Small Gestures, or When Silence Means Support

Social reactivity in the Netherlands was an omnipresent phenomenon. With remarkable consistency, the vast majority of the 500 Jewish testimonies available to us portray non-Jews as ‘very good people’, as Erna Bindelglas, who turned fifteen in 1945, put it. Before she went into hiding in Amsterdam in early 1943, paid for by her Polish-born father, Bindelglas found herself in a hospital during a raid. The practising physician, Dr Peters, a staunch anti-Nazi, counted on the Nazi fear of diseases to protect his patient. The doctor ‘put a sign on our door: scarlet fever’, thus successfully warding off the Gestapo agents.Footnote ²⁷ In the same vein, the 1954 testimony of the German Jewish immigrant Dr Auerbach, who was fifty-three years old in 1940, is replete with vital gestures of support from non-Jewish Dutchmen. The writer Bepp Otten and the Jewish social democrat Lena Lopes Dias – the first secretary of the Women's Union of the Socialist Party (Partij van de Arbeid) – arranged for four hiding places for Dr Auerbach and his wife around Hilversum in North Holland. A pious carpenter, who had heard about the danger to the couple, then built a closet hideout that allowed the Auerbachs to evade a house raid. Another time, seized by a policeman on the street, Auerbach successfully appealed to his being ‘a good Dutchman’ (ein guter Holländer). Yet the most crucial act of solidarity saved Auerbach in the summer of 1944 after several infectious diseases ailed him. In great pain, he resolved to go to a hospital where the physician on duty, Dr Schepel, agreed to treat his interstitial cystitis. The chief nurse and the entire staff were complicit in this surgery.Footnote ²⁸

Many survivor accounts illustrate just how widespread this type of social reactivity was in Dutch communities. Its various forms included supportive interactions with both strangers and familiar faces. Take the story of Shaul S., who was born in Rotterdam in 1925 and later lived with his orthodox family in remote Middelburg in the southwestern part of the Netherlands. Until late 1941, little changed in his daily life despite the expansion of anti-Jewish legislation. ‘The Dutch would let me enter the movie theatres from the back door, as they knew me’. Under Nazi rule, it became increasingly difficult for Jews to obtain food. Shaul recalls that the local baker ‘would save me the best cakes in his shop, and tell me biblical stories about my nation, which was ironic, as we never talked about this at home’. He describes the forced relocation of several hundred Jews from Middelburg to Amsterdam in March 1942 as a spontaneous gesture of friendship and solemnity: ‘a large portion of the population gathered along the side of the road . . . As we passed, the men took off their hats in a farewell gesture and thus escorted us in silence to the train station’.Footnote ²⁹ Ultimately, Shaul was deported to Auschwitz and forced to clean up the Warsaw ghetto's rubble. One could argue that his deportation occurred in part not because of non-Jewish indifference in Middelburg, but rather because his father had repeatedly refused to go into hiding. As with van der Boom's findings in non-Jews’ diaries, what stands out in these testimonies is the wave of verbal support across the country. For instance, a Jewish woman named Ilse L. relates that after the mandatory Jewish star was introduced on 29 April 1942, many men took off their hats and often told her how ‘proud you should be to wear that star’.Footnote ³⁰ Ilse's experiences during the first two years of the occupation are consistent with the vast majority of Jews of all ages and immigration and socio-economic backgrounds.

