resistance helping the Jews.
As, according to the myth, so many people were helping Jews, it seems remarkable that any were killed at all.

The final myth is about the Dutch volunteers for the SS. 

The Netherlands had the highest number of non-German volunteers for the SS from the whole of occupied Europe.
According to the myth, they were only "adventurers". The Dutch authorities accepted this explanation. Those who wanted to, were integrated into the Dutch army.

Later some diaries were found that had belonged to the Dutch SS volunteers. They were full of proud stories about how they killed Jews.

An example: “I forgot to tell you how great it was to hang a chief rabbi from the tower of his synagogue and then torch the synagogue with the Jews inside.”

After the collective Dutch myths came the individual ones, like the myths about Audrey Hepburn. If the story of her Nazi parents had broken without any redeeming feature, it could have destroyed her career.

All that is known for sure is that she was 10-years-old when the war started and 15-years-old when it ended.

A nice Jewish boy

Nowadays, a large majority of Jews enthusiastically support Israel.

In the early 1960s in my London Jewish community there was support, but it was less enthusiastic.

I was a nice Jewish boy.

I am not sure what that means exactly, but it had something to do with the fact that I went to a grammar school and was destined to become a lawyer.

My parents were proud of me. During card games they could brag about my future prospects, just as much as the other card players could brag about the future prospects of their children.

Then I decided to emigrate (make Aliyah) to Israel.

Go there and work on a farm for a short time, OK. But actually live there? That was unusual.

And where did I go in Israel? I went to a kibbutz in the desert where I milked sheep.

Nobody cheered. The only support I received was from my 3 non-Jewish friends.

Not much to brag about either.

Definitely a disappointment.

What a difference a war can make.

After the Six Day War, I shot up the bragging tree. Having a son in the Israeli paratroopers trumped the doctors and the lawyers.

There was not much competition. In my time in the IDF I never met another soldier from Britain.

However, I was no longer that "nice". Neither was anybody else in my platoon.

The Will of the People

I am arrogant.
Tired of discussing with nitwits who have strongly held opinions about subjects they know little about. Tired of discussing with zealots without any critical doubt who worship a person, party or ideology.

Put another way: nitwits and zealots should not waste their time discussing with me. It is more rewarding for them to interact with members of their own herds.

The latest banality is Jews in and outside Israel proclaiming that western democracy is only about giving all power to 50% plus 1 of the population.

Jew-hatred in the past has often been supported by a majority. 

It was only with the embedding of majority-rule societies in the context of protection for minorities and individuals that persecution of Jews stopped. 

No, the pogroms were not "democratic", even if they were supported by a majority of the population, even if they were "the will of the people".

Goodbye sabra

When I lived in Israel in the 1960s there were deep political and social differences. I remember someone remarking that if it were not for the Arabs we might have a civil war.

At that time, the Arabs meant the armies of Egypt, Jordan and Syria. These armies were an existential threat to Israel. 

Despite all the political and social disagreements there was no real danger of a civil war, because of the underlying feeling of solidarity and kinship in the country.

Israeli society was like the sabra, the fruit of the cactus: prickly on the outside, soft and sweet on the inside.

Then, the very idea that someone would assassinate a prime minister and others would rejoice, was beyond the realms of my vivid imagination.
Yet it did happen later and the people who supported that are poised to become part of the government.

Now there are comparable deep political and social differences in the country. However, without the underlying feeling of solidarity and kinship.
Say goodbye to the sabra, only the cactus is left.

The sect of revolutionary climate zealots

The strategist behind Just Stop Oil is Roger Hallam. He is a co-founder of Extinction Rebellion.
Just Stop Oil is meant to be a youth-lead campaign that is more aggressive than earlier campaigns.

Before the new campaign started, Hallam and other supporters toured universities calling on students to sign up.
In January, Hallam told students at Glasgow University they “had to become revolutionaries” to avert climate disaster. (The Guardian)

In November 2019, Hallam was interviewed by the German newspaper Die Zeit. During the interview he said the Holocaust was "just another fuckery in human history".
Actually not that big a deal, according to Hallam, because the "fact of the matter is, millions of people have been killed in vicious circumstances on a regular basis throughout history", and genocides are "like a regular event" in history.
He added that the Germans' attitude towards the Holocaust is holding them back.

In the fallout from his remarks, Extinction Rebellion UK stated that he “no longer has any formal role” with their organisation.

Why did Hallam minimalize the Holocaust?
In recent years there has been a growth of groups who declare that the evil they are fighting is comparable to the Holocaust. They often also compare themselves to the Jews who were slaughtered.
They do this because the Holocaust is still considered to be the benchmark of the worst evil.
Therefore, they are comparing the evil they are fighting to the worst crime in history.

