20
PARTISAN REV IEW
northern part of the country on May 4, 1945. When the Germans finally
surrendered, the Dutch celebrated in the streets for days. The Queen
returned . "People who had been in hiding came out onto the streets,"
Miep Gies wrote. "Jews came out of hiding places, rubbing eyes that
were unused to sunlight, their faces yellow and pinched and distrustful.
Church bells rang everywhere; streamers flew.... To wake up and go
through a whole day without any sense of danger was amazing."
And then came the questions and the counting-a new kind of reck–
oning amid the decay of civilized life. Miep Gies recounted that she and
her husband Henk
and everyone else began waiting to see just who would be coming
home to us. Shocking, unimaginable accounts circulated of the lib–
eration of the German concentration camps. Pictures were printed
in the first free newspaper; eyewitness information, too. Through
the occupation we'd heard rumors of gassings, murder, brutality,
poor living conditions in these camps, but none of us could have
imagined such atrocities. The facts had far surpassed even our most
pessimistic imaginings.... I needed
to
do everything
I
could to
keep my optimism about our friends. It would have been unbear–
able to think otherwise.
Their friends included nine Jews who had been hiding above the
offices where Gies had worked for Otto Frank's firm . Day after day she
asked returning Jews if they had seen any of the Frank family. In June,
Otto Frank returned to the Netherlands from Auschwitz with the news
that his wife had died there. He was unsure about what had happened
to his two children, Margot and Anne. Months later he got word from
a nurse in Rotterdam that the daughters had not survived their impris–
onment in Auschwitz and Bergen-Belsen. The finality of all the deaths
mixed into the tortured lives of those who survived . "I heard it said,"
Gies wrote in her book, "that where the Jews had looked like everyone
else before [the warJ, after what they had endured, those who returned
looked different. But people hardly noticed because everyone had been
through so much misery that no one had much interest in the suffering
of others." Despite the fact that Dutch Jewry lost nearly 75 percent of
its population-the highest number of deaths in any Western European
country under occupation-despite the fact that the Dutch Jews had lost
everything, the few who came back were expected to make do with
what they found, or did not find, of their former lives.