Such widespread social reactivity accords with van der Boom's view of public condemnation of the Jewish persecution but goes against his image of Dutch Gentiles largely failing to help Jews because they did not know about the genocide. Instead, Jewish accounts highlight how small, voluntary actions increasingly followed these expressions of sympathy and that non-Jews’ initial acquiescence to German policies transformed into what Margrit R. calls ‘less open opposition’, with two notable peaks in 1940–41 and the last six months of the war. Her testimony is filled with examples of social reactivity, such as her description of a Dutch carpenter who cemented holy books into his walls for safekeeping – books that Margrit R.'s father, the former president of the Orthodox Party, Agudat Yisrael, cherished the most.Footnote ³¹ Meanwhile, in Tilburg, the twenty-two-year-old Frances L. safely gave birth to two infants in late 1942 under the care of a non-Jewish physician. A complicit mailman then took one of her newborns to a Gentile neighbour to hide.Footnote ³² Small acts of support, here in the form of temporary shelter, seem to have increased in frequency even more so in the autumn of 1944 when an Allied victory loomed large. In Zeist, a Jewish émigré from Hamburg named Edith G., then forty years old, arranged hiding places for her children in 1942. Although she did not have to wear the star because a Dutch policeman, in a most fortunate coincidence, lacked information about her parents, she decided to go into hiding herself in the autumn of 1944. In February 1945, Gestapo officers arrested a group before her very eyes; ‘they wanted bikes – so they lined up people. A Dutch guy told me to put a scarf over my head and run. I did so, and the first house took me in. I waited for two hours until it was over’.Footnote ³³

Half of all the accounts that I analysed mention such spontaneous, rather than organised, acts of providing shelter at a critical moment. In the case of Edith G., the unknown man judged that she looked Jewish due to her dark hair and, sensing her panic, decided to react; then, strangers let her wait out the raid in their home. Similar gestures were made by a Protestant minister who hid Jews in Weesp, a city in North Holland, and by a Catholic who sheltered his Jewish neighbours in southern Limburg for several hours.Footnote ³⁴ But temporary shelter often evolved into a more stable support system. During the summer of 1942 in Amsterdam-Zuid, after the Social Democratic neighbours of twenty-year-old Miep Lakmaker had witnessed the police take her mother away, they let her stay with them for ten days. This was not the first time that Miep's mother was threatened with deportation – she had once successfully softened other policemen by appealing to their sense of ‘Dutchness’. After hiding with farmers in Limburg, where she barely escaped being raped, Miep quickly made her way back to Amsterdam and remained with these neighbours between September 1942 and mid-February 1943.Footnote ³⁵

Social reactivity also took the form of both speaking up and deciding not to speak.Footnote ³⁶ Warning a Jewish acquaintance of an impending round-up through a nod on the street or preventing someone from entering a building where a raid was underway were common actions, especially in towns with fewer than 20,000 inhabitants.Footnote ³⁷ Many testimonies indicate the existence of what one could call ‘silent groups’: not silenced in the sense of a censored and muzzled population under foreign rule, but rather referring to different groups’ use of silence in addition to active rescue.Footnote ³⁸ For instance, in 1942, the parents of Marguerite M., a then twenty-two-year-old non-Jewish woman, were hiding fifteen Jews in their home in Haren. When Marguerite travelled by train with a hidden child, the little girl let slip that she was Jewish. Promising not to report them, all passengers kept quiet.Footnote ³⁹ In October 1944, Keetje Frank, a sixty-eight-year-old woman who hid in no fewer than eight places during the war, was evacuated from Ottersum in the wake of Allied advances and travelled with fellow villagers to Gendringen, near the German border. Nobody gave away her identity.Footnote ⁴⁰ These examples of silence, which are absent from official records, indicate that Dutch non-Jews performed widespread gestures of support or, at least, displayed benevolent indifference. Such findings also align with what Froukje Demant characterised as ‘sympathising’ but ‘passive’ (sympathiserend passief) Gentiles in the Twente region, near the German border. Although non-Jews perceived the persecution of the Jews as horrible but inevitable, Demant writes, Jewish accounts demonstrate that even the smallest acts of solidarity went a long way, often unbeknown to these immediate helpers.Footnote ⁴¹

