The Curtain: Witness and Memory in Wartime Holland

by Henry G. Schogt

Henry Schogt met his wife, Corrie, in 1954 in Amsterdam. Each knew the other had grown up in the Netherlands during World War II, but for years they barely spoke of their experiences. This was true for many people ― the memories were just too painful. Years later, Henry and Corrie began to piece their memories together, to untangle reality from dreams. Their intent was to help others understand what had happened then, and how it influenced and affected not only their lives but those of all who survived. The seven stories in The Curtain reveal how two families ― one Jewish, one non-Jewish ― fared in the Netherlands during the German occupation in World War II. Each vignette highlights a specific aspect of life; all show how life changed for everyone, and forever. Four stories are based on the author’s memories of his own non-Jewish Henry’s friendship with a Jewish teenager; the conflict of personal antipathy with the realization that help must be provided; the Schogt parents’ determination to do the right thing; the difficulties of coping with an aunt with Nazi sympathies. These are stories about the randomness of survival and the elusive nature of memory. For the Jewish family, three stories drawn from the memories of the author’s wife and family demonstrate the bewildering situation of trying to make impossible life-determining decisions when faced with confusing and deceitful decrees. The family must struggle with the luck ― or absence thereof ― of finding refuge when forced from their homes, and with the perplexing inconsistencies of the collaboration of Dutch authorities and police with the Nazis. The Curtain emphasizes the difference between the options that were open to non-Jews and Jews in the Netherlands. Non-Jews could freely choose whether to actively resist the Germans, collaborate with the Nazis, or just to do nothing, and try to live a normal life in spite of wartime restrictions. Dutch Jews, on the other hand, did not have a choice ― whatever they did, whatever decisions they made, they were doomed, and it often seemed, when someone survived, just simple luck. A short introduction about the war years and an appendix with a chronology of decrees, events, and statistics, provide background information for this haunting memoir of those disturbing years during the German Occupation in the Netherlands.

144 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2003

Reviews

[Sam Schulman · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is the best first-person book on the experience of Nazi occupation and the holocaust in Western Europe, and I'm not saying that because it is half devoted to telling the story of my just discovered double-cousins, or because it is written by the son of the heroic gentile Dutch couple who married the daughter of those double-cousins.
I'm not fond of Holocaust-memoirs, partly because they are harrowing, but most because by the time they begin - with hiding, arrest, the death camp - the interesting part of the "lessons of the Holocaust" are usually long over, lessons which have to do with how early WWII and the holocaust started and could have been prevented. That the Nazis were evil, and that most people are pretty awful, is not trivial or banal, but I happened to learned it long ago.
The Curtain is truly different, because it is written-with beuatiful understatement - by a son of the best Dutch, a couple who quietly took it as their responsibility to undertake the most heroic actions in their everyday life to save the lives of Dutch Jews - friends and strangers - at the most appalling risk to themselves and to their children. Henry Schogt was born in 1927, and was in high school during the occupation - old enough to observe and remember, enough of a child to resent and misbehave and be capable of insoucience. Schogt, the retired professor of French at the University of Toronto who wrote the book, remembers all these things about himself, and is capable of dealing with them without drawing attention to his own agita at his behavior in retrospect - which at times he finds profoundly embarassing.
His parents are the books real heroes, and there are no through-and-through villains, though there are certainly plenty of people who behaved badly, including, interestingly, most household servants of Jew and Gentile alike. Schogt did not realize at the time how heroic they were, and does not make a big thing about it in the book. Moreover he shows that the character that made his father, a teacher of advanced math in a high school, so capable of doing the right thing also made him a rather difficult, perhaps sometimes unpleasant, person to have as a father. Again, Schogt does not mark this with heavy irony - it simply emerges. What a pleasure to read such a book - any book - that contains no indignation!
Equally pleasurable is to find a book in which the victims are not - with the exception of the Frenkels, Mme Schogt's parents murdered at Auschwitz - particularly noble or attractive. They no more "deserve" their salvation at the hands of the Schogt family than they "deserved" to be hunted down and killed by the Nazis. What's more, Schogt writes as if everybody realizes this! - for which he deserves a medal.
To someone with a reader's knowledge of countries under Nazi occupation, there are many revelations. One is the high degree of organization devoted to the sheltering of Jewish Dutch. A disciplined and efficient organization, which Schogt and his parents did not encounter directly, took charge of the whereabouts and security of the Frenkel daughters, moved them when necessary, expressed typically Dutch disapproval of sudden sentimental gestures that brought risk to the family as a whole, and to the whole resistance enterprise. Much has been made recently among "holocaustologists" about the statistical efficiency of the death machinery in various countries - 75% of Dutch Jews were killed, but a smaller percentage in Belgium, etc. etc - with the implication that the raw numbers prove something about the racial essence of the inhabitants of the country. I know it is nonsense, but this book dispels the notion that such numbers mean anything. The Dutch are efficient at keeping order, and Dutch Jews were as likely to have the instinct to comply and agree as Dutch gentiles. There are harrowing stories here of self-delusion - a friend of Schogt's who thought he could get a health exemption from forced labor for the Nazis (and damn if someone actually got one!). Fortunately for Mme. Schogt, the Resistance was aså well organized as was the collaboration with the Occupation, and she and her sisters survived. The resistance was able to act decisively in one instance by removing a 1-year-old Jewish baby from its mother, who was acting irresponsibly and was doomed to be arrested and killed (as she was) - and the senior Schogts took it in. If I were to guess, I would say that the high count of Jewish Dutch victims was due to the high degree to which the Germans valued Dutch gentile slave labor, and collecting young Dutchmen and Jews in hiding required no additional manpower or supervisory effort.
In any case, what saved Mme Schogt was the arrival of the Canadian army. What doomed Mme Frenkel's parents was the inability of the Allies to breach the Scheldt. Humanity is worth saving - but only organized force can save it from organized forces that wish to destroy it. To understand why humanity - at no higher than its lower-middle -- is worth saving is the reward of this book.