Nobody Lives Here E-Book

Lex Lesgever

• Herausgeber: The History Press
• Kategorie: Sachliteratur, Reportagen, Biografien
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 281

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2023

Beschreibung

'I was on the street and I was free – but what now?' This is the story of Lex Lesgever: a young Jewish boy who found himself alone on the streets of wartime Amsterdam, the only survivor of his large family. He was just 11 when the Germans invaded in May 1940, and less than a year later he had already been confronted with the horrific consequences of war when his eldest brother, Wolf, was arrested during a raid. This marked the beginning of a devastating time for both the Netherlands and for the young boy who had to survive it alone. From a cosy family home in Amsterdam's Jewish quarter, to sleeping rough, escaping Nazi raids and interrogations, and being taken in by members of the Dutch Resistance, Lex's memoir pulls no punches. Witness the growth of a naïve, frightened young boy into a smart, resilient and yet sensitive survivor. Painting a picture of the unfolding events in Amsterdam during Anne Frank's time in hiding, Nobody Lives Here is vivid and often horrific, but ultimately it is a poignant snapshot of humanity in its darkest moments.

Leseprobe

Praise for Nobody Lives Here

‘Lex’s very detailed, vivid and moving account of his experience offers a deeply personal reflection on the Holocaust in the Netherlands. Readers will be captivated as he recalls the plight of his Jewish community in German-occupied Amsterdam, and how he managed to avoid the same fate. He shares how he, as a young boy, was forced into hiding, in multiple locations and on multiple occasions, sleeping in stairwells and trusting strangers – some of whom undoubtedly saved his life with their kindness. His bravery and courage in the face of adversity and inhumanity, and that of his saviours, is truly inspiring.’

OLIVIA MARKS-WOLDMAN,Holocaust Memorial Day Trust

‘This spellbinding book will take you on the streets of 1940s Amsterdam as a Jewish boy twists and turns to remain alive. Each page immerses the reader in the sights, sounds and experiences confronting Lex everywhere he looks. A captivating account of one boy’s survival through his wit, courage and nine lives.’

BARONESS GILLIAN MERRON

‘This is a compelling and devastating account that offers a profoundly personal and disarmingly honest insight into the human reality of the Holocaust. It deserves to be read widely, and repeatedly.’

JAMES BULGIN,Head of Public History, Imperial War Museum

‘The clarity of Lex Lesgever’s recall matches the clarity of this poignant account and will convey vividly and sensitively the reality of the war years in Amsterdam to readers, particularly young ones, for whom the tragedy, if known of at all, is regarded as mere history. Evocative and memorable.’

GABY GLASSMAN,Amsterdam-born psychotherapist specialising in transgenerational Holocaust trauma

‘Lex Lesgever’s dry, factual account of how he survived – by the skin of his teeth – in Nazi-occupied Holland is extraordinarily moving. In part, it’s because of the dry, plain telling. In part, it is because of the extraordinary generosity of his spirit that shines through. In part, it is because he pays such warm tribute to those who saved him, rescued him, passed him on out of danger, loved him and cared for him. But in part, it is because he shows his fear, but does not condemn those who betrayed him. This is a must read, all the more so because his story so nearly disappeared with his death.’

BARONESS JULIA NEUBERGER

‘Nobody Lives Here is a spellbinding read. Lesgever writes with precision, simplicity, and pace but also with psychological wisdom. His story is one that stays with you and remains important, especially in these dark times for democracy, when freedom and truth again have powerful enemies. The translators, Babette Lichtenstein and Jozef van der Voort, have done a wonderful job. Highly recommended!’

BART VAN ESAuthor of The Cut Out Girl

‘This is a book of deep humanity, the slow and terrible unfurling of an atrocious time, one that captivates the reader with its attention to detail and emotion, it is … a most significant contribution to our understanding of these times, finely told, gently translated.’

