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by Patrick S. Wolfe

I – Evolving Perspectives on the Holocaust in Holland

The Netherlands was occupied by Nazi Germany from May 14, 1940 until May 7, 1945. These years increasingly became a time of privation and horror for much of the population, especially the country’s Jews, most of whom were swallowed in the Holocaust’s maw.

In the first years after the Netherlands’ liberation, the prevailing view of Dutch wartime behaviour “was not too nuanced,” historian Frank van Riet writes in The Jewish Guards: Supervision in the Dutch Gateway to Hell (2022).^[1] While this prevalent but facile perspective is understandable after the trauma of the occupation, it also fostered what van Riet calls “the myth of a ‘national resistance’.”^[2] This myth was discredited in the 1960s. First, in 1965, when Jacob Presser published Ondergang (Downfall), which came out in English three years later as Ashes in the Wind: The Destruction of Dutch Jewry. Second, in 1969, when Friedrich Weinreb’s three-volume, 1,800-page memoir Collaboration and Resistance: An Attempt at Demystification “exploded,” in historian Jacob Boas’s words, “on a complacent, prosperous Holland like a bombshell.”^[3] A shady, deeply controversial figure who was tried and imprisoned by the Netherlands after the war, Weinreb was later investigated by the country’s State Institute for War Documentation, which concluded he ”was ‘one of the most successful fantasts of the Second World War’ whose every action was governed by ‘personal desires for power, money and sex.’”^[4] Boas emphasizes that “Collaboration and Resistance dismisses the fond postwar notions of a heroic Dutch resistance to the Nazis as ‘ridiculous,’ a ‘fairy tale’.”^[5]

Similarly, van Riet maintains that Presser’s book “set in motion a short but violent generational conflict,” which “had profound consequences for public opinion.”^[6] While The Jewish Guards primarily addresses supervision and control at the Westerbork transit camp in the northeast of the Netherlands, which was the last stop for most of the country’s Jews before the death camps in the east, the book also continues the historiographic reappraisal process, specifically related to Westerbork’s alleged “Jewish SS.”

The Nazis began introducing antisemitic measures during the autumn of 1940 and ratcheting them up that winter. This included the placement of “Jews not welcome” signs in restaurants, cafés and coffee houses. At one point, these signs were displayed in nearly all such establishments in Amsterdam, but most were quickly removed by the business owners. These and other measures prompted a series of violent clashes that culminated in the massive Amsterdam strike of February 25-26, 1941, protesting the persecution of the Jews.^[7]

Although the strike was quickly suppressed, Presser’s contemporary and fellow historian Louis de Jong referred to it in The Netherlands and Nazi Germany (1990) as “the first and only antipogrom strike in human history.”^[8] But Bob Moore, an historian of the next generation, maintains in Victims and Survivors: The Nazi Persecution of the Jews in the Netherlands, 1940-1945 (1997) that “while the heroism of the strikers and the ‘particular dignity’ of the action cannot be denied, it has to be said that it failed to deflect the Germans from their task.”^[9] Little more than two weeks after the strike, Dr. Arthur Seyss-Inquart, Reichskommissar of the German occupation government, called for a policy of “for us or against us.”^[10] Moreover, in the spring of 1942, when Dutch officials, on German orders, once again placed “Forbidden for Jews” signs in restaurants and other public places, they encountered virtually no resistance.^[11]

Moore also stresses that the Nazis’ civilian occupation government in the Netherlands allowed “greater scope … for the SS, German police, and the Nazi Party to operate unhindered,” compared to the German military regimes in Belgium and France.^[12] This had devastating results for the Netherlands’ Jews, 73 per cent (102,000) of whom died against 40 per cent of those in Belgium and 25 per cent in France. Of the Netherlands’ 140,000 Jews, 107,000 were arrested and deported to the death camps; only 5,000 returned after the war.^[13] Of the remaining 33,000, about half survived by hiding, including Presser.^[14]

The Nazis established their policy of mechanized genocide at the Wannsee Conference of January 1942. Mass deportations of Jews from Germany to Poland had begun in October 1941, the same month that the second of two planning meetings occurred to work out the mechanics for removing the Netherlands’ Jews. The plan for the Netherlands also included steps to increasingly isolate its Jews: first, in February 1942, by requiring that their identity papers bear a stamp indicating that they were Jews and, second, in early May, that they wear a yellow star on their outer clothing. At the same time, following notable public statements by Nazi Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels in November 1941 and Hitler in early 1942 on the pending annihilation of the Jews, the Nazis decided such statements could prove counterproductive by prompting protest and resistance in occupied Western Europe, so they began emphasizing the euphemism of Jewish resettlement.^[15]

During the violent clashes in the run-up to the Amsterdam strike, the Germans had demanded the creation of a Jewish Council, which spread the fiction of resettlement and served as a tool of Nazi manipulation and coercion. As with the council, the Nazis accomplished much of their “dirty work” at Westerbork through the Jews themselves.^[16] Originally built as a central camp for Jewish refugees in the Netherlands, it began operation in October 1939.^[17] When the Germans invaded the country on May 10, 1940, Westerbork housed approximately 700 refugees. This number grew to 1,527, including 270 children, by July 1, 1942, when the Dutch transferred control of the camp to the Nazis.^[18]

II – Westerbork:
Commanders and Key Individuals

With the German invasion, Westerbork’s refugees were evacuated by train to prevent their possible capture by the Germans. At Leeuwarden, they were housed by local families until they were returned to Westerbork on May 27. In the interim, consideration was given to interning the refugees in Amsterdam, but this was rejected as they might “attract the attention of the Germans,” which “could have adverse consequences for all Jews living in the Netherlands.”^[19]

During the summer of 1940, Dirk Arie Syswerda, Westerbork’s commander, was replaced by Jacob Schol, who, as commander of the Hook of Holland refugee camp, had a proven record for leadership and discipline. Compared to Syswerda, Schol was expected to run a tighter ship at Westerbork. This included preventing Westerbork’s German refugees “from being sent back to Germany.” A Reserve Captain in the Dutch army, Schol apparently believed that “a more stringent policy” based on clear regulations, firm discipline and control, and appropriate punishments was the best way to protect the refugees; if the camp ran smoothly, the chance of German intervention would be minimized.^[20] Both Schol and the Dutch Gendarmerie, which assumed responsibility for policing the camp on March 1, 1941, maintained generally positive relationships with the Jewish residents.^[21]

Behind the scenes, major changes were brewing. In conjunction with their planning for the Final Solution, the Nazis would have decided during the latter months of 1941 to convert Westerbork into “a transit camp for all Dutch Jews and Jews residing in the Netherlands.” In addition, Westerbork was to be expanded. Arrangements were made in early 1942 to build 24 large wooden barracks to house 5,000 to 7,000 people. Construction “started without explanation as to why this was done. Documents prove that they waited until the last moment to do this.”^[22]

On February 19, 1942, anticipating the forthcoming German takeover, Schol modified the camp’s organization by establishing 13 service groups to cover “all parts of the camp organisation.”^[23] This important initiative was “proposed” by Kurt Schlesinger, one of Westerbork’s first German Jewish refugees. He was initially “employed building the camp,” subsequently joined the camp’s “Jewish Council bureaucracy,” and ultimately became the controlling figure in what van Riet refers to as “the Jewish self-government” that largely consisted of German Jewish refugees;^[24] “Dutch Jews did not arrive … until the summer of 1942.”^[25] This highly significant progression, which determined what Westerbork would become, was enabled by Schlesinger’s suggestion of inmate participation in the camp’s operation, which “led to the changes in the camp structure of March 1942,” according to Moore. Boas, who was born at Camp Westerbork on November 1, 1943, becoming Inmate 9378, notes that the changes included “the formation of a … Jewish police force,” the Ordedienst or OD.^[26]

July 1, 1942 is not only the date the Dutch government transferred Westerbork to the Germans, it’s also the date it became a transit camp and that SS-Sturmbannführer Dr. Erich Deppner became the first German commander.^[27] Deppner made three notable decisions. First, to order Schol to remain in his position after Schol said he was resigning. Schol “gave in not because of [Deppner’s] order, but because he had received requests and even pleas … to stay. One of these pleas came from the Jewish Council in Amsterdam,” which asked him to “defend the Jews.” Deppner quickly transformed “the refugee camp into the gateway to the murder factories” (the first transport left Westerbork for Auschwitz on July 15), but he “did not have enough staff… to take over the camp as a whole.”^[28] Deppner’s second decision was “to appoint Schlesinger … camp administrator.” His third decision was to award 2,000 of Westerbork’s 3,000 original inmates, most of them German Jewish refugees, long-term resident status, exempting them from deportation.^[29]

Deppner’s second and third decisions appear to be responses to the problematic first transports to Auschwitz. According to Boas, “July 15 and 16 were days of confusion and tumult such as Westerbork had not seen before. On both days a total of four hundred inmates—almost all German Jews—was ordered to join a transport of Jews from Amsterdam for the journey East.” This caused “a furor … among the Alter Kampinsassen [the long-term residents]. They felt betrayed by the [Amsterdam] Jewish Council [which] had openly avowed their intent to place foreign Jews” at the top of lists of Jews to be deported.^[30] Hence, Schlesinger’s appointment as camp administrator and the special exemption given to many of the long-term residents, which greatly strengthened the position of the refugee German Jews. Moreover, Deppner “avoided Schol,” preferring to communicate with German Jews “who, as the disgruntled Dutch Jews put it, ‘understood [the German] manner a little better.’” Boas refers to Schlesinger’s “successful palace coup.” He adds that “Schlesinger was far from being Westerbork’s only example of Nazi-Jewish osmosis, though he showed the fruition at its crudest…. Having become inured to camp life over the years of their captivity, sharing moreover with Westerbork’s Nazis an antipathy towards the Dutch and Dutch Jews, [the German Jews who were administrative bigwigs] identified with the oppressor to a degree that was both comic and revolting.” Boas also states that “Schlesinger and Deppner understood each other. When the next transport left Westerbork, not one of the ‘pioneers’ was on it. Nor would there be any on subsequent ones,” until the latter half of 1943.^[31]

Van Riet agrees that the management of the July 15 and 16 transports “caused a lot of commotion. In fact, it almost caused a riot.” Yet he tells the story differently than Boas. Where there was a shortage in the number of Jews arriving from Amsterdam, Deppner made up the difference by selecting “100 men from Camp Westerbork,” plus 50 orphans who resided there, and had 300 Jews from Camp Amersfoort “quickly transferred [who arrived] without luggage, hungry and dirty, [and] must have left a horrible impression.” Van Riet notes that it was the use of the orphans that triggered the near riot. He also references “harrowing scenes, such as the rough way the Jews were forced into the freight wagons.” All this was antithetical to camp “peace and order” that was deemed essential if “the increasing number of incoming and outgoing transports” were to be managed efficiently.^[32]

Deppner was only a temporary commander. He was replaced by SS-Obersturmführer Josef Hugo Dischner, who took over on September 1. Dischner, who Presser describes as “a rough SS man, with no brains and almost always under the influence of alcohol,” was in charge for less than six weeks. He was succeeded by Polizei Inspektor Bohrmann who was on the job for a mere three days before being replaced on October 12, 1942, by SS-Obersturmführer Albert Konrad Gemmeker, who was in command for 30 months, until just before the camp was liberated by the Canadian army. Gemmeker removed Schol in March 1943.^[33]

Gemmeker and Schlesinger are pivotal players in what transpired at Westerbork. Another important figure, as a witness, was the well-known Dutch journalist Philip Mechanicus, an inmate at Westerbork from November 7, 1942, until March 8, 1944. Of these 16 months, he spent the first nine in the hospital. He’d been “grievously ill treated” at Amersfoort concentration camp where he’d been taken on October 25, 1942, as a criminal case, after being arrested on September 27, apparently for not wearing the Jewish star. For the nine months from May 28, 1943, to February 28, 1944, Mechanicus kept a diary. On May 31, he recorded that Westerbork’s inmates believed Amersfoort was worse than the camps at Vught or Ellecom and that it represented “the peak of human misery.” On September 14, he added, “I got to know the brutes at the Amersfoort concentration camp.” It was “more than enough for one human life.” His diary, In Dépôt, was published posthumously in Dutch in 1964, slightly predating the important books of Presser and Weinreb. The English translation, Waiting for Death: A Diary, followed in 1968.^[34]

 

On August 15, 1943, Schlesinger informed Mechanicus that Westerbork’s structure and operation were “thanks to Deppner” and his key decisions. He added that Deppner’s successor, Dischner, had “wanted to bring in the SS and he sent a telegram to that effect to The Hague. But I sent off a counter-telegram to The Hague. Dischner threatened to shoot me for that. He stood with a revolver in front of me.”

Schlesinger told Mechanicus, “leaders must have the guts to say ‘no’.”^[35]

Dischner’s telegram may have contributed to the assessment that he “was not suited for the position of Commander,” for it contradicted the occupier’s goal of deporting the Jews while using as little German manpower as possible. Van Riet’s statement that the resource-strapped occupier “gratefully abused the existing camp system” points to the quid pro quo that emerged between the Germans and Westerbork’s Jewish refugees between February and July 1942.^[36] As Moore states, “the internal Jewish administration provided [the] smooth-running operation” the Germans wanted.^[37] This protected the Jewish administration’s privileged position and largely kept the dreaded SS and German Green Police at bay, although in a practical but not literal sense. Van Riet notes “the presence of only a dozen SS men, most of whom had suffered grave injuries on the Eastern Front, proved sufficient to run Camp Westerbork like a well-oiled deportation machine.”^[38] This arrangement also meant the Dutch Jews, for a time, would be deported first, while the refugee Jews would be deported later.

The Germans, Moore reiterates, were predisposed to deal “with ‘fellow’ Germans, even if they were Jews,” such as Schlesinger. This preference was also apparent with SS-Hauptsturmführer Ferdinand Aus der Fünten’s Zentralstelle für jüdische Auswanderung (Central Office for Jewish Emigration), and his staff who sent the letters summoning Jews to report for deportation. They worked closely with the Austrian Jewish refugee Dr. Edwin Sluzker, head of the Expositur, a branch of Amsterdam’s Jewish Council, which was responsible for allocating exemptions from labour service, “a disproportionate number” of which likely went to refugee Jews.^[39]

III – Westerbork:
The Refugee Aristocracy

Commander Deppner’s decisions created what Presser, Moore, and Boas describe as a camp “aristocracy” led by Schlesinger. Prior to this designation by these historians, Mechanicus, in one of his last diary entries, referred to Westerbork’s “aristocrats among the Jews: Schlesinger, Todtmann, Stein and so on…. Frau Stein [was] the dictator at the Accommodation Office,” while Todtmann was Commander Gemmeker’s “Jewish adjutant… who forms the link between the Commandant and the Registration Department.” The aristocracy “effectively determined the domination of the camp structure by German Jews.”^[40]

In addition to Schlesinger, the aristocracy’s leading trio included Dr. Fritz Spanier, who like Gemmeker was from Düsseldorf, and Arthur Pisk, a former officer in the Austrian army. Presser states Schlesinger was “the powerless and yet so powerful grand vizier of the all-powerful Camp Commandant. He and his round table were largely responsible for making up the transports for the weekly train from the ‘transport material’ available (this term was actually used)…. these paladins… had control over life and death and were accordingly flattered, influenced, bribed, envied and hated, and indeed loathed.”^[41]

Dr. Spanier was one of Westerbork’s earliest residents. Assigned to head the hospital, it became an extraordinary institution under his leadership in the even more extraordinary world of Westerbork. Moore writes, “the sick and the infirm were … nursed back to health so that they could be loaded on to the cattle wagons for the journey to Poland.” He adds, “Spanier was considered as by far the least corrupt of the aristocrats.”^[42] Mechanicus said Spanier was “charming” and “a man of some stature, a good man.” Spanier had the power to prevent members of his staff and their dependents being sent on transport, although it “could only be used sparingly.” His position was such that he reputedly “did not even rise when Gemmeker came in.”^[43]

Born in Vienna in 1891, Pisk left Austria after the Anschluss and new anti-Jewish measures made his women’s hat business impossible. He arrived at Westerbork at the end of February 1940. He headed the camp’s Fire Department. When Schol’s revamped camp organization created the OD, Pisk became its leader. The OD was initially staffed with 13 former firefighters. By July, it had grown to 20, of whom 18 were German or Austrian; two were Dutch. It developed into “a fully-fledged Police Force.”^[44]

The OD is a major focus of The Jewish Guards. Van Riet states that the background and motivation of some OD members “is explored for the first time.”^[45] The original OD uniform of brown overalls was changed to green overalls on April 27, 1943,^[46] which led to the OD being compared to the green-uniformed German police who were notorious for the roundup and arrest of Jews prior to deportation.^[47] Notably, the OD was sometimes deployed outside Westerbork to locations such as Amsterdam and Apeldoorn to assist the roundup process.^[48] The OD was “one of the most hated service groups” and was labelled by some as “the Jewish SS” and “the Jewish Gestapo.”^[49] Mechanicus recorded these phrases in his diary. Presser and de Jong both accepted and popularized the term “the Jewish SS,” a finding van Riet challenges—as will be discussed—given the complexity of the circumstances in which the OD operated.^[50]

The aristocracy extended to all those who had been exempted from deportation “until further notice,” including many long-term residents, baptized Jews, foreign Jews, Jews in mixed marriages or who worked for the German war industry or for the Jewish Council or who fell into another qualifying category.^[51] One’s category of exemption was indicated by the type of stamp on one’s personal identity card. The most valuable stamps conferred additional privileges such as smoking, a later curfew, and permission to have 250 guilders. Some long-term residents and service group members could also live in small, one-room cottages with kitchenettes, living and sleeping quarters. These provided “a world of difference from the barracks” in terms of privacy and not having to line up for the toilet, according to van Riet. The exemptions and stamps helped control the flow of Jews to the death camps.^[52] Presser called it “a wicked system of distinctions [and] a satanic application of the dictum ‘divide and rule’.”^[53]

Starting in 1941, the distinctions also included “lists,” identified by different names, that supposedly offered potential means of escape from deportation. “One of the most sought after lists was that organized by the German official Calmeyer, involving an investigation of ancestry by means of which one could present oneself as an ‘Aryan’,” writes Presser. “And there were all kinds of people… who arranged methods of evasion, emigration, exemption on a very long-term basis…. All the lists [had an admission fee and] smashed sooner or later.” This was true of Friedrich Weinreb’s list, which had its greatest success at Westerbork, but was revoked on February 3, 1944; “the bulk of his exemptees” were put on the transport to Auschwitz that left five days later. Presser quotes Mechanicus’s astute observation: “A list is a collection of Jews who will one day be deported.” Nonetheless, the subsequent investigation into Weinreb by the Netherlands State Institute for War Documentation found “that being on Weinreb’s list materially improved one’s chances of survival, from the 20 percent that was the Dutch-Jewish rate as a whole to a range of 28 to 38 percent.”^[54]

The exemptions, stamps and lists were always under threat of change and often operated in complex ways. Mechanicus was divorced from a mixed marriage, a union that had produced a child which he refers to as “an ‘Aryan’ child” and “my half-Aryan daughter.”^[55] In September 1943, after “A number of divorced partners from mixed marriages departed with the latest transport,” he observed: “Jewish fathers and mothers of ‘Aryan’ children are at present given Theresienstadt [concentration camp] as a mark of favour, whereas if Jewish men are found with ‘Aryan’ women they go to a [worse] camp where they are sometimes unlucky enough to be killed.”^[56]

As exemptions were cancelled, Westerbork’s aristocracy shrank and shifted. On July 7, 1943, a year after the deportations began, Gemmeker “announced that the stamps of all residents, with the exception of those with a blue ‘Z’, were no longer valid.” This was part of a camp reorganization. “In addition to the blue ‘Z’, a new group was formed, consisting of a maximum of 1,623 men and women between 14 and 65 …. They had to be able to be fully deployed in the labour process.”^[57]

Two months later, when department heads were “to nominate … ‘workers’ for a prolonged stay in the camp,” Mechanicus noted that Dutch Jews were “given preference…. [N]ow… baptized Jews, applicants for Palestine, Long-Term Residents, are finding it is their turn to worry about deportation.” He added, “All at once the portals of Theresienstadt,” which had largely “been reserved for German Jews…. have been opened to Dutch Jews.” In December, he stated explicitly, “The status of the Long-Term Residents has been lowered and undermined.”^[58]

Although undergoing some changes in the latter half of 1943, the privileged position of many of the long-term residents was a source of ill-will between the Dutch Jews and the German Jews. Presser referred to “the Long-Term Residents [as] the lucky ones,” but others, like Louis de Wijze, a newcomer who arrived at the camp in early October 1942, came to believe the long-term residents had “suffered as much and often even more than the Dutch Jews.”^[59] Apparently, Commander Deppner, in mid-1942, “felt that the German Jews had suffered enough and that it was the turn of the Dutch now.” Mechanicus, who brought a professional journalist’s thoroughness to describing the respective situations of Westerbork’s German and Dutch Jews,^[60] noted that “sentimentality of this kind or rather such sensitivity with regard to the just apportioning of all the violence and injustice inflicted on the Jews is not, as a rule, in keeping with the National Socialist regime.”^[61]

Boas maintained, in Moore’s words, “that three or more years of camp life and the view that they had been abandoned, both by the Dutch government and their co-religionists, made the German Jews … ill-disposed towards their Dutch counterparts and … enthusiastic to exploit their new positions of power.”^[62]

Mechanicus makes several points about the superior, sometimes abusive, attitude of the German Jews. First, “The German Jew, accustomed to… efficiency and thoroughness, cannot endure the lack of discipline or the touch of anarchy and individualism to be found in the Dutch Jews.” Second, by behaving like “National Socialists or Prussian soldiers,” the German Jews create “permanent tension…. This evil is to be found mainly in the subordinate staff, in hut leaders, porters, kitchen bosses, work leaders, people who, for the most part, have been given their authority and a say in things for the first time in their lives. They have been given some power and they abuse it completely.” Third, “these brothers of the same race… cannot stand one another. The Germans despise their Dutch camp companions and the Dutch hate the German Jews, not as fiercely as they hate the German National Socialists, it is true, but they do hate them because they are Germans—Prussians…. accustomed to playing the leader wherever they are.” According to Boas, an “unbending antagonism … kept German and Dutch Jews at daggers drawn.”^[63]

Notwithstanding examples of Dutch Jews being put on transport for insulting German Jews,^[64] it was de Wijze’s view that the use of Jews to deport other Jews was, in van Riet’s words, “perhaps one of the most gruesome and refined cruelties of the occupier,” which created “great inner struggle” for many. “Every day the residents experienced the fear of being sent on transport if they refused to do what was asked of them.”^[65] Van Riet adds that “the constant threat of being sent on transport if they refused to cooperate … kept the system functioning.”^[66] Indeed, thanks to this threat, “it was hardly necessary to apply physical violence.”^[67]

