OMA
My Dutch Grandmother Saved Jews During the Holocaust, While Feeding Them Pork and Telling Them It Was Chicken.
Anna Petronella Geurts was not a cookie baking warm and fuzzy grandma. She had mammoth breasts. They appeared a formidable shelf across her upper body, and I used to imagine she could slice bread on them. As distinct glands, they had fed ten children and Oma hadn’t stopped nursing for twenty-five years. She was a peasant woman living in the Catholic south of the Netherlands, who in the first half of her life had never met a protestant, much less a Jew. Nevertheless when my father, her oldest son who lived in sophisticated Amsterdam, asked her if she would take into hiding a Jewish man, Oma didn’t hesitate. Even though she believed that the Jews couldn’t get in to Heaven, she wasn’t about to let those bastard Nazis kill them if she could help it. It was about doing what was right.
This man’s life was the first of dozens she saved. After the war was over and my father miraculously returned from prison camps, she would love to talk about “her” Jews. How she conned her Jews into eating pork, and how much they loved that pig meat. In my memory she is a tall and imposing woman, although I know she was only five foot two. She had small eyes that were sharp as a bird’s and loose skin in her neck and arms that fascinated me. Dressed always in black, she canned hundreds of jars of green beans and cherries every summer. She killed chickens with dispatch: she took hold of the bird’s head and swung the body around with a swift jerk, so that its neck broke. Seven days a week she cooked chicken soup from scratch, looked after grandchildren, read the newspapers cover to cover, and talked so much, my grandfather rarely said anything.
Sometimes on the weekends, I would accompany my father on his visits to his family in the south. My sister Judith would much rather spend the weekend at her stable, petting and grooming her favorite horse, Kabila, and my mother, who suffered from life-long asthma, couldn’t stand all the cigarette and cigar smoke. But I wanted to go: in the bosom of his family my father cheered up, and it wasn’t only because of all the beer and gin. He would revert to his native Limburg dialect, the laughter and joking would increase, so that I would want to stay right there, catching his wave of happiness.
The men would sit smoking and drinking and talking about politics, while the women cooked and served. But later in the evening, after the younger children were put to bed, the women joined in the conversation. I stayed quiet, unless they notice me and tell me I had to go to bed too. Once, like a little spy, I hid under the table, which was covered by the traditional Persian rug. It was extra nice because all the smoke couldn’t get to me, and I could avoid the embraces which smelled too much of old people and liquor, and after a while, they seemed to forget I was there.
The war came up as a subject often, but there was such a difference between Papa’s sad stories and the tales told here. The one about Jan, for instance, who was now a sheep farmer in New Zealand. The youngest of the boys, he was 15 during the last year of the war, when the Nazis started taking all able-bodied men to work in Germany. My father, Piet and Louis were already gone, and all around families were inventing desperate ways to keep their few remaining men with them. One day they were warned there would be a raid. Oma placed Jan on a mattress in the attic of the barn, and rubbed flour on his face and hands. When the Gestapo arrived, she played dumb, walking them around the farmhouse rooms. Then, at the top of the stairs of the barn she stopped, and explained that her son had tuberculosis, he was quarantined up there, so as not to infect the whole family. Then she gave one of the men a shove:
“Go on, check him out, he’s not coughing too badly now.”
The Gestapo couldn’t leave fast enough, and Jan managed to escape conscription. As they laughed now to remember, I would wonder: where did Oma get her nerve?
It fascinated but also confused me how she made the war sound like fun and games. Terrible things had happened in her own family: my father’s three and a half years in prison and then camps, brother Piet’s year in a work camp, one of his sisters “ruined,” their word for rape, by the Gestapo who were trying to find out where the Jews were hidden. But they wouldn’t talk about that, nor about the hunger. Feeding a dozen people wasn’t easy before the war on a farm that squeezed out a living on bad soil raising sugar beets, potatoes and pigs. With shortages and all those extra mouths to feed, it had been a daily challenge, made possible by pigs, which grew scrawnier as the war progressed. Oma would say:
“The religious ones were the worst. But if you stewed up that pork meat and told them it was chicken, they couldn’t get enough. Where on earth did they think they were, being such fussy eaters?”
“Not all of them,” my father would say in defense of his friend Thea Lachman, who lived with her husband Hans, not far from us in Amsterdam.
“Ja, son, Thea was a good eater,” Oma would respond — a high form of praise I would never earn.
