Holland has had a benevolent image in Jewish circles, perceived as a tolerant and humanistic nation whose population courageously resisted a brutal Nazi occupation and selflessly helped its Jewish citizens evade arrest and deportation.

In this connection, Holland’s glowing image is also burnished by the saga of Anne Frank, the precocious Jewish teenager who poured her heart out in an extraordinary diary.

Holland’s image is continually buttressed by stories in the media of ordinary Dutch burghers who rescued Jews in their hour of duress.

Last October, the Associated Press reported that Hendrikus and Martha Snapper, a deceased couple, were posthumously honoured by the Yad Vashem Holocaust memorial authority in Jerusalem for having sheltered a Jewish family, Levy and Rosa de Hartog and their five children, in the town of Naaldwijk. In November, the New York Times published an obituary of Johtje Vos, a woman from the village of Laren who is credited with having saved 36 Jews.

From a broader perspective, 25,000 out of 140,000 Jews were rescued by the Dutch during World War II. Yad Vashem has paid tribute to 4,717 rescuers in Holland, which, after Poland, has more “righteous gentiles” than any other jurisdiction.

Yet 70 per cent of Dutch Jews perished during the Holocaust. Of 105,000 Jewish deportees, only 5,200 survived. Holland’s deportation rate is thus higher than any other  western European nation.  

Diane Wolf, a University of California sociologist who has written a book on this topic, Beyond Anne Frank: Hidden Children and Postwar Families in Holland, is distressed by these stark statistics.

Having done the research, she said that Holland has the dubious distinction of being the only western Europe country whose Jewish deportation and murder rate was comparable to that of eastern Europe.

“What exactly does this mean in human terms?” she writes. “It means that although Holland’s prewar Jewish population was less than half that of France’s, more Dutch than French Jews were deported and killed, in both absolute and relative terms.”  

“If you were a Jew in France, you had a higher probability of surviving,” she added in an interview during Holocaust Education Week.

She ascribes Holland’s poor record to several factors.

As in Poland, but not in France, the Germans administered Holland through a system of direct rule. “That made it more dangerous to resist,” explained Wolf, who headed Davis’ Jewish studies program from 2000 to 2001. “There was almost full collaboration by the Dutch civil service and police. Adolf Eichmann said, ‘The Dutch are a pleasure to work with.’”

A small minority of Dutch joined the resistance movement and assisted Jews, but a similar number were pro-German and basically unsympathetic to the plight of Jews.

Significantly, the vast majority of Dutch lay low and went about their business as if nothing had happened, she observed.

Contrary to conventional wisdom, the Jews of Holland were not as well integrated into Dutch society as commonly believed.

As a  result, few Jews knew Christians well enough to ask for help when they most needed it.

“Jews were seen as a separate group, and on the whole, there was not much interaction between Jews and non-Jews,” she writes. “Dutch mainstream society was always very aware of who was Jewish, even if Jews were highly assimilated.”

Wolf, whose mother was born in Anne Frank’s hometown, Frankfurt, Germany, claims that both the Dutch monarchy and the government-in-exile exhibited “complete indifference” to the fate of their Jewish citizens by virtue of  their “lack of concern” over the deportations.

The Dutch railways deported Jews to the Westerbork concentration camp, while Dutch Nazis and local police were involved in the roundup of Jews.

“There was no dearth of Dutch willing to help the Nazis,” she said.

As for Anne Frank, Wolf is unequivocal. “The Dutch betrayed her,” she said, alluding to the man who informed the Germans where she and her family had gone into hiding in Amsterdam.

During the Nazi interregnum, 5,000 Jewish children, mostly under the age of five, were hidden. Brought to safe havens by members of the resistance, they were passed off as non-Jews so that they and their foster parents would not be exposed to Nazi retaliation.

“They underwent massive identity makeovers in their moves from their natal Jewish families to their life-saving Dutch gentile families, in which their names, places of origin, histories and religions were radically revised,” she states.

Dutch rescuers usually hailed from working-class and middle-class backgrounds and were motivated by altruism, religious beliefs or financial gain, said Wolf, who discovered the topic when a Dutch colleague told her about Dutch state involvement in Jewish family reunification after the war.

In general, the children were well treated, though some were subjected to anti-Semitic slurs.

Their problems really began after Holland was liberated from the Nazi yoke in 1945. As one of Wolf’s 70 interlocutors admitted, “My war began after the war.”

In her estimation, 3,500 hidden Jewish children survived. The rest were betrayed and murdered.

Most of the hidden children were reunited with their biological parents, often in gut-wrenching scenes in which they failed to recognize them and desperately wished to remain with their foster parents.

“It was a traumatic experience for everyone concerned,” said Wolf, adding that some parents, whether biological or foster, resorted to kidnappings to reclaim the children.

Ultimately,  hundreds of them ended up with their gentile foster parents, much to the indignation of the Jewish community.

In cases where one of the biological parents had died, a child’s fate was determined by a central government committee, headed by a strict Calvinist who felt that Jews had to be “saved” from Judaism. The committee’s Jewish membership was composed of assimilated Jews, she said, noting that Orthodox Jews and Zionists were excluded.

The sometimes cavalier manner in which   these children were treated mirrored broader attitudes toward Jews as the war wound down, Wolf explained.

Refusing to create separate welfare organizations to deal with the rehabilitation of postwar Dutch Jews, the Dutch government-in-exile hewed to the belief that Jewish survivors should be helped by Dutch or international Jewish charities. Dutch authorities claimed  they did not want to emulate the Nazis and make an exception of Jews, arguing that special treatment could stoke the fires of anti-Semitism.

Wolf does not buy these arguments, saying that they smacked of insensitivity and, perhaps, anti-Semitism.

“All in all,” she writes, “the reception Dutch Jews got when they returned or reintegrated into society was mostly unexpected and quite negative.”

In summing up, Wolf claims that the history of hidden children in Holland is not a pretty story, shattering the myth that the majority of Dutch resisted Nazi tyranny and helped Jews.

Similarly, Holland’s postwar policies toward Jews, including its miserly attitude toward the repatriation of Jewish property, were at best insensitive and at worst anti-Semitic.