Therefore, what historians have uncovered as non-Jews’ overall accommodation (aanpassing) with the occupiers, important as it was, does not accord with these small acts of kindness and their long-lasting implications.Footnote ⁴² Providing one's papers to strangers was another significant act of social reactivity. Fleeing Amsterdam on 28 July 1942, the thirty-year-old professional dancer Karel Poons took shelter with a non-Jewish friend in Huizen until his liberation in May 1945. Once, in a shop, a stranger offered Poons ‘good papers’. After Poons's friend told him that this man, a German communist émigré, was himself hiding up to thirty Jews, Poons readily accepted his offer. In Amersfoort, eighteen miles from Huizen, a nobleman agreed to lend Yehuda Marshand his name after May 1940, which proved crucial to Marshand's survival in the first three years.Footnote ⁴³ Winnie S., a Protestant woman born in 1925, handed her papers over to an unknown Jewish girl in the western Netherlands, then declared them lost. Later on, her job in a city hall helped her to produce blank IDs, which her fiancé passed to the underground.Footnote ⁴⁴ As this young woman's story illustrates, gestures of immediate help towards Jews often evolved into full-fledged socialisation with underground networks. Still, they appear to be only the tip of an iceberg that proves difficult to measure quantitatively.

Fundamentally, what stands out in Jewish accounts is a different kind of ‘knowledge’: not knowledge about the ongoing genocide itself, as van der Boom described, but non-Jews’ awareness of who was involved in efforts to aid Dutch Jews. These influential instances of social reactivity suggest a much broader foundation of civilian acts of non-compliance and tacit obstruction – a foundation that was, indeed, as all-encompassing as other responses to Nazi rule. Over the last two decades, scholars have expanded our understanding of behaviours under Nazi rule, both pro-German (‘collaboration’) and anti-German (‘resistance’ or ‘underground’). In this vein, recent studies on collaboration have highlighted the dynamic relationship between local collaborators and the Nazi authorities and considered ‘collaborators’ independent actors with their own interests.Footnote ⁴⁵ The broad range of situational behaviours applies well to the Netherlands and social reactivity. Here, historians could use the concept to revise the traditional view of the population's wait-and-see attitudes after the German invasion in May 1940. The strike on 25–7 February 1941 is usually presented as the first and only public protest against anti-Jewish raids in Amsterdam after a calm accommodation period. Some testimonies, indeed, reflect on those workers who were devoted to ‘their Jewish proletariat counterparts’.Footnote ⁴⁶ But this person-to-person obstruction of Nazi policies, by any means possible, was frequent before the strike and only grew after it, as Nazification efforts turned coercive.Footnote ⁴⁷ Across Europe, the Nazi occupation exacerbated existing social, religious and political divisions.Footnote ⁴⁸ Dutch Jewish accounts indicate that in the Netherlands, a steady process of polarisation unfolded, through which the Gentile population split into those who supported their Jewish compatriots and those who participated in the occupation system in some way – the latter partly influenced by subtle Nazi propaganda. As Alfred B. puts it, ‘the attitudes of the citizens went beyond apathy, as with those who became Jew hunters’.Footnote ⁴⁹ Despite or precisely because of the numerous denunciations and instances of betrayal, there is much evidence that myriad small gestures existed before 1943 and increased at the same rate as and perhaps faster than those in favour of either the ongoing persecution or organised resistance after the summer of 1943.

Furthermore, these Jewish testimonies challenge the traditional top-down picture of persecution by revealing the existence of grassroots support. Social reactivity was one such process, involving a wide range of Dutch men and women from working-class families in Amsterdam, greengrocers, intellectuals and poor farmers in Friesland to a baron in Veghel, North Brabant. Shared enmity against the Nazis helped Dutch Gentiles to recognise and interact with each other.Footnote ⁵⁰ For the political and socio-economic elites, the BBC broadcast by Queen Wilhelmina (1890–1962), who asked Dutch non-Jews to help their persecuted neighbours, appears to have been influential. In North Brabant's high society, anti-German, rather than pro-Jewish, sentiments fuelled social reactivity, as ‘the baron and baroness were sheltered from life. They didn't know what Jewish people were’.Footnote ⁵¹ Gestures of help also depended on the financial resources that Dutch non-Jews could draw upon and on emotional responses to wartime hardships. While supplying Dr Auerbach and his wife with groceries, their non-Jewish helpers regularly suffered from panic attacks.Footnote ⁵² Concerning Amsterdam, Jewish testimonies align with Peter Tammes's findings that lower-skilled and unskilled workers had better survival chances because their non-Jewish peers tended to support them.Footnote ⁵³ Thus, financially struggling individuals and groups, often with an immigrant background, could frequently count on perceived class solidarity.