PHILIPPE SANDSAuthor of East West Street

Front cover image: Mark Owen/Trevillion Images

Originally published by Boekerij, Amsterdam, The Netherlands, under the title Nooit verleden tijd, 2010

This English-language edition first published 2023

This English-language paperback edition first published 2025

The History Press

97 St George’s Place, Cheltenham,

Gloucestershire, GL50 3QB

www.thehistorypress.co.uk

© Lex Lesgever and Meulenhoff Boekerij bv, Amsterdam, The Netherlands, 2010Introduction © Babette Lichtenstein, 2023, 2025English-language translation © Babette Lichtenstein and Jozef van der Voort, 2023, 2025

The right of Lex Lesgever to be identified as the Author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without the permission in writing from the Publishers.

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data.A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

ISBN 978 1 80399 323 2

eBook converted by Geethik Technologies

Typesetting and origination by The History PressPrinted and bound in Great Britain by TJ Books Limited, Padstow, Cornwall

I dedicate this book to all the members of my familywho were murdered during this dreadful war

Introduction

This memoir is a gripping and unusual account of a survivor of the Shoah in Holland. With impressively clear recall of his childhood and early teens – he was 11 at the outbreak of the war – Lex Lesgever writes of his years on the run and in hiding in Amsterdam and beyond. It is unusual because Lex was never deported to a death camp, but managed to escape when his family was taken, and then spent about two months on his own, mostly in Amsterdam, sleeping rough in shelters and stairwells, stealing food, trying to keep clean and, occasionally, receiving help from adults. He is caught in the middle of Nazi raids more than once – is hunted, shot at and interrogated at Nazi headquarters – and he grows ever more alert and resilient without losing his sensitivity and humanity. His many lucky and instinctively brilliant escapes are quite breathtaking, and are beautifully described through the eyes of a resourceful but very frightened child. Painting a picture of the unfolding events in Amsterdam during Anne Frank’s time in hiding, Lex’s memoir complements the reading of her diary.

Before recounting his time as a fugitive, Lex Lesgever describes what life in Jewish Amsterdam was like before the war, focusing on the long-established, close-knit, mostly working-class, loosely religious and vibrant life of Amsterdam’s Jewish quarter around the area of Waterlooplein, in which his large family comfortably took part: the Jewish festivals in the streets, the market stalls, the mutual support, the easy living alongside the rest of Amsterdam’s population. This gives a historically interesting prelude and highlights the horrific contrast with the devastating events that entirely destroyed this old way of life within such a short time.

Today’s visitors to Amsterdam are surrounded by greenery. There are trees along the canals, lavishly planted flowerbeds, wild grasses and weeds growing undisturbed between tram rails, and the inhabitants have been permitted to lift paving stones abutting their houses where flowering climbers are now growing around their front doors and up the brick walls.

It wasn’t always so. For about thirty years after the Second World War, Amsterdam was a relatively bare place. The dire need for food and fuel, especially during the Hunger Winter of 1944–45, had caused many of Amsterdam’s trees and even floorboards to go up in flames.

Amsterdam seemed bare in the 1950s and 1960s, but there was something else as well. People walked with their heads lowered, not looking each other in the eye. Evasion was in the air; people were wary of each other. Bullying was rife. Teachers bullied pupils, children bullied younger or weaker ones, anyone in authority bullied citizens, neighbours bullied each other. I lived there and witnessed it.

Growing up in Amsterdam shortly after the Second World War was an unsettling experience for me and my sister. My father, a Jewish musician, had left Germany for Holland in the early 1930s and had gone into hiding in 1942, at different addresses in and around Haarlem. Immediately after the war he married, and my parents spent a short period in Jerusalem before returning to Holland. They settled in the ‘old south’ of Amsterdam. We lived in an apartment on Merwedeplein, a few doors away from where Anne Frank and her family had lived before they went into hiding, also in 1942. It had been quite a Jewish neighbourhood, mainly middle class, unlike the old working-class community around Waterlooplein which Lex describes so vividly.

