The Just, page 4
Tillmanns realised he was trying his successor’s patience. After a brief explanation of a consul’s duties, he handed over the paraphernalia. Fifteen minutes later, Zwartendijk was back outside. To get to his own office on Laisvės Alėja, all he had to do was cut diagonally across the street.
‘We’ll have a sign next to the door,’ he said to De Haan and Van Prattenburg. ‘Consulate of the Kingdom of the Netherlands. With a lion and everything. I’m sure you’ll like it.’ They were too surprised to respond at first.
Koen de Haan, twenty-nine years old, was married and had a son Robbie’s age. Robert van Prattenburg, who had just turned thirty, was also married, but so far had only his cacti to care for. He had an apartment full of succulents in the city centre. But that would soon change; his wife was expecting a child in August.
‘They won’t be happy about this at the plant,’ De Haan predicted. The assembly plant was crawling with Nazi sympathisers. Zwartendijk had suspended the worst rabble-rousers, in consultation with De Haan, but there was still a great deal of support for the Nazis among the workers, most of whom were German Lithuanians.
Maschewski feared that Lietuvos Philips would be branded a foreign company, much more than it ever had been. After the Soviet occupation, the new regime’s first move would be to nationalise foreign companies. Maschewski feared that the sales force would panic. If the company was rapidly nationalised, they’d be the first to go; a planned economy had no use for travelling salesmen.
Lietuvos Philips really was a Lithuanian company. To avoid high import duties, Philips had set up independent firms all over the world and built assembly plants. Most parts came from the parent company in Eindhoven, but the radios, gramophones, transmitters, and medical equipment were assembled locally. Different models of radios and gramophones were sold in each country: the Germans preferred dark oak for the case; the Lithuanians, light-brown walnut. The Lithuanian branch was relatively small, while the Polish and Hungarian branches were medium-sized, like the Swedish and German ones. They made different product ranges; the Lithuanian subsidiary assembled only radios and gramophones and ordered its light bulbs from the Polish Philips factory. Each company had a degree of autonomy. The directors didn’t have to obtain permission from headquarters for every little thing, but all over the world, the employees – some 45,000 in 1940 – worked for the international Philips conglomerate. For a company like this, with offices in almost seventy countries, the world war posed painful dilemmas.
It had been company policy since 1919 for each international subsidiary to be integrated as fully as possible into its national economy. There were licensing agreements with RCA in the United States and Telefunken in Germany for the production and sale of vacuum tubes. That was not a problem in peace time, but Hitler’s expansionism had clogged the channels of international trade.
The next day, Zwartendijk met with his sales force. Maschewski was right: they disliked the idea of a consular office in the same building, which would emphasise the company’s Dutch character. He downplayed the duties of the consul, just as De Decker had on the phone, and told the salesmen that Lietuvos Philips would be nationalised in any case when the Soviet Union annexed the country. What difference would an extra sign next to the door make then? But he predicted that the Soviets would proceed with care, because they would want the company to manufacture good radios for them without too much delay. The salesmen seemed a little calmer by the time they left, if not entirely convinced.
Zwartendijk waited exactly two weeks before he informed head office in Eindhoven. On 14 June, he sent a brief report:
The mood in the office is very tense, because of differences of opinion and everything they entail. Unfortunately, this situation makes it impossible for me to plan a visit to Eindhoven for the time being, and in any case, I would be unable to travel there. As far as work goes, we have enough for the next few months. Only the factory is idle at the moment; I had to let twenty men go there.
… The envoy in Riga has asked me to perform consular duties, and I have agreed. The consul here, who was not a Dutchman, got a case of nerves after the invasion of Holland and bowed out.
He had briefly entertained the idea of asking head office for permission to act as consul. Then he remembered what De Decker had said: Philips had been placed under German administration. He no longer had any way of knowing who would receive his reports. Anthony Guépin or Jan Schaafsma, his longstanding contacts? Or some Dutch fascist, or, worse still, the German administrator?
The letter took an unusually long time to arrive, almost three weeks. The copy in the Philips archives is marked ‘received 5/7’. By then, the situation in Lithuania had grown dramatically worse.