However, despite or precisely because of all these differences among Jewish survivors, such as the low level of integration of Jewish immigrants, social reactivity is all the more remarkable. Each testimony has to be located in a specific culture of memory, and over the last twenty years, scholars have highlighted the links between individual and communal memories, as well as their communicative use.Footnote ⁵⁴ In our case, the large overlap between prewar middle-class Jews and the social reactivity of middle-class non-Jews is noticeable: owing to similar and thus relatable social expectations, middle-class Gentiles are particularly well represented in Dutch-born Jews’ accounts, including those of heads of the local post offices, mayors, Protestant ministers, Catholic teachers, lawyers, small business owners, physicians and well-to-do artists.

Nevertheless, the testimonies reveal that, at one point or another, citizens from different socio-economic backgrounds embraced social reactivity towards both Dutch-born and immigrated Jews. Here lies one significant difference between rescue and social reactivity: the former involved, at one point or another, financial resources, either from non-Jewish rescuers or from the persecuted paying for their often short-lived protection; the latter could – but crucially did not have to – involve money. This widespread, ever-increasing phenomenon went beyond paid rescue, resistance networks and pre-war connections.

Grassroots Contexts and Shifting Roles: Reassessing Dutch Non-Jews in the Occupied Netherlands

In the study of Nazi-occupied populations, one runs the risk of either romanticising social relations between Jews and non-Jews or ascribing too coherent a cluster of motives for non-Jews’ participation in the persecution. For the Netherlands, this polarisation of apologetic and accusatory views was particularly stark until the late 2000s. This is also because various kinds of sources shed a differential light on Dutch society. On the one hand, basing his study on postwar criminal files, the survivor Pinchas Bar-Efrat argues that it was less ideological enthusiasm than greed and financial gain that prompted betrayal. He asserts that ‘latent’ or ‘veiled’ antisemitism was ubiquitous, but its geographical extension remains open.Footnote ⁵⁵ On the other hand, studies on rescue, often on the regional level, have tended to focus on religious divisions. In this vein, Herman van Rens demonstrates that in the predominantly Catholic, southernmost province of Limburg, often small, closed-off Protestant communities rescued Jews. The latter often survived, van Rens concludes, because Protestant elites took decisive actions locally.Footnote ⁵⁶ As this section will argue, Jewish testimonies connect both ends of this spectrum of attitudes, resulting in an intimate portrait of Dutch society on the local level. Social reactivity more accurately represents the interreligious and intercommunal dynamics than the traditional dichotomy of betrayal and rescue.

To consider Jewish perspectives is to move to the local level and grassroots interactions, an ongoing shift in Dutch historiography.Footnote ⁵⁷ Such a shift shows that intimacy with members of one's community, Jews and non-Jews alike, played a crucial role. Take the example of Betsy H., born in the northeastern town of Hoogeveen in 1917. In the autumn of 1942, while hiding with her niece in Rijnsburg, located roughly halfway between The Hague and Amsterdam, she witnessed ‘the daily heroism of ordinary people’. In particular, she praises thirty-seven-year-old Johannes Post, who came to hide her niece, ‘said how to do it, and everyone listened. A simple farmer made so much sense’. Betsy H. would later join a resistance group and carry messages under a false name before her arrest and subsequent deportation to the camp of Ravensbrück and a satellite camp of Dachau in July 1944 – not as a Jewish woman, but as a Gentile resistant.Footnote ⁵⁸