In the 1950s my mother told us about the war years, mainly through anecdotes, and we heard about the Shoah and about the terrible danger my father had been in, as well as the people who had saved him. But outside the walls of our apartment there was a culture of silence. The word ‘Jew’ was avoided: it was painful to say it or hear it. After reading Lex’s sober, poignant and clear descriptions of what happened to him in the streets around Anne Frank’s hiding place (and that of many others), I realised that after the war Amsterdam was a city in trauma and denial.

According to my father there had been no antisemitism in the Netherlands before the war. I didn’t believe him at the time, but from Lex’s anecdotes of his neighbourhood before the occupation I concluded that maybe my father had a point. I began to understand that where fear and terror reign on such scale and intensity for even just five years, many people begin to absorb the prevailing mentality in an attempt to cope with life.

Visitors to Amsterdam today will find the silence around its Second World War history has been broken. Studio Libeskind’s impressive Holocaust Memorial, built close to Lex’s old neighbourhood, shows thousands of names of the Amsterdam citizens murdered in the Shoah. Amongst them are the names of all Lex’s family members. The shapes of the walls of the open memorial – because of its size only clearly perceived from the air – form the three letters of the Hebrew word ‘Remember’.

Lex describes a time when all moral sense had been turned upside down; what was good or bad had lost all meaning. Grown-up men would go hunting for a single child of 13, as happened to Lex, and for much younger children too. People would be turned out of their homes and carted off. In Amsterdam, the Shoah played out with particular viciousness: the German occupation had been headed not by a military commander but by the notorious Nazi A. Seyss-Inquart, who was later tried at Nuremberg and executed. Under his cruel and ruthless rule less than 25 per cent of Dutch Jews survived the Shoah.

It struck me that Lex doesn’t name the Shoah explicitly, not with any word. The Hebrew word Shoah means ‘calamity’, which in its neutrality is a more acceptable word than Holocaust, with its ancient biblical roots in a ‘complete burnt offering’ on an altar. Maybe the best word for the unimaginable crime is ‘Churban’, used by Tony Bayfield as the title of his textbook for Holocaust education. It means ‘Destruction’, and is most often used in connection with the two destructions of Jerusalem and its Temple in 587 BCE and 70 CE.

Growing up under the cloud of this twentieth-century ‘Churban’ has coloured my outlook on life. I am of course not alone in this. Trying to overcome my fear of it, trying to understand it, come to terms with it, think beyond it, is a constant burden. I therefore had mixed feelings when Jozef van der Voort suggested we translate Lex’s memoir together. But I am grateful to him for choosing it and glad to have accepted the challenge. It is a gripping and vivid account of events we should know about and never forget. The boy who emerges from the pages is talking to us all and should become a friend to children of his age, someone they can identify with, as much as they can with Anne Frank.

Another issue which is still hotly debated, and about which Lex tells us in all his innocence of that time, is the involvement of the Joodsche Raad or ‘Jewish Council’, the body set up by the Nazis as a go-between to reassure Jewish citizens, alleviate their stress and panic, and so aid the smooth organisation of the persecution. When Lex is awaiting deportation with his mother and elder brother Max, and many others, in the Hollandsche Schouwburg, it is likely the Joodsche Raad that secures permission for the smaller children to be escorted across the road to the Jewish Orphanage where there are mattresses to sleep on. And, astonishingly in the circumstances, they are also taken for a walk to the home of someone probably linked to the ‘Raad’, where they are given hot chocolate. This outing then provides Lex with the opportunity for his first heart-stopping escape.

After his astonishing survival amid the terrible dangers of Amsterdam’s streets, Lex is rescued by members of the Dutch resistance and taken to a small agricultural community, Roelofarendsveen, where he spends the rest of the war on a farm working extremely hard and living as a member of the farmer’s family. The manner in which the whole village knows and accepts the many Jews hiding amongst them provides a thought-provoking contrast to Lex’s experiences in Amsterdam, and opens the reader’s eyes to the complicated picture of the infamous German occupation of the Netherlands.

