Jan Brokken - The Just: How Six Unlikely Heroes Saved Thousands of Jews From the Holocaust

THE JUST

Jan Brokken is a writer of fiction, travel, and literary nonfiction. He gained international fame with The Rainbird, The Blind Passengers, My Little Madness, Baltic Souls, In the House of the Poet, The Reprisal, and The Cossack Garden, and his books have been translated into ten languages. The Just is his latest book.

David McKay is an award-winning literary translator who lives in The Hague. His recent translations include The Convert, by Stefan Hertmans, and the classic political novel Max Havelaar, by Multatuli. For more information, see openbooktranslation.com.

Scribe Publications

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First published in Dutch as De rechtvaardigen by Atlas Contact 2018

Published by Scribe 2021

Text copyright Jan Brokken 2018

Translation copyright David McKay 2021

All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise) without the prior written permission of the publishers of this book.

The moral rights of the author and translator have been asserted.

Every effort has been made to acknowledge and contact the copyright holders for permission to reproduce material contained in this book. Any copyright holders who have been inadvertently omitted from the acknowledgements and credits should contact the publisher so that omissions may be rectified in subsequent editions.

This publication has been made possible with financial support from the Dutch Foundation for Literature.

9781925849295 (Australian edition)

9781912854219 (UK edition)

9781950354566 (US edition)

9781925938722 (ebook)

Catalogue records for this book are available from the National Library of Australia and the British Library.

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1 Mister Radio Philips

2 One last breath of peace

3 Losing your company

4 Scales and cacti

5 Erni Christianus

6 Between Prague and Rotterdam

7 Aletrino

8 Stalin in the shop windows

9 Peppy Sternheim Lewin

10 Nathan Gutwirth

11 Not a chance in hell. But who knows?

12 The manual for consular officials

13 The white ship with the black hull

14 The independent-minded Sugihara

15 The yard of the Lietkis garage

16 Comrade Nina

17 The fiat: the party leader and the influential dwarf

18 Pan Tadeusz

19 Chanson russe

20 Please forgive me. I cannot write any more.

21 Every man for himself

22 The Swedish route

23 An overlooked date

24 Towards the ends of the east

25 No way forward, no way back

26 The house with the green shutters in Kobe

27 Zorach Warhaftig

28 Zofia and Count Romer

29 Odd is death; even is life

30 Escort to Shanghai

31 The secret of Kaunas

32 Mauthausen

33 A secret burial

34 Mister Frits

35 Hey! Blow! Scream! Bang!

36 From Avenue Joffre to the ghetto

37 So many names on a wall

38 Everythings fine in Psychiko

39 The reprimand

40 The need to know

41 Under a spruce or pine tree

42 No news from the survivors

43 The exodus from Egypt

44 Whoever saves one life saves a whole world

45 The Holland 977 Case

46 A wedding in Antwerp

47 Pebbles on a grave

The Talmud tells of the khasidei umt haolm, the Righteous Among the Nations. According to legend, there are thirty-six such people at any moment in world history. In 1940 there were two in Kaunas, Lithuania; one in Riga, Latvia; one in Stockholm, Sweden; and two in Japan one in Kobe, and one in Tokyo.

This is, at its heart, the story of Dutch consul Jan Zwartendijk in Kaunas. I have reconstructed it with the help of his children, drawing on documents and personal testimonies. But no one succeeds alone. It is also the story of three other consuls and two ambassadors, all equally unknown. Together, they set up one of the greatest rescue operations of the twentieth century. Thanks to their children, I can now recount their historic acts.

Ach, tten knnt ihr,

aber nicht lebendig machen.

Oh, you can kill,

but not bring to life.

Friedrich Hlderlin

Inscription on the memorial plaque for Louis Aletrino in Mauthausen concentration camp

Everything important begins unexpectedly and makes you suspicious. You may be confronted with an impossible choice and have only a split second to decide. Youre not yet sure what to do, but already you sense that the rest of your life may depend on your decision. How will you respond? I cant answer that question for myself, and that may explain why Ive burrowed into this story like a mole.

Jan Zwartendijk heard the telephone ring. He was already outside with his bag under his arm and a key in his hand. He had just locked up the office and the showroom. It was almost 6.00 p.m., Eastern European Summer Time. The sun was shining through the treetops along Laisvs Alja, Freedom Avenue, the longest, widest boulevard in Kaunas. The radios gleamed in the display window; their emblems four stars and three waves looked like silver. Mister Radio Philips, the people of Kaunas called him, always with a hint of admiration, as if he had screwed the sets together himself and equipped them with electron tubes and loudspeakers. In Lithuania, more than in the West, radios were seen as heralds of the modern age.

Kaunas (sometimes still called by the pre-war name of Kovno) had shaken off its provincial backwardness many years earlier. But the complete telephone book was still a slim volume. Something told him that if he didnt answer the phone there would be consequences. The date raced through his mind like a warning: 29 May 1940. Although he was just an ordinary businessman forty-three years old, married, with three children he was also a foreigner, and in Lithuania he never knew exactly who to trust. Whenever he could, he kept a safe distance. If he unlocked the door, walked back to his desk, and picked up the receiver, he would let in all the dangers of a city teetering on the brink of war.

He was not a born hero. He lacked ambition. What he really wanted to do was hurry home for an idle hour in the garden with Erni and the children before dinner. It was his third year in Kaunas, and he knew you had to savor the warm summer nights. Otherwise youd never make it through the long winter. Under the apple trees, the unhinged world would dwindle into a cloud on the far horizon. He couldnt help hiding away from reality sometimes, even though it had become absurd to believe in peace.

All afternoon at the office, hed felt the tension. On the surface, nothing was out of the ordinary, aside from the overflowing ashtrays. No customers, no orders. A grim quiet. He had sent De Haan and Van Prattenburg home at five-thirty. De Haan, the manager of the radio-assembly plant, now frittered away his days at the office. Since production had been halted, he made only a brief appearance at the factory each morning, to show the few remaining employees he hadnt vanished from the face of the earth. Van Prattenburg kept the books and was the financial director. His one brief spurt of activity came at the end of the week when they paid the wages. The three nerve-wracked men had not done much that day except smoke cigarettes and glance outside every other minute. Everyone in town was expecting the Red Army. Maschewski had stuck around for a while, until hed spotted a woman in a much too skimpy summer dress standing in front of the showroom window. Hed approached her as if she were a potential customer, and struck up a conversation in German, Lithuanian, Polish, or Russian Zwartendijk couldnt hear. But he was sure Maschewski had gone outside mainly to steady his nerves.