IV – Westerbork:
The Transports

The arrival and departure of the trains was Westerbork’s central reality. Presser said the trains were the camp’s “dynamic factor”; Mechanicus said they created “constant tension.”^[68] According to Boas, “the train was [Gemmeker’s] obsession just as much as the inmates’. Both lived in complete thrall to its appetite—Gemmeker by wishing to satisfy its voracity, the Jews by wishing to escape it.” October 1942 was “the biggest transport month of all”; it saw “fifteen thousand Jews [enter] Westerbork and close to twelve thousand immediately [sent on] to Poland.”^[69]

The OD supervised people on both arriving and departing trains. Through that October, trains destined for Westerbork arrived at the Hooghalen railway station, more than five kilometres from the camp. At the start of November 1942, an extension of the rail line enabled trains to enter the camp. The OD played a support role to the Gendarmerie Detachment in unloading and loading trains at Hooghalen but assumed full responsibility for these functions from the beginning of January 1943. The first incoming transport of arrested Jews arrived on May 28, 1942.^[70]

Between July 15, 1942 and September 1944, 93 transports left Westerbork on a near-weekly basis, mostly on Tuesday mornings, most of them bound for Auschwitz.^[71] These trains, which carried varying numbers of people, were augmented by some that went direct from Amsterdam and Apeldoorn to Auschwitz.^[72] But almost “107,000 Jews and several hundred Sinti and Roma were deported … largely via Westerbork.”^[73] While Auschwitz was the terminus of all previous transports: “Suddenly on 2 March [1943], the destination was changed and 19 of the following 20 transports were sent to Sobibor extermination camp in Lublin district.” There was also a five-week break from July 20 through August 23, 1943, when no transports left Westerbork. The reason for these interruptions was that Auschwitz, during March-May, “was almost entirely taken up with the extermination of the Jews from Salonika,” after which it was “beset by a typhus epidemic.”^[74]

There were other exceptions. The trips to the camps weren’t always three days, nor was the conveyance always a “cattle truck” or “cattle car” that Mechanicus said was filled “with forty, fifty or sixty persons”; a second witness maintained “about seventy people [were] squashed into each [freight car].”^[75] On a few occasions a proper “passenger train” was used.^[76] Mechanicus mentions “real passenger coaches, for Jews, as if they are going on a pleasure trip.”^[77] This refers to “the Palestine exchange,” involving “Jews who are on the Watik List, the list of the so-called ‘Veterans’ who are to be exchanged for Germans.”^[78] Originally scheduled to depart for Celle, near Hanover, in November 1943, these Jews didn’t actually depart until January 11.^[79] Fräulein Slottke, “an agent of the Sicherheitsdienst,” the SS’s Security Service, called it “a unique transport.” Mechanicus said it left “in the middle of the day” in a relaxed manner: “The applicants could also take all their goods and chattels with them.”^[80] The January 18 transport was also “made up of third-class carriages with luggage vans for the sick and livestock trucks for provisions.” It was destined for Theresienstadt and would take “More than half of the remaining Long-Term Residents.”^[81] There were at least three other transports to Celle (February 1 and 15) and Theresienstadt (February 25) during this period, all with upgraded cars.^[82] As Boas observed: “The camp’s Long-Term Residents not only lived, ate, and dressed better than the proletariat, they also anticipated a qualitatively superior resolution of their Westerbork internment. Not for them Auschwitz, the dumping-ground of the unexempted, but the reputed comforts of Theresienstadt, the ‘Model Camp’ in the Bohemian forest.”^[83]

Whether the transports consisted of routine cattle cars or were the novel passenger car variety, they all ended during the first half of September 1944. Two factors stopped them: the Allied advance into the Netherlands and, starting September 17, a national railway strike, which paralyzed the system.^[84]

On the day the first transport left for Auschwitz, a 28-year-old woman, Etty Hillesum, began work as a typist for the Jewish Council in Amsterdam. She did this on the “urgent advice” of Jaap, the elder of her two younger brothers, to avoid being sent to Westerbork.^[85] But two weeks later, she voluntarily changed jobs, moving to the council’s Department of Social Welfare for People in Transit, at Westerbork. However, for the 13 months, July 30, 1942, to September 7, 1943, that she was attached to Westerbork, she was physically there for only five months. As a volunteer, she was permitted to leave the camp at least several times before her exemption was cancelled in July 1943.^[86] When she was absent from Westerbork, she was mostly at home in Amsterdam suffering extended periods of ill health related to gallstones that took a long time to diagnose.^[87]

Like Mechanicus, Hillesum was a diarist. Her diary, An Interrupted Life, covering March 9, 1941 to October 13, 1942, was first published in Dutch in 1981 and in English in 1983. She also kept a diary at Westerbork, but it was lost. The 1996 edition of Etty Hillesum: An Interrupted Life and Letters from Westerbork includes 125 pages of her letters which, Presser says, “are incomparable documents of their kind.” They and Mechanicus’s diary both cover the June through early September 1943 period.^[88]

“I’ve been up since four this morning dealing with babies and carrying luggage,” Hillesum wrote on June 8 about that day’s transport of 3,017 Jews, the largest to leave Westerbork. “In a few hours you can accumulate enough gloom here to last a lifetime…. The whole camp holds its breadth; another three thousand Jews are about to leave. There are babies with pneumonia lying in the freight cars. Sometimes what goes on here seems totally unreal.”^[89]

Hours after the July 6 transport, she told friends, “the uncertainty until the last minute … is precisely what saps you.” Two days later, in another letter, she added: “I must explain that the call-ups for the transport come in the middle of the night, a few hours before the train leaves. If people are still needed at the last minute to fill the quotas, then Jews are seized here and there at random from the barracks. And that’s why the days before the transport are so nerve-racking. The day afterward I fainted twice, but I’m fine again now—until the next transport.”^[90]

Hillesum and Mechanicus both compared the transports to amputations. Mechanicus also said they were like shipwrecks. After one transport, with the atmosphere “normal again,” he said it was “like a raging sea that has grown calm after a fierce hurricane.” On a rare, transport-free Tuesday, he rejoiced: “Peace and quiet. The world seems kind and merciful.”^[91]

Mid-summer 1943, Mechanicus observed: “The hospital hut with its 250 beds … is the daily setting for family reunions.” Although he did mention the fright that existed “at the prospect of deportation,” his focus was not the looming reality of the transports, it was on how people’s lives had changed.

Families sit together looking at family portraits, sometimes the only possession they managed to bring with them … apart from their personal linen. Others sit together eating their evening meal from the mess-tin that the wife has prepared…

Understanding wives try to calm nervy or impatient husbands with words of comfort. It is like a colourful market where human tendernesses are exchanged—in an atmosphere of misery on the threshold between two worlds—the familiar and established milieu with its fixed values and the world of the pauper in endless space, indeterminate and unprotected.^[92]

V – Westerbork:
A Macabre, Nightmarish, Fairy Tale World

Mechanicus’s depiction of Westerbork as the threshold between two worlds applies in multiple ways and, sometimes, as if seen in a hall of distorting mirrors. He notes, for example: “There is something loathsome going on in the background when every transport leaves. This time [August 31, 1943], while the transport was being got ready and was moving off, people were dancing. Actually dancing. Rehearsals have been going on for some time for a revue. As if Westerbork itself was not rather like a theatrical show.”^[93] Five weeks earlier, he’d remarked:

The henchmen of the Führer play a cat and mouse game with the Jews—they chase them from one corner to the other and take pleasure in their fear and gradual exhaustion. The henchman at Westerbork mocks and derides them by laying on a cabaret with light and airy music as a change from the macabre Tuesday morning transports.^[94]

Yet, earlier still, on July 13, he’d claimed: “Westerbork has the best cabaret in Holland. National Socialist dignitaries come here to see it.”^[95]

Among the performers were famous pre-war cabaret entertainers: Max Ehrlich, Chaya Goldstein and Willy Rosen. Hillesum mentions them all. Mechanicus references Ehrlich and adds Camilla Spira, the star of the new revue that opened October 16. When Spira was “Aryanized,” enabling her to return to Amsterdam, Mechanicus commented: “A great loss for the revue,” the opening of which had been “Absolutely packed out,” as were earlier revues. He had mixed feelings about the entertainment. “Over this whole revue an atmosphere of painful melancholy and suffering hangs like a haze.” Of the October 16 opening, he said: “…well-acted. A great part of the programme consisted of dancing by revue girls with bare legs. The Oberstrumführer present with Aus der Fünten. Went home with a feeling of disgust.” On September 2, Hillesum noted: “The revue is taking over the whole camp…. Before the last transport, the people who were due to leave worked all day for the revue. Everything here has an indescribably clownish madness and sadness.”^[96] She was contemptuous of the entertainers, referring to them as “the commandant’s court jesters” who, as Boas notes, “by day wheeled the belongings of the deportees to the transport train and at night basked in the adulation of the cabaret crowd.”^[97]

Of the six chapters in Boas’s compelling history Boulevard des Misères: The Story of Transit Camp Westerbork, one is titled “Cabaret” and is devoted to Ehrlich, Rosen and Erich Ziegler who Boas says, “were the three separate parts of Westerbork’s entertainment dynamo.” From the summer of 1943 through the summer of 1944, they were responsible for “a total of six original variety shows [which were presented] almost entirely in German.” Although Boas states that Rosen “raised the idea of starting a cabaret with the Commandant,” it appears the origin of the revues may go back to mid-1942. Mechanicus, in his diary entry for July 6, 1942, remarks that “among [today’s] deportees was a male nurse who had been given permission by Dr. Spanier to sing a few songs in the hospital hut in the evening, but had laid on a whole cabaret show. For this excess he was punished by deportation. We must have discipline!”^[98] (This act of Dr. Spanier’s contrasts markedly with some of the descriptions of him cited earlier. Moreover, when the wife of Dr. Elie Cohen, a member of Spanier’s staff, insulted a German Jew, resulting in the couple being put on transport to Auschwitz, Spanier refused to intercede; Dr. Cohen survived. It is notable that the report by a Herr Wohl, who visited Westerbork during the summer of 1943 to determine what made it a “model camp,” said about Spanier: “No one questions his medical ability, but there is some question as to his humanity.”)^[99]

The camp’s cultural life also featured symphony concerts, smaller musical events and a range of initiatives to create a degree of normalcy in acutely abnormal circumstances.^[100] At the outset of the five-week transport hiatus, Mechanicus reported: “…it is said the Commandant intends to establish a café chantant for the grown-ups and a playground for the children.” The playground with “four seesaws, two horizontal bars and a sandpit” was ready by the end of August. A month later, Mechanicus recorded: “The Westerbork Café opened yesterday in the old Registration Hall. Packed out, almost all young people. A string orchestra.” On February 18, he added: “Westerbork is becoming a social centre. This afternoon yet another café opened.”^[101]

There was a kindergarten for children of “two to fourteen years” so their parents could work. When the school experienced a lengthy closure due to infectious diseases, the small children were taken for a walk each morning. There was a wide variety of athletics for young people: football and boxing matches, “basket-ball,” gymnastics, ju-jitsu, and sports meets. Mechanicus remarks: “Sport is under the august patronage of the Obersturmführer.”^[102]

All of this was one world, but it could never negate the world of the transports and how Westerbork had been structured to support the transport process. Central to this structure was Deppner’s decision to exempt 2,000 German Jews. Boas describes the importance of this decision and its ramifications:

By creating this list Deppner followed a model that without exception formed the social structure in every German concentration camp: a small elite set against a powerless Jewish commonality. In the case of Westerbork, the German Jew was pitted against the Dutch Jew, the privileged against the unprivileged—in fact, those who were to live against those who were to die. The internal tensions flowing from this strife generated a state of electric tumult among the camp dwellers while leaving the Nazi rulers in a vacuum from which they could pursue their ends without perturbation.

….The camp’s elite lived segregated from the rest of the inmates in small cottages…. A Hobbesian war of all against all among the inmates, stimulated by the corrupt excesses of the Jewish elite, served to deflect hatred from the common oppressor…. [Paradoxically,] the Nazi command … managed to promote a sense of security among the inmates which contributed to the dispatch of the deportation process…. [The] abominable thoroughness … of Westerbork’s bureaucratic machine [included the immersion of the bureaucrats in a system] that had warped them.^[103]

Gemmeker, who liked to project a public persona that was “cool, methodical, efficient,” was not immune to this warping effect. It manifested in delusion and magical thinking. “Very strangely,” Boas writes, “there had grown up in his mind a belief in some sort of compact between himself and the inmates…. For such favors as being allowed to pick berries, for example, he expected grateful compliance at the time of deportation.” On one occasion when two inmates scheduled for transport escaped, “Gemmeker’s equability collapsed…. ‘foaming with rage, ranting and raving, completely beside himself, cursing [and] screaming [about] “uncomradely behavior.”’”^[104]

Westerbork “swallowed [Hillesum] whole” in November 1942 and again upon her return in mid-1943. It was a “Heath Metropolis” that experienced “successive tidal waves of Jews.” On July 8, she described misery “so beyond all bounds of reality that it has become unreal” and suggested that the best form to convey Westerbork’s ungraspable horror was “to write fairy stories.”^[105]

Two months later, on September 7, Mechanicus wrote: “A great number of orphan children have been deported without anyone accompanying them.” He was more appalled the following February. “The carrying of the invalids from the hospital huts to the train yesterday beggars description. At two o’clock in the morning the nurses had already started to dress the people who were to be deported. OD men went in front with a horse and open cart and pushed the patients lying in their beds on to the open cart, alongside and on top of one another, just as one would push coffins into a hearse…. Children with scarlet fever and diphtheria were carried weeping to the long snaking train. Children without parents from the orphanage. Perhaps the most abominable transport that has ever gone.”^[106]

Mechanicus makes frequent allusions to death—the barracks are “sepulchral huts,” a half-moon is “like a death mask,” another transport brings “the plague train again” and “Light music beside an open grave.”—yet he also reflects or exhibits uncertainty.^[107] Noting the “daily discussion about the length of the war,” he quotes the queries of one participant on June 15, 1943: “what has Poland got in store for us? What news do we ever get from there? Hardly a thing.” Seven months later, he commented: “People still do not know what happens to the deported Jews in Poland.” On February 1, when a transport of 1,000 people departed for Celle, he asked: “Where are you, you thousands and tens of thousands who have been carried from one place to another—what has been your fate?” Many things at Westerbork were “Incomprehensible” to him.^[108]

VI – Westerbork’s Chroniclers:
Philip Mechanicus and Etty Hillesum

Within a week of her return to Westerbork on June 6, Hillesum had met Mechanicus. He recorded on the 13^th: “Went for a long walk round the edge of the camp with an intelligent young girl who is here voluntarily.” He was almost twenty-five years her senior. Toward the end of the month, she wrote: “Each day Mechanicus, with whom I go for walks along the narrow, barren strip of earth between the ditch and the barbed wire, reads me what he has just written. You develop friendships here that are enough for several lives at once.” Days later, she describes him as “a stylish, strong-minded character” with whom she has “struck up a firm friendship in a short time.”^[109] In July and August, he referred to her as “a woman-friend of mine” with “a clear and perceptive mind.”^[110]

Presser says Mechanicus compiled his diary like “a war correspondent setting down his record while his life was constantly in danger.”^[111] Mechanicus also wrestled with depression. “The daily struggle against the disgust of communal life, against noise and triviality and vulgarity uses up a lot of energy.” It curbed both his “urge to make [his] notes” and his “desire to write.” Nonetheless, he concluded the same entry: “It is more important … to record the daily happenings for those who in time to come will want to get an idea of what went on here. So I have a duty to go on with my writing.”^[112]

Hillesum faced similar challenges: “it is impossible to write from here; it would take the better part of a lifetime to digest it all,” a November 1942 letter says. She was also similarly motivated. In August 1941, she recorded in her diary: “I want to live to see the future, to become the chronicler of the things that are happening now.” Eleven months later, she reiterated this sentiment. She wrote about bearing “witness where witness needs to be borne.”^[113]

On August 22, 1943, she reported: “Opposite me across the rough wooden table, Mechanicus is chewing at his fountain pen. We look at each other now and then over our little scraps of scribbled-on paper. He records everything that happens here most faithfully, almost officially. ‘It’s too much,’ he says suddenly. ‘I know I can write, but here I am face to face with an abyss—or a mountain. It’s too much.’”^[114] Two days later they were both composing word pictures of Gemmeker, Schlesinger and other key members of Westerbork’s power elite immediately before the departure of the August 24 transport. Had Hillesum and Mechanicus, as they sat at that wooden table, agreed to do this? (Hillesum’s letters of August 24, 1943 and December 18, 1942 were published clandestinely by the resistance.)^[115]

In addition to the threat of being sent on transport, inmate compliance was also achieved by intimidation and retribution. Gemmeker’s order of February 11, 1943, stated that ten residents would be put on transport for every person who escaped.^[116] This “collective punishment,” as both Hillesum and Mechanicus termed it, was carried out two months later when 20 sick Jews with provisional exemptions were put on transport after two Jews escaped.^[117] Hillesum’s August 24 letter says Gemmeker was “remorseless” in administering collective punishment. She describes a “terrified young boy” running off upon learning he’s on the list for the next day’s transport. The result: “Fifty victims for one moment of insanity.” Mechanicus’s August 24 diary entry confirms this figure, but adds “three S-men, two from the S [punishment] hut and one more from the hospital” were involved. Only two were caught.^[118] Many inmates opposed escape attempts, which likely contributed to compliance, although attempted and successful escapes continued until the end of the occupation.^[119]

“Like bloodhounds OD men in green uniforms and with police sticks—rather like table legs—were sent out after the fugitives,” Mechanicus wrote.^[120] He continued:

Jews had gone out after other Jews like wild dogs and had not allowed them to escape. The mental degradation of many people here has advanced to such a degree that their indignation did not fall upon the executioner and his henchmen, but upon those who had attempted to escape from their clutches…. But a prisoner has still a right to escape, even though the executioner threatens reprisals against those who do not. They know they will be deported one day, but they cannot or will not offer any resistance; they merely go a little sooner.^[121]

Hillesum: “Slowly but surely six o’clock in the morning has arrived. The train is due to depart at eleven, and they are starting to load it with people and luggage.”^[122] Mechanicus:

Everything was done under the direction of Pisk…. Dr. Spanier appeared in his characteristic long waterproof, with his hands behind his back. He paused here and there and exchanged a brief word with someone, outwardly unmoved. The wagons were filling up….

When the train was full and all that remained was to close the doors and give the signal for departure, Schlesinger came up in a black jerkin…. a heroic figure, a lion-tamer. A fêted lion-tamer. A few handshakes here and there, a few words with this person and that. Not a studied performance. He went up quite naturally to the Obersturmführer who received him with a stern face. Still in a bad temper about the escapes …

The wagons were shut tightly…. The train got under way. At the oblong ventilators high up in the wagons the heads of the Jews and Jewesses appeared all in a line, as if at a puppet show. They went past like the pages of a book of living pictures. Bare, swaying arms and waving hands stuck out of the ventilators like independent living organs, like the limbs of buried human beings giving their last sign of life.^[123]

The commandant, Hillesum writes, “appears at the end of the asphalt path, like a famous star making his entrance during a grand finale.” Then Gemmeker is joined by Schlesinger. “The Oberdienstleiter is a German Jew of massive build, and the commandant looks slight and insignificant by his side. Black top boots, black cap, black army coat with yellow star. He has a cruel mouth and a powerful neck…. The light green commandant with his military bearing, the fawn, impassive secretary [Todtmann, and] the black bully-boy figure of the Oberdienstleiter, parade past the train. People fall back around them, but all eyes are on them…. [Gemmeker] is absolute master over the life and death of Dutch and German Jews here on this remote heath…”^[124]

Mechanicus once observed that he was “well on the way to becoming a misanthropist…. People in the mass, especially if they are living under bad conditions, are the most hideous and repulsive thing imaginable…. the chaotic, immoral passions of twenty, a hundred or a thousand human beings all packed together in a small space [produced] loathsome degradation.” Hillesum understood, but her spirituality and inner radiance (which was commented upon by others) protected her. She wrote: “Many feel that their love of mankind languishes at Westerbork because it receives no nourishment—meaning that people here don’t give you much occasion to love them. ‘The mass is a hideous monster; individuals are pitiful,’ someone said. But I keep discovering that there is no causal connection between people’s behavior and the love you feel for them. Love for one’s fellow man is like an elemental glow that sustains you.”^[125] Unlike Mechanicus, she never lived in the massive, crowded barracks.

Both chroniclers discussed escape. “Will I escape and go into hiding or will I go on the long journey, along with the crowd?” Mechanicus asked. He often discussed the idea, mentioned numerous escapes, twice noted the guards’ indifference to escapes, and once said his escape the previous evening would have been “Dead easy.”^[126] His “desire to escape” absorbed him “like a kind of hobby”: “I imagine myself going along the railway line in the darkness in the middle of the night and reaching Zwolle, from where I could catch a train…. The thought fascinates me.” But he knows the threat of retribution is “a guarantee against escape.” His entry of January 15 appears to represent his conclusion: “…if I escape the interests of many people might be prejudiced… the risk involved… is quite considerable. Recently people who have been in hiding have been pouring into the camp. I am an old S-man and, if arrested, would be in danger of getting a double S.”^[127]

Hillesum “rejected all offers to help her escape.”^[128] Her parents and her youngest brother, Mischa, arrived at Westerbork on June 21, 1943. Soon after, when half of the 120 Jewish Council volunteers were ordered to leave Westerbork, she remarked: “Luckily I am not one of the sixty, so I can keep on protecting my parents as best I can.” Discussing her resistance to escaping and hiding, she wrote: “I don’t think I would feel happy if I were exempted from what so many others have to suffer.” Her moments of weakness didn’t last long. “I sometimes feel like quietly packing my rucksack and getting onto the next transport to the east,” she disclosed. “But enough; it’s not right for a human being to take the easy way out.”^[129]

She observed: “Accepting your own doom needs inner strength.” She said Mechanicus had the same philosophic toughness: “We were both able to bear our lot…. most people are not able to bear their lot, and they load it onto the shoulders of others.”^[130] Mechanicus remarked, “the only real support is… to be found in yourself, in your beliefs or convictions or in your determination to get through these hard times.”^[131]

They both faced the reality of Westerbork with practical and mature attitudes. “Captivity,” Mechanicus wrote, “means the barbed wire and the discipline of hut life, but with a little imagination and a sense of humour and a love of nature you can create a world of your own in which it is possible to forget the captivity of the material body.”^[132] Hillesum swore off the usual sources of anxiety: “Debates, computations, laws of probability, are the order of the day. I keep well out of it. All this talking takes up energy, and nothing comes of it in the end.” Where Hillesum stood apart from Mechanicus was in the depth of her faith and her ability to find silver linings. “Against every new outrage and every fresh horror,” she declared, “we shall put up one more piece of love and goodness, drawing strength from within ourselves.” She wrote repeatedly of “helping to build a new and different society.” Author Patrick Woodhouse maintains that Hillesum became “a universal person, seeking to be in communion with all people across all boundaries.”^[133]

She maintained:

rebellion born only when distress begins to affect one personally is no real rebellion and can never bear fruit. And the absence of hatred in no way implies the absence of moral indignation.