Hallam is a strategist and goes a step further. He minimalizes the Holocaust because his disciples have to believe the evil they are fighting is the worst possible crime, the "ultimate" crime, in history.

Two young supporters of Just Stop Oil went to Downing Street in February, where they delivered an ultimatum to ministers calling for an immediate end to new fossil fuel investments.
“If you do not provide such assurance by 14 March 2022 it will be our duty to intervene – to prevent the ultimate crime against our country, humanity and life on earth,” said the letter, read out at the gates and delivered by hand. (The Guardian)

Just Stop Oil is a sect of revolutionary climate zealots. All zealots are similar, they just have different causes and different enemies.
Hallam's young zealots are fighting the "ultimate crime against our country, humanity and life on earth".
How far are they willing to go?

Dogs

Facebook keeps on showing me clips with dogs. I do not mind, as I have nothing against dogs.

According to all the clips, everybody loves dogs. That was not always the case in my past. Certainly not in the period 1964 to 1969 when I lived on a kibbutz.

There were few laws on a kibbutz, instead there were unwritten rules and social control through group pressure on the individual.

In my case the pressure was only in the beginning and it was "friendly".

People thought my hair was too long. The men made jokes about shearing. I was a shepherd.

The women acted as if they were surrogate mothers for me. They told me in earnest and friendly voices that I would be even more handsome with less locks of hair.

It was no big deal for me, so when the barber came around I let him give me a kibbutz hair cut.

When there was a festival all the men wore white shirts. It was like a uniform. However, white is not my colour.

I wore a coloured shirt to a festival in the communal dining room.

People presumed I did not have a white shirt and thought it a disgrace I had not already been given one. I was quite new on the kibbutz.

They complained to the woman who ran the kibbutz shop. She came over to me and said, "come around tomorrow and pick a white shirt".

I did, it was no big deal for me.

Not all the unwritten rules and social pressure were so benign.

I lived and worked with Holocaust survivors from Romania. Many had traumatic memories of dogs used by the Nazis.

There were no dogs on the kibbutz.

That is until Roni and Michaela arrived with a small dog.

They were Belgian and part of my West European group. They had no children and loved their small dog a lot.

For many members, no dogs was an unwritten rule. There were arguments galore, but Roni and Michaela would not budge: they kept their dog.

Then the dog was poisoned.

Roni and Michaela were distraught. They accused certain members of the kibbutz of the poisoning. Nobody owned up to the act.

Soon afterwards they left the kibbutz and returned to Belgium.

Haredim and (Zionist) Women

Jerusalem.
"I took a seat at the front of the bus because I suffer from car sickness and sitting in the back makes me nausea," she said.
"At one point, a group of 20 men who belong to an extremist Haredi branch, bordered the bus and ordered me to move to the back.
When I refused, they began yelling at me, pulling my hair and finally one man took off his shoe and shoved his dirty sock in my face," she said.
(Ynet, 1 August 2022)

The role and position of women in society have always been a problem for religious zealots. In Muslim societies, the dress and behaviour of women are governed by law.
On the one hand, women are hussies. They have to dress "modestly", to protect men from them.
On the other hand, they are seen as children who have to be "protected" by a male family member. They have to obey the rules of the men who protect them.
Many ultra-orthodox (Haredi) Jewish religious authorities have a perception of the role and position of women in society that is similar to the Muslim perception.

"A History of Zionism" by Walter Lacqueur is an admired general history of the Zionist movement before the establishment of the state of Israel.
I used to write papers on Zionism for my university study group on Arab Nationalism. 

I found Laqueur to be an excellent frame of reference.

Most religious authorities in the shtetls of Eastern Europe hated political
Zionism.
According to Laqueur, one of the reasons for this and the hatred of the larger socialist Bund movement, was the equality of women in both movements. He also writes that the animosity towards political Zionists was more intense than the animosity towards the Bundists.

Why?
The "immodest" clothing of Zionist women when working in the fields.
At least the Bund women knew how to dress modestly. 

Lo-ammi (Not my people)

During the Holocaust there were some Jews who betrayed fellow-Jews. Often out of fear, sometimes because of a reward.
One of the most nefarious of these traitors was the Dutch Jewess Ans van Dijk. She even betrayed her own brother and his family. She was hanged at the end of the war for her crimes.

