JUDITH GOLDSTEIN
21
Frieda Menco was fifteen when she returned from Auschwitz with
her mother. They were the only survivors of their large family that had
lived in the Netherlands for over three hundred years. "When we came
back," she recalled, "we tried to tell people of our experiences. But
nobody wanted to listen. The authorities considered us as a pain in the
neck. A Jew who came back and wanted something." The survivors
were told to be quiet-to keep their nightmares and losses to them–
selves. A once thriving Jewish Dutch world of family, community, insti–
tutions, and property was gone. The Dutch constructed effective
bureaucratic remedies to bury Jewish claims to emotional and full finan–
cial restitution. Many survivors retreated into silence as European coun–
tries began to rebuild, to cleanse themselves, and to adjust to the
development of the Iron Curtain.
Amidst rebuilding civilized life in the postwar world, Europeans and
Americans constructed comforting wartime myths, especially myths
about resistance. This is particularly true about the Dutch, who sought
to restore a viable nation after the trauma of occupation and the erosion
of the pillar society. In a seminal essay, Matthijs Kronemeijer and Dar–
ren Teshima described this process:
[This new] identity was built upon the heroic stories of resistance
in the Netherlands to the Nazi regime and the belief that Dutch
society had stood by and protected its Jewish citizens. While indi–
vidual acts of heroism and resistance certainly existed, the forma–
tion of a national myth focused on these acts and extending this
heroism to describe the entire Dutch nation obfuscated the truth of
the war experience.
The world thinks that the Franks were emblematic of what happened
to the Jews in the Netherlands. From Anne's story, the international
public has gained the impression that whole Jewish families could go
into hiding together; that most could remain in one place for a few
years; that numerous Christian friends or employees could sustain and
succor them in hiding; and that the unfortunate hidden Jews were the
ones betrayed by some unknown informer. And there was the final
impression: that after the war Dutch Jews would be welcomed back to
the country in which they had lived.
In the Netherlands, as in all European cOLlntries, there were extremes
of valor and decency along with villainy, greed, brutality, and cow–
ardice. [n the large middle ground there were bystanders who lived with
fear and indifference to the threatened minority. At Yad Vashem in