I know that those who hate have good reason to do so. But why should we always have to choose the cheapest and easiest way? It has been brought home forcibly to me here how every atom of hatred added to the world makes it an even more inhospitable place.^[134]

Did she speak this way to Mechanicus on September 6, 1943, upon learning she, Mischa and their parents were going on the next day’s transport? This sudden development was the result of actions by their mother and Mischa that displeased the authorities and led to “intervention by The Hague.” Gemmeker interpreted the resulting orders to mean “the whole family” was to go on transport. Mechanicus’s diary entry refers repeatedly to Mischa, mentions the parents, but only alludes to his friend Etty as “their daughter.” More important is this apparently critical statement: “The men and women who feared they would be deported packed yesterday evening with a resignation which could have been mistaken for courage, but was simply the resignation of human beings not familiar with the passion of indignation and opposition. It is the resignation of caged beasts who have lost their natural impulses and have got used to the cage. No word of protest, just calm preparation for the journey.”^[135]

Other than this, Mechanicus didn’t acknowledge Etty Hillesum’s departure. But in February, he wrote: “We were not emotional about the good-byes, nor have we ever been.” Yet, despite Dutch “sober restraint … we had a lump in our throats … as we have had so often before at those farewell moments.” Two weeks later, he added: “At every handshake with a departing friend one soul seems to penetrate into the other, hands grasp and clasp each other as if they will never let go. The spoken word is either too much or too little. The queue lining up in front of the hut door is like a caravan solemnly going on a pilgrimage to a far country.”^[136]

VII – Westerbork:
Population, Politics and Preparing for the Postwar

“Amsterdam was finally deemed clear of Jews,” following the last raid on September 29, 1943.^[137] This ended the intensive, 15-month roundup phase, which saw Westerbork’s population exceed 15,000 the previous autumn, following the massive, country-wide roundups the night of October 2-3. Despite the Amsterdam milestone, the transports continued until mid-September 1944. Many Jews in hiding were rooted out during this latter twelve-month period, and after it as well.

On February 5, 1944, the population of Westerbork was “about 6,000 residents,” Mechanicus says, but by the 16^th only 4,700 Jews remained. “Unless the war soon comes to an end,” he foresaw Westerbork “completely emptied out” and all Jews sent east.^[138] Although the population dropped to “4,230 Jews” on the 25^th, there were still 4,000 in the camp in early September when Seyss-Inquart declared a state of emergency owing to the Allied advance into Belgium and their imminent arrival in the Netherlands. On September 2, Gemmeker said Westerbork’s population had to be reduced. The last three transports departed on the 3^rd, 4^th and 13^th. They carried 1,019 Jews to Auschwitz, 2,087 Jews to Theresienstadt and 280 Jews to Bergen-Belsen respectively, dropping the camp population to about 600.^[139] When the Allied advance toward Holland’s big cities came to a stop that same month, the Nazis resumed searching for Jews in hiding. Those they found increased Westerbork’s population to 848 people by the beginning of March 1945 and to “about 900 residents” when it was liberated on April 12.^[140]

Mechanicus’s final diary entry is February 28, 1944. The S-cases were a focus of his attention that January. On December 30, he noted that 80 people had arrived from Amsterdam, most of whom “had been in hiding.” S-hut went from being “packed [with] about 650 men and women” to being “crammed full, about 800 people” on January 12 and to having “900 people” on the 19^th. The transport on the 25^th carried “1,000 persons” to Auschwitz, 590 from S-hut.^[141]

Mechanicus, the former S-case, was on the March 8, 1944 transport to Bergen-Belsen. Seven months later, on October 9, he was part of a group of 120 sent to Auschwitz. They were all shot three days later.^[142] By this time, Westerbork’s most famous S-cases had also been sent east. After being betrayed and arrested on August 4, Anne Frank and her family, along with their hiding companions, Hermann, Auguste and Peter van Pels and Fritz Pfeffer, arrived at Westerbork on August 8. They were transported to Auschwitz on September 3. While at Westerbork, Anne worked disassembling batteries. She worked 12.5-hour days, excluding a 90-minute lunch break, six days a week; she also worked four hours on Sunday mornings until 12:30 p.m.^[143]

Anne’s work raises the subject of Westerbork as a labour camp. Gemmeker, while imprisoned after the war, “claimed that he had tried with great difficulty and risks and without the knowledge of his superiors to turn the transit camp into a labour camp, which could have saved part of the Jewish population.”^[144] In October 1943, Mechanicus referred to Westerbork “residents employed on the sorting of scrap metal. This branch of activity is important for the German Wehrmacht.”^[145] This work took place in “the industrial barracks” and involved disassembling crashed aircraft as well as batteries.^[146] During December, Mechanicus referred three times to Westerbork being “a labour camp,” noting on the 21^st: “The camp has officially become a labour camp which… can provide permanent work for four to five thousand camp residents in the metal industry, thereby safeguarding them from deportation to Poland.” On the same day, however, Westerbork’s controller reported that the Bureau of Non-Ferrous Metals in The Hague was unhappy with the shoddy work of the foil-sorters, which, in Boas’s words, could jeopardize “any chance of Westerbork becoming a labor camp.”^[147]

While Westerbork’s one imperative was to provide the required “transport material” for the east-bound trains, it appears that Gemmeker and senior members of the Jewish aristocracy, recognizing that the war was increasingly turning against Germany, were influenced by the pending postwar and what it held in store for them and how they might best position themselves.^[148] Probably the most remarkable example of this positioning was the 70-minute film Westerbork “made on Gemmeker’s own initiative…. toward mid-1944.” An amateurish production, the script was the work of Todtmann. “It had been made outside proper Nazi channels,” with no reference to The Hague or Berlin, according to Boas. He added pointedly that the film “had been made for none but the president of the court in Assen” where Gemmeker was tried in December 1948. When asked by the court what the film’s purpose was, Gemmeker replied: “With this film, which was made for the camp and for showing in the camp, I tried to record everything, including the sadder aspects, in order that it might not be said that I only focused on the better side of the camp.”^[149]

Although less clear than the Westerbork film, the notion of Westerbork becoming a labour camp may be another example of Gemmeker’s trying to position himself for more favourable consideration after the war. But, as with so much at Westerbork, the labour camp idea was buffeted by conflicting factors. On the one hand, Mechanicus could write on December 21, 1943, that “the Jews have no choice but to take a fairly serious view of their employment and see to it that they produce enough for the work section to be a paying proposition, which will mean that they will not be sent to Poland.” On the other hand, as “an ordinary foil-sorter,” he noted on January 3 that he and his co-workers had “taken idleness as their motto.” Their principle, he added, was: “Be idle, but do it well and systematically—it is for a good cause.”^[150]

“The ‘good cause,’” Boas writes, “was to contribute as little as possible to the German war machine—which was easier said than done. By working hard you might prolong your stay but also the war; by slacking off might shorten the war but also your stay. Weighing one against the other was no simple matter. To their credit, most Jews seemed to have opted for the latter rather than the former, the threat of deportation notwithstanding. An order issued in December, 1943, forbidding prayer during work hours was honored only in the breach. The campaign against ‘work-shy’ women, launched by the Commandant at about the same time, was also stillborn. Many of these so-called shirkers were far too busy with their own small ‘businesses’—ironing, altering, tailoring, cleaning, mostly for the wives of the camp’s elite—to bother responding to the call.” The subject of shirking work was celebrated in at least one of the cabarets. The opening number for the “Humor and Song” revue, which opened September 4, 1943, was called “Roll-Call! Roll-Call!” and included the lyrics:

Whoever is a glutton for work
And fails to shirk
And works himself to the bone
Is a drone and a jerk.^[151]

The latter part of Gemmeker’s claim that he tried to transition Westerbork from a transit to a labour camp without the knowledge of his superiors is plausible given the intrigue that existed within the SS in the Netherlands. On August 25, 1943, Mechanicus stated that Hanns Albin Rauter, the head of the SS in the country, had sent “a few NSB men [Dutch Nazis] …. to Westerbork to operate as spies.” Gemmeker assigned “his camp detective, Simon,” to follow them. Simon reported “that the NSB men were operating against the Commandant who, in their opinion, was too kind to the Jews.” Gemmeker “had them locked up … and sent away on the S-transport. But first the guards beat up one or two of them.”^[152] The following January 6, Mechanicus reported: “Arrest in hut 71 … of mevrouw Z.-S., a spy working for the Sicherheitsdienst …. The Police had intercepted a letter written by her to the SD in which she had criticized … the Obersturmführer.”^[153] Between these two examples of internecine activity, Mechanicus wrote on October 21 that, based on “the high incidence of infectious diseases,” Gemmeker accepted Dr. Spanier’s recommendation and ordered a “strict quarantine for the camp.” Mechanicus later said he’d heard that Spanier and Gemmeker “are working together to have the transports stopped because of … infectious diseases.”^[154]

“But everyone is playing his own little game here,” Mechanicus observed in December. He had personal experience with Westerbork’s quid pro quos. When he avoided being sent on the July 6 transport “by the skin of [his] teeth,” it was due to the calculated intervention of Schlesinger and his associate Trottel.^[155] Hillesum was involved too, but as a pleader not a decision maker: “What exactly it was that I did, I’m not sure. I went to all sorts of officials.” She walked “around with a mysterious gentleman [she’d] never seen before.” They “went to all sorts of camp VIPs who are usually not available, especially before a transport. But this time invisible doors opened…. There is a sort of ‘underworld’ here … I sensed something of it … I don’t think it’s a savory story.”^[156]

Schlesinger and Trottel believed Mechanicus could be helpful to them after the war. Trottel told Mechanicus that he needed to commit to “look after” their interests. “And give your word of honour…. And you must also make it clear to [Schlesinger] that he will have some say in what you publish … about Westerbork.” On July 15, Mechanicus learned he’d been given a blue Z stamp. It exempted him from transport to the east “until further notice” and provided other benefits.^[157] On July 19, Trottel identified the nub of the problem: “After the war the German Jews will find themselves in a difficult position and it’s vital for us to have Dutch Jews who will look after our interests.” When a newly-arrived friend asked Mechanicus how he’d “managed” to remain at Westerbork, Mechanicus answered: “Because of Schlesinger’s protection.” He added he’d do anything for Schlesinger as long as it didn’t involve “compromising myself.”^[158]

On August 3, Mechanicus stated Schlesinger “rides rough-shod over everyone. [He’s] self-assured, arrogant, uncouth and cold…. an upstart who [can] do what he likes with the Jews.” That evening, Mechanicus and Trottel met with Schlesinger. Mechanicus explained his views on removing “tension between Dutch and German Jews” and eliminating any resentment after the war. Mechanicus’s August 4 meeting summary said: “A Dutch-German contact committee should be formed to spread the idea that Dutch and German Jews should bury their feuds and, if necessary, create an organization which in an emergency would prevent acts of violence.” On August 27, Schlesinger told him he was one of three members of an arbitration committee approved by Gemmeker; Mechanicus was invited to be “the chairman,” according to Boas. “After a few months of desultory negotiations,” Boas notes that the peace initiative “simply collapsed under the burden of accumulated hatreds.”^[159] The relentless need for “transport material” may have contributed to this result as well. Trottel was put on transport in January, Mechanicus in March. Schlesinger’s maneuvering may also have reinforced the status quo. The previous November, a member of Westerbork’s Jewish Council described to Mechanicus “a very hostile atmosphere between German and Dutch Jews in the camp”; Mechanicus advised Schlesinger. But, even though “the leading members of the Jewish Council were … viewed with mistrust and contempt,” Schlesinger didn’t want to “rebuff” them: “He might need them and is covering himself on more than one side. I feel this is like a comedy in which all parties are making fools of one another.”^[160]

These machinations extended to Gemmeker and Rauter, who was scheduled to visit Westerbork mid-February. Mechanicus said it was critical the SS chief “get the impression that the work was being done” by older people rather than the “many young working folk [Rauter would likely demand] be sent to Germany…. Gemmeker prefers to keep them here for the sake of his own position. So the deceivers deceive each other.”^[161]

Despite Mechanicus’s and Hillesum’s word portraits of Gemmeker quoted earlier, their other descriptions of him contribute to a complex picture of the man. “We are told,” Hillesum wrote, “that he likes music and that he is a gentleman…. for a gentleman he certainly has a somewhat peculiar job.” On one “cruel” transport morning, she said his face was “almost iron-grey. It is a face I am quite unable to read. Sometimes it seems to me to be like a long thin scar in which grimness mingles with joylessness and hypocrisy. And there is something else about him, halfway between a dapper hairdresser’s assistant and a stagedoor Johnny. But the grimness and the rigidly forced bearing predominate.”^[162] Mechanicus’s characterizations are equally striking: “There are some who think that, although he wants to get the Jews out of western Europe, he has nothing personal against them and does not want to do them any harm.” Mechanicus notes Gemmeker referred to Westerbork’s Jews as “My Jews” and, when highlighting the Commandant’s thoroughness, energy and determination, quotes him saying: “I care more about many of the Jews than about most of my own SS men.” Were these genuine sentiments or cynically manipulative statements? What is known is that Gemmeker valued and sought to maintain calm and order in the deportation-driven, twilight world of Westerbork. Next to meeting the quotas and deadlines for the transports, they were his top priority. “Once upon a time we had a commandant who used to kick people off to Poland,” Hillesum quotes another inmate. “This one [Gemmeker] sees them off with a smile.”^[163]

On September 14, Gemmeker had a large group of young Jews, who were members of the Hashera, “fetched out” of that day’s transport; “500 certificates had been made available for Palestine for members of the Aliyah. Actually they could only be members of the Aliyah up to their eighteenth year, but the age was forced up to twenty-one.” This spared 37 young people “the journey to the east,” at least temporarily. Gemmeker, who provided “favourable treatment” to Hashera members, managed this “because other camp residents volunteered for the journey in order to accompany relatives.” But two days later, Mechanicus remarked: “You cannot see the workings of [Gemmeker’s] heart,” an assessment he reinforced in December, calling Gemmeker “An over-sensitive man” and “An enigmatic character with iron hands covered in velvet.” Mechanicus noted that an unspecified number “of the young men of the Aliyah” were sent to Poland on the January 25 transport.^[164]

Gemmeker supervised “the deportation of 80,000 Jews.” At his trial he said he had “a strong conflict of conscience” about his work at Westerbork and that he tried to make life there “as tolerable as possible.” He was backed up by Schlesinger who testified that “Gemmeker was a good commandant, who prized order, calm, and humanity.” Schlesinger added that Westerbork’s general population shared this view and were impressed by Gemmeker’s “camouflaged sense of justice.” Dr. Spanier also testified for Gemmeker who was one of his patients in Düsseldorf in the 1960s. Nonetheless, during his tenure as commandant, according to van Riet, Gemmeker “was seen as an extremely suitable person” for the role. He ensured the transports ran on time and met the specified quotas.^[165] With Allied troops closing in, he left Westerbork on April 11, 1945.^[166] A month later, after Germany’s capitulation, he was arrested in Amsterdam. After his trial, he was sentenced to ten years imprisonment less time served. “The Court could not prove that he knew what had happened to the vast majority of the deported Jews…. The sentence was also lower because the Court took into account the correct treatment of residents.” He was freed April 20, 1951, his sentence reduced for good behaviour and his work in the Limburg mines. He subsequently worked as a salesman in a Düsseldorf tobacco shop. During his trial and in a 1959 television interview, he repeatedly maintained he didn’t know that most people deported from Westerbork were killed. But the 1967 Westerbork trial in Munich concluded “he must have known,” although there wasn’t enough evidence to retry him.^[167]

VIII – Did Westerbork’s OD Deserve to Be Labelled the “Jewish SS”?

“The OD men act as assistants to the [German] Green Police,” Mechanicus wrote about the August 24, 1943 transport.^[168] But on this occasion, and as a general rule, there was often a clear division of responsibility: The OD loaded the cattle cars; the Green Police were on standby until the train departed when they became escorts, travelling in a separate passenger car “to the final destination.”^[169] Mechanicus said the OD and Green Police came from “Two worlds that are diametrically opposed. They do not understand each other and gropingly size each other up.”^[170]

Outside the train, on the platform, or hanging out of … a third-class compartment were the Green Police…. completely indifferent and insensitive to their surroundings…. Under their scrutiny the OD men … carried out their duties…. In an unbroken stream they went along carrying stretchers with broken, half-dead human beings whom they hoisted efficiently into the cattle trucks…. Other OD men chased the public away from the Boulevard [des Misères] with threats and entreaties.^[171]

Hillesum’s August 24 letter refers to a “squad of armed, green-uniformed guards.” The fact they are armed identifies them as Green Police. “On earlier transports, some of the guards were simple, kindly types with puzzled expressions…. One would have found their company not too objectionable on the journey. Now I am transfixed with terror. Oafish, jeering faces, in which one seeks in vain for even the slightest trace of human warmth. At what fronts did they learn their business? In what punishment camps were they trained?”^[172]

Despite Hillesum’s portrayal of the Green Police and Mechanicus’s contention that they and the OD came from “diametrically opposed” worlds, there are numerous negative descriptions of the OD, whose members’ average age in mid-1942 was “between 20 and 25 years.”^[173] By April 1943, the OD had 182 members, its highpoint.^[174] If newcomers who were young men “had the right contacts and/or qualities,” they could land a position in the OD or another service group, usually with an exemption.^[175] Van Riet says, “Often immediately after arrival, the [newcomer’s] struggle for a stamp on the camp card began.”^[176]

The attraction of an exemption normally overcame the stigma of joining the OD.^[177] Mechanicus said OD members were “crude and course men, without civilization, without feeling and without compassion.”^[178] Van Riet says it was Boas’s view that “the OD was a messy collection of wretched people … with pathological issues, just like the SS.”^[179] Moore found the OD’s “conduct was anything but honourable and the treatment of fellow inmates often despicable.”^[180] Nevertheless, “examples that support the allegations about the brutal actions of the OD are not all that common,” van Riet maintains.^[181] He seeks to bring a more nuanced perspective to the “complex” question of the OD’s behaviour.^[182]

In Kamp van hoop en wanhoop (Camp of Hope and Despair), Willy Linder says escorting Jews to trains departing Westerbork and closing the boxcar doors was “one of the unpleasant and dramatic tasks of the OD.”^[183] They performed this function with merciless zeal, Boas maintains.^[184] Van Riet states: “They would occasionally push and/or scream people into the trains.”^[185] He adds that people who were to be transported “sometimes refused to climb into the wagons at the last minute, which threatened to slow everyone down,” possibly undermining the scheduled departure time.^[186] As Presser writes, meeting the quotas and timelines demanded by Adolf Eichmann in Berlin was the “absolute priority.”^[187]

Hans Margules and Werner Bloch, two German Jewish refugees and Westerbork long-term residents, were OD members who survived the war. They and other OD members were instructed, prior to supervising the loading of transports, to yell at people who were causing delays and to push them into the boxcars, if necessary.^[188] Van Riet maintains that “the OD had to act tactically, in order to be one step ahead of the Germans…. to prevent the Germans from intervening with violence.” While Margules and Bloch admitted some OD members “were bad and fanatical,” the OD, as a whole, had to perform a careful balancing act.^[189] If they were too lenient it invited Nazi intervention and could result in some OD members being put on transport. While walking this tightrope meant they were undeniably part of the deportation machine and subject to the contempt of many of their fellow Jews, “it was still better,” in Bloch’s view, “to be pushed into the train by a member of the OD than to have to go on transport bleeding due to being beaten with a rifle” by an SS man or a German police officer.^[190]

Mechanicus recorded an August 1943 confrontation between four women and an OD man.

“I’d rather have the men in green any day,” one woman says. “You know where you stand with them, at least.”

“They hit much harder than we do,” the OD man answers.

“I’d rather have the men in green than you because you beat your own people.”

“We carry sticks, but we don’t need to use them.”

“You do that all right. And even if you didn’t hit anybody at all, I’d still rather have the men in green. We hate you more than we hate them. So now you know!”

“Applause from the other women,” Mechanicus noted.^[191]

Boas maintains that Westerbork’s inmates “feared and detested” the OD “with a passionate intensity [and] came to regard the OD as a greater ill than the SS itself.”^[192]

Van Riet maintains “OD members were convinced that the Germans present would have acted much worse,” but also concludes “it is hardly possible to make an informed and fully accurate judgment about their actions.”^[193] The OD was not “the Jewish SS.” Van Riet says “collaborative survival” is a better but still inadequate description of the OD’s behaviour. His preferred phrase is “participation for survival.”^[194] This conclusion also applies to the OD’s conduct “during the pickup operations at Amsterdam and Apeldoorn,” which, according to testimonies, was as cruel as that of the Nazis but, in contrast to the Nazis, was sometimes prompted by duress and coercion.^[195]

IX – Survival of Westerbork’s German Jews Compared to Its Dutch Jews

Compared to the less than five per cent of transported Jews who survived (5,000 of 107,000), more than nine per cent of the OD members who went on transport returned (15 of 164). When the 32 OD members who remained at Westerbork are included (47 of 196), the OD survival rate jumps to almost 24 per cent.^[196] Upon Westerbork’s liberation, “the Canadian army compiled a list of the inmates and noted…. a large number of the survivors were of German origin and had managed to stay in the camp.” Moore continues, “the overall totals are striking,” adding: “Superficially, this does support the view that non-Dutch Jews had been much more successful as survivors of the camp. Their numbers are substantially more than might have been expected given the proportion of foreign Jews in the Netherlands in May 1940.” But he concludes: “The idea that non-Dutch Jews… were more likely to have survived the Holocaust in the Netherlands than their Dutch counterparts must remain conjecture.”^[197]

It is clear, however, that for some, including the leaders of the camp’s aristocracy, the unequal world of Westerbork bestowed privileges not only during their stay in the camp but for the remainder of their lives. Schlesinger, Spanier, Pisk and their families all survived, with the exception of Pisk’s mother who died, age 78, at Theresienstadt; Pisk was unable to save her from transport. Spanier’s parents were also at Theresienstadt.^[198]

“For those who have been granted the nerve-shattering privilege of being allowed to stay in Westerbork ‘until further notice,’” Hillesum wrote in her December 18, 1942 letter, “there is the great moral danger of becoming blunted and hardened…. What matters is not whether we preserve our lives at any cost, but how we preserve them.”^[199]

Writing about Amsterdam’s Jewish Council, she observed on July 28, 1942: “Nothing can ever atone for the fact … that one section of the Jewish population is helping to transport the majority out of the country. History will pass judgement in due course.”^[200] The same could be said about the leaders of Westerbork’s aristocracy collaborating with the Nazis.