To be sure, Johannes Post, to whom Betsy H. refers as a ‘simple farmer’, was one of the two leaders of the Nieuwlande rescue and resistance organisation alongside Arnold Douwes, an itinerant gardener. Bob Moore and Johannes Houwink ten Cate have recently edited Douwes's diary kept in Nieuwlande, a close-knit rural community of 700 residents involved in hiding hundreds of Jews, resistance fighters and German deserters. It shares with Le Chambon-sur-Lignon in France the distinction of being one of only two locations that Yad Vashem has honoured for rescuing Jews.Footnote ⁵⁹ Betsy H.'s remark thus calls for closer attention to non-Jews’ motives. Of course, survivors often did not know or recognise the motivations or background of their helpers. But while networks, both formal and informal, were essential, two arguments make a case for social reactivity as a more appropriate concept. First, even in Nieuwlande, many individual Gentiles did not know (or often did not want to know) what activities other farms were engaged in. The nature of such rescue networks was at best diffuse, often top-down, and even the most active and visible rescuers were involved in other social networks. Second and relatedly, involvement in rescue networks did not prevent other acts of social reactivity. For instance, local dynamics of friendship and enmity could also play into the Jews’ favour. Hiding on a farm some thirty miles west of Amsterdam in 1942, Erna Bindelglas states that she believed all villagers ‘knew my Jewish identity’. She relates the following incident:

Here, the hatred of the Dutch collaborators contrasts with the degree of communal cohesion. Mr Corte, the former owner of a chemistry plant who had fled Cologne in 1937, reflects the feelings of many survivors: ‘Dutch people around us in hiding knew who we were, but never said anything’.Footnote ⁶¹ Indeed, providing for large numbers of people, as in the most famous case of Anne Frank and her family hiding with eight other people, ‘could raise suspicions because so many groceries had to be purchased’ – but, as survivors recall, such suspicions were not necessarily passed on to the Nazis.Footnote ⁶² To blend in, probably few went as far as the farmer Lievestroh did who ostentatiously placed a framed photograph of Hitler on his mantelpiece. While several Jews, whom he had supported before, were in hiding on his farm in Winterswijk, two of his daughters ‘were going out with German soldiers for a cover-up . . . The youngest daughter was about twelve years old. She had a girlfriend whose father was a Gestapo agent, a Dutchman. The girl was smart enough not to talk about it’.Footnote ⁶³

These examples challenge the traditional thesis of a Dutch society acquiescent to the Nazi occupiers, inspired by centuries-long tolerance among subcultures of Catholics, Protestants, socialists and liberals.Footnote ⁶⁴ First, Lievestroh's example of civil disobedience on the local level invites further research into the relationship between obstruction and religion. He considered himself a devout Protestant and an honest citizen, and therefore took a considerable risk to save several Jewish lives. To a certain degree, religious affiliation and the Christian churches can help account for such social reactivity, at least for what Jews interpreted as non-Jews’ motivations. Recent research has demonstrated that antisemitism tended to be weaker in Catholic strongholds, themselves a minority in the predominantly Protestant country; in the same vein, as we have seen, Protestant minorities in the province of Limburg banded together to help Jews.Footnote ⁶⁵ But such a spatial distribution of support based on religious minorities can only go so far in explaining social reactivity. To consider Dutch society beyond a Jewish/Christian binary, we must also include non-religious and atheist groups. Community leaders, both religious and secular, drove local responses and displayed social reactivity towards Jews on a local scale. Their role appears to have been to convince and even force some in the community to support Jews – and this willingness could well erode over time.Footnote ⁶⁶ Individual acts were also often motivated, and thus interpreted by Jews, by wider humanitarian ideals, such as the noaberplicht (‘neighbour duty’), a sense of obligation towards neighbours which was particularly strong in the rural northeast.

But the question remains: how can one explain how many otherwise law-abiding citizens came to be inclined, even most fleetingly, in helping the persecuted outside rescue networks? Contrary to expectations, recent research demonstrates that in those places where electoral support for the National Socialist Movement (NSB) was high, deportations were low.Footnote ⁶⁷ Apart from religious and secular traditions, Jewish accounts seem to indicate that one additional factor for social reactivity might be the fact that, after 1941, fervent supporters of Nazism evolved in stark contrast to the socially reactive communities: communities that bonded over anti-German sentiments, which also meant support towards Jews and escalating refusal over forced labour.

