The 1940 German invasion and occupation of the Netherlands succeeded in trapping 140,000 Dutch Jews (1.6% of the total population), including 34,000 Jewish refugees from Germany, Austria, and the former Czechoslovakia who had entered the Netherlands between November 1938 and May 1940. The absence of geographic hiding places coupled with the efficiency and cooperation of the Jewish Council, the Dutch state bureaucracy, the Dutch Police, and the Dutch Military Police made the Nazi effort to cleanse Holland of Jews easy.
The 5200 Jewish deportees to Auschwitz-Birkenau and Sobibor who survived often married or remarried soon after Liberation, but many of these unions soon proved to be disasters. Psychological and physical wounds from the camps could not heal. Home life was marked by great sadness, extreme feelings of guilt, and often stringent rules of behavior.
For Simon Hammelburg, a well know Dutch journalist, minor diplomat, and son of Holocaust survivors, Broken on the Inside is a novel about Dutch Jewish survivors and their children. Based on his own life as well as interviews with 1200 other survivors and their children, Hammelburg describes in poignant terms how he and twelve other children of survivors escaped their tormented home life by joining Habonim-Dror, the Socialist Zionist youth movement. Though only one of the young people in the novel succeeds in making aliyah, the rest remain loyal to Israel and the memories of their grandparents, aunts, uncles, and cousins.
Hammelburg uses his novel to focus on another aspect of World War II, namely the brutal treatment that Dutch women and children suffered following the Japanese capture of the Dutch East Indies (modern-day Indonesia) in March 1942. Most of the 29,000 Dutch women and 33,000 Dutch children were separated from their fathers and husbands in wretched internment camps. Hammelburg portrays one character, Esther, under these conditions: starved and beaten, Esther witnesses the rape of her fellow inmates by Japaneses guards and several occasions is forced to whip her own mother. Repatriated to Holland at the end of the War, she joins Habonim-Dror in an effort to escape her mother’s terrible memories her father, physically and psychologically crippled by his forced labor on the Burma-Thailand railroad. Esther and the other eleven characters of Broken on the Inside present Hammelburg’s challenge to the Dutch government and citizenry to recognize the terrible losses suffered by Holland’s Jews throughout the mid-twentieth century.
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Carl J. Rheins was the executive director emeritus of the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research. He received his Ph.D. in Modern European History from the State University of New York at Stony Brook and taught courses on the Holocaust at several major universities.
