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REMEMBERING THE HOLOCAUST WHILE GAZA STARVES  
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Ariel Dorfman
June 6, 2024
New Lines Magazine
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_ A ceremony at an old food market in Amsterdam prompts reflections
on tragedy, indifference and survival. How could so many Israelis feel
indifferent to such grief and afflictions — that recalled how so
many Germans had turned a blind eye to the Nazis _

The large market hall of the Centrale Markthal in Amsterdam in the
1930s. (Amsterdam City Archives),

 

On May 4, as war and famine raged in Gaza, Amsterdam marked
Remembrance Day, an annual commemoration of those who resisted the
Nazi occupation, with special emphasis from the city’s organizing
committee on the Jews who perished in the onslaught. Among the dozens
of ceremonies that crisscrossed the city, I joined one at the Centrale
Markthal, a building that had, throughout that period of dread, housed
a vast open-air market that sold food to Amsterdammers, though it is
currently dedicated to spectacles, parties and gatherings enjoyed by
those who, mostly, know little about that remote tragedy.

I was there at the invitation of Max Arian, an 84-year-old Dutch
friend, one of the speakers that day. I had met him 50 years ago, on
my first visit to the Netherlands to drum up solidarity for the
Chilean resistance to the dictatorship of General Pinochet, which
drove me into exile. Max, as a secular Jewish survivor of the Nazi
occupation, was particularly attuned to freedom and national
liberation struggles elsewhere around the world, including the
struggle of the Palestinian people for a homeland and an end to the
occupation. What bonded us most back then, of course, was how he
identified with the promise of Salvador Allende’s peaceful
revolution, which was abruptly ended by Pinochet’s 1973 coup
d’etat.

During that initial, hospitable encounter, he hinted at his childhood
story, but I only learned the details when, with my wife and son, I
moved to Amsterdam in 1976 for a four-year stay — welcomed warmly by
Max and his family, like an echo of the refuge he had been given as a
young boy back in 1943.

His father, Arnold, a member of the resistance to the Nazis, had been
shipped to Auschwitz, where, unbeknownst to his relatives, he had died
in October 1942. Max’s mother, Rebecca, was subsequently arrested
and beaten and, while in captivity, managed to smuggle a message to a
relative asking that her 3-year-old son be “hidden” from the
Nazis. The child spent the rest of the war with a loving Christian
foster family, the Micheels, under a false identity. Rebecca herself
was eventually packed into a train with thousands of other Jews and
was only rescued at the last minute by men she presumed to be comrades
of her husband.

She lived the next two years in safety in Limburg, not far from where
her son was being cared for, though she could not know where he was
for security reasons. The only sign that he was well was an unsigned
letter from Max’s foster mother allaying Rebecca’s fears and
mentioning how much, perhaps too much, the little boy enjoyed vlaii, a
cake with green berries that was only baked in that southernmost
region of the country.

So Max was nearby and there was hope that they might still have a
future together. And on May 5, 1945, which is still celebrated as
Liberation Day in the Netherlands, Rebecca sought news of her son’s
whereabouts and immediately retrieved him.

If that clue of shared food had been her sole connection to her lost
child, food must have also been on her mind as a way of connecting
with her parents, Philip and Mietje Witteboom. They had been spared
when the Nazis occupied the Netherlands in early 1940 because Philip,
with his wife’s help, ran a stall in the Centrale Markthal providing
fruit and vegetables for the populace. Classified as “essential
workers,” they managed to avoid deportation until finally, in 1944,
they were sent to the Theresienstadt concentration camp in what is now
the Czech Republic. When Max’s grandfather fell ill, he was
transported to Auschwitz, where he died. Mietje outlasted her jailers,
though she almost succumbed to starvation before the camp was
liberated. Indeed, when Rebecca heard her mother had returned to the
Netherlands and rushed to see her, she did not recognize the gaunt,
skeletal woman advancing down the street, and was only able to
identify her by the dress Mietje was wearing.

I imagine their elation, and also the abiding pain left behind by so
many missing, murdered relatives, the extended family whose names and
dates of birth and death are inscribed now on the Holocaust Memorial
Wall, where, on a visit last year, I examined them, one by one, with
Max by my side recounting their stories. And we talked, once more,
about his own life as a “hidden” child, which had continued to
fascinate me over so many decades, to the point that I had borrowed
many aspects of his experience for one of the protagonists of my novel
“The Suicide Museum” (2023).

