Invisible Years Q&A with Daphne Geismar

Your family had a Holocaust drawer?
In 2006, I visited the church in Rotterdam where my grandparents, Chaim and Fifi de Zoete, had been hidden in the attic during the Holocaust. When I returned to Connecticut, I asked my mother if she had anything that would tell me more about the particulars of her and my father’s experiences under German occupation, and also the experiences of other family members. She surprised me by leading me to an antique desk and sliding open a bottom drawer packed with journals and papers. Inside this drawer, she had put everything Holocaust related (subsequently referred to as the Holocaust drawer). The quantity of material that survived is remarkable.

You spent more than a decade researching and writing this book. That’s a long time. What drove you?
The writings and documents of my grandparents, found in the Holocaust drawer, were in Dutch or German. I wanted to know what they said. While I knew more after I had the documents translated, I still had a lot of questions. For example: Where was my paternal grandfather hiding when he wrote his memoir, and what were the circumstances that led to his capture and murder in Auschwitz? Who was the resistance worker who delivered my mother’s poems and drawing to her parents, who were hiding separately? What was the significance of April 23, 1943—the date that both of my maternal grandparents noted as the day that “all Jews must disappear?” I wanted to know more about the historical references in my family’s writings, so I read books about the German occupation in the Netherlands by Presser, De Jong, Dawidowicz, Van Pelt, and others. My family’s combined multigenerational accounts, supported by historical facts, allowed me, for the first time, to comprehend the evil and horror of the Holocaust. I was driven to figure out a way to communicate this to others.

What’s the significance of the book’s title to you?
The initial inspiration for the title came from my mother, Mirjam. She was eight years old when the Germans occupied the Netherlands in May 1940. Not long after, the restrictions against Jews began. Her father, Chaim, lost his job, so they could no longer afford their house; Mirjam couldn’t go to public school, public parks, markets, or cultural venues; she had to wear an identifying Jewish Star; she had to turn in her bicycle. Then, her friends, cousins, aunts, uncles, and a teacher disappeared. Reflecting on this experience, she wrote, “Your whole life was one scary time. You tried to make yourself invisible.”

The title also alludes to the nearly three invisible years that my grandparents, parents, aunts, and uncles spent in hiding—and to the decades in which the details of their wartime experiences were invisible to my generation until my mother opened the Holocaust drawer.

Could you describe the church attic where your grandparents were hidden?
When the reverend asked the sexton to prepare a hiding place in the church attic for my grandparents, the sexton informed him—to his surprise—that another Jewish family had already been hiding there for a year. They prepared a second place, on the other side of the organ pipes, for my grandparents. Access to the attic hiding place was by a retractable ladder, through a trapdoor, which was covered with a cloth when closed. The attic sat below a steeply pitched roof, its brick and cement walls were windowless, and there was no floor—only joists, forcing one to step from beam to beam to avoid falling through the ceiling below. It was frigid in winter and suffocating in summer. In one of my grandfather’s many diaries, he wrote in great detail about a raid on the church, including a careful diagram of his hiding place.

Could you share the story of the spoon?
On a Saturday in April 1945, my grandparents had their midday meal in the organ loft, just below the attic hiding place. When the meal was finished, my grandfather put their dishes on a stone wall by the trapdoor inside the hiding place; a safety measure in case someone entered the organ loft. My grandmother went to sleep in the attic and my grandfather returned to the organ loft to read. Shortly after, he heard multiple footsteps, looked out over the nave through a peephole, and saw the Nazi police searching the church. As he climbed back into the hiding place and stepped over the stone wall, a spoon rattled. He raised the heavy ladder, being careful not to let it bump against the edge, hearing the Germans below him in the foyer. They enter the organ loft, searching, their heads just below my grandfather’s feet. My grandfather remained motionless. Finally, the sexton’s wife came to the attic with the news that the Nazis had left and had taken her husband. When they turned on the light, they realized that a spoon lay on the edge of the stone wall, millimeters away from clattering to the floor above the Germans’ heads. Had the spoon had fallen, my grandparents would likely have ceased to exist.