People tell me that I cannot compare modern-day Jews who betray (Israeli) Jews to war criminals like Ans van Dijk.
They are right. The Jewish war criminals feared for their lives.
Today’s Jewish “as a Jew” traitors do not have that fear. They betray other (Israeli) Jews out of narcissistic, arrogant “moral righteousness” or because it helps their careers.

Is the British Jewish journalist Jonathan Freedland an example of an “as a Jew” betrayer of Israeli Jews?
Let’s take a look.

He has just penned an article for the Jewish Chronicle with the title, “The 55th anniversary of the Six Day War merits no celebration”.
Why not celebrate? 

Because, according to Freedland, of what the “occupation” is doing to Israelis and “us” (British Jews).

Wait a minute.
The Six Day War was first and foremost an existential war. The goal of the Arab armies was the destruction of the state of Israel and the killing or expulsion of the Jews who lived there.
I know, I was in that war. I listened to the Arab propaganda in Hebrew. They did not ask us to surrender. No, they gloated about how they were going to kill all the men and rape all the women.

His objection to the “occupation” is Freedland’s legitimate political opinion.
However, he does not say that he will celebrate that Israel won the existential war and Jews were not slaughtered. 

No, he will not celebrate that the people of Israel live. 

All he cares about is the occupation.

To put it personally: He does not give shit about Jews like me, my family and my friends who survived. He does not give shit about the Jewish soldiers who died fighting for Israel in that existential war.

“As a Jew” all he cares about is his narcissistic, arrogant, perceived moral righteousness.
This is not just a difference about politics. This is an existential difference.

No country for old people

The Dutch Safety Board (OVV) has just published its report into the way the Dutch government handled the first phase of the corona pandemic in 2020.

If you want to assess the success or failure of actions, you first have to clarify what the goals of the actions were. There is usually a discussion of these goals in a report, at least in the preamble.

How do we remember earlier pandemics?
We conclude that the flu pandemic in 1918 was the worst pandemic in recent history because it killed the most people worldwide. The 2009 swine flu pandemic resulted in less than 300,000 deaths globally and is considered relatively mild.

Therefore, in my opinion, preventing excess deaths is a major goal of preventive measures during a pandemic. There are of course other goals and the different goals should be weighed before choosing a course of action.

A discussion of goals with the emphasis on saving lives cannot be found in the OVV report. The reason is simple: saving lives was/is not a relevant goal in the Dutch corona policy.
There are three illustrations for this lack of interest in mortality during the pandemic.

1. It is not compulsory to report deaths from corona in the Netherlands.
A policy directed towards preventing deaths from the virus would want to know how many people were dying from the virus.

2. The infected elderly were not given the necessary treatment that could have saved them.

No smiling photos of old people leaving hospital after a long fight against the corona virus in the Netherlands, as they would not have been admitted to hospital.
This also happens in other countries, but there is a difference.
In the UK it was exposed in a Sunday Times article: “Revealed: how elderly paid price of protecting NHS from Covid-19”.
In the Netherlands it is the accepted norm.

3. Lack of priority for vaccinating the elderly.

Remember the smiling photos of the old people who received the first corona vaccines. They were a signal of hope.

Not in the Netherlands. The first photo was of a happy nurse, the second was of a beaming television doctor. 

I remember an uplifting photo in German newspapers; it took another three weeks before the first old person was vaccinated in the Netherlands.

The German nurse who vaccinated the first person in Germany said he was happy that Germany had started to vaccinate. It was important to start as soon as possible because every day people were dying.
The Dutch Minister of Health when confronted with a question about the Dutch tardiness with vaccinations replied: it was not important when you started as the Dutch would eventually catch up with the rest of Europe.

My back burner

We lived behind and above my parents’ shop in the Elephant & Castle. When I was 6, my parents sent me to a Jewish boarding school in Hove. I stayed there until I was 12.

One of the problems of the boarding school was that other children only stayed one or a few terms. It was quite usual for me to return from a school holiday and find that some of my friends had left the school.

I unconsciously developed a defence mechanism for this recurring form of loss.
When I went home, I put all my school friends on a back burner. If they were gone when I returned, I left them there and eventually forgot about them.

Since then I have always used my back burner for events and people. It has enabled me to hide traumatic events and move from people and countries more easily.
For me, it is literally: out of sight, out of mind.

When I was 18, I left England to go and live on a kibbutz in the northern part of the Negev desert. I was the only member of the kibbutz from an English-speaking country. 

The Romanian Holocaust survivors who founded the kibbutz did all speak a foreign language, but that was German.
I put my family and old friends out of my mind and concentrated on the present and the future.