X – Final and First Words

Jacob Boas quotes Hannah Arendt who said: “The destruction of Dutch Jewry was ‘a catastrophe unparalleled in any Western country,’ a disaster comparable only to the extinction of Polish Jewry.” He goes on to say: “The ordinary Dutch Jew, hedged round by the German gun, a collaborative Dutch officialdom, and the zeal of the Jewish administrators, confronted a situation that was absolutely hopeless.”^[201]

The first Dutch book to examine the Holocaust in Holland got it right. The title of Heinz Wielek’s De Oorlog die Hitler Won (The War that Hitler Won), published in 1947, captured the centrality of annihilating the Jews to Nazi ideology, the driving force of which helps explain the Nazis’ exploitation and manipulation of Westerbork’s German and refugee Jews, resulting in the camp’s aristocracy and functionaries doing much of the Nazis’ dirty work eliminating Dutch Jews and themselves, with a small number of exceptions who survived through complicity and/or luck.

Copyright © 2024 Patrick S. Wolfe
All rights reserved.
Short segments may be quoted with due attribution.

For more on Etty Hillesum see:

• Etty Hillesum Safeguards God: The Story of Her Spiritual Transformation During the Holocaust
• Holocaust remembrance: Etty Hillesum’s story in her own words
• Etty Hillesum and the Great Protective Hand (poem)

1. Frank van Riet, The Jewish Guards: Supervision in the Dutch Gateway to Hell, Assen, Netherlands, Nedvision Publishing, 2022, 202. ↑
2. Van Riet, 202. ↑
3. Jacob Boas, Boulevard des Misères: The Story of Transit Camp Westerbork, Archon Books, Hamden, Connecticut, 1985, 137, 147, 145, 164. ↑
4. Boas, 132, 134, 145, 146. ↑
5. Boas, 147. ↑
6. Van Riet, 202. ↑
7. Patrick Wolfe, A Snake on the Heart – History, Mystery, and Truth: The Entangled Journeys of a Biographer and His Nazi Subject, Iguana Books, Toronto, 2023, 163-168. ↑
8. Louis de Jong, The Netherlands and Nazi Germany, Harvard University Press, 1990, 8. ↑
9. Bob Moore, Victims and Survivors: The Nazi Persecution of the Jews in the Netherlands, 1940-1945, London, Arnold, 1997, 73. ↑
10. Gerhard, Hirschfeld, Nazi Rule and Dutch Collaboration: The Netherlands under German Occupation, 1940-1945 (translated by Louise Willmot), Berg Publishers, 1988, 80. ↑
11. Moore, 89. Wolfe, 189. ↑
12. Moore, 9. Boas, 8. ↑
13. Moore, 2. Jacob Presser’s Introduction to Philip Mechanicus, Waiting for Death, Calder and Boyars, London, 1968, 5. Van Riet, 200-201. ↑
14. Moore, 16, 146, 148 (Presser), 249 (Presser). ↑
15. Wolfe, 188-189. ↑
16. Van Riet, 38, 114. ↑
17. Van Riet, 18-20. ↑
18. Van Riet, 23, 41, 43. Presser, 5-6 (750 people). ↑
19. Van Riet, 24. ↑
20. Van Riet, 24-28. ↑
21. Van Riet, 29, 33. ↑
22. Van Riet, 34, 41. Wolfe, 188-189. ↑
23. Van Riet, 34-35. Boas (43, 45) refers to “twelve administrative units.” ↑
24. Boas, 40 (proposed). Moore, 219 (building camp, Jewish Council bureaucracy). Van Riet, 42, 43. ↑
25. Moore, 218. ↑
26. Moore, 219. https://jacobboas.com (date of birth, innate number). Boas, 40, 41. ↑
27. Van Riet, 41, 43. ↑
28. Van Riet, 43, 49 (first transport). ↑
29. Moore, 219-220, 218. Van Riet, 127. ↑
30. Boas, 41, 68. ↑
31. Boas 42, 47 (osmosis), 70 (eventually German Jews also put on transport). ↑
32. Van Riet, 51-53. ↑
33. Van Riet, 53 (including Presser quote), 59, 194-195, 221 (Schol “forced” to leave). ↑
34. Presser, 12 (ill treated, September 27, October 25). Mechanicus, 23, 158. ↑
35. Mechanicus, 128. ↑
36. Van Riet, 53, 100. ↑
37. Moore, 223. Boas, 46 (“functioned so extraordinarily well”). ↑
38. Van Riet, 7. ↑
39. Moore, 255 (also 218), 106-107, 217 (disproportionate). Boas, 97 (German Central Office for Jewish Emigration). ↑
40. Presser, 8. Moore, 221, 220 (domination). Boas, 37. Mechanicus, 261, 104, 32. ↑
41. Moore, 220-222. Presser, 8-9. ↑
42. Moore, 221-222. ↑
43. Moore, 222, 221. Mechanicus, 107, 229. Boas writes (50-51): “If Gemmeker was the most treacherous man in Westerbork, Schlesinger the most feared, and Pisk the most hated, the sobriquet ‘most mysterious’ might be fitted to Dr. F. M. Spanier [whose] extraordinary … hold … over [Gemmeker] was seen as the key to his omnipotence.” ↑
44. Van Riet, 37, 39, 49, 102. Moore, 220. ↑
45. Van Riet, 7. ↑
46. Van Riet, 39, 104. ↑
47. Van Riet, 105. Boas, 48. ↑
48. Van Riet, 110-122. Moore, 220. ↑
49. Van Riet, 102 (most hated), 7 and 105 and 202 (Jewish SS), 37 (Jewish Gestapo). ↑
50. Van Riet, 7, 202, 229 (complex). ↑
51. Van Riet, 126-127. ↑
52. Van Riet, 127-128, 126 (control the flow: exemptions were reduced over time; they were “never intended to keep the Jewish community alive, not even part of it.”). ↑
53. Presser, 9. ↑
54. Presser, 9-10. Boas (re: Weinreb), 140, 144, 146. ↑
55. Mechanicus, 159, 161, 171. According to Moore (124), “Presser states that on [the question of Jewish partners in mixed marriages] the Germans ‘never knew what they were doing.’” ↑
56. Mechanicus, 161. ↑
57. Van Riet, 128-129. ↑
58. Mechanicus, 151, 152, 154, 213. ↑
59. Presser, 8. Van Riet, 100 (De Wijze). ↑
60. See Mechanicus, 30-31, 34-35, and Moore, 218-219. ↑
61. Mechanicus, 32. ↑
62. Moore, 219. ↑
63. Mechanicus, 34, 30. Boas, 70. ↑
64. See Moore, 222, and Mechanicus, 81. ↑
65. Van Riet, 100-101. ↑
66. Van Riet, 203-204. ↑
67. Van Riet, 77. ↑
68. Presser, 7. Mechanicus, 71. ↑
69. Boas, 27, 96, 101 (“peak periods” like “the first half of October, 1942.”). ↑
70. Van Riet, 52, 101, 51. ↑
71. Jan G. Gaarlandt’s Introduction (and Notes) to Etty Hillesum, An Interrupted Life and Letters from Westerbork, Holt, 1996, xx (“From 15 July 1942 until 3 September 1944, week in and week out, the trains left, ninety-three in all.”). Gaarlandt’s statement is not entirely correct. In The Jewish Guards (166-168, 173), van Riet discusses the transports of September 3, 4 and 13, 1944. ↑
72. Moore, 102. ↑
73. Van Riet, 6. ↑
74. Moore, 102. Gaarlandt, Notes, 375 (Note 58). ↑
75. Mechanicus: “cattle trucks” (57,97, 137, 235, 239, 244 – “going like cattle”); “forty, fifty or sixty persons” (57); he also referred (25) to “filthy old wagons …. originally intended for carrying horses.” Hillesum: “cattle cars” (285, 342); she also referred to “dilapidated boxcars” (285), “freight cars” (274, 293, 309, 348), and “sealed” cars (274, 293); “about seventy people” (309, see also 293); “three-day journey” (309, see also 293, 347, 348). ↑
76. Mechanicus, 225, 230 (“third-class carriages”). ↑
77. Mechanicus, 194. ↑
78. Mechanicus, 193, 192. ↑
79. Mechanicus, 192-193, 230 (“the exodus of exchange Jews”), 231 (“last week [January 11] 200 went on transport to Celle.”). ↑
80. Mechanicus, 84 (agent), 225. ↑
81. Mechanicus, 228-230. ↑
82. Mechanicus: Celle (238, 253), Theresienstadt (263). ↑
83. Boas, 63. ↑
84. Wolfe, 254-257. ↑
85. Hillesum, 180. ↑
86. Patrick Woodhouse, Etty Hillesum: A Life Transformed, Bloomsbury, 2009, 2 (several occasions). Gaarlandt, xix (dozen times). ↑
87. Woodhouse, 98-99. ↑
88. Boas, 109 (lost diary). Presser, 10. ↑
89. Hillesum, 273. Email of February 25, 2024, from Frank van Riet to the author (largest transport; 3,017 Jews). ↑
90. Hillesum, 300, 308. See also, 285, 297. ↑
91. Hillesum, 354. Mechanicus, 246, 144, 68. 111. ↑
92. Mechanicus, 87-88. ↑
93. Mechanicus, 144-145. ↑
94. Mechanicus, 100. ↑
95. Mechanicus, 89. See also, 61-62, 80, 146-147. ↑
96. Gaarlandt, 375 (Note 49). Hillesum, 306, 357. Mechanicus, 158, 159, 176. ↑
97. Boas, 127, 126-127. ↑
98. Boas, 118, 120. Mechanicus, 80. ↑
99. Boas, 35, 51-52. Moore, 222. ↑
100. Mechanicus, 46, 48, 224. ↑
101. Mechanicus, 99, 145, 166, 258. ↑
102. Mechanicus, 82, 179 (infectious diseases), 117, 135, 138, 141, 176. ↑
103. Boas, 62, 52-53, 53, 54, 39, 54. Boas also maintained (70): “Fear forced a revolution in the conventional patterns of behavior, and Jews ended by discarding the wrap of civilization like so much excess baggage…” ↑
104. Boas, 154, 28. See also Van Riet, 95, 226. ↑
105. Hillesum: “swallowed” (239, 267), 263, 276, 305. ↑
106. Mechanicus, 149, 248. See also, 235. ↑
107. Mechanicus, 43, 150, 135, 147. ↑
108. Mechanicus, 48, 235, 240, 127. Jacob Boas notes (66) that Dr. Elie Cohen, “a survivor of Auschwitz and the author of a study of human behavior in the concentration camp, claimed that people in Westerbork knew that Jews were being gassed in the East but repressed the thought.” ↑
109. Mechanicus, 47. Hillesum, 279, 291, 297. ↑
110. Mechanicus, 87, 139. ↑
111. Presser, 11. ↑
112. Mechanicus, 181-182. ↑
113. Hillesum, 239, 41, 173, 195. ↑
114. Hillesum, 338. ↑
115. Hillesum’s letters of December 18, 1942, and August 24, 1943, were, according to Gaarlandt (370 – Note 9), “published under the false title Three Letters by the Painter J. B. van der Pluym (1843-1912) [and] were the only writings of Etty Hillesum published prior to 1981.” ↑
116. Van Riet, 94, 224. ↑
117. Hillesum, 351. Mechanicus, 226. Van Riet, 95, 226. ↑
118. Hillesum, 350, 341. Mechanicus, 136. ↑
119. Van Riet, 93-94. ↑
120. Mechanicus, 136. ↑
121. Mechanicus, 136. ↑
122. Hillesum, 348. ↑
123. Mechanicus, 137, 138. ↑
124. Hillesum, 351, 353, 352. ↑
125. Mechanicus, 245. Hillesum, 323. ↑
126. Mechanicus, 146, 152 and 161 (indifference), 241 (Dead easy). See also, 104, 158, 163, 164, 176, 179, 193, 222, 228. ↑
127. Mechanicus, 159 (desire), 229, 166 (guarantee), 228. Boas writes (80-81) that the widespread belief, in the summer of 1943, that the war would soon be over … combined with the tolerable living conditions at Westerbork, especially compared to those at Vught and Amersfoort, “probably kept more Jews from escaping…. many of the inmates, Mechanicus and Dr. [Elie} Cohen contended, actually preferred sitting out the war in the camp to returning to the uncertainty of life on the outside.” ↑
128. Gaarlandt, xxii. ↑
129. Hillesum, 275, 289, 177, 297. ↑
130. Hillesum, 287 (also 314), 315. ↑
131. Mechanicus, 264. ↑
132. Mechanicus, 105 (see also 106). See also, Boas, 83. ↑
133. Hillesum, 280 (see also 304), 294, 295. Woodhouse, 39. ↑
134. Hillesum, 255-256. ↑
135. Mechanicus, 149, 148. See also, Boas, 109 (re: Etty and her family’s departure on transport).. ↑
136. Mechanicus, 239-240, 254. ↑
137. Moore, 104. See also, van Riet, 120-121). ↑
138. Mechanicus, 243, 256. ↑
139. Mechanicus, 264. Van Riet, 166 (1,019, 2,087, 600), 173. ↑
140. Van Riet, 183, 186, 195. ↑
141. Mechanicus, 219, 226, 231, 235. ↑
142. Presser, 12. ↑
143. Van Riet, 86, 166, 88-89. Email of February 6, 2022 from Frank van Riet re: Anne Frank, etc., being on the September 3, 1944 transport to Auschwitz. ↑
144. Van Riet, 224. See also, 227. ↑
145. Mechanicus, 179. ↑
146. Van Riet, 89. ↑
147. Mechanicus, 205, 213-215. Boas, 78. ↑
148. In his diary entry of December 25, 1943, Mechanicus writes (216-217): “We have looked for a reason for the Commandant’s irritability…. We think that the underlying reason is that he is annoyed at the unfavourable course the war is taking and the concentrated bombing of German cities. The Commandant has just been to Düsseldorf on leave and would have seen the devastation with his own eyes. He probably realized that Germany was losing the war. He is supposed to have said something of the sort the other day.” ↑
149. Boas, 31. Van Riet, 225 (trial date). ↑
150. Mechanicus, 215, 220, 221. ↑
151. Boas, 77, 113-114. ↑
152. Mechanicus, 139. Boas refers (67) to these “NSB men” as “Jewish Nazis.” ↑
153. Mechanicus, 223. ↑
154. Mechanicus, 177, 178, 183. ↑
155. Mechanicus, 206, 77. See also, 77-80. ↑
156. Hillesum, 298. ↑
157. Mechanicus, 84, 92. ↑
158. Mechanicus, 96, 101-102. ↑
159. Mechanicus, 111, 113, 140. Boas, 69-70. ↑
160. Mechanicus, 225-226, 183, 185, 186. ↑
161. Mechanicus, 255-256. ↑
162. Hillesum, 245, 352. ↑
163. Mechanicus, 59, 99, 145. Hillesum, 352. ↑
164. Mechanicus, 157, 20 (favourable treatment), 159, 215, 216, 235. ↑
165. Van Riet, 225 (80,000), 224 (extremely suitable, on time). Boas, 15 (Gemmeker quotes), 20 (Schlesinger). https://kampwesterbork.nl/downloads/wandelroute/wandelroute-hckw-en.pdf – 17-page booklet, “Neighbours, Guards, Residents & Controversial Traces,” accessed June 15, 2024 (see p. 6 re: Spanier). ↑
166. Van Riet, 194. ↑
167. Van Riet, 224-228, 220. ↑
168. Mechanicus, 137. ↑
169. Van Riet, 137. ↑
170. Mechanicus, 137. ↑
171. Mechanicus, 137. ↑
172. Hillesum, 340, 349. ↑
173. Van Riet, 39. ↑
174. Van Riet, 102, 108. ↑
175. Van Riet, 102. See also, 126, 203, 204. ↑
176. Van Riet, 126. ↑
177. Van Riet, 203. ↑
178. Van Riet, 105. ↑
179. Boas’s view paraphrased by van Riet, 106. ↑
180. Moore, 221. ↑
181. Van Riet, 106. ↑
182. Van Riet, 229. ↑
183. Van Riet, 106. ↑
184. Van Riet, 106. ↑
185. Van Riet, 107. ↑
186. Van Riet, 204. ↑
187. Presser, 6. Moore, 92 (meeting the requirements of the deportation process was “imperative” and “the central objective”). Boas, 64 (“the iron laws of the Final Solution”). ↑
188. Van Riet, 204. ↑
189. Van Riet, 204. ↑
190. Van Riet, 203 (“It was precisely the constant threat of being sent on transport if they refused to cooperate”), 204. ↑
191. Mechanicus, 140. ↑
192. Boas, 49. ↑
193. Van Riet, 230. ↑
194. Van Riet, 230. ↑
195. Van Riet, 230, 111. Examples of duress provided by van Riet include OD members being “beaten” (112) and kicked (112) by Germans for being too gentle or “humane” (112) when removing patients from the psychiatric hospital “Het Apeldoornsche Bosch” (110) and having an SS man draw his revolver and threaten them when they were too slow removing a woman from her Amsterdam home (118). The OD men were also coerced by the threat that five family members would be put on a transport to the east if they failed to return to Westerbork (117). ↑
196. Van Riet, 199-201, 230. ↑
197. Moore, 218, 222, 223, 224. ↑
198. Moore, 223 (Schlesinger and Spanier and families). Van Riet, 194-195 and 200 (Pisk, wife, son and mother). Mechanicus, 229 (Spanier’s parents). ↑
199. Hillesum, 250. ↑
200. Hillesum, 196. ↑
201. Boas, 4, 7. ↑

by Patrick S. Wolfe

^[1]  According to Rabbi Abraham Heschel, moments occur in every life “when there is a lifting of the veil.” The trick is to recognize this lifting and grasp its rarity and importance. While such recognition can be the product of readiness, it can also result from the occasion’s sheer impact.

Author Michael Lipson says “there is nothing whatsoever for us unless we notice it, cognize it, make our preliminary guess about it. This is as true of a pencil as of an archangel: we perceive only what we can perceive, and it means only what we allow it to mean. It’s not that there ‘is nothing really there’; it’s just that what is there for us depends on our perception.”

The Irish poet, philosopher, Catholic priest and scholar John O’Donohue tells an African story he learned from the American poet Robert Bly. When a farmer investigates why his cows are giving less milk, he discovers that a beautiful woman who comes down from the stars is taking it because she and her sisters love it so.  He asks her to marry him; she agrees on the condition he never look in the basket she carries; he agrees.  But six months later, figuring that the basket belongs to him because he’s married to her, he does look.  He discovers that the basket appears empty, and he starts to sing and dance, saying, “There’s nothing in the basket, there’s absolutely nothing in the basket.”  Hearing the commotion, the wife comes along, sees what has happened and announces she must leave for the basket is her spirit’s home. She adds it’s so like humans not to see spirit and to presume what they cannot see is nothing.^[2]

In 1976, Bly introduced Coleman Barks to the poetry of Rumi (1207-1273), telling him: “These poems need to be released from their cages.” Not only did Barks’ translations make Rumi the world’s bestselling poet, but the first years of this work saw an extraordinary event occur in Barks’ life, which was followed by a remarkable nine-year friendship.

“I am sleeping out on the bluff above the Tennessee River where I grew up,” Barks writes about his dream of May 2, 1977, his holy day.  “I wake inside the dream …. A ball of light rises from Williams Island and comes over me …. it clarifies from the center out, revealing a man sitting cross-legged … a white shawl over the back of his head. He raises his head and opens his eyes. I love you, he says. I love you, too, I answer. The landscape … feels suddenly drenched with dew, and I know that the wetness is love.”^[3]  Sixteen months later Barks met this man.

Some time after the dream, Barks began sending some of his early translations to a teacher friend at Rutgers-Camden.  This friend, “inexplicably, read them to his class.  A … student came up afterward, asked him for my address, and started writing, urging me to come meet his teacher in Philadelphia.”  When, in September 1978, Barks walked “into the room where the Sri Lankan saint Bawa Muhaiyaddeen sat … talking to a small group,” he realized this was the man he had met in his dream.  Bawa endorsed the Rumi work, but “cautioned, ‘If you work on the words of a gnani, you must become a gnani,’ a master.  I did not become one of those, but for nine years … I was in the presence of one.”^[4]

As Barks says, “Working on Rumi’s poetry deepens the inner companionship,” so reading it can be like having the veil lifted.^[5]

Copyright © 2024 Patrick S. Wolfe
All rights reserved.
Short segments may be quoted with due attribution.