This polarisation within Dutch society played an influential role. Jewish accounts illustrate that the immediate environment influenced social reactivity, as we have seen with noaberplicht: the smaller the locality, the higher the likelihood of support appears to have been. For instance, Abraham Polak, born in Harlem in 1921, arrived in Beets, a village located twenty-two miles northwest of Amsterdam, in September 1944. At first, he lived with a family in an old watermill; then he obtained a labour exemption from Beets's municipality. He worked at the local grocery store, later joined the Dutch resistance and interpreted for shot-down English pilots, who gave him a revolver. Though he carried false papers, Polak's Jewishness was an open secret in this locality of 200 residents.Footnote ⁶⁸ In another case, after escaping from a train headed to the transit camp of Westerbork in 1943, the thirteen-year-old Leonard Vis went into hiding in Huizen thanks to his sister's contacts with the underground. There, Vis met his grandparents, aunts and uncles in this ‘little fishing village, . . . where everybody knows each other’.Footnote ⁶⁹ Also reporting from Huizen, the dancer Karel Poons recounts how Isaac, a Jewish man married to a Protestant woman, was arrested. Then ‘he did something that no proper Dutch Bürger (citizen) would ever do – lying to get away with it. When he was asked if he had four Jewish grandparents, he lied’. Nobody denounced him, and no investigation ever ensued.Footnote ⁷⁰

But betrayal was never far away despite or even precisely because of these intimate dynamics. A few months later after having eluded arrest, Isaac began to hide twenty-eight people before dismissing his non-Jewish girlfriend. His disappointed lover ran to the Dutch police, hoping for personal revenge and perhaps 7.50 guilders of bounty (approximately £56.40 or US$70 today) for every captured Jew.Footnote ⁷¹ While a friendly policeman warned some who visited the hideout, including Leonard Vis, most of the twenty-eight Jews were deported to Westerbork.Footnote ⁷² Further northwest, in Amsterdam, Karel Poons's brother-in-law handed all his money to a Protestant minister, only to be chased away the next day and transported to Auschwitz a few months later. Most infamously, Anne Frank and her family were betrayed on 4 August 1944.Footnote ⁷³ The extent of such instances of betrayal is challenging to research, as most victims perished in camps in Nazi-occupied Poland. Additionally, post-war files capture only those officially tried for collaboration and war crimes in the Netherlands.Footnote ⁷⁴ Having emigrated from an assimilated Viennese family, the twenty-two-year-old Frances, her husband and the two babies she delivered in hiding found themselves in Tilburg. Next door lived a man who told everybody who wanted to hear it that he could ‘smell Jews’, but he was on friendly terms with Frances's family. ‘This neighbour was responsible for thirteen Jews being picked up by the Gestapo – he was never prosecuted for it afterwards’.Footnote ⁷⁵

National Socialist and antisemitic sentiments did certainly influence some betrayers, and the degree of antisemitism has repeatedly occupied an important place in Dutch historiography. His critics have accused van der Boom of ignoring it altogether.Footnote ⁷⁶ But such transgressions do not dominate Jewish testimonies, even those given by people who were ultimately deported. The case of Huizen rather indicates that motives, including greed, were rooted in interpersonal and communal relations.Footnote ⁷⁷ Selma E., later known as one of only nineteen Dutch survivors from the death camp Sobibor, went into hiding in late 1941, the only one to do so within her extended Orthodox family. Her English teacher took her to the first of three hiding places before she was arrested for a poorly fabricated passport in January 1943. Meanwhile, her three brothers contacted a non-Jewish man with whom Selma had fallen in love, but ‘he took their money and then did nothing for them’.Footnote ⁷⁸ Here, greed and emotional bonds converge, as is the case in the twenty testimonies that recount instances of betrayal in intimate settings and subsequent rescue as a profit-oriented enterprise, sometimes within one household.Footnote ⁷⁹ The accounts show that Jewish women tended to switch hideouts more often, growing to sense imminent danger, particularly extortion and sexual violence.Footnote ⁸⁰

