Life can sometimes throw up some very curious coincidences and unforeseen connections, the symbolism and outcome of which may not be realized for many years. The astonishing story of the house at 140 Blaricummerweg in Amsterdam links New York, Los Angeles and Amsterdam and spans over seventy years of secrets and deliberately, or accidentally, forgotten memories. It brings the consequences of a single act of proud defiance by a strong-willed young woman called Betty Polak into the present day, and tells us how, if not for this same young woman, the publication of Anne Frank’s diary might never have happened.
In 2017 Jan Erik Dubbelman, the international director of the Anne Frank House, shared with me an incredible series of situations and coincidences that had connected his own birth in 1955, to Betty Polak’s life and to Jan and Annie Romein, the couple who had been instrumental in helping Otto Frank to get Anne Frank’s diary published. Jan Erik had first been introduced to Betty at her brother Jack and his wife’s sixtieth wedding anniversary party in New York in 2006. With Jan Erik’s insatiable interest in people’s lives, Betty and he naturally started to chat about her wartime experiences in the Netherlands. She told him that she and her first husband Phillip Leeuw had both been active in the Dutch Resistance and that Phillip had been executed by the Nazis. Distraught and now fearing for her own life, Betty had been taken in as a domestic servant by a wealthy Amsterdam family; a way of Christian families acquiring additional domestic help and a sanctuary for a Jewish girl from almost certain death if she were deported.
During Betty’s time working for this family, an expensive crystal glass happened to have been accidentally broken by the family’s young son, and fearing punishment by their parents, he and his brother had both blamed their maid, Betty. On being confronted about something she hadn’t done, Betty’s youthful pride and indignation got the better of her. She immediately gave her notice to the family, packed her minimal belongings and ran out into the dark street. Not a wise thing to do for a Jewish girl seeking a safe haven from the threat of murder by the Nazis, but fortunately she found herself in a prosperous area of the city, populated by a liberal left-wing network of artists and intellectuals. To avoid being seen, she turned a corner into a quiet residential street and knocked on the door of number 140 of the street called Blaricummerweg.
It was opened by Jan Romein. Later on, Jan Romein and his author and historian wife Annie would come to play a crucial role in the publication of Anne’s diary. Romein was shocked to see a trembling young girl on his doorstep clutching a brown leather suitcase. Instinctively he was going to shut the door in her face as there were so many desperate people begging for food and money during the war. But on that night in 1943, Jan Romein made a prompt and difficult decision, despite being aware that he could be jeopardizing his own life. Looking at this fragile, terrified girl, he realized this was not a beggar, but a Jewish girl who was running away from the Nazis. Jan beckoned the girl to come in, closed the front door and took Betty inside to meet his wife Annie. Betty remained living with the Romeins, feeling relatively safe again.
After the war, Jan Romein was the historian and literary critic who wrote an article for the Dutch newspaper Het Parool, insisting that Anne’s diary be published and read by many. The article, which appeared on 3 April 1946, was entitled ‘Kinderstem’ (‘The Voice of a Child’) and focused on the pubescent innocence of the girl who was killed, while presenting the diary as a didactic tool to keep alive her memory. It was an anti-fascist call by the liberal-minded Romein to remind us to be vigilant against the enemies of humanity. Romein’s article led to the diary being taken on and published in book form on 25 June 1947 by Contact, a small Catholic publishing house.
Jack Polak was the co-founder and Emeritus President of the Anne Frank Center USA. After he had made that first step of sharing his life story, Jack Polak spoke at hundreds of schools and civic events, and Anne Frank exhibition openings. Sometimes he would be joined by his sister Betty, and would usually end his talks with six key calls to action: Don’t Discriminate; Don’t Generalise; Don’t Be a Bystander; Choose to Work for Peace; Appreciate your Life and, finally, Remember You Live in a Great Country.