Finally, the memoir is also a ‘coming of age’ story. Already while working on the farm in Roelofarendsveen, when the farmer is incapacitated by illness for some months, Lex, aged just 16, has to take over, work twice as hard and make business decisions. And when the war ends, he must cope with the terrible fact that not one member of his immediate or wider family has survived the death camps. He returns to the chaos of post-war Amsterdam, where he tries to rebuild his life with scant help from the authorities. After battling with illness (several bouts of tuberculosis), he recovers his health, sets up a successful business and starts a family. The last chapter in the book describes Lex’s emotional visit to a concentration camp and is a well-crafted coda to the story.

Lex Lesgever died on 31 December 2019 at the age of 90. Not until he retired did he write down his experiences during the Second World War. After the memoir was published in the Netherlands he gave interviews on radio and talked in schools about his life. Shortly before his death Lex was filmed at home giving testimony for the new National Holocaust Museum in Amsterdam which was opened in March 2024. Holocaust education was close to his heart. I admire Lex’s dedication to teaching the devastating consequences of a regime’s complete loss of moral compass and share his hope that we will ‘never forget’.

Babette LichtensteinFebruary 2023

Foreword

Although I was born in Amsterdam, I have lived near Leiden for about forty years now. At least three times a week I pass Roelofarendsveen, where I spent a few years during the war. A very special place for me, with very special people.

It’s strange really that a village which sheltered such a huge number of fugitives during the war, and thereby helped so many people, has never been given a statue. Few people remember what took place there during the war years, though sometimes I visit Roelofarendsveen to go fishing, and when I happen to bump into an old acquaintance, we may talk about it. Once I called the secretary of the local authority in Roelofarendsveen in search of information, but the good man knew nothing and there was no archive of those days either.

Yet the village and its inhabitants still have a place in my heart of hearts. As far as I’m concerned, many of the people there were made by God Himself. I met them, I got to know them, and I came to love them. I survived the war in part because of them. They warmly welcomed me into their midst, kept me safe and watched over me. But sadly, not even they could do anything for the loss I suffered.

Lex Lesgever2009

1

There were about twenty centimetres of snow on the ground and an icy easterly wind was blowing. It was an old-fashioned Dutch winter’s day in January 1937 and we were on the way back from the funeral of my grandfather, Moos Gompers. It was my first time at a funeral. I was 8 years old. Grandpa Moos was my mother’s father. I can still picture him clearly – a real grandpa. A stately, grey-haired old gentleman with aristocratic looks. I know that he made a living in many different ways, but my memory only goes back to his last business, a confectionery wholesaler on Zandstraat in Amsterdam.

Everyone was closely involved in the funeral, as is the Jewish tradition. The coffin was carried to the grave by the immediate family, and then the prayers were recited. Four family members held the ropes and lowered the coffin into the grave. Each of the men in attendance tipped three shovelfuls of sand on top, with close relatives going first. Then it was the turn of friends, followed by the rest of the men, until the grave was full.

I can still hear the dull sound of the sand falling on the wooden coffin; it was a very memorable experience. The occasion was also a very serious one for me, as one’s first time at such an event is of course particularly interesting.

The second funeral I attended was that of my little cousin Max. He was the son of my mother’s brother Bernhard and he was 6 years old when he died. A few months earlier he had survived the bombing of Rotterdam with his parents and sister. The only thing I knew of his illness was that he had a very swollen tummy. The rest of his body was frail and almost translucent. It wasn’t clear then what his illness was, but knowing what we know now, he must have had leukaemia. He died in the winter of 1940. I can vividly recall that funeral too; just about the whole school was there, although he’d only attended for a very short time.

It wasn’t until later that I realised I had a relatively large family; I had seventeen uncles and aunts who all had children of their own too. At home there were five of us: my father, my mother, my two elder brothers Wolf and Max, and myself of course. There were three years between each of us boys.

