THE MOTHER I have known all my lengthening life began her existence not when she was born but when her parents, Walter and Betty Jacobsthal, disappeared. The Nazis then occupying Holland came for them at their Amsterdam apartment during the night of July 23, 1943. My mother, Hilde, wasn’t there. She was eighteen and had gone to explore a potential safe haven in the country that some neighbors had found for her. She had never wanted to go. The family had been looking around for hiding-places, and Hilde didn’t want to be separated from her parents; but it was riskier to go Underground in a group than on one’s own. This time her parents insisted that she investigate the opportunity.
All the same, it was exhilarating to sit on a train without her star in the company of Gentiles and look at the countryside. By then it had been three years since she had left Amsterdam, and a year since she had traveled anywhere by rail. Everything you could put in a sentence with a verb, practically, was against the law for Jews: travel, exercise, going to a beach or a pool or a park or the zoo, all other kinds of entertainment, most kinds of work, appearing in public without the yellow star, eating or shopping in the wrong places at the wrong time. The laws against moving freely had been designed to increase the anxiety of the Jewish population, which had been subject to constant pressure and violence. The Jews were corralled in the big cities and then picked off. To this day, my mother remembers the couple of hours on the way to the hiding-place as a tiny vacation, heightened by the danger of “passing” and by the general sense of flight.
Anyway she didn’t like the people, a country doctor and his family, who were supposed to be her protectors. They were haughty and mistrustful. They said that she would be taken on as a servant, as she expected, but told her that she’d sleep in the kitchen, should never speak to the children, and never speak at all unless spoken to. She imagined that they would denounce her as soon as the slightest thing went wrong. She thought them so dangerous that she slipped out of the inn where her neighbors had arranged for her to stay the night (an infraction, ditto), walked to the station, and took the first train back to Amsterdam.
Hilde arrived in the city at five in the morning. When she made her way past the SS guards and their dogs at the Central Station and took the long walk home to South Amsterdam, she found the apartment sealed and her parents gone. She knew that they had been arrested. It had taken nine tries, and this time the SS had succeeded. It was the morning of July 24, 1943, a date well-documented in accounts of the period. The massive operation of the previous night had been the last raid but one on the Jews of Amsterdam.