Protestant Church apologizes for treatment of the Jews

Thirty years ago, we invited hundreds of people to come to Dordt College to talk about the Second World War, especially to talk about what that war had done in the Netherlands. At that time, the college enrolled hundreds of students who were the children or grandchildren of Dutch immigrants who'd come to Canada and America after the war's carnage left their homeland in tatters. 

What we knew was that the vast majority of those students came from families who had taken a role in the Dutch Resistance. Some Dutch people, like Corrie Ten Boom, hid Jews from the Nazis. Some hid Dutch men who refused to be arrested and taken to Germany to work in munitions plants in support of the Nazi war effort--so called onderdykers, who disappeared under the cover of sympathetic friends and family. Some Resistance fighters pulled off armed robberies, securing ration cards to support the thousands of Jews hidden all over the country. All of them did that work at great, great risk. Preachers who maintained that what was happening to the Jews ran powerfully contrary to God's law could be--and were--arrested, often taken off to infamous concentration camps from which they never returned.

The hundred or so visitors to our campus might be somewhat surprised to read that the Dutch Protestant church last week officially acknowledged its guilt in allowing so many of its Jewish citizenry to die during the war. Of the 140,000 Jews in Holland in 1940, 100,00 were systematically eliminated by Hitler's madness. Our students parents and grandparents would have been surprised, I'm guessing, because so many of them risked their own and their families' lives the Underground.

Historians have determined that most active force to resist the Nazis were, first of all, the Marxists, who were bitterly opposed to national socialism. Dutch Marxists fought the Nazi occupation more frequently and more violently than any other group in the Netherlands. 

But the second most dedicated group were what researchers call "the orthodox Protestants," a designation which includes the church from which my own denomination has descended. Dutch men and women with "orthodox Protestant" roots operated in the Resistance in numbers that came up a close second to the Marxists and significantly exceeded Roman Catholics and less orthodox Protestants.

Why? Just exactly who will dare to risk his or her life for another human being, men and women they didn't know and may not have liked at all--is impossible to answer definitively. Historians claim that an examination of religious motives generally reveals that those Christian believers who took the Old Testament seriously were most likely to risk their lives for Dutch Jews. Those who believed that the Old Testament's tenacious regard for "the children of Israel" wasn't simply some odd tribal myth, an interesting but irrelevant biblical theme. Orthodox Protestants were among the most likely to risk their lives in defense of others, particularly Jews.

I'm saying that those who came to Sioux Center, Iowa, in 1991 a conference we titled "Suffering and Survival," would have been surprised to hear the Dutch Protestant church now admits its failure to do more. 

While many of our constituent immigrant Dutch parents and grandparents participated in the Resistance, no European country that suffered German occupation lost more of its Jewish citizens than the Netherlands.

There's nuance. There's always nuance. Some who helped the Nazis also helped the Resistance. Some resisted in private. No one ever knew. When the war ended, some who did important things were black-balled because most of the populace assumed they were collaborators and acted, sometimes brutally, upon that assumption.

The conference was, I believe, a smashing success. Lots of those who had resisted had never talked much about those experiences, especially those who suffered greatly. For almost a year Diet Eman told me she didn't want a book about her life because what she had done in the Dutch Resistance was something anyone would have done and so many had. She didn't believe she should be somehow singled out for taking a moral stand that anyone would act upon. 

One of the speakers at that conference was Diet Eman. She was a stand-in for a Resistance fighter from California the Dutch government had found for us, a woman who took sick a week before that fall's conference. Diet was a sub.

Some still small voice in me makes the claim that confession is good for the soul. I can't help think that things needed to be said, even though it's now 75 years since the Nazi horror, and so much of what happened way back then seems ancient history.  

No one else in Europe so freely gave up so many of its own.

You can read the account here.