Fast forward 3 years. The 6 day war is over and I have been demobbed. I was back on the kibbutz but that was difficult. 

The relentless routine of work, eat, work, sleep was eroding my motivation.

I had a relationship with a South African tourist. She was pleasant company and I found her attractive.
For me, she was a diversion. For her, I was an experience she could relate to her girlfriends when she returned home.

We were together in my room. A knock on the door: telephone for you. Where is the telephone? In the office.
I went down to the office that was in a wooden hut. There was a telephone there that I had never seen before.

I picked it up. It was my mother.
She knew I was in the paratroopers because she had been to the Israeli Embassy about my father’s illness.
She was phoning to find out if I was still alive. I had not contacted her since the war.

That’s the problem with back burners.

A New Beginning

In order to make Aliyah in 1964 I tagged on to a “Hashomer Hatzair” European youth “garin” (group) that was going to settle in kibbutz Magen, in the north of the Negev desert near to the Egyptian border.

The group was composed of 15 to 20 Jewish teenagers from Belgium, the Netherlands, Austria, Switzerland and Italy.
I am not sure about the exact number because some had emotional or mental problems and were quietly returned to the countries they came from after a short period in Israel.

Before I could make Aliyah I had to spend a few weeks at a training farm in Bishop's Stortford, Hertfordshire. This was to prepare me for physical labour on a communal farm.
The Hashomer Hatzair “shaliach” (emissary) was an Israeli man who lived on the farm with his wife and young child.

I met Gidon for the first time on that farm. He was visiting on his way to Israel. I thought it was a strange detour to make from the Netherlands, but he said he wanted to visit the shaliach.
We hit it off well and he later confided in me the real reason he was there. He was knocking up the shaliach’s wife.

I was an 18-year-old innocent British teenager about to start on a life changing adventure.
The first person I met who was going to be part of that adventure told me he was knocking up somebody else’s wife.
Was I shocked? No.
I thought to myself: bring it on.

Rich families

The west coast of Sicily is one of the poorest and most underdeveloped areas of Italy. There is an old, dilapidated public hospital in Castelvetrano that you should avoid.

How do I know?
I spent 3 hours there waiting to be admitted to their emergency department and then another 14 hours with an intravenous cannula in my arm waiting to be seen by a doctor. There was no bed for me, I was allocated a stretcher in a large open space with about 15 Sicilians on stretchers and beds.

It was difficult for them to register me because their computer programme did not accept British as a nationality.

I knew that I had (recurrent) erysipelas and all I needed was antibiotics.

The place was in a constant state of bedlam. The nurses shouted at patients and patients shouted at nurses.
There was only one doctor for the whole emergency department. When he had to walk past patients he would keep his head in the air. They would call to him, but he did not respond.

There was no bedding, only a sheet of paper for the stretcher. I had an extra roll that allowed me to change the paper when it got torn or too crumpled. 

There was no food or potable water. At the front of the building there was a vending machine for cola and other fizzy drinks.

The one toilet had no toilet paper. I asked a nurse for toilet paper and he gave me some surgical cloths.
The other patients ignored me. Not in a hostile way, more not wanting to bother me.

On the other hand, all the patients had family at their bedside who looked after them.
They brought food and water, helped them to the toilet (they had their own toilet paper), and helped them wash. Some had even brought their own bed linen.
Most important of all they were there to comfort their ill family (or friends): talking, smiling and sometimes stroking and hugging.

I remember one older woman with little hair who was coughing a lot. Every now and then she was sick. 

A middle-aged man sat close to the head end of her bed. He read from a book for her.

Those poor people, rich with family.

Fornicating memories

Music can bring back memories.
Sometimes of a period in life, other times of a specific occurrence.

I was working on the docks in Amsterdam doing rather hard and dirty work. My pulmonologist says I now have a scar on my lungs from that period.

In those days I was paid in cash at the end of the week; in a brown paper envelope with my name written in ink on the outside.

We had been living in the flat of my girlfriend’s mother for a couple of weeks. Now, as the mother was coming back from her holidays, we needed a place to live.

In the east of Amsterdam there is a building near the Zoo called the Hollandse Schouwburg (Holland’s Theatre).
Originally the Schouwburg was a Dutch theatre, but in 1941 the Nazi occupiers used it as an assembly point for the deportation of Jews.
Nowadays it is a monument with an eternal flame in memory of the deported Amsterdam Jews.

Right behind the Schouwburg in the adjacent street there was a courtyard that could only be reached through an alley.
In the courtyard there was a large building owned by a carpenter. He had his workshop on the ground floor.

