Gertrude van Tijn was a German-born Dutch Zionist and feminist. In the 1930s, she worked tirelessly to help Jewish refugees from Nazi Germany. A recent biography by Bernard Wasserstein focuses on her wartime activities, which involved the impossible moral choices that became all-too-common during the Holocaust. Saskia Coenen Snyder writes in her review:
[I]n 1941, the SS officer Klaus Barbie . . . demanded the names and addresses of Jewish students who had left the [work-village for Jewish refugees from Germany established by van Tijn]. Barbie vowed that he wanted the list so that the students could return [there], and, believing him, van Tijn provided him with the information—a decision she would regret for the rest of her life. The people on van Tijn’s list ended up among some 300 young Jewish men who were arrested and sent to Mauthausen. Few of them survived.
The following year, as head of the department called Help for the Departing, which fell under the umbrella of the [Netherlands’] Jewish Council, van Tijn witnessed the process of name selection and the drafting of deportation lists at the council’s headquarters in Amsterdam. . . . Van Tijn, having vowed never to hand over one more Jewish name after Barbie’s betrayal, distanced herself from the proceedings. In fact, Wasserstein found that she objected and submitted her resignation to [a council leader], who promptly declined to accept it. She remained a staff member—thereby exempt from deportation—of a highly controversial administrative body.
Wasserstein correctly points out that our judgment of van Tijn depends on what she really knew about the horrors in Poland in 1942 and 1943. Did her supply of baby diapers, boots, toothpaste, and blankets aid and comfort deportees in a time of need, or did the operation of the Help for the Departing contribute to the deception that Jews really were going to the East for labor service? Based on van Tijn’s personal records, Wasserstein leans toward the former and ultimately defends her, convinced that she . . . acted out of genuine humanitarian concerns for the well-being of her people under extraordinarily difficult circumstances.
Read more on Marginalia: http://marginalia.lareviewofbooks.org/possible-moralities-in-impossible-times-by-saskia-coenen-snyder/