The Secret Diary of Arnold Douwes

Arnold Douwes

Description

In the Netherlands, the myth that resistance to Nazi occupation was high among all sectors of the population has retained a strong hold, and yet many Dutch Jews fell victim to deportation and annihilation in the camps of Eastern Europe. How could a country that prided itself on its tolerance, adherence to legal norms, and democratic government have been the site of such an enormous tragedy? Even while Nazi arrests of Jews were taking place, Arnold Douwes, a gardener and restless adventurer, headed a clandestine network of resistance and rescue. Douwes had spent time in the United States and France and was arrested several times by the police after his return to the Netherlands in 1940. Keenly aware that he was doing something important, he started a diary in the summer of 1943. He hid some 35 small notebooks in jam jars at safe houses in the vicinity of his base in Nieuwlande (Drenthe). After the war, he dug the notebooks up and transcribed them, adding several postwar sections with scrupulous notations. Bob Moore has translated Douwes's diary into English for the first time, and he and co-editor Johannes Houwink ten Cate have added a historical and contextual introduction, annotations, and a glossary for readers who may not be familiar with Dutch technical terms or places. Organized chronologically, and remaining largely as Douwes originally wrote it, the diary sheds light on the successes—and failures—of this important Dutch rescue network.

Prologue: Mordecai Paldiel

Editors' Preface

Acknowledgments

Translator's Notes

Contextual Introduction

The Diary

Aftermath

Epilogue

Glossary

Biographical Sketches

Sujets

• HISTORY
• Nazismo
• Jews
• Diary
• Nazism
• The Holocaust
• Netherlands
• History of Europe
• Jew
• Holland
• Nazisme
• Germany
• Western
• Holocauste
• Pays-Bas
• Europe

Informations

• Publié par: Indiana University Press
• Date de parution: 29 août 2019
• Nombre de lectures: 2
• EAN13: 9780253044211
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 9 Mo

Extrait

This book is a publication of
Indiana University Press
Office of Scholarly Publishing
Herman B Wells Library 350
1320 East 10th Street
Bloomington, Indiana 47405 USA
iupress.indiana.edu
2019 by Bob Moore and Johannes Houwink ten Cate
All rights reserved
No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of the American National Standard for Information Sciences-Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1992.
Manufactured in the United States of America
Cataloging information is available from the Library of Congress.
ISBN 978-0-253-04418-1 (cloth)
ISBN 978-0-253-04420-4 (ebook)
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Contents