Thea and Hans were German Jews who had immigrated to Holland ten years before the war started. Thea did not appear at all Semitic with her cornflower eyes. Their son, who was four years old when they requested hiding, favored his mother, so Oma decided that Thea and her son would live openly with them at the farm, under cover of the story that she was a cousin who had lost her husband and decided to come home when life grew too difficult in the big city. Thea’s husband Hans, however, looked a lot like Elie Wiesel, so he was placed in hiding in the attic of a farmhouse two villages away. One evening a month, Oma would make one of my aunties ride a bicycle with Thea on the back, so that the couple could spend the night together.
While my aunties would reminisce about the two times they were stopped by the Gestapo, how frightening that was and the lies they told about why they were out bicycling home at six in the morning with their cousin from the big city, my uncles would drown them out with endless sexual innuendo. Only once a month, poor Hans! Bet she didn’t get a wink of sleep all night. But Oma, maybe conscious of my presence, would shut them up by holding forth on how well the little boy performed in his first grade catechism class.
“When he brought home a ten on his report card? You should have seen Thea’s face! She couldn’t object, poor thing. Being a good little catholic would only make him safer. But deep down, she couldn’t have been prouder, you know it’s so. My Jews, they liked doing well in school.”
“That’s how it was,” someone would say and everyone would nod and take another drink, another drag.
One day when I was ten, my sister and I arrived home from school to be told to get in the car. Oma had had a heart attack. She was critically ill, her heart had sustained a lot of damage, and we were going to Limburg right away to attend the last rites. The doctor had warned the family that she shouldn’t get excited, not talk too much.
“Not talk, Hah!” my father repeated. I couldn’t decipher his tone exactly but I was beginning to suspect he didn’t really like his mother. Was it because she talked so much? Or was it because she cheated at cards? Everyone knew she cheated, but she denied it. Even playing her grandchildren, whe would drop cards into the folds of her skirt, between her knees, under the table. Then when she would stand up, and accuse the person next to her. She just had to win.
To get to the farm, we had to drive south, through miles of peat bogs and the nearby village of Amerika, with its resident count of about three hundred people, a fact that at the age of six introduced me to the mystery of names. How was it possible that this tiny hamlet had the same name as that huge country across the ocean, where my mother’s family lived and where she had hidden away during the war. Amerika consisted of one street of brown brick houses with the obligatory lace in the windows, a garage and a bakery. Years later, when I was a hippie growing my first garden and learning to bake bread, I would remember Oma saying that the day the bakery opened in Amerika, was the happiest day in her life. I didn’t get it at the time, but of course, if you had to bake bread for twelve people every day of your life, the joys of kneading might be lost to you.
When we arrived at her home, last rites had just started, and we were ushered into the bedroom she had shared with Opa for some 60 years. It was a small room, full of kneeling aunts and uncles and my grandfather in the one chair. As the priest started anointing her forehead and chest with oil, speaking the Latin words, we too fell quickly to our knees. Above her bed on the wall hung the picture of the sacred Heart of Jesus. On the bedside table stood a Mary statue with a candle burning in front of it and also bottles of pills and a glass of water. Her bed was a narrow double, wooden and high off the floor. It was made up with sheets and pillowcases that were starched a shiny white and embroidered with tiny blue forget me nots on the borders, and it was covered with a heavy crocheted, cream colored blanket.
Oma was lying on her back with her eyes closed, her large hands folded in prayer. I liked watching those hands peel potatoes with mesmerizing speed. She used a paring knife, and her potato skins were thin as petals. Her white hair, normally pulled back in a tight little bun, now lay loose across the pillow and that made her seem curiously girlish to me.
From my perspective as the smallest member of the family, I could see the chamber pot, which sat hidden under the bed. The floor was clean, but I was sure I smelled piss. My father had kneeled at the head of Oma’s bed, as befitting the oldest son. Beside him were his two nun sisters, one standing and assisting the priest, who now finished with the oil, and started reciting the Hail Maries. We all prayed along except for my auntie, Sister Lorino, known in the family as the sensitive nun. She started to cry and was now sobbing loud enough to be audible above the murmured prayers.
Oma opened her eyes. Her hands unfolded. She pulled herself up in the bed, grimacing. She leaned over and she slapped Sister Lorino across the face.
“Why are you crying? This is nothing to cry about.” She lowered herself back down, folded her hands piously on her chest and ordered the priest to continue.
I saw my father move a little further away from the bed. As I studied him, I realized it wasn’t dislike but fear he felt for his mother. And I understood for the first time, how this woman had managed to lead the Gestapo around the farm, chatting them up about the weather and crop blight, about how difficult it was to find someone to shoe the horses, knowing there were a dozen terrified human beings in the cellar under the stable. Knowing that if she gave anything away, they as well as her own family, were as good as dead.
She was so scary, even death stayed away from my Oma. This was the first of eight heart attacks she would survive.