But for each instance of betrayal in personal accounts, several cases of social reactivity appear, though it is unlikely that most Dutch Gentiles went as far as the twenty-one-year-old Protestant Marion P. In 1941, she talked the SS out of taking several Jewish children. Soon after, she spent six months in jail for distributing bulletins of BBC broadcasts. Once freed, she took in several Jews in need and, when a pro-Nazi Dutch policeman threatened to expose her, she killed him on the spot.Footnote ⁸¹ More common is the experience of Gigi Kray, a divorced, well-to-do Jewish woman in her early forties. After placing her daughter Brigitte with a host family in Alkmaar, she went into hiding with a working-class family in Hilversum in May 1943. Soon, she realised that the family had struck a deal with local Gestapo officers to rob her. Fleeing the doomed house, she found shelter with a friendly widow and relied on Mr Neefs, a jeweller, who saved her valuables.Footnote ⁸² Although the underground provided Jews with new addresses, it could not prevent extortion and physical violence in hiding places.Footnote ⁸³ Here, both small and more significant small gestures of help became crucial in Jews’ survival.

A careful analysis of Jewish testimonies also provides a more sophisticated picture of Dutch government officials. Since the 1970s, scholars have echoed Jacques Presser's stance that officials contributed more than most groups to the persecution, mainly the Dutch police, the railways and the civil service, which remained in place after May 1940. Indeed, these civil servants appear to have been more accommodating than those in other occupied countries.Footnote ⁸⁴ However, we still lack a comprehensive picture of those who, at times, hindered the deportation of their Jewish neighbours. A case in point concerns the figure of the reluctant police officer.Footnote ⁸⁵ Survivors recall that many of them practised a broad range of benevolent gestures, ranging from mailing a note thrown off a deportation train to looking the other way during a routine check of papers in Hilversum or helping Jews escape during a round-up in Amsterdam-Zuid.Footnote ⁸⁶ It was not uncommon for some officers to voluntarily inform Jews about imminent round-ups and house searches, hide belongings or even escort someone from one hideout to another.Footnote ⁸⁷ Jack P. speaks of a Dutch official who would visit him at his hiding place to listen to the forbidden BBC – ‘a man who was not really a Nazi, but rather an official who simply wanted to get rich’. In many cases, these acts of sharing information in critical moments were embedded in local battles over power. Ilse F. recalls that when the local ‘Dutch Nazi mayor . . . decided to find the Jews’, the Dutch police wanted to support them. ‘They would get there just ahead of the mayor and quickly say “hide”. This happened to me – I was able to hide in a camouflaged area of the attic’.Footnote ⁸⁸

Dutch policemen also appear in Jewish testimonies as forgers of false papers which ‘were very hard to duplicate’. These small acts of support by officials could lead to them joining informal resistance networks, as with those who did not hold office.Footnote ⁸⁹ Hetty D., born in 1930 to a non-religious Jewish family, is an excellent example. Upon her father's decision to flee from the Jewish quarter in May 1943, she was taken by a member of the underground to a Protestant family near the German border. She describes the following event that occurred during an Allied attack in early 1945: ‘we went to the neighbour's shelter at first, then ended up retreating to our own basement because the neighbours didn't want a Jewish girl with them. A border guard was our ally and never said a word about me; otherwise, I wouldn't be here today’.Footnote ⁹⁰ Her experiences encapsulate two interrelated phenomena at work in wartime Dutch society: the tacit silence within the surrounding community and the support of a policeman complicit in this knowledge.

A Nation of Two Tales? Reconciling The Old and Opening Up New Perspectives

Writing the history of the occupied Netherlands can be akin to moving around the spotlight – but events and groups that drop from sight do not disappear altogether. The Netherlands, which saw the highest death toll of West European Jews (104,000), both produced the highest number of Waffen SS volunteers and the second-highest number of documented rescuers of Jews. At least 100,000 Dutch people out of nine million saved Jews, as recorded in Yad Vashem's ‘Righteous Among the Nations’ database, and the hiding of Jews heavily depended on clandestine networks after 1943. This essay has attempted to move beyond top-down Nazi persecution policies and organised rescue by Dutch non-Jews. The polarisation of views on Dutch history has occurred in part because scholars traditionally divided ‘Dutch’ history from ‘Jewish’ history. While the gap has begun to narrow in the last ten years, not least thanks to Bart van der Boom, Jewish testimonies are still rarely analysed in field-defining works. Such personal accounts, which should be widely studied, not only inform us about Jews’ choices and perceptions, but also reveal the social fabrics in which these Jewish experiences were embedded. True, the Holocaust in Western Europe was a ‘deliberate project’, as Ido de Haan reaffirms. However, neither the ‘Dutch paradox’ nor van der Boom's focus on ‘knowledge’ tells us much about the intimacy of local dynamics and Jews’ perceptions of non-Jews before deportation. For that, we must look to survivor testimonies.