1. This essay was originally published in the Faith Forum space of the Times Colonist newspaper (serving Victoria, B.C., and Vancouver Island), Saturday, July 6, 2024, C8. ↑
2. “Our most requested interview: John O’Donohue,” Tapestry, CBC Radio, December 17, 2023 rebroadcast (originally broadcast in 2004) – https://www.cbc.ca/listen/live-radio/1-59-tapestry/clip/16030316-our-requested-interview-john-odonohue ↑
3. Coleman Barks, translator, The Soul of Rumi, First HarperCollins Paperback edition, 2002, xv. Barks has also orally recounted this dream on many occasions. Listen, for example, to (1) “Tapestry@25: Rumi: Poet Laureate of the Planet Earth,” a January 2007 interview by Mary Hynes of CBC Radio’s Tapestry with Coleman Barks and Andrew Harvey about Rumi (rebroadcast in January 2020) – https://www.cbc.ca/player/play/1691856451851 ; and (2) “Coleman Barks: The Man in the Dream,” YouTube, June 10, 2012 – https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-d&q=coleman+bark%27s+dream#fpstate=ive&vld=cid:4f043615,vid:m8TLb0wWpPc,st:0 ↑
4. Coleman Barks and John Moyne, translators, The Essential Rumi, First HarperCollins Paperback edition, 1996, 290. The Soul of Rumi, xv (September 1978). ↑
5. The Essential Rumi, 291. The Soul of Rumi, xvi. ↑

 

The Story of a Patent Medicine Man and His Internment by the Japanese in 1942 and 1943

by Patrick S. Wolfe

ABSTRACT: Starting in the 1890s, Dr. Williams’ Pink Pills for Pale People, an iron-based patent medicine, became an international marketing sensation that in the coming decades would see the product sold in more than eighty countries around the world. Dr. Williams’ Medicine Company was the trading arm of G.T. Fulford Co. Ltd., which was headquartered initially in Brockville, Ontario, and later in Toronto. Samuel Williamson Wolfe (1872-1952) worked for the company for more than fifty years starting in April 1895 and played a critical role in its development. His career, most of which occurred overseas, provides insight into the patent medicine industry. According to Hubert C. (“Pard”) Myers, general manager and a director with the company for approximately thirty years starting in 1930, “The Fulford Co. never had an executive that made as great a contribution to its growth and survival” as Sam Wolfe. Having departed Shanghai in November 1941 and started home to Kingston, Ontario, and retirement, Sam was still conducting company business in Manila when the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor. His experience as a Japanese prisoner-of-war, which he described in a memoir, delayed his return home by almost two years. Thanks to the efforts of George T. Fulford, Jr., MP, who used his connections with Prime Minister Mackenzie King, Sam was one of the first prisoners repatriated from the Philippines. ^[1]

After “a third-of-a-century in China,” Sam Wolfe left Shanghai for the last time on Saturday, 22 November 1941.^[2] His ultimate destination was Kingston, Ontario, where his wife Blanche, youngest son Pierre, and retirement awaited him.^[3] On the way to his new home, he stopped in Manila “to confer upon methods for improving our Philippines trade,”^[4] by which he meant the business of his employer, “G.T. Fulford Co. Limited,” the Canadian patent medicine firm that from the early 1890s had—with Sam’s help—become a worldwide powerhouse, thanks to the popularity of Dr. Williams’ Pink Pills for Pale People, a heavily advertised iron-based fatigue remedy.^[5]

The Manila stopover was a fateful step. Sam was still there “on the 8^th December (7^th to you [in North America])” when the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor. This news arrived “like a galvanic shock,” according to “Philippines Retrospect,” Sam’s 46-page memoir.^[6] Up until the attack, the idea of improving G.T. Fulford Company’s Philippines trade had, he wrote, “seemed entirely reasonable, despite the imminence of war, for no one believed that the Japs, if they really dared start a Pacific war, could stand up successfully for long against the combined might of Great Britain and America.”^[7]

Sam had been scheduled to sail from Manila to North America on the President Madison of the American President Lines. He also had a backup berth on the President Harrison. But when the attack on Pearl Harbor occurred both ships were commandeered for military service.^[8] Sam then found a spot “on a freighter called the Columbia” that was departing for Los Angeles on 9 December, but this too fell through. Moreover, as Sam noted in “Philippines Retrospect,” the Columbia “may have been one of those [vessels] bombed and sunk in Manila harbour.”^[9]

News of the attack on Pearl Harbor had been “followed a few hours later by the arrival of the Japs themselves, in the air, … and right over our heads.”^[10] Sam spent most of the night of 8-9 December “in the crowded bomb-proof cellar of the Manila Hotel. There was a complete black-out throughout the city and suburbs, and we were kept running up and down the darkened stairs, from our rooms to the shelter, as successive air-alarms sounded…” The next day he got his “first sight of the enemy air fleet attacking Manila.” He added: “I had often seen Jap air-planes before—over Shanghai—and witnessed the tremendous devastation they wrought in the native areas around that great city in 1932.” He had strong opinions about the Japanese; from the vantage point of early 1944, he asserted:

Wherever the flag of the Rising Sun is planted the sunshine of life disappears. Freedom gives place to military domination, misery supersedes happiness, families are divided, suspicion and treachery destroy friendship and neighbourly good will. The fruits of the earth, on which the people have hitherto lived—especially in tropical Asia—are seized and consumed by rapacious soldiery, spread, octopus-like, over the land, or shipped away to Japan. ‘Co-Prosperity’—‘The New Order in Asia’—means only prosperity to the Japanese, whatever else they may pretend it to be. Such was the lesson learned long ago in Korea and Manchuria, and more recently in China. Its bitterness is now being experienced by the peoples of the Philippines.^[11]

The upshot of the situation in December 1941 was that Sam, as he phrased it, was “caught like a rat in a trap.” It was a tense time for his family. Noël, the oldest child, was a new junior officer with the Indian Army. Désirée, the second child, had recently been evacuated from Singapore with her son, Michael, and her newborn daughter, Carol; they were “somewhere in Australia.” Désirée’s husband, Leslie, had joined the British volunteer army and became a prisoner-of-war when Singapore fell to the Japanese. It would be almost two full years before Sam could rejoin Blanche and Pierre, as well as Désirée, Michael, and Carol, who, in the interim, had made their way from Australia to Kingston.^[12]

*

Born in Cork, Ireland, on 9 January 1872, Samuel Williamson Wolfe was raised there until about the age of seven when his family moved to London, England. The 1891 census for Battersea (London) lists Sam’s occupation as “Ironmonger’s Assistant,” which confirms part of Wolfe family lore that he worked for a time during his teens in a hardware store while also attending night school. Soon after he turned twenty, he answered a newspaper ad for a job, was hired and, in April 1892, was sent by his new employer to Cape Town as a “merchant.”^[13] His employer was the “predecessor” to the G.T. Fulford Company, a Canadian patent medicine firm, which he joined three years later.^[14]

George Taylor Fulford (1852-1905) was a successful drug store owner in Brockville, Ontario. Patent medicines were an important part of his business. In January 1887, he filed a sworn deposition with the Leeds County Registrar establishing “Fulford and Co. … as a manufacturer and vendor of Patent Medicines.” In June 1890, he purchased the patent for Dr. Williams’ Pink Pills for Pale People and soon after launched Dr. Williams’ Medicine Company.^[15] Heavily promoted using testimonial advertising and aided by a timely influenza epidemic in 1891-92, the Pink Pills were an immediate hit in Canada, the United States and Britain where they were initially sold.^[16] The business expanded rapidly, eventually operating in over eighty countries and surviving for almost a century, until 1989, when it went into receivership.^[17]

Despite an international stereotype that “patent medicine men were widely seen as scurrilous characters who sold useless or dangerous remedies at inflated prices to an unsuspecting public,” historian Lori Loeb has concluded that George Fulford was an “ethical self-made man…. [who] marketed a relatively harmless, even beneficial, product with which many customers were satisfied.”^[18] Moreover, Fulford is not an isolated example. Like him, “Francis Jonathon Clarke (1832-88), the proprietor of Clarke’s Blood Mixture, James Crossley Eno (1820-1915) of Eno’s Fruit Salt, and Thomas Holloway (1800-83) of Holloway’s Pills”—all of Britain—were men of “humble beginnings” who “worked remarkably hard. Each risked his security on a heavy investment in advertising. Each marketed a remedy with some genuine efficacy. Having achieved financial success, each became a noted philanthropist and active member of his community.”^[19]

While acknowledging the existence of “fly-by-night operators in the nostrum field,” Loeb points to a different reason—a “polarization of medicine and trade”—to explain why men like Fulford, Clarke, Eno and Holloway did not conform to “the scurrilous stereotype.” These men, she writes, “were entrepreneurs who marketed health as a commodity at a time when professionalism demanded that doctors retreat from the commercial arena. The unease of professionals with the commodification of health was expressed in vitriolic ridicule for patent medicines and their makers. The hyperbolic advertisements of the patent medicine men made them easy targets for the doctors, aspirants to an ideal of gentility, who imagined an artificially large gulf between professionalism and trade, an image further entrenched by the fashionable attribution of ethics and altruism to professionals alone.”^[20]

Although Sam was not a business owner like Fulford, Clarke, Eno and Holloway, his career as a senior manager in a patent medicine enterprise for half a century provides a window onto the industry. Following the establishment of the Fulford Company’s Cape Town office, where Sam started, an office was opened in Paris in 1893, which spun off “satellite agencies” in Holland, Belgium, Italy, and Greece. Cape Town, with the accompanying territory of South Africa, was managed by Charles Fulford, George Fulford’s nephew. Sam subsequently took over the Cape Town operation. This presumably occurred when Charles Fulford was reassigned about 1897 to establish an office in Sydney, Australia. In 1903, Sam too was reassigned to open up the Far East. Despite these early similarities, Sam and Charles’ careers with the company were very different.^[21]

A document in the Fulford Place Archives in Brockville asserts that “All went well” for Charles in Sydney until it was discovered he was running “a separate business of his own—Bile Beans for Biliousness.”^[22] First introduced in the late 1890s, Bile Beans became “a popular liver and digestive remedy.”^[23] Charles was not only fired for this unauthorized enterprise, his Uncle George also “severed contact” with him. But this did not stop Charles starting a Bile Beans business in Britain.^[24] When he “got into full swing he put on the market an additional line[,] Dr Slaters Blood making Tablets[,] [sic] and began a display advertising campaign in South Wales. [His Uncle George] was furious at this attempt to injure the [Pink Pills] business and said ‘Go after him full speed.’ So South Wales was swamped with [Pink Pills advertising] regardless of costs or profits on that section until [Charles] lost heart and let the line fade away.”^[25] What is more, a 1905 court case in Edinburgh (Bile Beans vs. Davidson) concluded that Charles’ “Bile Beans Company was ‘engag[ed] in perpetuating a deliberate fraud upon the public in describing and selling an article as being what it is not.’”^[26]

Although the Bile Beans case, along with the Medical Battery case and the Carbolic Smoke Ball case, both from the early 1890s, “demonstrated that patent medicine advertisers could not operate deceptively with impunity,” problems persisted in other parts of the industry. For example, when Bile Beans “were under a cloud,” Charles Fulford “started a new line called Karnac, a laxative pill…” This product also “had a short life…. an unfortunate error occurred in the mixing room with an effect upon the public not claimed in any [advertising] of Karnac.” Charles was nothing if not determined. “After an interval of years,” he re-entered the Bile Beans market with a product that became increasingly successful, to the point that, by 1944, it was “one of the best sellers in [Britain].”^[27]

During the period when Charles started working secretly on his own behalf, his Uncle George, who had served for twelve years on Brockville’s town council and was on the boards of several corporations, was appointed to the Canadian Senate by Prime Minister Wilfrid Laurier in January 1900.^[28] According to Hugena Cook, secretary for many years to George Taylor Fulford, Jr. (1902-87), the appointment to the Senate occurred after the senior Fulford “had reputedly donated $5,000 to the Liberal Party.”^[29] (The senior Fulford died following an automobile accident in Boston in October 1905. His Schenectady-based business manager, Willis Tracy Hanson, ran the company for the next quarter century.^[30]) George Taylor Fulford, Jr., who took over the company in 1929, also followed his father into politics, serving as a Liberal Member of Ontario’s Provincial Parliament, 1934-37, and as a Liberal Member of Parliament, 1940-45 and 1949-53. Moreover, Prime Minister MacKenzie King was godfather to Fulford Jr.’s youngest son, Dwight, the future diplomat.^[31] Fulford, Jr., would use his connections with Prime Minister King to help repatriate Sam.

Sam was thirty-one when he established the Fulford Company’s Singapore office in 1903. He went on to open offices in Hong Kong, India, Ceylon and, in 1908, Shanghai, which became his home base until the Second World War. Sam’s early business trips also took him to Mauritius, Java, Bangkok, Peking and Manila.^[32] Through similar expansions elsewhere around the world, “The Great Canadian Medicine”—as the Pink Pills were dubbed in 1899—became a global phenomenon.^[33]

While Sam was building the company’s Far Eastern network, he was also putting down his own roots. He married Blanche Louise Victorine Sabatier, who hailed from Lyon, France, on 16 March 1907, in Singapore. They moved to Shanghai when the company office was established there.^[34] Although their first child, Noël, was born in England in early 1908, Désirée and Pierre were born in Shanghai in 1910 and 1918, respectively.

Unlike Senator Fulford and his son George, Sam was not involved in politics. But like them, as well as Clarke, Eno and Holloway, he was an “active member of the community.” He “organized a Rotary Club in Shanghai” and served as its president. He was also a strong supporter of the Salvation Army and a member and president of the St. Patrick’s Society.^[35] According to Pierre, Sam was “A champion for [Shanghai’s] oppressed and the underprivileged.”^[36] Désirée recalled that Sam “visited the filthy Chinese jaols [sic] every Christmas morning with food for the prisoners.  He looked after the rickshaw coolies at the mission—instigated, for their protection, by the British because they were so badly treated by their own people.  He adopted a Chinese boy who was blind—paying his school fees and medical care.”^[37] As a small boy, Pierre accompanied Sam on one of his Christmas morning jail visits and watched his father give “each prisoner an apple, banana and an orange among other things … the memory is vividly etched in my mind.”^[38]

Although Sam said he had an “unorthodox mind” and “never cultivated a very strong desire for scriptural study,” he was nonetheless influenced by “the ‘still small Voice’” and described an experience when “at some chance moment, the cloud lifted, the vista cleared, a portal came in view. It was found in a book, and read, ‘All paths lead to Heaven.’ This comforting dictum remained heart-treasure for many years…”^[39] A neighbour in Kingston characterized him as a man of “so much quiet dignity, culture and charm.”^[40]

F.C. (Charlie) Wise was a Pink Pills colleague and friend of Sam’s. He joined the London office of John Morgan Richards and Sons in April 1896.^[41] This firm had been contracted by the Fulford Company in 1892 to market the Pink Pills in Britain, an arrangement that was later “extended to South Africa, Singapore and Shanghai.”^[42] Wise was assistant to Thomas Baron Russell, who was responsible for the Pink Pills file. Wise assumed this responsibility at a later date when Russell became the advertising manager for “The Times.”^[43] In early 1919, the Fulford Company terminated its relationship with John Morgan Richards and Sons. Wise, however, presumably moved to the Fulford Company, for he continued looking after the Pink Pills until September 1939 when he retired.^[44]

Wise was a vital resource in 1944 when Sam contemplated writing “a history of the business.”^[45] Such a history was a daunting task given that many vital records had been destroyed. The prospect “appalled” Sam.^[46] In addition to “documents lost in a Cape Town fire… others destroyed by the Japs in Singapore and Shanghai, and yet others … looted in Manila” that Sam mentions in a draft Foreword for the projected history, the company’s archives had been lost in a 1916 fire at the Fulford Building in Brockville and the London office at 36 Fitzroy Square had been “demolished by a German bomb… towards of end of 1940.”^[47] As a consequence, Sam wrote to his “old colleagues and friends” around the world asking for information and their recollections. Wise made by far the largest contribution, attaching a 37-page handwritten manuscript to a letter of 8 August 1944, and providing another eight handwritten pages of “Additional Notes” via Hubert C. (“Pard”) Myers, the company’s general manager, during the late autumn.^[48]

Wise’s recollections, which have already been used extensively in this essay, describe how he supplied Sam with part of his sales force:

I recall the procession of young men we sent out to the East to be your assistants—Campbell Sales Craston (or Cranston) Henly Keller and Kerr, some by Steamer some via Siberia…

Some of those young men were not successes, but it now seems to me that they were insufficiently paid. To start at £300 per annum on a five year agreement with moderate increases meant that they soon became discontented.

…some of the fellows you engaged in Shanghai were troublesome customers—Jackson who violently assaulted you in your office when he returned from one trip…^[49]

By the time Sam left the Orient in late 1941, his Shanghai staff exceeded one hundred, consisting of forty men and sixty-plus women. Most of the employees were Chinese. Sam described the men as “a formidable band… of friendly, faithful souls.” Of the women, he wrote: “I loved those little ladies and I know they all loved me.”^[50]

In a December 1969 letter, “Pard” Myers told Pierre: “The Fulford Co. never had an executive that made as great a contribution to its growth and survival, as your father. He built their business in South Africa, in Singapore, and in China. I’ve told this to everyone in the company that would listen to me…” During Sam’s tenure, the “Far Eastern Branch… was the largest and most profitable in the company.”^[51]

*

As internments go, Sam got off lucky. Soon after he’d arrived in Manila in late November, he contacted Désirée’s brother-in-law, Alec Smith (“Smithy”), who he did not know; Smithy was an employee of Nestle’s and a resident of the Greater Manila area. On 10 December, following “a second bad night in the Manila Hotel cellar,” Sam said he “was glad to receive a phone call from my new friend ‘Smithy’ … inviting me to become the guest of himself and his [American] wife in their home at San Juan, a little township some seven miles outside the city.”^[52]

Sam recalled later that the Smith home “stands in a fine garden on an elevation overlooking the whole city, and from its balcony over the front entrance we witnessed many thrilling sights[:] The strafing of Fort Murphy, a mile or two from us; great fires, tremendous volumes of black smoke, and the destruction of huge oil tanks, the contents of which ran flaming down the creeks and waterways out to the sea.” He added: “When at home with the women and children dashes into the sand-bag shelter under the house were frequent, and we all had hand-bags packed with night clothes, an extra suit, passports, money, ready for immediate flight.”^[53]

When the festive season arrived, “despite bombs and blackouts, we had a real Christmas dinner, with all the trimmings, liquid and otherwise…. Ten of us sat down to the table that night. Halfway through the meal we were unexpectedly joined by two American soldiers, one a lieutenant, the other a sergeant…. These men had been out on duty all day, driving a military lorry, hiding as best they could in ditches and under trees when enemy planes were overhead…. The [lieutenant], a thin stick of a man, as dry in appearance as he was in speech, had known our hostess during her school-days in Texas. The sergeant was Falstaffian. Huge, burly, black-bearded, ruddy and jovial, with his stories and laughter he dominated the feast….We were sorry to bid them good-bye when they remounted their lorry and drove away into the darkness.”^[54]

The next day, with the Japanese forces continuing to close in, General MacArthur declared Manila an “Open City” to save residents from a siege. The American troops left the city and “marched out to the wild mountainous terrain of Bataan…. At the same time President Quezon and Vice-President Osmena departed by submarine to Corregidor, leaving a high subordinate official named Vargas in charge, with only the native police to keep order, until the Japs came in.”^[55]

With these developments, Smithy and his wife, Theo, decided it was “too dangerous” to continue living “in the country.” Prior to the end of the month, they, along with their small children, Brian and Susan, “moved into town, to the home of the Swedish Consul who had offered them shelter…” Sam, meanwhile, “found quarters” in the Luneta Hotel, “a much humbler place… [than] the palatial Manila Hotel.” That night the Luneta Hotel’s “Chinese Manager… ran away into the country, as also did his staff, fearing what the Japs might do to them if they stayed.” Fortunately, a number of ships stewards from the President Grant were among the hotel’s guests and “took charge of the hotel kitchen on the morning of January 1^st.”^[56]

The stewards had been enjoying “a few hours sight-seeing ashore, and on return to the pier found their ship had sailed, leaving them behind, with nothing but the clothes they were wearing and a few dollars in their pockets. This… was also the experience of many passengers, who were hurriedly put ashore, carrying a few handbags. Then the ships hastened out of port, to get away to sea, to escape if they could the Japanese bombers. Men, women and children were thus left, bereft of their heavy baggage, to face the future in a strange land, and with the prospect of soon falling into the hands of the dreaded sons of Nippon.”^[57]

Sam’s “Philippines Retrospect” reports that about the same time “the Filipino officials threw open all the wharves and warehouses in the dock area to the native populace, with complete freedom to help themselves, and soon we saw hundreds of people streaming across the Luneta, carrying away huge bundles, cases and packages of every kind of loot. Among these goods, as I discovered afterwards, were the contents of four trunks containing many of my most prized possessions…. things I never saw again.”^[58]

The Japanese army arrived on 2 January. “Knowing the exceeding ill-repute acquired by their troops in China and elsewhere the Jap High Command had given strict instructions that there was to be no bad behavior.”^[59] Guests of hotels

…were forbidden to go out of doors. Japanese officers and men came in, made lists of our names, nationalities, baggage and so forth, and four days later we Britishers and Americans were carted away in open trucks to Santo Tomas University [a short distance from the city centre], which had been selected as a Concentration Camp. We suffered no ill-treatment, but were allowed to take with us only such luggage as we could carry in our hands. Thus I had to leave two trunks behind, which I did not see again for nine months. Then the Philippine Red Cross succeeded in recovering them for me, with locks smashed and the more valuable of their contents missing.

In this way over 3,000 of us were herded into Santo Tomas without bedding and, in many cases, without food. However, our ships stewards, having no personal baggage of their own, managed to carry into the camp quite a good supply of tinned meats, etc., sufficient to keep us going for a meal or two. Then outside the University grounds hundreds of Filipinos gathered, bringing with them supplies and meat, fish, fruits, bread, biscuits, honey, jams and so forth, which we bought from them through the railings. Most of this food, doubtless, had been looted from the shops the previous day. This trading, however, was stopped by the Japanese next morning.

