This accompanies Jan Burzlaff’s Contemporary European History article Silence and Small Gestures: Jews and non-Jews in the Netherlands (1940–1945)

For Edith G., a forty-year-old Jewish woman from Hamburg, it happened in Zeist, a small Dutch town east of Utrecht, in February 1945. Until then, she had successfully escaped from the jaws of death. In the fall of 1944, a critical moment when the last deportation trains were heading east, she decided to go into hiding. Yet in February 1945, with the Allies looming large, she briefly stepped outside her hiding place. In a desperate gesture of arbitrary retaliation, Gestapo officers began to arrest a group in front of Edith: “they wanted bicycles — so they lined up people,” she remembers in her 1985 interview. Suddenly, an unknown man, who was witnessing the scene, approached her and said “that I should put a scarf over my head and run. I did, and the first house took me in. I waited two hours until it was over.”

When we think about “rescue” in the context of mass violence, we tend to think about our family, friends and acquaintances — people with whom we share long-standing ties — and the outcome alone. But rescue only becomes rescue when the danger is over. Why do strangers help us, sometimes most fleetingly? In my research on the Holocaust in Western Europe, I often came across stories like Edith’s. Here, a Dutchman judged she “looked Jewish” and reacted as soon as he sensed her mounting panic. On her end, Edith quickly decided to run away. Last but not least, strangers welcomed her into their home. What we see here are moments of spontaneous support and shelter at a critical juncture. Warning someone on the street with a nod of an impending raid or preventing someone from entering a building where such a raid was underway were common actions, especially in cities with fewer than 20,000 inhabitants. How can we explain this?

The answer, I believe, carries an important lesson for our own deeply polarized societies. Spontaneous support and help are not only rooted in empathy (as important as it is) but in the effects that polarization has on discriminated and persecuted minorities. My article argues that various segments of Dutch society, at one time or another, preferred fleeting acts of solidarity to open protests and active resistance against the Nazis. Because non-Jews understood that anti-Jewish measures were not negotiable, these supportive interactions, however temporary or modest, became part of wider civil disobedience. As Dutch society split along the lines of approval or rejection of anti-Jewish policies, general observance of the Nazi laws could also allow for small acts of kindness toward Jews by entire villages, neighbours and their extended families, strangers on the street, and ambivalent officials. Many accounts of survivors and victims point to what one might call “silent groups”: not silenced in the sense of a muzzled population, but the ways these groups use silence as a weapon. A smile, silence, or a helping hand can all go a long way in countering, if not halting, violence, persecution, and betrayal.

Silence and Small Gestures: Jews and non-Jews in the Netherlands (1940–1945) by Jan Burzlaff