Lex’s mother and father. (Courtesy of Fiety Lesgever)

I was only able to bury two members of that large family. The rest were all murdered in Nazi camps.

My eldest brother was named after Grandpa Wolf, my father’s father, and wasn’t unlike him in character either. Grandpa Wolf never said much – or rather, he said very little – but what he did say was often to the point. On the way home from school we would walk past grandpa’s house and we’d always pop in, because we always felt peckish just after school. Grandpa knew that, and so he always had something tasty for us. Only in hindsight do I realise that he never really gave us sweets; he usually gave us a slice of ginger cake spread so thick with butter that you could leave neat little toothmarks in it. ‘That’ll oil your gut,’ grandpa would say. Then he’d send us home and we’d have to hurry because otherwise mother would get worried. He would plant a kiss on your cheek a bit too hard – I think on purpose – so that the little moustache adorning his upper lip would sting your skin and you’d yell with pain and have to squirm free. If you made enough fuss you’d get a cent by way of consolation.

Grandpa and Grandma Gompers, my mother’s parents, lived on Koningsstraat above Veldman’s the butcher. If I close my eyes I can still smell the aroma of their kitchen. It was a small kitchen with a window over the counter, which had two Haller kerosene stoves on it. It was a custom in our family that on Friday night one or two grandchildren would have dinner with Grandpa and Grandma Gompers, and I always went over with my brother Max.

After Grandpa Moos died, grandma came to live with us. Grandma had diabetes and was nearly blind. We lived in a fairly big house on Jodenbreestraat. She had grey hair and was a quiet, sweet woman. When you sat with her she would always put her hand on your head without saying anything. Apart from in the evening, that is, when I had to go to bed. I would stand next to her chair in my pyjamas and she’d put her hand on my head, right where my kippah would have been, and say: ‘Now nachtlajene, pee and off to bed.’

* * *

I can talk for hours about my grandparents; for the short time that I knew them they were very important to me. I can still hear grandma telling us to say our prayers, wash, brush our teeth and put on our pyjamas. It’s awful that so many Jewish people my age have no idea what it is to have grandparents as they all perished in the war; they’re missing out on so much without really being aware of it.

All in all I am lucky that I do remember my grandmas and grandpas and all my uncles, aunts and cousins, and when I blow the shofar on Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement, I stand alone on the bimah and look at the Torah scrolls in the Aron Hakodesh – the Holy Ark – and they are in my thoughts, every last one of them.

* * *

After we got back from grandpa’s funeral and everyone was having coffee, Aunt Cis decided she’d come over to ours for dinner. Aunt Cis was one of my father’s sisters and the only one in our family, on father’s as well as on mother’s side, who wasn’t married. She was what we now call emancipated, and for the time she was a little bit special. Aunt Cis had a boyfriend abroad whom we called Uncle Kees. We children liked going to see her, but whenever he was there we weren’t welcome.

Lex, about 3 years old, with a toy car. (Courtesy of Fiety Lesgever)

Aunt Cis coming with us meant that as soon as we got home a civil war would break out between brother and sister. They adored each other as long as they didn’t discuss politics because then they’d instantly become virtual enemies. The living room transformed into a kind of parliament with two factions: a socialist party led by my father and a liberal party chaired by my aunt. The discussions would already start at the door and the debate would gradually grow more heated; the volume crept up, but oddly enough the boiling point was always reached during the soup course. Fists would often bang the table so hard that our spoons would jingle on our plates and spatters of soup would land all over the cloth.

All I can recall from these discussions are the names that kept coming up, often including that of Adolf Hitler. At our long table in the dining room we predicted the Second World War. In fact, I’d have to say my family already fought it there, though in their own way, not in the way of Hitler and Mein Kampf. At this point my mother would throw herself into the fray. She had spent a year living in Hamburg with her parents as a young girl, but one year had been enough because my grandfather soon saw what was coming. In all those political arguments it was mostly my mother who turned out to be right. Hitler really did come. And he kept his word and did to us what he’d promised in Mein Kampf.