I spent that first night in a big classroom turned into a dormitory. There were some 65 men crowded into this room and we smashed up everything in the way of class-room benches, tables and shelving to make beds for ourselves, the less fortunate sleeping on the floor. I was lucky, because one Manila resident whom I had formerly known in Shanghai loaned me a fold-up camp cot, of which he had purchased three.^[60]

Smithy and “another friend of his named Walker” had also been picked up and interned at the university. Their wives and children were allowed to stay “behind because the [five] children [who ranged in age from three months to three years] were so young and small.” The morning after they’d all arrived, Sam “ran into [Smithy and Walker] in one of the corridors.” Smithy then set to work persuading the camp authorities that Sam, who was a week shy of his seventieth birthday, was too old to be a prisoner. Sam was “released only 28 hours after [his] internment” began. He joined the Smith and Walker families at the home of the Swedish Consul “in Pasay, Manila’s most fashionable suburb, just a block from Dewey Boulevard, which for miles skirts [Manila] Bay.”^[61]

One night Sam and the Smith and Walker families “were awakened… by the noise of exploding bombs. Hastily gathering up the children,… we hurried them down into the basement. At the same time we heard our Nippon neighbours across the street dash out and begin shooting guns and revolvers into the air. It turned out to be an attack upon close-by Nichols’ Air-Field by a solitary American plane which came over from somewhere in the dark and, after successfully accomplishing its mission, made a safe get-away.”^[62]

Sam had a close call one afternoon when he was out for a walk with “the family dog.” They “got held up at the end of a side street by a triumphal procession. This consisted of a long train of military motor trucks, carrying hundreds of soldiers through the main thoroughfares, the purpose being to impress the natives with Japan’s magnificence and might. Getting tired of waiting on the corner of the side street whilst truck after truck slowly rolled by, I thought to cross, but decided it would be wiser not to. Luckily, I didn’t, for an unfortunate Filipino who took the risk was promptly pounced upon by soldiers who jumped down from a truck and gave him a terrific beating. He had acted disrespectfully towards the Japanese army, and thus to the Son-of-Heaven in Tokio.”^[63]

At the end of January, Sam and what he termed “our little family” left Consul Jansen’s home “and returned to San Juan, not this time to the home of the Smiths, but to the Walker’s [sic] home.” Sam points out that “[a]ll ‘enemy subjects’ given the privilege of living outside, were instructed not to forget they were still prisoners of war…. For a time, at intervals, I had to report myself at Santo Tomas. Then the Commandant’s Office gave me a permanent release, which was not at all welcome, as these visits to the Camp made a pleasant break in the daily monotony, and furthermore there seemed a real danger that, ‘out of sight, out of mind,’ I might become a forgotten man when repatriation began. So I got friend Smithy to have my name added to the Camp List, later taken by the British Consul General to England, and passed on to the Foreign Office, which, in turn, advised [the Fulford Company’s] London Office. And thus it came about that Toronto Head Office and my wife first got news of my well being.”^[64] It took some time for this information to arrive, however. In the meantime, the Kingston Whig-Standard reported: “The wife and members of the family of S. W. Wolfe, of this city who was reported missing, but believed to have been captured after the fall of Manila, have been unable to get any trace of his whereabouts. It is thought from information obtained from semi-official sources that Mr. Wolfe reached Burma.”^[65]

*

On 1 October 1942 the Fulford Company learned that Sam “was interned” in the Manila area. This phrase was used in a letter of 7 October 1942 that George Taylor Fulford, Jr., wrote to Prime Minister Mackenzie King requesting “a great favour.”^[66] Sam was indeed fortunate to have an ally who was both powerful and well-placed. Fulford’s letter pulled out all the stops, describing Sam as “a trusted and faithful employee” and noting that the Fulford family counted Sam, Blanche and their children “amongst our most intimate friends.” He added that Sam’s

…daughter is at present en route from Australia to Canada with her small child having barely escaped with their lives from Singapore where she was residing with her husband at the time when the city fell to the Japanese. His older boy is somewhere in China with the Imperial Army where he holds a very responsible command, due to his intimate knowledge of Mandarin Chinese language. [Noël, in fact, was one of “a group of China men” who trained in India for the Indian Army, according to a Shanghai newspaper clipping of 24 April 1941. He rose to the rank of Lieutenant-Colonel with the 5^th Gurkha Regiment, served in Burma and also spent time doing intelligence work behind enemy lines in China.]^[67]

Fulford also said that Sam was “none too robust,” had “recently become extremely deaf” and was “now well on in his seventies,” which was a marked exaggeration. “I am sure that you must realize,” he concluded, “that I would not ask a favour such as this [pursuing Sam’s repatriation on a priority basis] if I did not consider Mr. Wolfe’s very life depends upon his release, and I conscientiously believe that there could be no more deserving case for repatriation than this.”^[68]

A letter of 14 October 1942 from the Under Secretary of State for External Affairs advised Fulford that because “the Philippine Islands [are] a zone of active military operations…. [Canada has] been unable to establish direct contact with this area through the Swiss representatives normally in charge of Canadian interests in enemy and enemy occupied territory, and the present situation with regard to the Philippines is consequently rather obscure.” The letter went on to say: “Although Mr. Wolfe is not a Canadian national, in view of his close connections with this country his name has been included in the list of Canadians eligible for repatriation which has been submitted to the Swiss authorities.” At the same time, the letter cautioned that “the choice of individuals [to be repatriated] must be left largely in the hands of the Swiss representatives on the spot” owing to “limited space available on any one sailing, and of practical considerations such as transportation from outlying districts to the port of embarkation on the exchange vessels.”^[69]

*

Months earlier, in February and early March 1942, “everybody,” according to Sam, “expected American airfleets to come to our rescue.” While this prospect was much desired by those opposed to the Japanese, it was also “rather alarming” to the Wolfe-Smith-Walker contingent for their San Juan abode was close to two obvious targets. Not only was Fort Murphy “only about a mile away,” but “at the bottom of our garden, not 250 yards distant, was a huge underground powder magazine and ammunition dump.” But the situation changed in mid-March when the Japanese-controlled Daily Tribune, Manila’s only remaining newspaper, vaingloriously reported that General MacArthur had fled to Australia. “Probably rarely before in history,” Sam opined, “had a hero’s reputation descended so rapidly to zero.”^[70] The American and Filipino troops that were still active surrendered on 6 May.

During the spring and summer, Sam observed that both Mrs. Smith and Mrs. Walker “were losing weight and showing more and more evidence of nerve strain.” They had to deal with a number of challenges, including the absence of their husbands, although the men occasionally arrived “home… on a few days furlough.” Rationing, of course, increased as many food items became scarce. “Bread soon became a luxury, until it disappeared altogether—for lack of wheat flour. Cow’s milk too—when the Nestle’s tinned products were sold out—became a problem, until we got used to coconut milk as a substitute…. The stocks of popular imported breakfast foods soon gave out. Then we bought ‘cracked wheat’ by the sack…. until, some twelve months later, no more was available. Then we fell back on cornmeal, and after that on rice, not the polished rice of civilization, but the native unpolished variety which is much more satisfying and nutritious.”^[71]

The Japanese soldiers encamped around the neighbourhood were another source of anxiety. The house was periodically “visited by small parties of them. This was unpleasant, but beyond checking up our camp permits of release and suspiciously searching every room and cupboard, these men, who spoke no English, gave us little trouble. This was surprising as from many homes they removed beds, bedding and furniture to equip their own quarters.”^[72]

In early August, Mrs. Smith and her children moved back into town. Sam went with them “to another pleasant house and garden in Pasay,” which allowed him to resume his afternoon walks along Dewey Boulevard, usually accompanied by “little Brian Smith, aged four.” Close to their new home was a big schoolhouse that had been converted to “a camp for American military prisoners.”^[73]

The prisoners were marched away early every morning to work at Nichols Field, and shortly after 5.00 [sic] each evening they could be met, trudging slowly and painfully back. To stand and openly watch this sad procession would be dangerous, and I only did so from a safe distance, hidden up a side street or in a quiet corner. Filipino spectators, looking out from their own gates, had been manhandled by the Japanese guards. A few who had dared to call out to the men had been seized, taken on to the schoolhouse, and there hung up by their wrists in the open as a public warning.

These unfortunate soldiers were a deplorable sight. Unshaven, dejected, burnt deep brown from exposure all day in the tropical sun, they looked like scarecrows, so tattered were their garments. Some wore rags to protect their feet, others limped along in broken boots, shoes and sandals.

For compatriots to intervene on behalf of these Americans would have been useless. So the matter was taken up by Swiss, Danish and other neutrals who lived nearby the road along which the prisoners passed and were shocked at their appearance. By the efforts of these good folk some slight amelioration was brought about. Clothing, boots and shoes were collected and permission was obtained to send them in to the prison. Money was contributed monthly by internees in Santo Tomas and other civilian camps, to enable these neutral friends to purchase other necessities, as well as cigarettes, for distribution to the men. Towards the end of 1942 a group of women got busy making socks and other garments, also cakes and candies, with the thought to help make Christmas happier for them. But when Christmas came the Military Commandant refused to allow any of the food into the prison.

Then, one afternoon two ladies visited us and our neighbours bringing with them the cakes and candies, and these we bought at their request, so that the money could be used to provide more cigarettes for the soldiers. I especially remember this event because of one of these ladies. She was young and pale and very sweet looking, and came limping in on crutches, for she had only one leg. The other she had lost during the Jap air-attack on Baguio, where she was living at that time. As the planes came over she rushed out into the street to save her little daughter, throwing herself upon the child for its greater protection. Then the bomb fell.^[74]

An edict from the Japanese High Command in early January 1943 required “that all enemy subjects must wear red arm-bands, to differentiate them from neutrals and pro-axis nationals…. Thus marked, the Japs thought we would become objects of derision in the eyes of the natives. But exactly the opposite happened. The symbol created greater sympathy for us, as ladies shopping in the markets discovered when kindly stall-keepers pressed little extras upon them in the way of additional fruits and vegetables, as a gift they would not be gainsaid.”^[75]

Another edict required “that we must salute every Japanese sentry on duty, by raising the hat and politely bowing to him as we passed. Failing this we were liable to reprisals. We could be stopped by the sentry and slapped across the face, the least of punishments from a Japanese point of view. Soon after, when walking along a wide but almost empty avenue in Pasay, I spied a sentry on duty across the way, in a place where no sentry had been posted before. I thought the avenue wide enough for me to pretend not to see him, but did not get away with it. The man shouted to me to stop, called me over, and then sternly, with grim face, showed by signs how he expected me to act. This I did, fully expecting to be slapped for my negligence. That I was spared may have been due to my venerable appearance, certainly not to a smile, for a smile is likely to be interpreted by a Jap sentry as a slight rather than a compliment. Had I been a Filipino or a younger man undoubtedly my face would have suffered.”^[76]

A third edict followed soon after: “all wearers of red arm-bands [were forbidden] to appear upon the boulevard, avenues or main thoroughfares; we must confine our walks to the back streets. Then they sent patrols out to watch for those who ignored this ruling, every now and then rounding up delinquents caught shopping in the markets or main business streets, and hustling them off into Fort Santiago. There these offenders, men or women, were detained for several days, sleeping in cells and subsisting on prison food.” This put an end to little Brian accompanying Sam on his walks, for his mother feared if Sam were seized Brian “might be taken along” too.^[77]

March 1943 brought another change in living arrangements. Mrs. Smith “decided that she and the children would be safer and happier in Santo Tomas with her husband.” Sam went into Sulphur Springs Camp in the township of San Francisco Del Monte, located a little north of San Juan and about as far distant from Manila. Affiliated with Santo Tomas, the Sulphur Springs Camp was “used as a home for aged people, invalids and convalescents.” Sam “was told it had formerly been a country hotel, road house, or rendezvous for sailors from the American fleet and their ladies, Filipino or otherwise.” Before becoming a resident, he made the long trip “by caratella, street car and finally, strap-hanging on the step of a much overcrowded little bus… to investigate on the spot.” Upon arrival, he “entered the grounds with considerable misgiving.” But he found himself “most agreeably surprised by the place.”^[78]

The hotel building was two storied, the lower portion very solidly built of reinforced concrete; the floor above of wood, supported on stone pillars and covered by an iron roof. The ground floor consisted of a spacious, cool dining room wide open to the terrace. Bedrooms and cubicles extended down either side of it. Upstairs the accommodation was similar as regards bedrooms, but had a lounge or sitting room filling its entire length. There were ample rattan chairs and settees everywhere, and quite a number of pleasant looking people sat around.^[79]

Sam was one of twenty-eight internees when he joined the Sulphur Springs Camp. “Then our number increased to 92, among them merchants, architects, accountants, engineers, planters, insurance men, army nurses from Corregidor, a journalist, and a retired Supreme Court Judge, many with their wives.

“An interesting group [was] the ‘squaw men.’ These were mostly elderly fellows, veterans of the Spanish-American war, who had remained in the islands, married native women and raised Filipino families. I found these men self-respecting and agreeable companions. Their women-folk continued to live outside, and brought them in fruit and delicacies to augment the camp fare.”^[80]

Sam’s internment—what he called “my seven months’ sojourn in Sulphur Springs Camp”—was hardly typical of what other internees experienced as the war ground on into 1944 and 1945. Security was “[a]lmost farcical.” From March through July, “we never saw [any] Japanese in the camp. The big iron gate at the bottom of the front garden was rarely closed except at night, and the rear of the grounds, some distance away down the other side of the hill crest, had no wall, fence, or wire obstruction to prevent us walking out. In fact there was no sentry posted either front or back at any time.” But escape wasn’t really an option. “We could not have gone far in any direction without being seen by natives; a telephone message from the camp, once we were missed, would have promptly set the local police on our track, inevitably resulting in speedy capture and a trip to military headquarters in Fort Santiago.”^[81]

Another distinction of being an internee at Sulphur Springs was paying room and board. “Up to the time I left the rate was two pesos [$1.00 U.S.] per day, and the Japanese augmented this by a daily allowance of 70 centavos (35 cents) per person, which helped cover camp expenses such as cost of electricity, servants’ wages, and charcoal for the kitchen fires. For this total sum we were provided with three meals a day and sleeping accommodation, two in a room or one in a cubicle, but supplied our own mosquito net and bedding.”^[82]

In addition, Sulphur Springs internees were not required to work. “Most of us, however, made our own beds, and did our own laundry,” Sam reported. “Some worked, spasmodically, in the fruit and vegetable gardens.” For his part, Sam voluntarily “kept the recreation ground clean and in apple-pie order” for several months until he had a run-in with another man. It appears Sam enjoyed recounting this episode, which is nonetheless revealing of what at least one of his children regarded as his often-unbending nature.^[83]

Every morning saw me out bright and early, armed with garden broom and bucket. Taking great pride in the job, after about an hour’s labour I would survey the results with intense satisfaction. Then, woe betide the miscreant caught sullying my work! All went well until a certain Mr. “Buster” Brown joined the camp. “Buster” was a fat, choleric type of individual. I am a thin man with an Irish temper. One morning we had a row over his untidy habit of throwing cigarette-stubbs [sic] around, after which I resigned my honorary job in disgust and the recreation ground reverted to its old dishevelled state.^[84]

Overall, however, Sam considered the Sulphur Springs community “a pretty cheerful crowd.” Their “daily routine was monotonous,” he said, but “time seemed to pass quickly enough. We got up at 6.30, breakfasted at 7.00, played miniature golf on the recreation ground, or took sun-baths, or strolled around for exercise until the sun got too hot, then went indoors to read or play dominoes. Tiffin was at noon, after which a siesta was in order. Then more golf, a game of horse-shoes, or another walk. Dinner was served at 6.00, followed by music, singing, dominoes and cards. At 10.00 o’clock ‘lights-out’ was the rule in the dining room and lounge. Most people were glad to turn in by 9.30, excepting the poker-players.”^[85]

Sam described their board as follows: “The morning meal consisted of one small banana, or piece of papaya, a bowl of cornmeal mush with coconut milk, a very small egg, and a cup of darkish brown liquid vaguely suggesting coffee. Tiffin was a bowl of soup, hash or stew, a modicum of vegetables. Dinner again soup, a little meat, fish or fowl, and another small portion of vegetables. At every meal there was ample boiled rice, but no bread. So long as they could afford to, most internees added to these rations bananas, melons, papayas or other fruits, purchased for them outside. Sugar—though we lived in one of the greatest sugar-producing countries of the world—was very strictly rationed. It would seem from the foregoing that we did rather well; actually many internees were under-nourished, the diet did not suit them, and all lost weight.”^[86]

Food and repatriation were popular topics of conversation. “The favorite time for camp chat was between dinner and dark. Then folks gathered in the dusk on the big terrace outside the dining hall, and under the trees in the grounds, talking about this and that…. But somehow or other the conversation almost invariably drifted round sooner or later to ‘exchange’ ships, home-going, and the good things we would eat when we got back to the other side. Believe it or not, no matter what menu was selected, items never omitted were coffee and pie, with hot dogs running a close second.” No doubt, as a self-described “hungry person,” Sam was a keen participant in these discussions.^[87] He added:

When sugar was rationed to a meagre quantity issued fortnightly, the Dahlon family [which owned and operated the camp] went out of their way to secretly give me an extra supply because they heard the doctor had said I needed it. A Scottish lady and her husband insisted that I should be their guest every day to afternoon tea—Lipton’s no less—almost worth its weight in gold, so scarce was it. They had a little reserve stock of their own, and I had none. To be invited to coffee after dinner—Chase & Sanborne, not the Camp’s “jus-de-chapeau”—by people who could afford to possess such a luxury, was another very occassional [sic] privilege. Such an invitation in itself was a high compliment. These may seem trivial matters, but in those days of scarcity, and in the circumscribed circumstances under which we lived, they meant very much.^[88]

About July, “the sudden influx of newcomers” arrived. As a result, Sam and a number of others “had to remove to another and much older house on top of the hill which formed the crest of Superintendent Dahlon’s domain. This shift was necessary to provide accommodation in the main building for the really old, asthmatics, rheumatic cripples, and married couples….

“During bad weather we had to walk through the downpours to the main building for our meals; everybody living in our ramshackle building got badly wet, coughs and colds were almost universal. Often, too, we were temporarily washed out of our rooms, and our bedclothing and baggage were always damp until a spell of good days came, enabling us to take them out to dry in the welcome sunshine.”^[89]

Toward the end of Sam’s stay at Sulphur Springs, the camp received “a visit from some plain-clothes Japanese police officials. They were searching for a Filipino dentist whose photograph, which I saw, showed him to be a handsome, middle-aged man of intelligence and education, probably trained for his profession, as many Filipino professional men have been, in America or Europe. We learned that the Jap military had [suspicions] that the dentist possessed fire arms, so sent three soldiers to investigate. They found him in his office, seated at his desk, and demanded his gun, whereupon he quickly opened his desk drawer, drew a revolver therefrom, and shot each of them dead where they stood, one after the other. Then he bolted down the stairs and disappeared. Whether he was found I do not know.” Sam included this vignette in a section of “Philippines Retrospect” that discussed several attempted assassinations of prominent, pro-Japanese Filipinos. He maintained that “guerilla risings and associations by patriotic gun-men began to grievously worry” the Japanese early in 1943.^[90]

*

As the end of summer neared, Sam “had abandoned all hope of early repatriation,” but “one day in early September… a gentleman named Browne…. an envoy from Santo Tomas” arrived to advise him that his name was on a list “of internees to be sent home at the end of the month by an American exchange ship” and that he was to report to Santo Tomas on 22 September.^[91]

“I could hardly believe this wonderful news,” Sam recounted. It was all the more remarkable because he was one of “only 151 out of 5,000 or more, internees in Santo Tomas, Los Banos, Baguio, and the remaining few camps throughout the islands…. How was it possible that I… could have been selected for freedom, and especially—as a Britisher—on an American exchange ship! It was not until some time later that I discovered my repatriation was due to the efforts of my good friend George T. Fulford, MP.” On the appointed day, Sam and two others from Sulphur Springs who were being repatriated were sent on their way by “a big gathering of [their] fellow internees…. It was an emotional scene.”^[92]

At Santo Tomas, Sam “made all haste” to find his friends Alec and Theo Smith. As Smithy “had done so much for [him] already, with financial aid as well as in other ways,” Sam presumed “that Smithy was the person responsible for [his] coming repatriation.” Sam found the Smith family in “’Shanty-town’… a village of shacks fringing upon the big market gardens which lie behind the Camp’s main buildings. Another similar village enjoys the more alluring title of ‘Glamorville.’ Some 600 shacks [owned by ‘usually more affluent’ internees] comprise these little townships. They were built by the internees themselves and are laid out in lanes which, though narrow, bear such distinguishing names as ‘Fifth Avenue,’ ‘Broadway,’ ‘Market Street,’ ‘Piccadilly.’

“With the exception of a few privileged bachelors no internees are permitted to sleep in these shacks. When night falls husbands and wives must separate, the former to the men’s sleeping quarters, the women to theirs, a most effective method of birth control.” At this point Santo Tomas held “some 3,800 men, women and children” (3,000 Americans, 800 British).^[93]

Smithy and Theo were surprised and pleased to see Sam, “the more so when they heard that [he] was homeward bound.” As part of this exchange, Smithy, who “was astonished” by the pending repatriation, corrected Sam’s belief that Smithy was somehow responsible for Sam’s “extraordinary good luck… [and] this further benefaction.”^[94]

During his brief four days back in Santo Tomas, Sam devoted much of his time to “studying the Camp life…. Out of the chaos which prevailed during … January, 194[2], complete order had evolved, a well-managed, largely self-governed and self-supporting little city had grown.”^[95]

Of course supreme control is in the hands of the Japanese. In the main, so far, it had been reasonable and humane…. Apart from Commandant Kuroda, and his small personal staff, the internees had very little contact with Japanese.

The Camp is managed and run by an American-British Committee elected by the internees themselves. It consists of seven members. Its chairman is Mr. C.C. Grinnell, formerly chief executive of the General Electric Company of America in the Far East, who lived in Japan up to the outbreak of the war for a number of years. Under this Central Executive Committee are sub-committees and staffs taking care of finance, health, sanitation, education, policing, fire-safety, kitchens, work-assignment, and other essential services. All those officials, office staffs and manual workers give their services without pay, as also do the doctors and nurses in the camp hospital. Every internee is expected to share in the daily public duties. It is a matter of honour with most of them to carry out this obligation.

Santo Tomas internees are not supposed to have to pay for their food and lodging. The Japanese authorities, up to the time I left, were granting an allowance of 70 centavos (35 cents) per head per day for internees’ support. How they supposed their prisoners could live on this miserly sum is difficult to understand. Yet incredible as it may seem, all internees do receive at least two meals a day, and money is set aside also from the allowance to provide assistance to destitute persons and for other camp purposes.

Children and the aged get three meals daily…. Shack owners… provide and cook their own midday meal. My friends, the Smiths, took only camp breakfast, and cooked for themselves and children the rest of the day. I was always their guest at tiffin and dinner, so did very well during this short sojourn in Santo Tomas….

There have been several references within these pages to internees who are ‘affluent,’ who can afford to buy what might be considered luxuries, or who have sufficient, at least, to purchase extra food. It may quite reasonably be asked where does the money come from[?]

The answer is that ‘affluent’ folk are those who were wise enough to withdraw substantial cash funds from their banking accounts before the Banks closed at the end of December ‘41: Strange to say, the Japanese did not search internees when we were taken into Camp, nor did they ask people, like myself, who were subsequently let out on parole, what cash they possessed. The only demand they made—and that came several months later—was for a detailed statement of what monies we had in the various Banks. No doubt these lists were checked against the Banks’ records later.^[96]

Sam reported as well on the camp’s daily activities, outdoor and indoor recreation, educational opportunities, and noted that in the evenings, concerts and plays were presented on a large stage. He also pointed out that the Japanese prohibited alcohol and dancing, and that attempted escapes had “been few and far between. The tragic fate of three men who did get away in the very early days of the camp is too well remembered. These men were speedily caught, brought back and shot out of hand.”^[97]

The repatriates were saluted with “a farewell entertainment” two nights before their departure.^[98]

It was a gala affair, featuring all the best talent the Camp possessed. Among the performers were a number of professionals, internees like the rest.

