Willy Lindwer is a man on a mission, actually several missions. I met the 78-year-old Dutch documentarian at his home in Jerusalem’s Abu Tor neighborhood primarily to discuss his latest film, Lost City, which is due to be screened at the Jerusalem Cinematheque on Holocaust Remembrance Day, April 24.
The Holocaust and digging into its whys and wherefores have informed the Emmy Award-winning filmmaker’s personal timeline and, subsequently, professional life from the off. His filmography incorporates over 50 titles, with around half devoted to various aspects of the Holocaust and Dutch Jewry. He has also put out several works that panegyrize Israel and some of its blue-chip characters, such as Vienna-born Jerusalem mayor Teddy Kollek and Yitzhak Rabin.
Lindwer is justifiably proud of his Israeli portfolio. He rolls off a list of some of the topics he has portrayed in the country he settled in just over 20 years ago.
“I came here in 1995, but only partly, because I had my company in Holland, and we finally made aliyah in 2004,” he said.
He may not have set up permanent shop here at the time, but he dived headlong into the thick of Israel’s political, historical, and social fabric, profiling some of our most prominent figures on the way.
“Between 1995 and 2004, I made numerous films here,” he said. “The first one was my biography of Teddy Kollek. It was just after he left office.”
Curiously and, no doubt, unrelatedly, Lindwer recruited Aliza Olmert, an acclaimed artist, to write the script for his paean to Jerusalem three millennia after its founding, a 1995 three-part series called Jerusalem: Between Heaven and Earth. Olmert’s husband, Ehud, succeeded Kollek as mayor of the capital in 1993.
The Lindwer oeuvre also features films about Africa and the Far East, and about art, but the Holocaust has always been central to his professional and personal ethos. Considering he is only here with us thanks to his Polish and Ukrainian-born parents managing to find a safe hideaway during the Nazi occupation of the Netherlands, that makes perfect neat sense. They were among the estimated 25,000 to 30,000 who survived the Holocaust out of a total pre-World War II Jewish population of 140,000 to 150,000.
Death machine tram
Lost City tells the story of the trams that were used to transport Jews to Amsterdam train stations, from where they were shipped to death camps.
The film includes a substantial amount of footage of Lindwer and his lifelong non-Jewish friend Guus Luijters traveling on a vintage tram, similar to those that were in satanic Nazi service during World War II, talking about the deportations and the role of the Amsterdam public transport system, and other atrocities committed against Dutch Jewry.
Lindwer also recruited an array of Holocaust survivor interviewees for the film, including now-107-year-old Jerusalem resident Mirjam Bolle-Levie, who served as secretary of the Jewish Council of Amsterdam during the war. And there is Ina Groenteman-Rosenthal, who relates how her family’s Dutch neighbors burgled their home while the family was being detained by the Nazis.
Luijters was not just Lindwer’s “friend of 60 years,” as he put it. Luijters, who recently died, was an acclaimed writer and journalist. Inter alia, he had devoted seven years of his life to co-writing In Memoriam. The book contains painstakingly accumulated information about around 20,000 children who were killed during the German occupation of the Netherlands.
I ask Lindwer whether he thought, or perhaps knew whether, the tram that he and Luijters rode in the film had been used as part of the Nazi death machine.
“Correct!” he exclaimed. “I was very emotional when I picked the tram out [for the documentary]. I told Guus I’ve made many films about the Shoah, but I’ve never made a film about Amsterdam [in the context of the Holocaust]. I wanted to make a film about Amsterdam and what happened to these 80,000 Jews! How is it possible to deport, in a little over a year, such a huge number of people? How do you do that?”
Lindwer didn’t rein in his feelings during our conversation and was patently emotionally engaged with the subject matter. His personal backdrop fueled his eagerness to get the film done, and that goes some way toward explaining the fire in his voice and demeanor as he sits next to Luijters on the vintage public transport carrier.
Indictment of a nation
Lost City is not just about the crimes the Germans perpetrated against the local Jewry. It is also an indictment of Holland as a nation and its conduct during the war. We know that Germany had the full support and active cooperation of locals in many of the countries it invaded. Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Hungary, and Ukraine certainly did their part to assist the Nazis with their murderous work. Lindwer said that it applies equally to the Dutch.
“How many [German] Nazis were there in Holland? Not many – around 200 to 300. They worked only with collaborators. Like they murdered my [paternal] grandmother in Ukraine in 1941, by the einsatzgruppen (Nazi paramilitary death squads), with the help of the Ukrainians.”
Lindwer’s father fled the antisemitism in Ukraine in 1931 and had hoped to bring his mother to safety in the Netherlands. Lindwer’s mother had experienced pogroms and other antisemitic violence in Poland. That had a catastrophic effect on their families but also made Lindwer’s parents keenly aware of the warning signs and ultimately led to their own survival.
“My parents went into hiding in 1942,” the documentarian noted. “Because my parents came from Eastern Europe, they knew what antisemitism meant. When they started to deport Jews [from the Netherlands] in July 1942, my mother said, ‘We are not going anywhere; we’re going into hiding. We know what is going to happen.’
