On a street in The Hague

A researcher is trying to find out more about the Jewish community of the Dutch capital, a story unknown.

JUNE 12, 2014 12:36

Hermann Fischer and Rachel Barsam, with (front) Lea Barsam-Fischer and Moses Barsam, on the stairs leading to their house in June 1936. (photo credit: WIM WILLEMS) — Hermann Fischer and Rachel Barsam, with (front) Lea Barsam-Fischer and Moses Barsam, on the stairs leading to their house in June 1936.

(photo credit: WIM WILLEMS)

Harstenhoekweg Street is like any typical Dutch street. It’s residential, with multistory homes side by side, meant to accommodate as many families as possible in a small space. But what is most interesting about this street in Scheveningen, a neighborhood in The Hague, is that nearly 18,000 Jews lived there until 1942.

The history of the Jews in the Netherlands goes back almost four centuries, but most research and literature only deal with their experiences during World War II – the most well-known stories being Anne Frank and the Jews of Amsterdam. Virtually nothing is known about the people and the community that once thrived on Harstenhoekweg Street; it is believed that only 2,000 people from the Jewish community of The Hague managed to escape the Holocaust, either fleeing to Switzerland or managing to survive in hiding.

How did this small street come to boast such a large community, and what was life like for those residents? For Wim Willems, a professor of modern urban studies at Leiden University in The Hague, this was a story he felt obligated to explore and tell. His first introduction to Harstenhoekweg Street came while he was working on a book about Polish immigration, Honderd jaar heimwee: De geschiedenis van Polen in Nederland (One Hundred Years of Homesickness: The History of Poland in the Netherlands), and could find virtually nothing written about the Polish Jewish community in the Dutch capital.

“There is a lot written about the Jewish presence in the Netherlands, but it’s always about the war,” he says. “As if there was only this victimization of Jews, and after that there is Israel.”

While the book focused mostly on Polish immigration to the Netherlands, one chapter dealt specifically with the Polish Jewish community. The driving force of the book came from personal narratives, which entailed finding relatives of migrants to recreate what their lives would have been like in the early 20th century.

“I think personal narratives are the only [way people can connect emotionally],” he says.

But he could find virtually no one to tell the story of the Jewish community.

His first introduction to the Jews of The Hague happened by coincidence. In 2001, a family had bought a house on Harstenhoekweg Street and wanted to renovate the cellar. In emptying out the debris, sand, stones, concrete and rubbish, the family found pieces of paper stuck in between the cracks of the walls. On these were written the surnames of Jewish families.

With this tip, Willems went to the national archives and found more information about these families. Immigrants from Poland, they had become naturalized Dutch citizens by the 1930s.

“We found all this material about them, but at that moment I couldn’t find survivors of the family. As far as I knew, almost all of them were killed during the war.”

He could see that two members of one of the three families had survived, but he didn’t know where to find them. After being in contact with a 91-year-old woman who could give personal testimony about a different Jewish family, Willems felt the unknown stories of the other families gnawing at him. Evidence started to add up that there had been a large Jewish presence on this one tiny street. Out of 171 addresses, those living at 43 of them had been deported.

“Then we found out, in fact, that in 1940, [at] 51 addresses lived 66 Jewish families,” he says.

The discrepancy in numbers suggests that these families were not all deported, and it is possible some of them went into hiding or fled the country, Willems explains. “Yet,” he adds emphatically, “comparing it with other streets, we saw this was a street with the highest concentration of Jewish families in all of Scheveningen.”

And that was where Willems began his research.

“If you go back to the beginning of that neighborhood when it was built, in the early 20th century, between 1915 and 1925, in almost every house lived a Jewish family.”

According to Willems, many Jewish families from Germany, Belgium and Russia immigrated to the Netherlands to escape World War I.

Scheveningen is an attractive destination. It’s a resort town with beautiful houses, beaches and hotels.

Eastern European families would rent a couple of rooms or a whole floor, traveling to Amsterdam or Rotterdam to work in the diamond industry or trade.

Willems was able to locate one of the granddaughters of the Antwerp family Lipschutz, a 92-year-old woman now living in the US. She recounted to him that every morning she would stand on the train platform as her grandfather, father and uncles left Scheveningen to travel to Amsterdam, and return home around 9 or 10 p.m.

“That explains why there was an early presence of a very large Jewish community from Belgium working in the diamond trade,” he notes. “Most of these people went back after the First World War, but 12 families were naturalized, so they became Dutch citizens.”