4
Scales and cacti
That Friday, 31 May, Jan Zwartendijk could feel how tense he was after his meeting with the sales force, and hoped he could shake it off by focusing all his attention on his family. He left the office much earlier than usual, at four-fifteen, to pick up Edith from her piano lesson. Although he’d never done this before, it suddenly seemed only natural that he would. She had a weekly lesson right after school on Fridays.
Her strict Russian teacher lived entirely für die Musik – or so it had seemed until Edith began coming home with more colourful tales. The woman was always overheated, gave piano lessons in her slip with her legs spread wide, and smoked one cigarette after another, sighing, ‘Ach, Kind, can’t you tell it doesn’t sound good …’ When Edith played her scales too slowly, she would get a rap on the knuckles. Whenever that happened, she would respond the same way: ‘Liebe Frau Lehrerin, I can’t learn that way.’
The door was ajar. He hesitantly pushed it open and entered the house, guided by the sound of the piano. With a tentative cough, he said, ‘I thought I’d pick up my daughter myself for once today. Tensions are running high in the city.’
‘There’s no denying it, Herr Direktor. War is coming.’
And sure enough, there she was in her white silk slip, seated on a straight-backed chair beside Edith, who was struggling to believe that her father had come just for her. The shoulder bands were halfway down her upper arms.
‘As a Russian,’ he said, ‘you don’t have much to fear …’
‘Ach, Herr Zwartendijk, do you really believe that? True, I would have nothing to fear if I were a Bolshevik. But a Russian who fled to Lithuania? Your daughter needs to play more at home, Herr Zwartendijk. Practise, practise, practise. Every week, I tell her she’ll never get anywhere if she doesn’t master those scales first.’
Edith in a school photograph taken in Eindhoven, 1938.
‘I’ll make sure she does. But now I’d like to take her out for ice cream.’
‘Just as I suspected, you spoil the girl. But ach lieber Gott, I have such fond memories of the two or three times my father pampered me. So go on, but I warn you, I will charge full price for the lesson.’
He had to chuckle at that.
‘Dad, is something wrong with Mam?’ Edith asked in the car.
‘No, sweetheart, don’t you worry. I wanted to surprise you, and the city is in such confusion. No one at the office is acting normal anymore.’
‘Are we really going for ice cream?’
‘What do you think of the place next to the pastry shop?’
‘Be careful, Dad. You’ll be in plain sight of your office.’
‘How was school?’
She shrugged. She tried to say as little as possible about the German school, so that her parents wouldn’t worry. They would think it was much too strict. Whenever a teacher entered the room, the students had to close their desks, jump to their feet, stand at attention, and clearly say, ‘Guten Morgen, Herr Lehrer.’ They might has well have been in the army, except that they weren’t quite expected to salute.
They had school uniforms. The girls wore white blouses under pinafore dresses with dark-blue georgette skirts, smooth at the waist and pleated. Their peaked caps were royal blue with silver edging. Edith thought they were gorgeous, and would have chosen the German school for the uniforms alone. But her father had said, ‘I preferred the way you looked in Kralingen, in your regular clothes.’
Gymnastics meant drilling. In the schoolyard, they had to take off their shoes and skirts, and march in circles in the pouring rain, freezing cold, or snow – barefoot, in their underpants. She didn’t mind that either; five minutes of marching warmed you up. When she told her mother, Mammie said, ‘What a bunch of thugs!’, even though Mammie – she often spoke German to her mother, but never called her Mutti – had gone to a German school herself.
Most of the students were Prussian Lithuanians, Volksdeutsche. When she visited one of her classmates, she was shocked to see that her small wooden house was on the verge of collapse. The interior was full of statuettes of saints, but unfurnished except for a table, a wooden bench, and a sideboard. There were also a couple of wealthy German children at the school. They didn’t want anything to do with the Volksdeutsche, who were looked down on by everyone in Lithuania.