After the war, Betty Polak and her brother Jack found themselves living thousands of miles apart, and even if they had not been siblings, their lives would be forever connected by the link to Anne Frank. Betty had owed her life to the goodwill of the couple who were to ensure the publication of Anne Frank’s diary, and her brother, by coincidence, was to go on to be a founder of the Anne Frank Center in New York in the 1980s. But this story gets even more convoluted and astonishing.
On being told by Betty of where she had been hidden during the war, Jan Erik’s mouth dropped open and he very nearly dropped the glass of white wine he was holding. He took another mouthful of wine and then these astonishing words came out of his mouth. ‘Betty, I was actually born in that house on 30 March 1955’, Jan Erik told her. ‘Blaricummerweg 140 is the address of the house where I greeted the world.’
When in 2017 Jan Erik shared with me those incredible series of situations, he also revealed to me (some thirty years after our first meeting!) that he had actually been named after the Romeins’ own son Jan Erik. ‘I was born six weeks premature and my parents had not yet thought of a name for me. After my father had helped my mother give birth, he went upstairs to find a spare blanket to help keep me warm. Up in the attic, he came across some letters from the Romeins addressed to their son called Jan Erik. ‘My father quickly spotted that Jan Erik Romein had also been born six weeks premature. He went downstairs to my exhausted mother to inform her that he could not find a blanket to swaddle me, but had instead found a name for me!’
Having discovered their incredible shared connection to the house in south Amsterdam, Jan Erik and Betty decided it would be rather special to pay a visit to 140 Blaricummerweg together. Jan Erik had never been to the house before. He knew it only from its presence in the background of his own baby photos. So one evening in 2014, Jan Erik and Betty, accompanied by Jan Erik’s father, his wife Dienke and son Robbie, drove south from central Amsterdam.
On finding Blaricummerweg, Jan Erik asked a man standing in the street if he thought it would be OK for the party to ring the doorbell of number 140, replicating the action taken by the desperate Betty decades earlier. The man enquired politely as to why they wished to if they did not know the owners.
Jan Erik and Betty related their respective stories to the stranger, who turned out to be a local historian of the wartime period, a profession and specialism shared by Jan Erik’s wife, Professor Dienke Hondius. The man told them about the area in which they were standing, which turned out to be a tiny pocket of humanitarian action that defied the comparatively poor record of the Dutch nation in helping its desperate Jews. The man then summoned the group into a small side street off the Blaricummerweg called Paviljoenweg. It was discovered only after the war had ended that six out of the seven houses in that one small street had sheltered Jews, and in all the lives of eleven Jews had been saved. The Dutch political leadership of that community had been pro-Nazi, not knowing what was happening right under their noses.
Jan Erik was curious as to why this one street had shown so much humanity, each house guarding its dangerous secret from its neighbour. He discovered that in the 1940s this area had been populated by intellectuals and artists who had previously numbered Jews among their friends, explaining a lot about how fundamental human connections, and the empathy and understanding this generates, saves lives.
On their drive back on that dark night to central Amsterdam, a glistening shard of memory from those distant post war days suddenly came back to Betty. She had never shared it with anyone before as it was one of those instances that can shape history but have no particular significance at the time it happened. The visit to Blaricummerweg had propelled it back to the forefront of her mind.
After the war ended, Betty had been working as a secretary for a civil servant whose government department controlled the distribution of paper, a valuable commodity immediately after the war as the limited amount available needed to be used wisely and productively. She told Jan Erik of a call she had received in 1947 from her wartime protector Annie Romein. Annie explained that a friend of hers had a manuscript that needed publication – it was the diary of his young daughter murdered in the Holocaust. After several rejections, they had at last found a company who wished to publish it, would she agree to supply the paper? Betty went to have a word with her boss, who agreed to supply Contact with the paper to publish 1,500 copies of Het Achterhuis – now known throughout the world as Anne Frank – The Diary of A Young Girl.
A phone call, a simple insignificant administrative action, and history is made. Jan Erik had found it perplexing that Betty, who in later life had been so interested and involved in her brother’s educational work for the Anne Frank Center USA, had completely overlooked her important role in the chain of events that had brought Anne Frank’s diary to the world.
