Symbol of National Pride
The St. Louis approached the Dutch shore on the afternoon of June 18. A small steamer, the Jan van Arckel, pulled alongside and took 181 passengers into the port of Rotterdam. Like most of his countrymen, 25-year-old Jan de Hartog, the skipper of a tour boat on the Amsterdam Canals, had closely followed the news of the dramatic voyage of the refugee ship.
The son of a Dutch Calvinist minister, de Hartog was raised in the northern Dutch city of Haarlem. (In honor of their hometown, early Dutch settlers named upper Manhattan “Nieuw Haarlem.”) From an early age he exhibited a love for the sea, and even ran away at age 11 to become a cabin boy on a Dutch fishing trawler. In early 1940, de Hartog produced and starred in a film about the Dutch navy, “Somewhere in Holland.”
At almost the same time, his first novel appeared: Holland’s Glory, which depicted the life of Dutch sailors in striking and glamorous terms, was published just days before the German invasion of Holland in May 1940. The novel became an instant bestseller and de Hartog became a living symbol of Dutch national pride.
“People put the book in their windows with the title facing outward, with candles by the side,” he later recalled. “There were stacks of the books in the shop windows of butchers and haberdashers who had never displayed a book before.” More than half a million copies were sold.
The German occupation authorities regarded de Hartog as a threat. They banned the book and the film on the grounds that they were arousing “national passions,” and de Hartog went into hiding to avoid arrest. At one point he lived in an old age home, disguised as an elderly woman.
“The Dutch film studios were closed, and everybody connected with them was thereby officially unemployed and liable to be deported to Germany as slave labor,” de Hartog recalled many years later, in a talk at Weber State College in Maine.
“We decided to go underground and form the ‘Underground Theatre,’ which would travel through the country and perform in barns and haylofts and, in the case of the Zuider Zee [the famous Dutch bay], in those large sheds where the fishermen dried and mended their nets. As we thought it was too dangerous for women, we decided it would have to be a play for men only. Of course that was a silly conclusion; as it turned out the women were much better at underground activity than the men, but that’s another chapter.”
Searching for Hiding Places
In the summer of 1942 the Germans began preparations for the mass deportation of Dutch Jews to Auschwitz. On July 6, Anne Frank and her family went into hiding in an Amsterdam attic. Themselves refugees from Germany, the Franks were undoubtedly well aware of what happened to the St. Louis. In fact, Anne’s mother, Edith, wrote to a friend in 1939: “I believe that all Germany’s Jews are looking around the world, but can find nowhere to go.”
Before the war began, the Franks had sought permission to immigrate to the United States. Otto Frank, Anne’s father, filled out the small mountain of required application forms and obtained supporting affidavits from the family’s relatives in Massachusetts. But that was not enough for those who zealously guarded America’s gates against refugees. In fact, in 1941 the Roosevelt administration even added a new restriction: no refugee with close relatives in Europe could come to the U.S., on the grounds that the Nazis might hold their relatives hostage in order to force the refugee to undertake espionage for Hitler.