The other foreign students, like her Russian friends and the Swedish girl in her class, had no more trouble at school than Jan and Edith. Their nationality was never an issue. The Jewish children had been taken out of the school by their parents. They no longer felt at home in that German-speaking environment.
Edith (seated) with her Russian friends, Kaunas, 1940.
Her father obviously had no idea what he was doing; first he took her to the ice cream parlour next to the pastry shop, and then to the terrace of the Metropolis Hotel for more ice cream, served in a glass dish.
‘Aren’t you spoiling me, Pa? It’s only Friday.’ As far as she knew, Friday was not a day for goodies. They didn’t get sweet treats until Saturday, and of course on Sunday, when they would visit the Stoffels and wolf down one piece of apple pie after another.
The Stoffels lived next to their market garden in Kaunas; but eight kilometres out of town, in the village of Dainava, they had a second home with a large orchard around it. In the summer months, they would rent a farm on the banks of the Memel River (now the Neman) for Saturday afternoon and Sunday, and the farmer and his wife would spend the night in the hayshed. On Sunday evening, they would hurry home, because they couldn’t leave their garden and orchard untended for more than a day and a half.
Lenie Stoffel was seventeen years younger than Kees. They had three children: Anneke and Alice and one boy, Pieter, who had red hair and a protruding chin. He was a rather unusual boy, in Edith and Jan’s opinion. He always wore a sailor suit and a military cap that concealed his red hair. If anyone knocked the cap off his head, he would scream and shout. The girls wore Lithuanian dress.
Kees’s family was in Deventer, and had always traded in wood. Kees himself had begun his career as a forester in Archangelsk. By 1920, when he had to leave the Soviet Union, he had been married to the Latvian Lenie Barnehl for just over a year. Lenie’s father was an Anabaptist preacher from a village near Riga. Kees returned to the Netherlands with Lenie, but couldn’t adjust to the country of his birth. He used his inheritance to buy land in Kaunas, and started a market garden. Aside from cucumbers, not many vegetables were available in Lithuania. Kees introduced spinach, endive, chicory, Brussels sprouts, and peas to the market, supplying all of Kaunas.
Besides her native German, Lenie also spoke Latvian, Lithuanian, Polish, and Russian, and could get by in Yiddish. She was a charming woman who made friends easily and liked to have lots of people around.
Kees liked to help Dutch families who settled in Lithuania. ‘We were so naïve in those days,’ Edith recalls. ‘We didn’t know a thing about the situation in the country, and just took it all as it came.’
Robert van Prattenburg had more insight into the real state of affairs. He followed political developments from day to day. Twenty-five years after the war, he could still paint such a detailed picture in the Philips employee periodical that it sounds like an eyewitness account written at the time:
Events surged forward at a dizzying pace. The Germans felt confined by their borders and longed for Lebensraum. The first to fall prey were the Czechs. Chamberlain set out to Munich, but his umbrella of peace did not provide the protection he had hoped. In March 1939, the Memel Territory adjoining Lithuania was reunited with Germany. Germany also wanted a free hand in Danzig, but the Poles refused, supported by England and France. Germany and Italy forged a military alliance, and on 23 August the foreign ministers of Germany and Russia, Joachim von Ribbentrop and Vyacheslav Molotov, made a pact of non-aggression between the two countries. On 1 September 1939, German forces invaded Poland. Two days later, England and France declared war on Hitler’s Germany. On 17 September the Russians, deciding to play it safe, occupied the east of Poland. Ten days later, Warsaw fell into German hands. Lithuania found itself in an awkward position, sandwiched between two totalitarian powers. It had always been faced with the fallout of war: Russian refugees from 1917 to 1920 and then multitudes of Volksdeutsche from the impoverished post-war Reich. Now Polish Jews on the run from the German armies were fleeing into the country. As the large neighbouring countries changed their positions on the Baltic states, there were corresponding shifts within Lithuania. At first, Russia limited its ambitions to Finland, Latvia, and Estonia, allowing the Germans to cast a covetous eye on Lithuania’s territory. As a result, the Reich citizens living in the country were soon parading around in brown Nazi uniforms. As the German war machine rolled on, the Russians developed a new interest in Lithuania. When they made treaties with the three Baltic states, the Germans living there started to keep a slightly lower profile.