We were not exactly an orthodox family, but the traditions were very much present. My brothers and I went to a state school, but on Wednesday afternoons and Sunday mornings we had to go to the Jewish school. I’m not sure if that was to teach us to feel Jewish or to keep us safely off the streets. They absolutely succeeded in teaching us to feel Jewish, but that was inevitable given that we lived on Jodenbreestraat, the heart of Jewish Amsterdam. Jewish New Year was an obvious example of that. Every Rosh Hashanah I remember the street scenes from back then. Those were wonderful days. The most beautiful cards, covered in glitter, would be pegged on washing lines above the stalls on the street right outside our door, and everyone would wish each other ‘Shana Tova’ (‘Happy New Year’).

Jodenbreestraat, Lex’s parental home. (Courtesy of Fiety Lesgever)

And all the women shelling nuts in the street. It cost them a lot of effort to strip off the thick green skin and they were left with terribly dirty black hands that they could hardly get clean again.

And then Pesach – Passover – the festival to relive the exodus from Egypt and the escape from slavery. I thought that was one of the most thrilling and beautiful stories from the Old Testament. I recall that on Seder night, which heralded the start of the week of celebration, my grandfather would always make a mistake somewhere in the story. He did it on purpose to see who would correct him; he loved that. The day before Pesach we always went with father to Jonas Daniël Meijerplein – a square named after the first Jewish lawyer in the Netherlands – where people would be standing around empty oil drums in which they lit fires to burn people’s chometz for five cents, because during Pesach not a crumb of bread must be left in the house. Then we’d eat nothing but matzos with brown sugar for a whole week.

Burning of the chometz. (Jewish Museum, Amsterdam)

I loved it on Jonas Daniël Meijerplein – hearing who could yell, ‘Chomeeeeetz, chometz, who’s still got some chometz?’ the loudest and then throwing the scrap of bread you’d brought from home into the fire.

In those days you celebrated part of the festival on the streets – that’s how it was. It wasn’t just the orthodox Jews who loved those days, but the liberal too. Matzos, horseradish and matzo balls – nothing special really, but the festive spirit was everywhere. Of course, there was something of the ghetto about it, but that was part of the neighbourhood – the resemblance and the pleasant companionship that the people found in each other. Nobody worked during Pesach; everyone was free and out on the streets. That meant a lot of people bumped into each other and wished each other ‘Chag Sameach’ (‘Happy Passover’).

We still celebrate Pesach and Rosh Hashanah, but that neighbourhood is gone. Now we just send each other cards or emails, or take out an advert. The rest is only a memory.

* * *

One thing I remember very clearly about home is the way we were brought up, which was clearly focused on our independence. On Friday afternoons, for example, they would give me a certain amount of money and then I’d have to do all the shopping for Shabbat. No list or anything. If I asked my mother what to get, she would answer, ‘You know what you always eat on Friday night, so just make sure we have it in the house.’ That meant I had to get fruit from Mr Gokkes and gherkins from Sarah Scheefsnoet on the Vissteeg, and then go to another shop to buy Valencia peanuts. And I definitely couldn’t get any other peanuts; only Valencia peanuts would do.

* * *

Something else I also recall well is how both my brothers were financially independent from my parents at a young age. When my brother Wolf left school he was offered an apprenticeship as a furrier at Maison Modern on Kalverstraat. He got it through our downstairs neighbour; Mr Leeuwin, the owner of the fur company, was his brother-in-law. My brother Max was a born dealer, so he went to work at a wholesale textile business on Sint Antoniesbreestraat. Max always knew how to find lucrative things to trade outside his work. You noticed it particularly on Sinterklaas, or St Nicholas Day, on 5 December – a traditional Dutch family celebration. At our house, Sinterklaas was a real occasion. I’ll never forget the time Wolf took me to Van Emden, a well-known toyshop on Kalverstraat, and bought me an electric train. I was standing right next to him, but I didn’t suspect a thing. And then on Sinterklaas he gave it to me and I still had no idea that it was the exact same train I’d more or less picked myself! That was the best part of it for Wolf.