Long before the show opened men, women and children came trooping out, most of them carrying their own chairs, until an audience of over 3,000 was seated or standing facing the big stage. A remarkable sight, that great sea of upturned faces, illuminated in the darkness by the glare of powerful electric lights.

During the proceedings, Mr. Kodaki appeared, accompanied by Commandant Kuroda and the members of the Camp’s “town-council,” or Central Executive Committee. [Mr. Kodaki was head of the Department of Internal Affairs in the Philippines and Mr. Kuroda’s superior.] His purpose was to tell us how good the Japanese really are, good in heart and purpose, and how well we ought to speak of them when we get back home. To speak otherwise, of course, might accentuate ill-feeling, to the disadvantage of our compatriots still remaining in the Orient. Kodaki spoke in fluent—though broken—English, and he really seemed a very well-intentioned little man.^[99]

Those departing “were forbidden [by the Japanese] to carry any money… other than Japanese Military Notes” to a limit of “One Thousand pesos.”^[100]

“Most of us,” Sam commented, “contented ourselves with Ps. 200.”^[101]

They were also forbidden to take any “diaries, manuscripts, letters, books or printed matter of any sort.” Sam left some of his personal papers with Smithy.^[102]

After an early and especially large breakfast, those being repatriated left Santo Tomas on a “procession of busses and trucks” at dawn on 26 September. “For unexplained reasons Jap headquarters had decided to ship us from the port of San Fernando, some 240 miles up the island, instead of from Manila. The journey, in a slow-going ‘special’ train with hard wooden seats, was long, hot and tiring, especially for the children and sick.” They reached their destination by late afternoon and were transported in open lighters to the Teia Maru, a French mail steamer, anchored “some distance off-shore.”^[103]

She had accommodation for, at most, 600 passengers. Now she had to carry and provide for 1503 repatriates from Japan, North China, Shanghai, the Philippines and Saigon. So we were terribly overcrowded, and before long lacked for food. No fire or boat drills were ever held, because there were not nearly enough boats to carry us away should catastrophe come….

We saw nothing of the Japanese captain and his officers; they kept to themselves in their own quarters. So far as we were concerned the ship was run by stewards, exceedingly overworked it is true, but a nasty, hostile crowd who soon began to rob us of food—bread, butter, coffee, meat—in order to sell it to the hungry in the afternoons and as supper at night….

Insolence was one of the chief characteristics of those Jap stewards. They demanded a tip from every passenger coming on board, then invariably declared that what was given was insufficient. If additional food was asked for at meals they said “No more,” or else “Pay,” holding out their hands. One elderly lady who sat opposite me at table could not drink the miserable coffee and tea supplied at meals—only half a cup as it was—and sent her daughter one day to the stewards for a glass of iced water. For this a charge of one peso (fifty cents) was demanded, and paid….

“Adversity makes strange bed-fellows,” says the proverb, and this proved entirely true with us. The Japs, regardless of the lists of “desirables” submitted by Washington, Ottawa and the Swiss Red Cross, decided to substitute a number of “undesirables” of whom they were anxious to get rid. Among these was, at least, one murderer—maybe two—I was warned by my friends in Santo Tomas. Also there were habitual roughs, professional toughs, irredeemable drunkards, and several ladies of more than exceedingly doubtful virtue.

It proved impossible during the early days of our voyage to distinguish between the sheep and the goats. We were all so deplorably patched and shabby, ill-shaven and down-at-heel, that many saints looked like sinners, and highly reputable college professors like tramps….

A little police force of able-bodied men was organized among our passengers. These plain-clothes officers patrolled the ship day and night. At times there were fights with the drunks long after all respectable folk were abed. The ship’s brig was rarely empty. Petty thefts occurred at intervals, and a “Dead End” gang, sequestered somewhere down in the holds, stole bed-clothing, travelling rugs and shoes as opportunities came. But fortunately, nothing really serious happened of a criminal kind. ^[104]

The Teia Maru “steamed up the Mekong River in French Indo-China… [t]hree days after leaving the Philippines.” On 2 October it reached Singapore. “We spent two days [there], taking on much-needed water, of which there was always a scarcity on the ‘Teia Maru.’ Those two days many got their first bath since leaving Manila. Water again became strictly rationed, down to very small quantities issued for short periods twice a day, immediately after we started on the final leg to Goa,” which Sam described as “an ancient Portuguese possession, a tiny patch in the centre of India’s west coast.” The Teia Maru arrived there in mid-October, followed twenty-four hours later by the Gripsholm.^[105]

Then, on the morning of the 19th October Freedom came; the long-looked-forward-to “exchange” took place. We 1503 repatriates marched in file from the “Teia Maru” to the “Gripsholm,” whilst a similar stream of Japanese men, women and children poured out of the “Gripsholm,” and on into the quarters we had vacated. We were supremely happy. They gave no indications of joy, knowing only too well the discomforts that awaited them in Japan….

On reaching the “Gripsholm’s” main deck each of us was handed a large slab of Nestle’s chocolate, and every one who wished received also a package of American cigarettes. An enormous and hungrily-devoured alfresco lunch followed, whilst meanwhile the ship’s crew were fumigating and refurbishing the cabins. Then mail was distributed. Thousands of letters and cablegrams, a supreme event to us, many of whom had not heard from home, relatives and friends, for nearly two years. That night the “Gripsholm” cooks and stewards served us an enormous dinner, chief features of which were roast turkey, ice-cream and coffee—such coffee as Canadians and Americans enjoy. And then to bed—after one of life’s most memorable days.^[106]

Sam and the others were provided “with much-needed changes of clothing and other necessities.” He commended the Gripsholm’s “Swedish staff” for making the voyage not only comfortable, but also “health and strength restoring.” He added: “Every passenger was given a box of Vitamin capsules by the ship’s doctors, with instructions they must be taken every day; we were vaccinated, fed upon scientifically planned ample diet, provided with books and magazines, entertained with movies and concerts, attended lectures and classes, sing-songs and sermons, each according to his or her will. We Rotarians on board—there were 44 of us—had two Rotary dinners during the voyage. Everybody regained weight, some more than they desired.”^[107]

On 3 November the Gripsholm landed at Port Elizabeth, South Africa. Sam was met by Mr. Pat Gleeson, representative for G.T. Fulford Company’s agents for South Africa. Sam’s “first move there was to go shopping, to exchange [his] dirty, dilapidated khaki pants and worn-out foot-gear (relics of internment) for respectable trousers and shoes.” He discovered that Mr. Gleeson, who was “freshly back from a long spell of war service in West Africa and Abyssinia,” was “a brother southern-Irishman and a great fellow. In his office I met colleagues of his, Mr. Field from Natal and Mr. Godwin from the Eastern Province. It was a real pleasure to me, going over the South African map with them, and resurrecting memories of my own experiences and travels throughout that vast territory more than forty years before.”^[108] As Sam was being delivered from bondage and moving on in his life, his career with the Fulford Company came full circle.

The penultimate port of call for the repatriates destined for North America was Rio de Janeiro, a city Sam had long wanted to visit. The Gripsholm landed there on 15 November for a “36-hour stopover.” On 24 November Sam and his fellow repatriates crossed the equator for the fourth time since leaving the Far East. They docked at Jersey City early on 1 December. After an all-night train ride, Sam arrived in Montreal “soon after breakfast, and there, to welcome me, were my dear wife, whom I had not seen for two and a half years, and my good friends George Fulford and ‘Pard’ Myers. That afternoon the journey to Kingston was completed, and on Kingston platform we found my daughter Desiree, my grandchildren, Michael and Carol Anne, the latter born in Singapore whilst I was in Manila, and my medical-student son, Pierre, all waiting to give me a loving welcome home.”^[109]

*

On 9 December 1943, one week after he had returned to Canada, Sam addressed the Kingston Rotary Club.^[110] A month later, on 10 January 1944, he told the Gananoque Rotary Club:   “As the war moves toward their own country, then the Japs will become more brutal toward those helpless people [the thousands of British and American military and civilian prisoners of war]. I could sense that feeling and change when I left [the Philippines] last September.”^[111] The Kingston Whig-Standard said Sam feared “the Philippines will have to undergo much greater suffering than they have yet experienced.”^[112] During August and September 1944, he spoke to the Kinsmen Club in Picton and to Rotary Clubs in Ottawa, Trenton, and Picton. The total number of his speaking engagements is not known. When Brockville’s The Recorder and Times reported on his 19 March 1945 talk to the Brockville Rotary, the story noted that it was the fourth time Sam had addressed the club (one or more of these other talks may have been from the pre-Pearl Harbor period).^[113]

By leaving the Philippines when he did, Sam avoided the last twenty-two months of the war in the Pacific, during which time conditions became progressively more desperate for the Japanese, their prisoners, and the people of Japanese-occupied territory. “I was so fortunate… to escape mal-treatment at Japanese hands,” he wrote in an April 1946 letter. “Many of those who remained in Manila after I left suffered very badly indeed, several having died of starvation, and others at the hands of Japanese executioners for no justifiable reason…”^[114] He knew he was doubly fortunate: first, to have been among the first internees to be repatriated; and, second, while interned, to have been at the Sulphur Springs Camp, which he said was “one of the best in the Philippines,” even though “the meals… were barely enough to keep the [camp’s] civilian population… above the subsistence level.”^[115] He credited his freedom “to months of work on the part of George Fulford of Brockville, my very good friend.”^[116] “Philippines Retrospect,” which Sam completed in February 1944, is dedicated to Fulford with the tribute: “To Whose Untiring Efforts I Owe My Deliverance from Bondage.”^[117]

Sometime after his repatriation, Sam was given the title assistant general manager of the company.^[118] In the early months of 1946 he was helping General Manager Myers plan for the return of Hubert Cohen to the company’s Singapore office.^[119] Sam had also been assigned the job of writing a history of the company.^[120] But, likely due to failing eyesight and other health problems, he made little progress on this beyond soliciting and collecting information from his friend F.C. Wise and a number of others, which is now held in the Archives at Fulford Place in Brockville.

Sam and Blanche resided in Kingston until the summer of 1946 when they moved to Victoria, British Columbia, where both Noël and Désirée had attended school in the 1920s and where Pierre began his medical internship on 1 March 1946.^[121] Noël and his family moved to Victoria in mid-1948.^[122] Désirée and her children went to England in November 1945 to meet her husband, Lieutenant Leslie Caton Smith, who had “arrived there after being a prisoner of war of the Japanese in Thailand for nearly four years.”^[123] After he regained his health, their family returned for a number of years to Singapore where he worked in the rubber business with Boustead & Company. They eventually settled in England. Leslie’s brother Alec and his family, who had been so important to Sam during the twenty-two months he was “stranded” in the Manila area, continued to reside there after the war.^[124]

Sam died in Victoria, B.C., on 2 November 1952. He was eighty.

Text copyright © 2024 Patrick S. Wolfe
All rights reserved.
Short segments may be quoted with due attribution.

1. When Sam spoke to the Brockville Rotary Club on Monday, 19 March 1945, Mr. George T. Fulford, Jr., MP, in his introduction, said that as of 1 April of that year Sam “will have completed 50 years in the service of the G.T. Fulford Company.” Wolfe Family Records: “Christian Beliefs of the Filipinos Bar to Japanese,” Brockville Recorder and Times, Tuesday, 20 March 1945. ↑
2. Wolfe Family Records: S.W. Wolfe, “Philippines Retrospect: A Hard-Luck Story With a Happy Ending,” February, 1944 (unpublished), 2. ↑
3. Fulford Place Archives, Brockville, Ontario: A letter of 15 October 1942, from George T. Fulford, Jr., MP, to Walter Turnbull, Private Secretary to Prime Minister Mackenzie King, advises that Sam’s “retirement from the Company with pension was to have taken place last December” (1941). ↑
4. “Philippines Retrospect,” 3. ↑
5. The company name is taken from company letterhead used in Britain in 1944, per Bev Robey’s letter of 12 October 1944 to Sam Wolfe (Fulford Place Archives). According to historian Lori Loeb, “The name patent medicine was in fact a misnomer; few were actually patented. More properly they were proprietary medicines whose manufacturers were unwilling to reveal their ingredients to competitors through the patenting process.” Dr. Williams’ Pink Pills for Pale People was a patented product, however. “It had been patented in 1886 by Dr. William Frederick Jackson, a McGill-trained doctor who practiced in Brockville.” Lori Loeb, “George Fulford and Victorian Patent Medicine Men: Quack Mercenaries or Smilesian Entrepreneurs?” Canadian Bulletin of Medical History (Vol. 16: 1999), 127, 133. ↑
6. “Philippines Retrospect,” 1. ↑
7. Ibid., 3. ↑
8. Ibid., 4. According to “Believed S. W. Wolfe In Manila” (Kingston Whig-Standard, 9 December 1941 final edition, 2, Sam “had booked passage on the steamer President Madison.” ↑
9. “Philippines Retrospect,” 4. I have found no information on the fate of “a freighter called the Columbia.” ↑
10. Ibid., 1. ↑
11. Ibid., 6, 7, 26. ↑
12. Ibid., 1. ↑
13. Wolfe Family Records: Pierre Wolfe in conversation with author, 25 November 2001 – see author’s “Dream Book #2,” 126-128 (went to night school). H. Eileen (Harris) Wolfe, The Harris History, September 1993, privately published, 198 (answered newspaper ad). According to “UK, Outward Passenger lists for 1890-1960,” Sam departed Southampton 9 April 1892 for Cape Town on the Grantully Castle. Sam recalled that he made this trip “early in 1892”— Wolfe Family Records: S.W. Wolfe, “The Wolfes of Ireland as I Remember Them,” 13 September 1952, unpublished, 5. The passenger manifest for the Grantully Castle listed Sam’s occupation as “merchant.” The same term is used on his Canadian arrival card in April 1922. ↑
14. “At 20 in 1892 [Sam] went to S. Africa for Fulford Co. or its predecessor.” Pierre Wolfe to author, 25 November 2001 – see author’s “Dream Book #2,” 126-128. Fulford Place Archives: F.C. Wise manuscript, 6 (a margin notation by Sam states that he started with the Fulford Company in April 1895). See also footnote 1. ↑
15. Loeb, 133. Paul Adolphus Bator, “Fulford, George Taylor – Dictionary of Canadian Biography Online,” <http://www.biographi.ca/009004-119.01-e.php?BioId=40847> (accessed 2 November 2012). ↑
16. Loeb, 134. According to Sam, John Morgan Richards and Sons, which had been hired to market Pink Pills in Britain, “were much opposed” to testimonial advertising, which G.T. Fulford insisted upon and which proved to be a great success. “Hence the deluge—of orders,” as Sam states in a margin note on the Wise manuscript (4). The testimonials were a subject of occasional mirth among some of those associated with Pink Pills. According to F.C. Wise’s “Additional Notes” (7-8; they’re “additional” to the “Wise manuscript”; the “Additional Notes” are also held by the Fulford Place Archives), Mr. Kulnow of Kulnow’s Carlsbad Powder, upon visiting the offices of John Morgan Richards and Sons in the early days, commented to Wise: “Hello, my boy. I am doing good business with my Carlsbad Powder, and no b….y [bloody] miracles either.” Wise repeated this to his boss, Thomas Baron Russell, who “just rocked with laughter.” ↑
17. Wikipedia’s article on “George Taylor Fulford” says the pills “were marketed in 87 countries” <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Taylor_Fulford> (accessed 6 December 2011). In his letter of 15 October 1942 to Walter Turnbull, Private Secretary to Prime Minister Mackenzie King, G.T. Fulford, Jr., MP, stated that his company operated in 72 foreign countries “before the war.” “G.T. Fulford & Co King Street – Heritage Brockville” states the Pink Pills “were sold in over 80 countries” <https://heritagebrockville.com/industry/node/376> (accessed 14 December 2011). Wikipedia’s article on “Dr. Williams’ Pink Pills for Pale People” says “the product came to be advertised around the world in 82 countries” <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dr._Williams%27_Pink_Pills_for_Pale_People>(accessed 14 December 2011). Loeb, 138. ↑
18. Loeb, 125-126, 138, 139. ↑
19. Ibid., 138. ↑
20. Ibid., 140, 139. ↑
21. Wise manuscript, 14 (satellite agencies), 28. Loeb, 134-135, 137. Fulford Place Archives: A letter of 7 October 1942 from George T. Fulford, Jr., MP, to Prime Minister Mackenzie King states that Sam was “Manager in Capetown [sic] but more laterly [sic] as Manager of the Company in Shanghai.” ↑
22. Wise manuscript, 28. ↑
23. Loeb, 131. Charles Fulford’s Bile Beans went on to be “marketed around the world through the offices in Sydney, Leeds, and Toronto and Far Eastern subsidiaries.” (Same reference.) ↑
24. Wise manuscript, 28. Loeb, 143 (footnote 44). ↑
25. Wise manuscript, 29. ↑
26. Loeb, 132. Loeb adds (131-132), “Advertising literature claimed that the explorer Captain Cook had discovered a vegetable remedy which kept the natives free from ‘disease or any bodily complaint.’ Subsequently, advertisements proclaimed,Charles Forde, an eminent scientist, thoroughly investigated the healing extracts and essences of Australian roots and herbs and after long research he found himself the discoverer of a natural vegetable substance which… was beyond all doubt the finest remedy yet discovered.That remedy, the advertisements said, was Bile Beans. The story was completely invented.” ↑
27. Loeb, 130-131 (includes summaries of these cases). Wise, “Additional Notes,” 6, 7. Wise also said (7) that Charles Fulford’s eventual success with Bile Beans was “A truly wonderful come-back.” ↑
28. Loeb, 137. Bator. ↑
29. Bator. ↑
30. Loeb, 137-138, 134. ↑
31. Email of 4 September 2014 to author from Pam Brooks, Coordinator of Eastern Ontario Museum Sites, based at Fulford Place (re: Dwight Fulford being Prime Minister King’s godson). Dwight Fulford died 23 January 2009. His life and career were summarized in an article by Buzz Bourdon, “Posted to the Canadian embassy in Havana from 1961 to 1964, he went on to become ambassador to Argentina,” The Globe and Mail, 24 February 2009. ↑
32. Wolfe Family Records: Patrick Wolfe’s notes on a conversation of 25 November 2001 with Pierre Wolfe in which Pierre stated that Sam opened offices in India, Ceylon, Hong Kong and China. Margin notes by Sam in the Wise manuscript state (8 – “In 1903 when I went on to Singapore to open the first Far Eastern branch there.”) and (26 – “…after initiating [James Mackenzie] into the S. African business I sailed for Singapore about the middle of 1903”). Bator mentions the offices in Bombay and Hong Kong. A collection of 55 postcards from October 1903 to November 1911 (Wolfe Family Records), most of them from Sam to F.C. Wise, documents many of Sam’s early business trips. The Shanghai office became the head office for the Far East. Per a typed copy (by Pierre) of Hubert C. (“Pard”) Myers’ handwritten letter of late December 1969, Pierre added a notation on the bottom that the Far Eastern territory included Hong Kong, the Federated Malaysian States, the Philippines, and an agency in Japan. It appears, however, that the territory reached beyond these limits. F.C. Wise writes in the Wise manuscript (37) that “Craston [sic] distributed India and Burma for you” (i.e., Sam). ↑
33. Loeb, 137 (“Soon known as ‘The Great Canadian Medicine’”), 144 (footnotes 101 and 91). ↑
34. Wolfe Family Records: On a postcard of “Singapore from the Harbour” dated 28 October 1909, and sent to F.C. Wise, Sam advises that Blanche is furnishing their new house. ↑
35. The quote “organized a Rotary Club” is from “Rotary Hears Thrilling Story By Sam Wolfe: Relates Experiences As Prisoner-of-War In Philippines and Subsequent Return on the ‘Gripsholm’,” The Picton Times, Thursday 10 August 1944. Wolfe Family Records. ↑
36. Wolfe Family Records. ↑
37. Wolfe Family Records: Désirée’s letter of 11 March 1987 to Pierre in which she also observed: “Rickshaw coolies were made to run with far too heavy burdens and paid a pittance.  One woman and five children and a panting coolie made to run miles was to be seen to be believed.” ↑
38. Wolfe Family Records: Pierre’s letter of 9 June 1987 to Désirée. ↑
39. “Philippines Retrospect,” 41, 38, 40. ↑
40. Wolfe Family Records: Letter of condolence of 7 December 1952 from Hilda C. Laird to Pierre. ↑
41. Wise manuscript, 6. ↑
42. Loeb, 134, 144 (footnote 74). Wise manuscript, 3. ↑
43. Wise manuscript, 6, 3, 4, 11. ↑
44. Ibid., 19, 20, 21-22. ↑
45. Fulford Place Archives: Sam’s handwritten draft Foreword to the projected “A Brief History of The G.T. Fulford Company Ltd.” ↑
46. Ibid. ↑
47. Ibid. Information on 1916 fire provided by Pam Brooks, Coordinator, Eastern Ontario Museum Sites, based at Fulford Place, during author’s visit of 25 October 2012. Loeb 145 (footnote 107). Wise manuscript, 20-21 (German bomb). ↑
48. Sam’s draft “Foreword.” The Wise manuscript is usually referred to as a 39-page document, with pages 1 and 2 being Wise’s 8 August 1944 cover letter. It and Wise’s “Additional Notes” (sent by Myers to Sam 4 December 1944) are in the Fulford Place Archives. During his employment with John Morgan Richards and Sons, it appears Wise had considerable loyalty for the Fulford Company. In his “Additional Notes” (Fulford Place Archives), he told Sam (5): “Don’t think for a moment that I am vindictive towards JMR and Sons but you have no idea of what I endured over many years because I preferred to watch the interests of the G.T.F. Co. closely. There is no need to refer to all this in any of your notes.” According to The Canadian Who’s Who, 1958-1960 (828-829), Myers had been general manager and a director with the Fulford Company from 1930 through the later 1950s. This is the last volume of The Canadian Who’s Who that includes Myers, presumably indicating that he retired during 1958-60 or soon after. He was born August 2, 1893. ↑
49. Wise manuscript, 37-38. ↑
50. “Philippines Retrospect,” 1. ↑
51. Myers’ letter of December 1969. The Harris History, 198. ↑
52. “Philippines Retrospect,” 3-4, 8. The Harris History, 221 (worked for Nestle’s), 222 (American wife). In “Philippines Retrospect” Sam wrote (4) that thanks to Smithy “I was saved fifteen months of internment camp, found a comfortable home instead, and made a number of good, kind friends.” ↑
53. “Philippines Retrospect,” 8, 9. ↑
54. Ibid., 9. ↑
55. Ibid., 10. ↑
56. Ibid. ↑
57. Ibid. ↑
58. Ibid. ↑
59. Ibid., 11. ↑
60. Ibid., 11-12. ↑
61. Ibid., 12, 13. ↑
62. Ibid., 13. ↑
63. Ibid., 13-14. ↑
64. Ibid., 13, 14, 15. Prior to the arrival of the Japanese army, Sam had sent two telegrams to his family, which had been received on 19 and 29 December 1941. ↑
65. Wolfe Family Records: “S. W. Wolfe, Former Resident, Still Unreported in Far East,” Kingston Whig-Standard, 30 September 1942 final edition, 3. ↑
66. Letter of October 7, 1942, from George T. Fulford, MP, to Prime Minister King. ↑
67. Ibid. Wolfe Family Records include the 24 April 1941 Shanghai newspaper clipping which includes a photo of twenty-two men captioned “China Volunteers in India,” as well as “Noel Wolfe Is Promoted,” Kingston Whig-Standard, 26 June 1945 final edition, 3. The Harris History (221) mentions “the 5^th Ghurkas” (sic) and Noël’s intelligence work in China. According to “Three Members of Wolfe Family in Active Theatre of War,” Kingston Whig-Standard, 17 December 1941 final edition, 2: “Lieut. Noel Wolfe is with the Indian Army in Burma.” “S. W. Wolfe, Former Resident, Still Unreported in Far East,” Kingston Whig-Standard, 30 September 1942 final edition, 3, adds that “Lieut. Noel Wolfe… was last reported to be in China. He was on service with the Indian Army during the invasion of Burma by the Japanese.” The death of Noël’s wife, Freda, on 28 December 1997 was marked in the Victoria Times-Colonist’s “Passages” column of 22 March 1998, which stated: “With the approaching war, the young family moved to India where Noel was a lieutenant colonel in the secret service. Both husband and wife had to have cyanide capsules implanted in their teeth to protect military secrets in case of capture.” Wolfe Family Records: In a letter of 15 January 1988 to his friend Bob Riley, Pierre commented: “My brother was 2^nd in command of the 5^th Gurkha regiment when in Burma during W.W.II, he was also in M.I.5, largely because of his fluency in Chinese and French—he also understood some Japanese.” In fact, Noël was a member of the “India Mission,” established in late 1940 as part of Britain’s Special Operations Executive (SOE). The India Mission subsequently became “GS I(k)” and ultimately “Force 136,” when its headquarters relocated to Ceylon. Disbanded in 1946, the SOE was a distinct entity unrelated to the British Security Service, founded in 1909, with separate home and foreign sections. (The home section became known as MI5 during the First World War.) ↑
68. Fulford’s letter of 7 October 1942 also claimed: “Although his ship was two days outward bound from Manila [when the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor], the Captain was ordered to turn around and return to port.” Sam says nothing about this in “Philippines Retrospect.” According to this memoir, after disembarking at Manila in November 1941, he didn’t board another vessel until late September 1943 when he was starting the process of being repatriated. ↑
69. Letter of 14 October 1942 from the Under Secretary of State for External Affairs to George T. Fulford, MP. ↑
70. “Philippines Retrospect,” 16, 17. ↑
71. Ibid., 17, 15. ↑
72. Ibid., 17. ↑
73. Ibid., 17, 18. ↑
74. Ibid., 18-19. ↑
75. Ibid., 19. ↑
76. Ibid. ↑
77. Ibid. ↑
78. Ibid., 19, 20. ↑
79. Ibid., 20. ↑
80. Ibid., 21. ↑
81. Ibid., 27, 24. ↑
82. Ibid., 23. ↑
83. Ibid. Wolfe Family Records: Pierre said Sam had a “Victorian shell” and “was a rigid soul, and a colossal worrier.” ↑
84. “Philippines Retrospect,” 23. ↑
85. Ibid., 22. ↑
86. Ibid., 23. ↑
87. Ibid., 22, 31. ↑
88. Ibid., 27, 21. ↑
89. Ibid., 23, 24. ↑
90. Ibid., 26-27, 26. ↑
91. Ibid., 27-28. ↑
92. Ibid., 28, 29, 28. On 7 January 1944 the Kingston Whig-Standard final edition, 10, carried the second of two articles written for “the NEA Service” by Clifton Forster, the “19-year old, Manila-born son of the Red Cross manager there” (sic). Clifton was one of 850 men interned “in Los Banos, 40 miles southeast of Manila…. In mid-July [1943] we got official notice that 27 of us were classified as prospective repatriates. I was among them…. we left in September…” ↑
93. “Philippines Retrospect,” 28, 29, 30. Sam added (34): “Marriage, of course, is out of the question…. Eleven babies were born in the first three months after the Camp was formed. Gradually the birth rate declined until it ceased altogether. Segregation had proved effective. Then suddenly there was a scare. The startling news went round that some six or seven couples were expecting…. This revelation angered the Jap authorities so much that they had the expectant mothers removed post-haste to a maternity hospital outside. As for the husbands, they were given a period of confinement inside, so that they might have ample opportunity to brood over their sins. Only one case was an unmarried girl. She was no more than 17 years old. The man concerned got a longer sentence than the others, and ‘solitary’ it was, in the camp coop.” ↑
94. “Philippines Retrospect,” 29. ↑
95. Ibid., 30. ↑
96. Ibid., 30-31, 32. ↑
97. Ibid., 33-35. ↑
98. Ibid., 36. ↑
99. Ibid., 36, 30. ↑
100. Ibid., 36. ↑
101. Ibid. ↑
102. Ibid. ↑
103. Ibid., 37. ↑
104. Ibid., 37, 38, 39, 40. Wolfe Family Records: An AP wire story, “Japanese Ship at Mormugao,” filed from “Mormugao, Portuguese, India” and dated 15 October 1943, states: “The Teia Maru carried 1,236 Americans, 221 Canadians and 40 Latin Americans” (for a total of 1,497). But the article’s opening paragraph also states that the ship carried “1,500 American, Canadian and Latin American civilians…” ↑
105. Ibid., 42, 43. ↑
106. Ibid., 43. ↑
107. Ibid., 43, 44. ↑
108. Ibid., 44. ↑
109. Ibid., 45, 46. ↑
110. “S. W. Wolfe Rotary Speaker,” Kingston Whig-Standard, 10 December 1943 final edition, 3. ↑
111. “S. W. Wolfe Tells Club Of Jap War,” Kingston Whig-Standard, 10 January 1944. The Allies, having gained the upper hand in the Pacific Theatre, had recently pressed forward through the central and northern Solomon Islands in mid-1943 and taken Bougainville during the autumn and, by the end of February, would be in control of the eastern part of New Guinea and, to its north, the strategic Admiralty Islands. Arthur S. Link, American Epoch: A History of the United States Since the 1890s, Alfred Knopf, Third Edition, 1967, 558, 559, 553. ↑
112. “Filipinos Not Pro-Jap Speaker Says: S. W. Wolfe Describes Situation to Rotarians,” an undated clipping from an unidentified newspaper, possibly the Kingston Whig-Standard as it pertains to an address by Sam at a Kingston Rotary Club luncheon at the Hotel La Salle. This talk was either the one he gave on 9 December 1943 or another from a later date. ↑
113. Wolfe Family Records: Sam’s “Scraps” book contains the following six newspaper clippings: “Rotary Hears Thrilling Story By Sam Wolfe: Relates Experiences As Prisoner-of-War In Philippines and Subsequent Return on the ‘Gripsholm’,” The Picton Times, Thursday 10 August 1944. “Kingston Man At Rotary,” Trenton Courier Advocate, Thursday 24 August 1944. “Relates Experiences While Prisoner of Japs: S. Wolfe, Repatriate, Tells of Attack Upon Philippines – Kinsmen Speaker,” The Picton Gazette, Wednesday 30 August 1944. “Filipinos Ready To Rise for Allies,” Ottawa Morning Journal, Tuesday 19 September 1944. “Prisoner of War In Philippines Harshly Treated,” The Ottawa Citizen, Tuesday 19 September 1944. “Christian Beliefs of the Filipinos Bar to Japanese,” Brockville’s The Recorder and Times, Tuesday, 20 March 1945.  A seventh clipping from a Rotary Club of Brockville publication states: “In his [19 March 1945] discussion of ‘The Philippines at Peace and at War,’ Sam Wolfe gave us probably the best of all the four talks he has delivered in the course of his various visits to the club.”  A clipping of a partial article (with no title) of 15 July 1940 from The Recorder and Times notes that Sam, as immediate past president of the Shanghai Rotary, presented a silk flag on behalf of his organization to the Brockville Rotary at its luncheon that day.  Sam and Blanche were the guests of Mrs. George T. Fulford at Fulford Place. (Sam’s “Scraps” book.) ↑
114. Fulford Place Archives: Sam’s letter of 8 April 1946, to Hubert Cohen in Sydney, Australia. ↑
115. “S. W. Wolfe Tells Club Of Jap War,” Kingston Whig-Standard. ↑
116. Ibid. Sam also paid public tribute to Fulford in a lengthy story, “S. W. Wolfe Tells of Life Under Japanese in Manila,” Kingston Whig-Standard, 2 December 1943 final edition, 2, 15. ↑
117. “Philippines Retrospect,” title page. ↑
118. Wolfe Family Records: According to “Relates Experiences While Prisoner of Japs,” The Picton Gazette, Wednesday 30 August 1944, Sam held the title of assistant general manager of the Fulford Company. ↑
119. Sam’s letter of 8 April 1946. ↑
120. In his “Foreword” to the projected “A Brief History of the G.T. Fulford Company Ltd.,” Sam states that about 1930, “when on one of my periodical visits to Canada from China, I suggested to Toronto Head Office that it might be worthwhile… to get one of the senior members of the staff to write a history of the business…” The person Sam “had in mind was Mr. John A. MacKenzie, who had been closely associated with the Senator, and his business, from earliest years.” Although “the idea was received with favour,” nothing was done until Sam was repatriated, “raised the subject again” and found himself tasked with the project. ↑
121. Wolfe Family Records. ↑
122. The Harris History, 221. ↑
123. Untitled news item in the Kingston Whig-Standard, November 9, 1945 final edition, 6. The first sentence of the item reads: “Mrs. L. C. Smith and her two children, Annandale apartments, left today for Montreal and are sailing tomorrow for England, to meet her husband, Lt. L. C. Smith, who has arrived there after being a prisoner of war of the Japanese in Thailand for nearly four years.” Sam’s letter of 8 April 1946, states, “Leslie experienced [illegible] hardships and much sickness in Thailand, which pulled him down badly[;] he is now looking remarkably well.” ↑
124. The Harris History, 221-222. “Philippines Retrospect,” 5 (stranded). ↑