As a boy, Robert had dreamed of being a radio sportscaster and covering the Amsterdam Olympics of 1928. Instead of a radio reporter, he became a radio salesman; but in the article above, you can hear an echo of his early enthusiasm. Robert devoured the news, sitting by the radio night after night, and passed on what he’d learned to Zwartendijk and De Haan. A report from the Philips personnel department describes him as ‘very calm, very cooperative, and very compassionate’. After the war, he managed the company’s Norwegian branch for twenty-seven years, becoming ‘a Norwegian among Norwegians’ and, according to that same report, the ‘father figure of the Norwegian organisation’. He identified so strongly with the Norwegians that he eventually took Norwegian nationality. He already possessed all those qualities in Lithuania, and immersed himself in the society around him. The only difference was that he grew cacti in Kaunas and orchids in Norway.
De Haan – who would become the manager of the Philips car-radio factory in Tessenderlo, Belgium, in the 1960s – had a practical nature. His first question was always, What do we need to do? Then Zwartendijk would have to come up with an answer.
The three of them made a good team. Under Zwartendijk’s leadership, they formed a ‘small but militant organisation’ (as Van Prattenburg put it) in Lithuania. The two ambitious young men at the start of their careers were given plenty of room to grow by Zwartendijk, who had ten years of international experience under his belt and saw good management as mainly a question of good listening. Even before he became a consul, Zwartendijk was something of a diplomat.
Kees and Lenie Stoffel kept pointing out to the Philips men that there was just as much hatred of the Poles in Lithuania as there was of the Russians. In 1918, on the eve of Lithuania’s independence, Poland had snatched a quarter of its land and occupied the historic capital of Vilnius. At first, the desperate Lithuanians looked around for a strongman to lead them. The coup of 1926 smothered parliamentary democracy and paved the way for the dictatorship of president Antanas Smetona. When even he could not turn the tide, the Nazis were seen as the great hope. But their popularity was short-lived. After Hitler annexed the Memel Territory, the Lithuanians no longer trusted the Führer.
The last summer afternoon with the Stoffels. Standing (l to r): Koen de Haan, Pieter Stoffel, Robert van Prattenburg, Jan Zwartendijk holding Robbie, Kees Stoffel. Seated in the middle row: Lenie Stoffel with Jan Junior and Erni to her right and Mrs De Haan, Edith, and Mrs Van Prattenburg to her left.
The Stoffels must have explained that Lithuanian anti-Semitism was born not of any desire for racial purity, but out of the envy and frustration inflamed by the extreme right-wing party Iron Wolf. In the late eighteenth century, Russia had sent its poorest Jews, by the millions, to Lithuania, Latvia, and Poland. In all three countries, they served as cheap labour in the manufacturing and textile industries. In Lithuania, they specialised in processing fur, and a few tried their hands at farming, to the irritation of the Lithuanian farmers, who were unable to earn a decent living.
The Lithuanians wanted to be rid of the Jews – the sooner, the better. But not entirely, because then they would have to harvest their own potatoes, close most of their textile factories, and tear down whole districts of Vilnius and Kaunas, full of small businesses, sweatshops, and other workplaces. ‘It can’t have escaped you,’ Stoffel said to the Philips men, ‘that Lithuania is the only country in the region that still has open borders for Jewish refugees from Poland and Czechoslovakia.’ Yes, Van Prattenburg said, it was a striking contradiction.
Once they had covered the Eastern Europe situation, it was time to relax. Zwartendijk and Jan swam across the Memel while Erni and Edith watched from the bank. Edith wanted to join them; she wanted to do everything her father and brother did. But she didn’t dare. And she didn’t blame anyone but herself for that. The Memel had a strong current. Jan senior had swum in the Rotte and Maas Rivers throughout his childhood, sometimes going against the current for several kilometres. Little Jan swam like an otter. And by the time he finally returned to dry land, he would be panting like a steam engine.
