They don't hurt us is the latest public book about the persecution and deportation of Jews during the Second World War. The International Holocaust Remembrance (27/1) is always a good reason for a book on this subject. The authors wrote it because we are beginning to forget what excluding and threatening minorities can lead to.
One of the authors of They don't hurt us is Carry van Lakerveld, (art) historian and former deputy director of the Amsterdam Historical Museum. She was vice president of the International Auschwitz Committee (IAK) for many years. She wrote the book together with exhibition maker Victor Levie. My expectations were high for this book. These have not been fully realized.
In the introduction, Van Lakervelt and Levie indicate that this book is not based on new insights or similar research results. It is therefore not a scientific publication, but a public book. Research at the end of the last century showed that knowledge about the persecution of the Jews, especially among young people, is limited. The writers want to do something about this, so that we never forget. Certainly in the current zeitgeist where right-wing populism threatens to gain the upper hand again:they see the same threat and exclusion as 80 years ago and the youth need to know where this could lead. A good goal, but does that also make for a good book?
General history lesson
Quite surprisingly, a large part of the book is not about the Second World War (1940-1945). It begins with an extensive chapter (one-fifth of the entire book) on the Jewish diaspora. However, the authors explain only later that this means the dispersion of the Jews outside of present-day Israel, which I find special in a public book. This isn't the only time the book has been careless. This history of diffusion begins in the year 586 ("before Christ" the writer is briefly forgotten), when Jerusalem is taken:this leads to the fifty-year exile of the Jews to Babylonia. Then the second diaspora is discussed, after the Jewish Revolt against the Romans in 70 AD (this year will also follow later).
We are slowly moving towards Western Europe. Van Lakervelt and Levie talk about the multiple times that Jews are blamed for disasters or epidemics, such as the Black Death in the fourteenth century, and are murdered en masse for it. Next up is the Netherlands, where the first physical evidence of Jewish presence dates from 1295, with a Jewish street in Maastricht.
From the sixteenth century, Portuguese Jewish traders found their way to Amsterdam, followed by High German Jews in the seventeenth century. Their presence is tolerated and after the Batavian Revolution in 1795 they even get equal rights as 'ordinary' Dutch people. They will have to follow Dutch education, as a result of which the Portuguese and High German (Yiddish) languages are less and less spoken and are slowly disappearing. In the nineteenth century, the Jews largely assimilated and with the rise of Nazi Germany they see themselves as Jewish Dutch or Dutch Jews, according to Van Lakervelt and Levie.
Fooled around
Now we come to the part of the book about the Second World War (1940-1945). The authors explain how it is possible that such a large part of the Jewish population (75 percent) was murdered in the Netherlands, in contrast to countries such as France and Belgium.
That starts with the chapter, equal to the title:They don't hurt us. The Jewish Dutch are misled by the initially reticent attitude of the German occupier. The exhortations from the Dutch government to the entire people, and from the Jewish Council to the Jews in particular, to cooperate above all, do not help either. The Germans set up the Jewish Council to govern the Jewish community in the Netherlands. New rules to be imposed or calls to 'work' in Eastern Europe go through this governing body.
When the raids start in 1941, this leads to massive strikes in Amsterdam (the February strike), after which the Germans will act less rigorously and more secretly. Most Jews think that the penalties for discovered hiding will be much worse than working in the east and volunteer. The horrors of the gas chambers are not yet known in the Netherlands at that time.
Belgian Jews, on the other hand, mainly refugees from outside Belgium, are arrested with a lot of open violence. The remaining Jews go into hiding or fleeing en masse because of this obvious threat. The clear overview that Van Lakervelt and Levie give of the persecution of the Jews in other European countries and the explanations for the various degrees of success are a plus of this book.
Confusing
The structure of the book deserves less of the beauty prize. The chapters are divided into different themes, interspersed with personal stories of Jewish Dutch people. The themes are chronological and deal with the increasingly restrictive measures against the Jews and then the deportations, life in the camps and the return. The chapter on Jews in the resistance is special. When writing about the resistance, it is generally not from a Jewish perspective, so this is a nice addition.
In the chapters themselves, however, things go from hot to here. When the authors describe how the occupying forces gradually imposed more and more restrictions on the Jews and thus isolated them, they interspersed this with whole life stories of people. And then return to the year where they left off. Confusing. There are also regular frames of several pages with extra information in between. In these blue frames, the writers make trips to Germany, for example about how Hitler came to power or the Kristallnacht. It gives the whole the feeling of a school book.
The concluding chapter about the return to the Netherlands and the insensitive treatment that most Jews could count on then is poignant, as is the fact that anti-Semitism was much more widespread in the Netherlands shortly after the war than before. 'They forgot to gas you' has been criticized by several interviewed survivors.
Richly illustrated
The book is based on the exhibition Persecution and deportation of the Jews in the Netherlands 1940-1945 in Auschwitz, which the authors made in 2005. As with an exhibition, there are lists with names of murdered victims in the book. That works less well in this medium, pages full of names, than when you are in a museum. Advantages of this history are the many beautiful photos and images in the book, which makes it attractive. The writing style is also freely accessible, despite the spelling errors, the careless use of dates and the interviews, which are not all equally well executed. The verbatim quotes from the personal stories of survivors are often repetitive and not pleasant to read.
The content of the book is not really original, but that was not the intention of the authors. The book gives a nice overview of what happened to the Jews in the war and what the danger is of excluding and demonizing a minority. In that sense, the plan has been successful.