Your grandparents got to see one of their daughters once while they were in hiding. How?
Chaim and Fifi’s youngest daughter, Hadassah, had to change hiding places after the first year. For a short time, she stayed with Riek Dekkers, a nurse, resistance worker, and close friend of the Reverend Brillenburg Wurth and his wife, who were hiding Chaim and Fifi. Ms. Dekkers took Hadassah to visit the Brillenburg Wurth family at the church. While Hadassah was playing with the children, chickens, and rabbits in the courtyard garden, her parents left their hiding place to watch her from a window in the church tower. Chaim wrote, “It was the only time we saw one of our three children during the nearly three years of hiding.”

You’re a book designer by profession—have done work for major museums and top universities. Was this project more difficult because it was more personal?
It was an intensely personal project about an extremely difficult subject. Surprisingly, that’s not what made it difficult. The most difficult part was the all-encompassing nature of my involvement. When I work on books for others, I typeset and design the publication and manage the printing and editorial processes. On Invisible Years, I hired translators; created an archive with detailed documentation; did historical research; visited archives in two countries; created the narrative; wrote the introduction and other non-narrative sections; pieced together family trees and timelines; collaborated closely with a developmental editor, Holocaust historian, and copy editor; directed the photography; retouched and silhouetted the images; did the typesetting and design; managed the printing; applied for grants; and found an agent and publisher.

Most of your source material was from your mother’s side of the family, but there was one absolute gem from your father’s side—a 49-page memoir by your paternal grandfather. How did that come to be in your family’s possession?
When my paternal grandmother, Grete, died, her papers went into my mother’s Holocaust drawer. When my mother revealed the contents of the drawer to me, I discovered my grandfather Erwin’s memoir concealed in an envelope from the Union Electric Company of Missouri. He began writing on July 21, 1943, in the Amsterdam apartment where he was hidden, two days after he had sent his thirteen-year-old son, David (my father), to a safer address. Writing in his native German, Erwin meticulously documented the occupation, his work for the Jewish Council, and his distress over the fate of his family and all Jews. Six weeks later, he was captured by the Germans, and, on November 19, 1943, murdered in Auschwitz. I assume the woman who hid Erwin found his memoir and gave it to Grete after the war. 

Do you have a favorite photograph in the book and, if so, could you tell us about it?
One of my favorites is of my uncle Nathan, taken shortly after the war—a boy on the cusp of manhood. The portrait reminds me of Paul Strand’s beautiful and compelling photographs from the same time period. Nathan’s eyes and mouth reveal a multitude of emotions from anger and grief to vulnerability and sweetness, with a touch of mischievousness still shining through.

 Nathan hid with his entire family at the home of a Dutch policeman, Theo van Dalen, whose mission was to sabotage the German war effort. Nathan’s account is filled with adventure—and even humor—as he tells about exciting events such as a staged robbery, by Van Dalen and his father, to obtain false identity papers and coupons. Nathan also describes interactions with Allied airmen and German deserters who took refuge in the Van Dalen home. After liberation, Nathan learned that ten aunts and uncles and eight cousins had been murdered in the concentration camps.

Though it’s the story of your family, the book seems larger somehow. Did it feel universal to you while you were compiling it?
While reading my family members’ letters, diaries, and interviews, I realized that the people, places, organizations, and events mentioned in their combined accounts tell the history of the Holocaust in the Netherlands. Their stories reveal the danger of unlimited authority, racism, and cruelty inflicted by one person on another. They show how ordinary people were turned into an invented enemy—slandered in their own country, not welcome in other countries, stripped of their rights, and even murdered. At the same time, their accounts of resistance workers who risked their lives to help friends and strangers show us how one person can make a difference by having the courage to act, resisting what is not right, and seeing every person as fully human.