Prologue
Editors Preface
Acknowledgments
Translator s Note

The Diary and Its Context
The Diary
Aftermath
Epilogue

Glossary
Biographical Sketches
Index
Prologue
I N 1983, I had been barely one year at my job at Yad Vashem as head of the Righteous Among the Nations Department, when I was approached by Haim Roet. Born in the Netherlands in 1932, he was hidden in several places in the Nieuwlande region (Drenthe province) with the help of Arnold Douwes and his Jewish colleague Max Nico L ons. Douwes had already earned the Yad Vashem honor of Righteous Among the Nations in 1965 and was living in Israel, not far from Tel Aviv. Roet discussed with me the debate in the Yad Vashem Commission for the Righteous with regard to Douwes s request to include among the Righteous several hundred Nieuwlande residents who, he claimed, answered his and L ons s call for sheltering Jews during the German occupation of the Netherlands and thus saved their lives. In fact, Douwes had kept notes in a diary during the war years carefully listing all the locations he secretly visited in the Nieuwlande countryside to find places where Jews, coming mainly from Amsterdam, would be afforded safe shelter. These notes were hidden in a secret place, but Douwes was able to recover them after the war. The notes gave the details in coded language, the names and acts of the people in the Nieuwlande region who had aided him in hiding Jews from the Germans. He then insisted that all these rescuers also be accorded the Righteous title. He was quite adamant about it, once going so far as threatening that if these rescuer colleagues of his were not recognized, he would request to have his tree, planted years earlier, removed from Yad Vashem.
Born in 1906, the son of a pastor, Douwes was recruited for the underground by Johannes Post, a farmer and town councilor in the village of Nieuwlande, and immediately dedicated himself to saving Jews. Assisted by Max L ons, a Jew posing as a Protestant, Douwes systematically traversed great stretches of the Nieuwlande countryside on his bicycle, stopping at every house and farm to ask whether they would be willing to lodge a Jewish child. When convincing failed, Douwes was not beyond, in some instances, forcing people to admit Jews for shelter, using all kinds of excuses and addressing the reluctant hosts in their own dialect (which he would take the time to learn). Haim Roet, as an 11-year-old boy, was himself one of the beneficiaries of Douwes s help. Fetched by train from Amsterdam to Zwolle, in eastern Holland, and then taken by Douwes on his bicycle to Dedemsvaart, Roet was hidden in several places. Lou Gans, one of Douwes s other many beneficiaries, described him in the following glowing terms: You met him. Look in his eyes; look at his tight-lipped face. Then you will understand that no brute in the whole world could resist his will. Did he save 50 Jews, 100, 200, or 500? Heaven knows! He himself could hardly say, because there were so many Jews he helped!
An operation of such magnitude could not go long unnoticed, and the Gestapo was on the lookout for him. To avoid arrest, he changed his appearance, sporting a moustache and wearing a hat and eyeglasses to hide his face as much as possible. Despite all these precautions, Douwes was arrested on October 19, 1944. Luckily for him, while he was imprisoned in the Assen prison, fearing execution or deportation with fatal consequences, the underground rescued him in a daring operation on December 11, 1944. He then went into hiding until the country s liberation. It is estimated that Douwes was responsible for saving some 350 Jews, including around 100 children. In 1965, Yad Vashem awarded him the title of Righteous Among the Nations.
Subsequently, Douwes championed the cause of honoring many other rescuers in Nieuwlande, but the issue before the Commission for the Righteous in 1983-which at the time was headed by Dr. Moshe Bejski, one of the Schindlerjuden (Schindler Jews), and also then a sitting justice on Israel s Supreme Court-was that by the commission s own criteria, each nomination to the Righteous title had to be supported by evidence from the beneficiary party-in other words, the Jewish persons saved by his/her rescuers. In the Nieuwlande case, this was lacking as neither the names of all the people sheltered there nor their current addresses were known. In fact, nearly all the evidence presented was based on Arnold Douwes s writings during the war years, save for testimonies from his rescuer colleague L ons and people such as Haim Roet, who had been aided by the Nieuwlande region residents. Would that be sufficient to recognize the several hundred persons as Righteous Among the Nations, as requested by Douwes? There was no precedent for this in the commission s history. At the same time, the case s rapporteur, Dr. Jozeph Michman (formerly Melkman), strongly supported Douwes s request, and the commission chairman, Justice Bejski, also leaned in that direction.
In the meantime, Haim Roet sat for hours with me, going over the full names of all those on Douwes s list of Nieuwlande rescuers (originally numbering 270, including husbands and wives), to verify their correct full names. Roet also took me on a trip to Douwes s home, then at Kiryat Ekron, near Rehovot, to meet the man and clarify certain points in his story. Finally, that same year, after several sessions, the Commission for the Righteous voted to award the Righteous title to 202 of the Nieuwlande rescuers. Ceremonies then took place both at Yad Vashem, where a special commemorative stone was dedicated on which were engraved the names of all the 202 recognized rescuers, and in Nieuwlande, where the community received a specially worded certificate of honor on behalf of Yad Vashem. Upon my request, Arnold Douwes, who in the meantime had moved back to the Netherlands, sent me a copy of his wartime diary, which he had rewritten, and which I kept with me, waiting for an opportunity to have it published. I managed to visit him in Amsterdam, shortly before his passing in 1999. I am presently happy that Douwes s longtime wish to have his diary, originally written in Dutch, will appear both in the original Dutch and a new English version in a scholarly project conceived by Professor Bob Moore. Hopefully, it will also one day appear in the Hebrew language, for the benefit of Israeli readers.
I wish also to underline that Nieuwlande was the first large-scale community that was honored by Yad Vashem in toto, coupled with over two hundred individual local rescuers. This created a precedent that made it possible in 1990 to honor a similar community, in France, that rescued many Jews, running into the hundreds and perhaps even more: Le Chambon-sur-Lignon. This, too, was in the form of a special certificate that I had the privilege to personally present on behalf of Yad Vashem to the Le Chambon-sur-Lignon community, coupled with honors to individual rescuers of that town and immediate vicinity.

Dr. Mordecai Paldiel
Former Director, Righteous Among the Nations Department, Yad Vashem (1982-2007).
History Professor, Yeshiva University-Stern College and Touro College, New York.
March 2017
Editors Preface
T HE DIARY OF Arnold Douwes is in many ways a remarkable document. During the German occupation of the Netherlands, he was an itinerant gardener who in late 1942 became a member of an active resistance group in the eastern Netherlands organized by Johannes Post in and around the village of Nieuwlande. This was a village in the eastern Dutch province of Drenthe, well away from the big cities in the west and close to the German border. The group was involved in direct actions against the German and their Dutch collaborators but also engaged in sheltering those on the run, either from political or racial persecution or in order to avoid being conscripted for labor service in Germany. While there were many networks helping labor draft evaders, the work done by Post s group was unusual in that it was largely devoted to the rescue of adult Jews. When Post was targeted by the authorities and had to leave the district in July 1943, Douwes took over leadership of this aspect of his work; for the next fifteen months, he took sole responsibility for those in hiding and is credited with helping several hundred Jews remain underground during the occupation. Rescue networks of this size were rare in the Netherlands, and in the rest of occupied Europe, but what makes Douwes unique is that he kept a record of all his activities, writing extensive notes and then burying them in jam jars in various safe places. This ran contrary to all the precepts of clandestine work and although there are instances of other men and women engaged in illegal actions who kept some limited notes on their work, this i