The notion of social reactivity explored in this essay suggests a different timeline for Dutch society. For although ‘negligence, social distance, career motives, and malice’ did exist, and about 50 per cent of the Jews in hiding were denounced,Footnote ⁹¹ many small acts of kindness and support occurred simultaneously throughout the war, with notable peaks in 1940/1 and after the autumn of 1944.Footnote ⁹² A nuanced discussion ought to do more than exonerate or provide comfort for large swaths of Dutch society, or for that matter, the European population. In 2021, seventy-six years after the war, a responsible public history, neither ‘black-and-white’ nor ‘grey’, has emerged that tackles how these local processes help explain variations of survival. By shifting the focus from the eventual outcome of the Holocaust – a prevailing theme in most studies – to wartime social processes, this essay has offered a first probe into these silent cracks in what historians usually present as a broad national unity held together, despite unrest and chaos, by the Dutch elites.Footnote ⁹³ To begin with, confusion did not prevent non-Jews from making both immediate and long-term decisions.Footnote ⁹⁴ Unlike the much-debated extent of public support for Vichy's antisemitic policies before the summer of 1942, the Netherlands seems to have witnessed a more linear process of non-Jews’ disobedience after May 1940.Footnote ⁹⁵ Jewish testimonies indicate that many non-Jews, at one moment or another, chose fleeting acts of solidarity over open protests and active resistance. As Gentiles understood that anti-Jewish measures were non-negotiable, these supportive interactions, as temporary or modest as many were, became part of broader civil disobedience. Under Nazi rule, all behaviour had the potential to be of political significance, as other studies on daily life during the war demonstrate.Footnote ⁹⁶ In this regard, traditional perspectives on organisational continuity and adaptable elites poorly accommodate these grassroots gestures that opened cracks in the fabric of society and built bridges between societal pillars (verzuiling), a common self-image of the Dutch society in the 1930s.

Jewish testimonies indeed allow us to find a middle ground between non-Jews’ incomplete understanding of the Holocaust, as van der Boom described, and the alleged passivity of most non-Jews. Obedience under Nazi rule not only meant other attitudes than indifference among different Dutch subcultures; overall compliance with the law could also accommodate small acts of kindness towards Jews by entire villages, neighbours and their extended families, strangers on the street and ambivalent officials. If we consider that for each of the estimated 28,500 Jews in hiding (onderduikers) at least ten non-Jews became sympathisers or silent accomplices,Footnote ⁹⁷ estimates drawn from these testimonies suggest that at least 285,000 Gentiles partook in a solidifying ‘conspiracy of silence’ – and this number does not account for all those Jews who did not seek refuge.Footnote ⁹⁸ Further comparative studies drawn from Jewish testimonies will be needed not only for the Netherlands, but also Western Europe and Central Europe. I am thinking in particular of Denmark, Belgium, Italy and France, both on the regional and local level, which will help us better understand (and perhaps) reevaluate the role that the responses of non-Jews played over time. They will prove crucial to affirm or refine the case for widespread social reactivity that I have made here. Above all, the notion of social reactivity in the Netherlands, an occupied country that fractured along the lines of approval or dismissal of anti-Jewish policies and the Nazi persecution, invites us to provide nuance to rigid notions such as ‘collaboration’ and ‘resistance’. In this sense, ‘complicity’ designates not only more or less active participation in the Nazi crimes, but also grassroots acts of support towards the persecuted Jews, no matter how effective or ineffective they eventually proved to be.