The Love Story of Bergen-Belsen
In March 2017, I was staying for a few days in Los Angeles with Margrit Polak and her husband Harvey Shield, a London-born musician. Margrit is Jack Polak’s daughter. Her mother, Catharina ‘Ina’ Soep Polak, had died in May 2014 at the age of 91, and unexpectedly her father Jack, who was a decade older, had outlived his beloved wife – but only by eight months, passing away in January 2015 at the age of 102.
I had heard a lot about Margrit from Jan Erik over the years, and although she and I had never met before the afternoon I walked through the door of her Victorian house in Echo Park, we connected immediately. We hugged, laughed and had fun over the following three days I stayed there.
One afternoon Margrit prepared tea and we sat at her table in a room surrounded by mementoes of her Dutch family. For the next two hours she opened up to me about the impact gradually learning the truth about her family story had had on her own life and more facts about her aunt Betty and the amazing love story of Jack and Ina.
Jack Polak and Ina Soep had fallen in love in Westerbork transit camp after their arrests in Amsterdam. They had first met at a birthday party of a mutual friend in 1943, and in Jack’s case it was love at first sight. He was a struggling young accountant, already married, and Ina was the daughter of a wealthy diamond manufacturer. By the time he had met Ina, Jack’s marriage to his flirtatious and vivacious wife Manja was in an increasingly unhappy state, and they had agreed to divorce should they both survive the war. Ina’s fiancé Rudy Acohen had been arrested in a Nazi reprisal round-up of Jewish men in 1941, but she did not know at the time of the party that Rudy had been deported and was probably by then already dead.
Remarkably Jack found himself sharing Barrack 64 in Westerbork camp with both his wife Manja and his amour Ina, which he later sardonically described as ‘not easy’. Ina was in a dilemma, feeling guilt about her missing fiancé but having more and more feelings for Jack. It was a very complex and bizarre situation, and on one occasion, when Ina got very sick, Manja gave up her own bread to save her. When it was difficult to meet, Jack and Ina started exchanging letters. ‘I’m writing with a pencil stub. Darling, try to steal a pencil for me somewhere,’ wrote Jack in one of his letters.
After their miraculous survival of Bergen-Belsen, and deeply in love with Ina, Jack divorced Manja, with whom he afterwards remained friends, and married Ina, who had returned to Amsterdam to the confirmation that her fiancé Rudy would never be coming back. Jack and Ina Polak emigrated to New York in 1951 with their two sons, Frederick, named after his murdered grandfather, and Anthony. Upon arrival in his new country, Jacob Polak, previously known to his Dutch family and friends as Jaap, Americanized his name to Jack. He got work as an accountant, they had a third child, a daughter called Margrit, and then he started to dabble in the stock market using his own and clients’ funds. Jack’s life as an investment counsellor started to take off.
In 1980, as a young adult, Margrit happened upon something that would change her life. She had been fascinated by a letter that her father kept in his study. It was in Dutch and apparently written to his beloved Ina during their time in the camps. One day, he casually told Margrit that there were ‘probably more letters up in the attic’. As a teenager, and having learnt about her family’s European history, she had experienced nightmares that there were both dreaded Nazis and the ghosts of murdered Jews living above them in their own New York attic. The attic of the Polak’s large family home in New York was not a place that Margrit ever relished visiting. Summoning all her courage and buoyed by curiosity, she ventured up to the top of the house and after a good poke around found a bag within which was a folder containing a large collection of letters. They were in fact 130 passionate love letters from Jack to Ina, written in another time and a terrible place, where each day was thought to perhaps be their last. As Margrit had imagined, there had indeed been ghosts in the attic.