Max, with trumpet. (Courtesy of Fiety Lesgever)

All those happy memories of home are probably what gave me the courage and tenacity to get through difficult times for the rest of my life.

During my boyhood, my only experience of the serious side of life was on schooldays: Monday to Friday from nine to twelve o’clock and two until four. Other than that I remember it as a carefree time – but that soon ended after the war broke out. On the streets the situation wasn’t so bad, but at home it was all too clear that anxiety had the upper hand. War was something I think every boy dreamed of in those days. There was something magical and thrilling about it, but you didn’t really understand it. At school you learned about the Eighty Years’ War; the people had survived that, so surely this wouldn’t be so bad either. My father was an eternal optimist, but sadly not a realist. All the roaring and ranting in German on the radio was very ominous and the whole family would listen to it intently. I didn’t understand a word myself, but it did make me afraid. You could tell how nervous everyone was after these broadcasts. Words like ‘Hitler’, ‘Mein Kampf’ and ‘concentration camps’ became commonplace frighteningly quickly.

The arguments between my parents grew fiercer. My mother, who knew what she was talking about, didn’t agree with my father at all – that was quite obvious. My mother took Hitler’s speeches very seriously while my father would laugh about them and then list all the marvellous technologies which Britain, America and let’s not forget Holland could and would use against the German army. Surely it was impossible for a country like Germany to fight on so many fronts at the same time, let alone win. No, it would never come to that. It was just like my father to say such things. He didn’t believe there would be a war between Holland and Germany; it was unthinkable. He had no respect at all for the prime minister at the time, who told the people they could sleep soundly in their beds, but as far as war was concerned he agreed with the prime minister that there wouldn’t be a long one – end of discussion.

Wolf was of a different opinion, but he never said so. He had a cupboard in his room which was always locked. That was nothing new because he kept his private things in there. Wolf came home at quarter past six every evening and he would walk past the living room straight to his bedroom. In about December 1940 we began to notice that he was coming home every evening with a large bag, passing through with a ‘Good evening’, and then walking straight to his room, only to re-emerge about fifteen minutes later. My parents started to wonder and after a while they asked Wolf to explain himself. As usual he wasn’t very talkative and refused to say anything. My parents assumed that he was bringing home spare skins.

* * *

People in the fur trade worked with animal hides. Each type of coat needed a certain number of hides and the boss knew exactly how many. But a clever furrier sometimes managed to deliver a beautiful coat with a half or even a whole hide left over. That leftover hide was called a spare skin. You were really supposed to give it back to your boss, but it was often regarded as a well-earned perk.

* * *

Wolf’s behaviour increasingly aroused our suspicions, and since this wasn’t how we were brought up, the bomb eventually had to explode. At first he still refused to say anything and he definitely wouldn’t let anyone look in his cupboard. One evening father and son had a real row for the first time ever. And I mean real.

Wolf was 18 and, as I said earlier, he was very independent. After a heated argument my mother got permission to go to his room and the cupboard in question was opened. I still remember the long silence that followed. Then she said, ‘Your father needs to see this.’

The whole cupboard was packed with food: coffee, tea, sugar, flour, rice and packs of tobacco and cigars. My father was the only one of us who smoked and my brother had even thought of that. There was great bewilderment. Even Max was speechless – and believe me, it took a lot to shut him up. Once this first step had been accepted, the real stockpiling fever started. Sometimes I was allowed to come along on hoarding trips, and occasionally my brothers would start arguing in de Gruyter’s over who should be served first. That had me in stitches, at a time when there wasn’t much to laugh about, but for the shop girl who had to intervene it was horrible. In the end, nobody ever reaped the benefits of our splendid supplies.

2

I turned 11 on 1 May 1940.