One morning in May 1941 Gertrude van Tijn—a middle-aged Jewish woman bearing a Dutch passport—arrived at Lisbon airport after an adventurous journey from Nazi-occupied Amsterdam.

The Portuguese capital at that time was a place of strange incongruities and topsy-turvy values: an island of peace in a continent at war, the seat of government of an authoritarian police state that boasted of being Britain’s “oldest ally,” and a magnet for international intrigue. The city was also the main embarkation point for refugees from Nazi-dominated Europe seeking desperately to secure passages to the Western Hemi sphere.

Who was Gertrude van...

“Almost all the things I remember of my childhood are acts of rebellion,” wrote Gertrude van Tijn in her unpublished memoirs.¹ She called herself an “exasperating child,” and the independent-minded outlook with which she approached everything throughout her life was deeply rooted in her character and in the circumstances of her upbringing.

Gertrud Franzisca Cohn, as her name was rendered on her birth certificate, entered the world “during the worst hailstorm in history” on July 4, 1891, in Braunschweig (Brunswick), the historic “Lion City” in Saxony. Her father, Werner Cohn, a merchant, was born in 1854 in the small town...

The Holland to which the Van Tijns returned had been radically dislocated by the onset of the Great Depression. No country was immune, but the Netherlands felt the effects with a special intensity. At first it seemed as if, notwithstanding the surrounding turmoil, the family would resume a placid, conventional existence. Jacques found a well-paying job as an engineer with a large company headed by the Jewish industrialist Bernard van Leer. He took a lease on a house belonging to the wealthy Boissevain family in Blaricum, to the east of Amsterdam.

An artists’ colony, Blaricum was a delightful small town,...

The 1930s were for Gertrude a decade of personal as well as political upheaval. In 1930, her beloved younger brother, Walter, committed suicide in New York after losing a fortune in the Wall Street crash. In 1933, her close friend Pieter Vuyk died. Although she made a speedy recovery from her heart attack the following year, she felt under enormous strain. In early 1936, she wrote to Norman Bentwich: “I would gladly give five years of my life if I had the strength of character to dissociate myself from this work, but even then I would probably cheat providence, as...

By 1939, Gertrude was recovering from the breakup of her marriage. She had always enjoyed male company. After her divorce and the deaths of her friends Vuyk and Ter Meulen, she formed a close attachment to Professor Curt Bondy. An agronomist and educator, Bondy headed a training farm at Gross-Breesen in Silesia until his departure from Germany in November 1938. He acted as an adviser at the Wieringenwerkdorpbefore moving to England, where he took charge of a refugee camp. A bachelor, Bondy was a little younger than Gertrude, who visited him in England several times. In intimate conversations,...

The Netherlands endured the next five years as a satrapy of Germany. On May 18, 1940, Hitler appointed Arthur Seyss-Inquart as Reichskommissar, or head of the occupation regime. But for the most part, the Germans preferred, at least at the outset, to rule through the existing Dutch administration. Initially, there were just two hundred German civil servants in the country, and the number never rose beyond about two thousand at any point of the occupation.

One of the architects of the Anschluss and a former deputy head of the occupation authority in Poland, Seyss-Inquart was an unswervingly loyal acolyte of...

Immediately upon Gertrude’s return to Amsterdam in the second week of May 1941, she was again summoned to SS headquarters to report on her trip to the same official who had dispatched her. According to Gertrude’s account, he addressed her with crude discourtesy and made her stand throughout the interview. He seemed dissatisfied with the Joint’s failure to commit a specific sum for shipping passages, although Gertrude assured him that what ever was necessary would become available.

A few days later, Gertrude wrote to Lisbon that “the situation here is extremely trying and the nerves of all our friends, who...

In the summer of 1942, the Nazis began deporting Jews from the Netherlands to death camps in Poland. Eichmann had visited Holland in April, inspected Westerbork, and told Zoepf that transports would begin in the summer.¹ In early May, Heydrich and later Himmler came to discuss arrangements. On June 11, Eichmann presided at a meeting of SS officials from France, Belgium, and Holland to discuss the deportation of tens of thousands of Jews to the east, among them twenty-five thousand from the Netherlands. Following further consultations, Eichmann, on June 22, increased the projected size of the Dutch contingent to forty...

In addition to her new position, Gertrude still operated as head of the council’s emigration department. Its workload had diminished, as innumerable barriers now faced Jews who sought to leave. An office memorandum in November 1942 noted that over the previous three months, only about forty people had been able to emigrate. Presumably this referred only to legal departures.¹ Gertrude, however, declared it “an error to suggest that this department is now dormant.”² The numbers were small, but she worked with almost frenetic energy, conscious that behind the statistics were human souls being rescued, one by one, from mortal danger....

By late 1942, the machinery of mass murder was operating at full throttle. Initial limitations based on age, sex, or state of health had been set aside: children, the elderly, and invalids were all dispatched for “labor service in Germany.”

On January 21, 1943, a police unit, commanded by Aus der Fünten, raided the Jewish mental hospital at Apeldoorn and hurled hundreds of patients pell-mell onto trucks. At Apeldoorn station, Zoepf supervised the loading of prisoners, some of them in straitjackets, in nightgowns, or naked, onto goods wagons. Fifty-two nurses volunteered to go along to look after them. Patients and...

On September 29, 1943, the eve of the Jewish New Year, nearly all surviving Jews in Amsterdam, including the leaders of the Jewish Council, were rounded up and sent to Westerbork. Aus der Fünten informed Cohen and Asscher that the council, having fulfilled its purpose, was now dissolved. A residual office remained in Amsterdam for a year, whereupon its handful of remaining employees went “under water.” The one department of the council that continued to perform some useful function was Help for the Departing, which dispatched parcels containing food and other aid to inmates at Westerbork for another eleven months.¹...

“It is really like being re-born and I am still really rather dazed,” Gertrude wrote to her daughter in America a few days after her arrival in Palestine. “I am quite slender again and my hair is quite white…. If only life did not include sleepless nights and remembrance of all I have seen.”¹ The “serenity of landscape and manner of living” in Palestine formed “too much of a contrast with the rather tumultuous thoughts” that tormented her.²

Gertrude’s friends rejoiced in her escape from Europe. “When we saw your name on the back of an envelope from Palestine, I...

The life of Gertrude van Tijn, especially the record of her activity between 1933 and 1945, touches on some of the central moral-historical issues of the twentieth century. Those were famously articulated and addressed by Gertrude’s contemporary Hannah Arendt in her bookEichmann in Jerusalem. There, she excoriated the Jewish councils in occupied Europe, whose members she portrayed as pusillanimous instruments of the Nazi genocidal apparatus.

Gertrude shared many characteristics with Arendt. Both were products of the assimilated German-Jewish bourgeoisie; both were brought up barely conscious of their Jewish origin; both acquired in their twenties a sudden awareness of and...

In the summer of 2011, as I began to write this book in Amsterdam, my wife suggested that we take a look at the different addresses where Gertrude had lived in and around the city. We started at 585 Keizersgracht, Gertrude’s home in Amsterdam during the First World War. A few weeks later, we visited the “Wooden House” in Blaricum, to all external appearance little changed since it had been the Van Tijn family’s residence in the 1930s. Next we called at the former “Prins Hendrik” boarding house at 28 Prins Hendriklaan, where Gertrude had rented a small flat in...