Margrit had suddenly found a cause and she set about working with her father to translate the letters into English. She convinced him that translating the letters together would help her to learn Dutch. Ina was still too traumatized by those years to take any part in the process, and even working with Jack took many months as Margrit adopted a patient and sensitive approach, working on just one letter at a time. She became so passionate about uncovering every aspect of her parents’ lives that she even went over to Amsterdam to interview her father’s first wife Manja. In 2000, the love letters became the basis of a book, Steal A Pencil for Me, and then a documentary film with the same title made by Michele Ohayon. The film was critically acclaimed and won several film festival awards, including the Yad Vashem Prize at the Jerusalem Film Festival. It continues to be used in schools throughout the US for Holocaust education. In 1992, Jack Polak was knighted by Queen Beatrix of the Netherlands for his work in Holocaust education.
Prompted by my curiosity to know more during my visit, Margrit and I spent time talking about her parents and their remarkable story. During her childhood there had been no mention of the Holocaust at home, but there were odd references made to the many family photos that adorned the walls. In answer to little Margrit’s enquiries about the faces who stared down at her every day, there would be from her Mom, ‘That’s my cousin, she died in the war’, or from her Dad, ‘They were my parents, they didn’t survive the war’. These were the only descriptions of her murdered family members that Margrit remembered. It was the same with her parents’ Dutch survivor circle who would visit their home, elegantly-dressed Continental people who would drop their lively chatter during the evening to talk about ‘certain things’ in whispers.
One day in her early teens, Margit had been taken by her father to an amateur football game in the Bronx and so found herself with one to one time and the opportunity to probe further his early life in Europe. He quietly explained to his inquisitive American-raised daughter that his own parents had actually been murdered, he had had a difficult time in those years and talked briefly about his marriages to Manja and to Ina. But then the subject was closed down again.
Margrit only really found out about the Holocaust when she went to interview a local survivor called Jack Topolsky for her school magazine. At that stage she was trying to ‘put the pieces together’. Margrit Polak finally learnt the truth about her own family’s experiences through Topolsky’s story. The terrible and incomprehensible truth about her parents’ early lives affected Margrit’s teenage years deeply. She was a sensitive and creative girl and started to read incessantly about the subject to find out more and more.
After school, she moved herself far away from New York to Kenyon College in Ohio, where she majored in drama (some years earlier their ‘star pupil’, one Paul Newman, had also studied the art of acting). After several years as an actress and then acting coach, Margrit opened a successful talent agency. Meanwhile she had married Harvey Shield, a musician who was a member of the London rock band that became Deep Purple, and had their daughter Sofia, known as Sofi.
For Margrit the stresses of the frenetic world of pitching clients around Hollywood are broken up by an early-morning walk of her dog around Echo Park Lake, a midday half-hour stop for a silent meditation session and her leisurely commute to work, which simply requires an enjoyable stroll down the path of her fragrant rear garden.
Margrit and Harvey’s garden, with its lush trees, hot tub, barbeque and constantly blue sky, is firmly Californian, however the interior of the house is overtly European in its feel. Many of its contents help to keep the connection tangibly alive between Margrit, her daughter Sofi and their Dutch heritage. Sofi, who had been very close to her grandparents, had recently graduated from the University of Amsterdam with a Masters’ Degree in Conflict Resolution and Government, while spending some of her time in the city as a volunteer at the Anne Frank House.
As we sat in her Los Angeles house, Margrit Polak wanted to tell me about the next project to share her family’s history for posterity and to ‘give life to those no longer there’. She and Sophie were planning to work on this together. Margrit pulled out a weathered album from beneath a pile of documents. It contained a series of black-and-white photographs that captured a summer’s day in the Netherlands in 1941. A group of eight teenagers from Amsterdam had been on a cycling excursion in the countryside. One of them had recorded the laughter-filled day on camera, and the albums were distributed to all the eight. Ina’s copy of the album had lain in her parents’ Amsterdam home throughout the seizure of the house by the Nazis and had been found after liberation, along with half the family’s valuable silver cutlery which had inexplicably been left behind.
The happy and carefree group of teenage cyclists included two Christians and six Jews, four of whom were to be killed within the next three years. There, amongst the group, was the pretty young Catharina Soep. Between that day of laughter and fun, and her death in New York in 2014 at age 91, the fortunes of Ina Catharina Soep Polak’s life had turned like the wheels of her cycle.