“They were Eastern European Jews – not like the Dutch Jews, who thought they were Dutch, so nothing would happen to them. My parents had a long history of persecution and pogroms, which didn’t happen in Holland. That’s why they immediately ran out of Amsterdam. They returned in 1945, and I was born nine months later.”
Hence Lost City. “That is why I wanted to make this film,” Lindwer continued. “I wanted to know what happened to all those other Jews from Amsterdam who did not survive.”
In the film, Lindwer skillfully puts the dark past in the here and now from the outset as color footage of contemporary Dam Square, the historical center of Amsterdam, seamlessly dissolves into an archival black-and-white scene of the same spot, showing the invading German Army striding into town as locals look on. I got the impression that the Dutch faces expressed a mixture of bemusement and shock. Lindwer sees it differently.
“You see the archive footage on the streets of Amsterdam, how they were all standing like this,” he said, raising his arm and imitating the “Sieg Heil” Hitler salute. “Not all,” I interjected. I’d watched the film a couple of times by then. “No, they were all standing like that,” he came back at me.
Pivotal invoices
Lindwer’s angst and Holocaust baggage – and, hence, his motivation for making Lost City and the rest of his Holocaust-themed filmography – are palpable.
“There were all those Dutch people who loved Hitler,” he continued, adding some documented beef to his claims. “The archives were opened in January, about all those who helped the Nazis. There are 500,000 people in that archive! That’s a lot!” he declared.
He said that made things a lot easier for the Germans and paved the way for the mass transfer of Jews to the concentration camps. “There were only a few hundred, maybe a thousand, Nazis in Amsterdam. There were not 10,000 German soldiers in Holland.” So, I posited, they knew they could rely on the local population. “Of course,” Lindwer said. “that was the whole system.”
Lindwer has the tangible fiscal black-and-white evidence of the Amsterdam tram company’s collaboration with the Nazis, and doing its damnedest to assist the Germans in deporting and murdering as many Jews as possible, in the quickest and most efficacious manner. “I discovered 23 invoices for this story. Nobody has ever seen them before, except for one researcher who told us about them.
“Here are all the invoices,” he said, referring me to a pile of papers, “every month, how many Jews, from which places, wherever they took them to the train stations on their way to the extermination camps.”
The discovery of the invoices also helped Lindwer tie up a loose end he’d left hanging for close to four decades. That also brings us to his biggest official kudos to date, which sits proudly in a glass cabinet in the corner of his office in Abu Tor.
“I discovered the last invoice, of August 1944. I discovered it because I did the film The Last Seven Months of Anne Frank in 1988, when I received the [International] Emmy Award. Here it is,” he said, pointing to the fetching trophy in the glass showcase with understandable and justifiable pride.
“And here’s the Golden Calf [award]. That’s the big prize of the Dutch film industry. That one I got for Jewish children in the war.” That film was called Child in Two Worlds, a 1993 documentary about Jewish war orphans who were raised by Christian families.
BACK TO Anne Frank. “At that time, I analyzed what happened to the Frank family from the moment they were taken out of the house behind [better known as the ‘secret annex’]. They were brought to the Nazis there, who were in two terrible buildings in the city. You see them in the film. And from there to the prison.
“But I could not make a reconstruction of what happened from the prison to the train station. How did they go? By foot, by bus, by truck? I found it here!” he exclaimed. “I discovered it, in the last invoice [of the 23], from August 8, 1944, that is from the prison to the central train station. That is the day Anne Frank and her family were taken away. I discovered they went by tram. Here’s the proof.”
There it was, in plain typewritten columns, the names of Annelies M. Frank – the posthumously celebrated young diarist’s full name – along with her sister, Margot, and parents, Edith and Otto.
Lindwer feels that the Netherlands, as a country, has a lot to answer for with regard to the Dutch people’s actions, and inaction, while the Holocaust unfolded there.
That came as something of a surprise, considering the large number of Righteous Among the Nations titles awarded to Dutch people by Yad Vashem. Holland is second only to Poland on the international list. But, when you weigh the 7,280 recipients from Poland against a total Jewish population there of around 3.5 million, and compare it to the number of Dutch laureates – 6,066 – who helped some of Holland’s far smaller Jewish community, of 140,000, that logically leads one to conclude that the Dutch were, by and large, far kinder to the Jews.
“That is a wrong conclusion,” Lindwer stated. “Why is it wrong? Out of the 140,000 Jews in Holland, 102,000 were murdered. 80,000 lived in Amsterdam. Out of those 80,000, some 62,000 were murdered, and 48,000 were brought by tram out of the Jewish quarter and [subsequently sent] out of Amsterdam to the concentration camps,” Lindwer asserted.
That could not possibly have happened, the filmmaker stressed, without robust local underpinning. “As I mention in the film – and this is a very important element of the film – the Nazis were able to take out 62,000 of the 80,000 Jews in a little over a year without anyone in Amsterdam lifting a finger to help them. On the contrary, the Dutch police played a horrible role.”
Lindwer pointed an accusatory finger in that direction when he was a fledgling filmmaker. “My first film on the Holocaust was about the Dutch police in 1969. I was at film academy at the time.
“What I show in this film, Lost City, are all the invoices that were sent by the Amsterdam tram company to the Nazis for every month bringing away so many thousand Jews.
“Do you think I can conclude that the Dutch were so good?”