To understand the Jewish community of 1942, he says, it is essential to study those who established the community between 1910 and 1915. The social infrastructure developed in the early 20th century made Scheveningen a desirable place for Jewish families to live.

“People liked to come to Scheveningen because it had this Jewish air, Jewish structure – you could be there and you weren’t out of place when you migrated,” he says. But there are a lot of missing links. “That’s why I need the stories, the eyewitnesses, memories, letters, photographs.”

One might wonder why Willems, who is not Jewish, cares so much about recreating this part of the city’s history.

“People have to realize [that] what happened to the Jews in my neighborhood can also happen to me,” he explains. “My grandfather lived here, and if I would have lived in Scheveningen, I would have had a lot of Jewish friends.”

Assimilation and mixed marriages were not uncommon in The Hague and Scheveningen in the early 20th century, he says. “[The Jews] were like everybody else, then they were set apart, then they were deported. People forgot that they lived together before 1942. I want people to realize that there was a ‘togetherness’ before the war. The war started the great division.”

Before the war, he says, there was a more integrated community and networks between Jews and non-Jews.

“The thing is, when you walk through The Hague now, there are maybe two or three monuments that bring us back to the history – what happened during the war – but there are almost no monuments, no signs that lead us to the prewar Jewish presence in the city, and for a historian that is a lack of consciousness. So I want to change this consciousness as much as possible.”

To understand his commitment to this project, it is worth taking a look at his own history and experience. Born and raised in The Hague, he came from a working-class environment.

His father and grandfather were bricklayers. Going in the opposite direction and pursuing academia, he became interested in minorities, racism and migrant issues. In 2001, he began a regular column for a large local newspaper discussing social history, mostly through his own story – how the child of a working-class family with no books could grow up to be a prolific author, researcher and academic.

“As a social historian, I was interested. ‘How did I develop into the person I am today?’” he says.

He then decided to expand and make the project interactive, asking people to contribute their own stories of growing up in The Hague. The end result was a recreation of what life was like in the city from the 1920s through the late 1960s and ’70s. This idea of the personal, historical narrative got a lot of attention in The Hague, garnering support from the community and the mayor. It was parlayed into a TV documentary that lasted two seasons.

“That was thrilling,” he recalls. “We did it for six years, then I started to believe in the force and power of interactive projects.”

After that project, and working on his chapter about the history of Polish Jews, he decided the time was right to begin learning the personal stories of the Jews of Harstenhoekweg Street so he could recreate a model of their lives as well. Last month he and his research team launched the Harstenhoekweg website in Dutch and English: a present-day Google Street View map that lists the names and addresses of the Jewish families who lived there between 1900 and 1942. Willems and his research partner, Hanneke Verbeek, are working on a book compiling these personal stories, expected to be published in 2016. They also launched a twitter campaign, @eenjoodsestraat, that sends out tweets as if from the residents themselves. But most data is not filled in, and that is where Willems is appealing to the public.

The most important thing is getting the story out there, he says. “You can’t do that in a systematic way, because it’s about so many people; you know who survived, but you don’t know where they went.”

Many Dutch people who returned to the Netherlands found homes that did not belong to them anymore, or neighborhoods without anyone they used to know, those neighbors having been murdered in the Holocaust.

“They were living in an ‘empty house,’” he says.

After he launched and publicized his project, one of the first people to come forward and offer information was a 94-year-old woman in Antwerp, the daughter of the kosher butcher Schächter. Her niece had found an article online in a Dutch Jewish journal discussing the project.

“She phoned us and told us she has a lot of memories of this Jewish community in Scheveningen in the 1920s and ’30s because she grew up there,” he says.

Willems has also found former Jewish-Dutch nationals living in London and Israel, although it has been easier to find people who used to live in The Hague than to find people from Scheveningen.

“That is the thing with this project – we have to select, we have to make it small to give it a large impact, start small then broaden our scope,” he explains.

But people have started to come out of the woodwork.

“We are in contact with people in the US... whose families worked in the diamond trade in Antwerp, and who fled to The Netherlands in 1910,” Willems says.

Three members of this family have written memoirs.

“Some of their descendants are still alive, and we are in contact to get more context [for] the stories that were written down.”

Since launching the project, Willems is in touch with more families in Israel, the US and London to locate information in archives and categorize personal memories.

“It becomes an interactive family project,” he says.

“They are interested in family history, I am interested in the family history as a source to write a historical narrative.”

More information on the project is available at www.harstenhoekweg.nl and www.joodsscheveningen.nl.