It was not, however, until the ceremony on May 4 of this year that I
learned what had happened in the aftermath of the occupation and, once
again, the importance of food. Because Mietje, in addition to that
solitary dress, had brought something else back from Theresienstadt: a
piece of chocolate given to her by the Russian liberators of the camp.
This famished woman, instead of devouring it, had kept it for her
grandson, wagering that he was still alive. It offered him not only
sustenance but the memory as well, because that sweet would remain for
Max as the unforgettable moment when he first tasted chocolate. It had
melted and then hardened over time, mixing with the tin foil, and yet
it was so savory.

And more memories of food: how his grandmother and mother had, for the
following decades, sold fruit and vegetables in a stall at that
marketplace, despite the efforts by some other vendors to deny them
that right on the grounds that the original license was in the
deceased Philip’s name. This was the place where the miraculously
saved Max, beloved of those two formidable female figures, had spent
the rest of his childhood and adolescence, had helped to carry boxes
and scrape the muck from them and even, on Mondays, work the cash
register. So it was food, again, that came to the rescue of the
family, providing a livelihood during difficult years of scarcity,
continuing a tradition that had been in the family for generations,
even if Max himself would become a famous journalist and cultural
critic.

The commemoration at the former marketplace was, therefore, a way of
celebrating the triumph of life over death, embodied in the fact that
both octogenarian speakers, Max and another hidden child survivor,
Simon Italiaander, were very much present to evoke a time when that
space had resounded with the back-and-forth of merchants and
wholesalers and clients and filled with the smell of cabbages and
tomatoes and oranges, so Amsterdammers could eat and love, multiply
and laugh, betting that life could, that it must, go on. Because Max
was not alone that day of the ceremony. His (non-Jewish) wife Maartje
was there, as were other members of his family — one of his three
children and two of his eight grandchildren — who existed solely
because he had been saved. The ghosts of the past, the dead who await
some sort of resurrection in our memory, seemed to be blessing those
who had managed to defy the extinction the Nazis had wanted to visit
upon those innocent people.

And yet, as more and more recollections of the food that had been sold
in that marketplace filled the air, as photos of that space vibrant
with sustenance and nourishment circulated among the spectators, as I
stared at a marvelous image of a robust, older Mietje, no longer
famished, standing defiantly in the midst of endless crates of
vegetables, what kept intruding on me, perversely and inevitably, was
Gaza: the horror of what was going on in Gaza, what students around
the world have been protesting against, including in the streets of
Amsterdam. How could a state that had been founded by the survivors of
the Holocaust be inflicting starvation on its Palestinian neighbors?
How could its armed forces massacre children who, unlike Max, had
nowhere to hide, no one to take them in? How could so many Israelis
feel indifferent to such grief and afflictions — an indifference
that, alas, recalled how so many Germans (and Dutch people, and
millions around the world) had turned a blind eye to the sins of the
Nazis?

These searing questions, which invaded me, which I could not help
asking, do not undermine or disrespect the ceremony at the Centrale
Markthal. They make the need to remember more relevant than ever, the
certainty that never again should humanity witness terrible war crimes
without demanding accountability, as the prosecutor of the
International Criminal Court in the Hague has done. More relevant,
also, because those who acclaim Hamas — a murderous, theocratic,
misogynistic, oppressive organization that also massacres children and
holds innocent hostages — those who share its dreams of ridding the
region of its Israeli enemies, would do well to attend memorials like
the one I was at on May 4 in Amsterdam.

This is the complicated challenge of our times: to rejoice at the
wondrous survival of Max Arian, a fervent supporter of amity between
Palestinians and Israelis, and at the same time condemn those
persecutors who, by their current acts of terror and forced famine,
are betraying the ardent memory of so many of their ancestors who died
and are still crying out for peace and justice.

_[ARIEL DORFMAN is a Chilean-American author whose works include the
play “Death and the Maiden” (1990) and the novel “The Suicide
Museum
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(2023)]_

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* Israel-Gaza War
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