The other floors had been converted into rooms separated by walls made of hardboard. That is where we went to live when my girlfriend’s mother came back from her holidays.

The room was small and the carpenter had used hardboard (again) to separate the room into three even smaller areas. One of these areas was an alcove big enough for a three-quarter bed.

Our neighbours were a young couple. Their alcove and our alcove were next to each other, just separated by hardboard.
The young couple were not too keen on us listening to their sexual activity. 

They solved the problem by playing a record of the Mamas and the Papas during their lovemaking.

Since that time, the music of the Mamas and the Papas reminds me of fornication.

Flourishing business, flourishing virus

Sunday in November, around 5 in the afternoon, I finished my latest reunion with a cross trainer and other similar unsavoury devices in my gym.

A few doors down there is a post-secondary vocational education centre for older teenagers. On the ground floor of the same building there is a big supermarket belonging to the Dirk van den Broek national chain of supermarkets.

I stumbled from the gym to the supermarket.

When it comes to corona infections, the Dutch are up a creek and cannot find a suitable paddle.

They do not know how many people are infected because the maximum of their test capacity has been reached. Regular hospital wards and ICUs are filling up with corona patients at an alarming rate.

There is now talk of "code black": a situation where they decide to let people die because there is not enough capacity to treat everybody.

A talk show guru physician said recently that if code black is activated, the hospitals will have to be guarded by the police.

The police immediately replied: we do not have enough capacity, it will have to be done by the army.

The government has reintroduced a few measures.

One is the mandatory wearing of a face mask in all indoor areas accessible to the public, including shops. The only exceptions are indoor places where the coronavirus entry pass is used

The supermarket that was the destination of my weary tread was quite busy.

People were walking in and out without a face mask.

There were two young female shop assistants standing near to the entrance chatting to each other. One was wearing a face mask over her nose and mouth, the other had it under her chin.

I am not really integrated into Dutch society as I do not think rules only apply to other people.

I approached the young ladies and asked them why all these not wearing face masks people were in their shop. Should they not do something about it?

They replied that wearing a face mask was only an advice and their team leader had told them not to say anything about it.

I told them wearing a face mask in shops had been mandatory for over a week. They shrugged their shoulders.

Most of the staff inside the supermarket were either not wearing a face mask or wearing it under their chin.

Next day, a report in the media, Dutch Security Council chair:

"If compliance with the measures does not fundamentally change and the number of infections does not fall substantially, there will be a lockdown that will last all winter."

Another report: "still hoping that a lockdown can be averted, the cabinet makes another appeal to us about our behaviour."

Don't mention the Verkaufsbücher

I have written before that during the Second World War almost all Dutch government and private organisations collaborated with the German occupier in the isolation, persecution and deportation of Dutch Jews.

I have also explained that the reason for this collaboration was not virulent overt antisemitism as it was in other occupied countries.
The reason was much more mundane: it was profitable.

In recent years there has been more research into the collaboration and as a result it has been raining profuse apologies.
However, it is not something people like to talk about.

The silence surrounding the collaboration can lead to a distorted view of the prelude to the Dutch Holocaust.
The following case is an example of this distortion.

The Jan van Goyen Medical Centre, a private, well-known Dutch clinic with a growing number of subsidiaries, has its domicile at Jan van Goyenkade 1.
It is a beautiful building in a very nice part of Amsterdam near to the Hilton Hotel.

On their site they write about their "long history":
"In 1942 an ENT clinic was established in the building on the Jan van Goyenkade."
According to their site, the building had a glorious war record as well: “During the occupation, people in hiding still needed medical care.
That was possible in a secret hospital in Amsterdam. The hospital was located at Jan van Goyenkade 1."

Strange, even though I searched as thoroughly as possible, I could not find any corroboration of a secret hospital there.
Surely, somebody would have recorded it somewhere? This was not the case.

The bigger problem for me was: why do they not mention the original owner?
He was the man who had the house built in 1923. His name was Alfred Cohen and he was a Jew.

The reason they do not mention him is because their "secret hospital", that is not mentioned anywhere else, was one of the houses Jewish owners were forced to leave and sell at a fraction of their value.
This is now referred to as the "theft of Jewish real estate."

The address can be found in the "Verkaufsbücher", the files the Germans kept of all stolen Jewish property.

"The Verkaufsbücher provide a gripping overview of Jewish real estate that was confiscated in World War II and subsequently stolen by war buyers.
These books describe in detail how more than 7,000 Jewish properties and plots of land ended up in the hands of mostly shady entrepreneurs and real estate traders."
KRO, NCRV television networks.