by Patrick S. Wolfe

The first official portrait of King Charles III, the world’s most famous monarch, is a surfeit of red and a dearth of green. The work of artist Jonathan Yeo, it was presented to the world in May 2024. It is a stunning representation of humanity’s current moment, of humanity trapped in a situation of its own making, of humanity being hoisted, as it were, on its own petard.

“Remarkable,” was the King’s one-word assessment. The same CBC Radio news report included conjecture that the all-pervading red, from the King’s Welsh Guards uniform to the borders of the larger-than-life painting, was symbolic of colonialism and its mixed legacy. That’s certainly one interpretation, one that entirely dwarfs the monarch in relation to the venerable, historically scarred institution, seemingly denying the King’s environmentalism and his passionate commitment to various other causes. In ascending to the throne, have those personal interests been extinguished by the requirements of being king?

On startled, fiery first blush, the portrait spoke to me quite differently. The version I saw in my local daily newspaper, the Times Colonist (which serves Victoria, British Columbia, and the rest of Vancouver Island), was less vivid than the one shown here. I saw the King, on behalf of humanity, standing amidst the flames of hell in a portrayal of the absent devil’s apparent triumph. By referencing the devil, I’m not suggesting we are subject to his powers (except by our own choosing), but I am saying that we’ve gotten ourselves into a devilish situation that would seem to validate the devil’s famously low opinion of humanity or at least of that portion of it that might be called the ruling class, which has and continues to largely shape the human race’s trajectory.

The devil is known to operate through temptation, meaning that, as noted above, we are the ones who make the choices. Despite the very real advances humanity has made, we succumb again and again to temptation by making deficient choices, by thinking too narrowly or too short-term or in a way that gives insufficient attention to the negative, unintended, and/or delayed consequences of our actions—consequences that are generally felt less by the insulated prime movers than by other people and creatures and by Earth’s sub-systems and the planet as a whole.

In January 2019, I wrote a commentary, “The emergency of climate change is upon us,” in the Times Colonist. Over the next four years, ten more of my essays spoke to the same topic and audience. More recently, I have come to believe that we are presently trapped. I was going to add “or stalemated,” but it’s worse than that for we continue to pump harmful, heat-intensifying emissions into the atmosphere at an increasing rate.

We are trapped by interlocking problems. Although the scientists of the United Nations International Panel on Climate Change, along with U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres, Greta Thunberg and others, have been speaking truth to power for years, most national governments have preferred baby steps to more consequential action to rein in global warming. They do this to safeguard the socio-economic status quo, which is thoroughly intermeshed with and dependent upon the fossil fuel industry. Of course, the term “safeguard” is a devilish oxymoron given what is coming. Understandably, no national government appears willing to step out of line with others for fear of negative repercussions to its economy and society. Moreover, the need for collective action is pushed further afield by the Russia-Ukraine and Israel-Hamas Wars and by the increasing split between authoritarian and democratic states.

Being trapped doesn’t mean that there isn’t a way out. It only means that I don’t presently see it, although I am intrigued by the possibilities of geothermal energy as described by the Cascade Institute at Royal Roads University and impressed by progress we are making in other ways, such as major cities requiring buildings to significantly cut their emissions and wealthy countries finally achieving, two years late, their 2009 goal of providing $100 billion US to help poor countries both combat and adapt to climate change, to give two recent (May 2024) examples. Sometimes progress is straightforward, other times it appears daunting, especially when we’re looking for breakthrough progress.

Emergence is a mysterious process. Intention and hope, along with imagination and disciplined effort, are vital ingredients. We must change what we are doing to refashion our future and avoid the future of global warming that is already showing itself in ever-more destructive and costly ways. While the question of emergence has much to do with climate change, it has even more to do with human consciousness. Success will require maximizing wisdom and minimizing succumbing to temptation.

In his fiery portrait, there’s butterfly over the King’s right shoulder. It didn’t get there by accident. Perhaps it’s there with the King’s consent or even at his bidding. Rather than the flames of hell, perhaps the staggering portrait depicts the fire of transformation and the King, with his hands clasped atop the hilt of his sword, is in league with the Knight of Fiery Hope.

Who is the Knight of Fiery Hope? He is a non-physical being who appeared in “a visionary experience” to the American mystic David Spangler in December 2013. According to Spangler, he “looked like a knight out of a storybook, clad in shining golden armor, its face hidden within its helmet. On its chest burned a flame, as bright and radiant as a piece of sunlight. It said clearly, ‘I am a Knight of Fiery Hope! I speak to all humans. You are not entering a darkened age. You are entering a time when the Light of your creative spirit can manifest new vision and new life. Be what I am. Let fiery hope, not despair or fear, shape your world.’”

Note the word “can.” It’s an opportunity not a given. We must assertively choose the world we want.

Text copyright © 2024 Patrick S. Wolfe
All rights reserved.
Short segments may be quoted with due attribution.

Patrick Wolfe is a writer and historian in Victoria, B.C., Canada. The Knight of Fiery Hope is referenced in his essay “A New Silent Minute for the 21^st-Century: Acknowledging and Holding Humanity’s Uncertain Future,” which is available on this web site under “COMMENTARY – SPIRITUALITY.”

 

by Patrick S. Wolfe

A quote I identify with comes from Mahatma Gandhi: “I’m a Hindu, a Christian, a Muslim, a Jew, a Buddhist and a Confucian.” I’m sure Gandhi could’ve kept going, mentioning the Bahá’ís, the Quakers, and others, but only stopped where he did for reasons of economy.

Gandhi’s universality reminds me of news footage of the Dalai Lama and Archbishop Desmond Tutu on stage together with much joyous high jinks occurring between them. Were it possible to have news footage of the Buddha and Jesus meeting, I’m pretty sure they’d also relish each other’s company.

A personally meaningful 1980 event occurred when my father’s older cousin, Getta, who was visiting from England, gave me a used copy of Wellesley Tudor Pole’s The Silent Road: In the Light of Personal Experience that she’d just purchased at a church bazaar. I was 28, Getta was 74. “I think you’ll find this of interest,” she said off-handedly. And I did once I got my nose into it. A British mystic (1884-1968), WTP would become an important life companion.

But this essay isn’t only about WTP. In the spirit of Gandhi’s universality, it’s also about Abdu’l-Bahá (1844-1921), the son of Bahá’u’lláh (1817-1892), who, in 1863, announced that he was the Universal Messenger of God foretold by the Bab, the forerunner, in 1844. (Bahá’u’lláh, meaning “the Glory of God” in Arabic, was born Mírzá Husayn ‘Alí. Abdu’l-Bahá, meaning, “Servant of Bahá,” was born Abbás Effendi.)^[1] WTP first heard of the Bahá’í when he was in Constantinople in 1908.^[2] He and Abdu’l-Bahá became friends when they met at Ramleh, near Alexandria, in 1910.^[3]

Viewed as heretical, Bahá’u’lláh and his family were exiled from Persia, first to Baghdad, later to Turkey and finally, in 1868, to Akka in Palestine (now Acre, Israel). They were essentially imprisoned from 1868 until the Young Turks Revolution in 1908, when Abdu’l-Bahá and the others were freed and moved to Haifa.^[4]

According to WTP, Abdu’l-Bahá “insisted that his father had come to proclaim anew the unity underlying all religions. He also spoke of the danger of exclusiveness.” WPT added that Abdu’l-Bahá impressed “all who met him by his dignity, friendliness, and his aura of spiritual authority^[5] [as well as with] his immense breadth of outlook, permeated with the spirit of deep and loving kindness…. Abdu’l-Bahá always struck the universal note, the note of Oneness as between the Creator and all His creation, great or small.”^[6]

When WTP arrived at Alexandria in the spring of 1910, he did so via the streamer Sphinx which had crossed the Mediterranean Sea from Marseilles. He was bringing gifts from Abdu’l-Bahá’s English friends. This was one of several purposes of WTP’s extended trip, which was to continue to Damascus, Smyrna, Constantinople, and Vienna. But when WTP met Abdu’l-Bahá a series of remarkable events quickly occurred and caused WTP’s carefully made travel plans to fall apart to his “considerable annoyance.”^[7]

The first remarkable event was when Abdu’l-Bahá’s grandson, who was serving as the interpreter for Abdu’l-Bahá and WTP, was called away and, as WTP subsequently stated, “Abdu’l-Bahá continued the conversation and I found myself replying! When the interpreter returned, my ability to do so ceased. To make sure that I had understood correctly, I asked for a translation of what Abdu’l-Bahá had been saying in his absence, and this confirmed the fact that I had been able to understand and to reply accurately in a language of which I was completely ignorant. (This curious experience was repeated some years later when visiting Abdu’l-Bahá in Paris.)”^[8]

The next day, WTP asked for Abdu’l-Bahá’s blessing for the rest of his journey. WTP was taken aback when Abdu’l-Bahá “casually” said that WTP “should be returning to Marseilles on the following day on the same steamer” he had arrived on. WTP explained to the translator that this wasn’t possible—“all my overland bookings have been made”—but the translator “replied to the effect that if the Master said I had to return to Marseilles now, then that was what would happen.”^[9]

WTP relented. When he came to say goodbye the next morning, Abdu’l-Bahá asked him “to carry out a commission for him on reaching Paris.” The assignment was to find Tammadun ul Molk, a Persian student who was nearly blind, and give him “£10 in gold to pay his fare to Alexandria.” In relating all this, WTP added: “When I asked for the student’s address in Paris I was told that this was unknown but that a way would be found for bringing me into contact with him.”^[10]

WTP was about 26 at the time, while Abdu’l-Bahá was forty years his senior. In his book The Two Worlds of Wellesley Tudor Pole, Gerry Fenge remarks: “It is possible that Abdu’l-Bahá was deliberately giving TP the minimum of information and in a fashion designed to raise the hackles of a less mature person. In a way, it was a typical piece of spiritual training, the sort an older figure might give a younger one in order to pass on some hard lessons of experience.”^[11]

WTP concludes the story of his unusual assignment and his changed travel plans this way:

On reaching Paris I went to the Persian consulate only to find that Tammadun ul Molk was unknown to the officials there. I then visited the student’s quarter on the left bank of the Seine and spent the whole day there and elsewhere in a task that yielded no results whatever. When one’s mind is fearful or depressed, no interior guidance can be experienced. This I have found to be true on many occasions throughout my life. In the present instance I gave up the search and set out for the Gare du Nord, where my luggage was already deposited in readiness for the return to England. En route I crossed the Seine by the Pont Royal. Happening to look across the bridge to the opposite pavement, I saw, among a crowd of pedestrians, a young man, evidently of Eastern origin, who was using a stick to tap his way along. I dodged through the traffic and accosted him. In reply to my question, he told me he was of Persian origin. I then enquired whether by chance he knew a certain Tammadun ul Molk. In surprise he replied “C’est moi”, adding that he had only arrived in Paris from Vienna that very morning. In a Vienna clinic three serious operations on his eyes had been undertaken, but the results were negative and he had been told by the surgeon that his sight could not be saved.

I then gave Abdu’l-Bahá’s message and the £10 for his ticket to Alexandria. To watch the profound joy on his face was more than sufficient reward for all my previous disappointments, including the abandonment of my European tour. Tammadun duly reached Alexandria and visited his Master at once. Those present told me later that Abdu’l-Bahá poured a few drops of attar of roses into a glass of water. He then gave the youth his blessing whilst anointing his eyes with the water in question. Immediately full sight was restored, and when I met Tammadun some years later he was still enjoying perfect vision.

The further sequel was both significant and instructive. I crossed to England late that night and, on reaching my office the next day, discovered that I was only just in time to avert a very serious crisis in my affairs. The change in my plans had indeed turned out to be a blessing in disguise.^[12]

In The Silent Road, a five-page section on Abdu’l-Bahá is titled “Healing ‘Miracles’”. Describing the “devoted followers” who made the long journey from Persia to Akka to receive Abdu’l-Bahá’s blessing, WTP states that he “secured reliable evidence [of] many remarkable healings, even of so-called incurable diseases.”^[13]

In September 1911, Abdu’l-Bahá came to London and “gave his first ever public address at the City Temple, Holborn.” He spoke for eight minutes in Persian, followed by WTP reading the English translation to the assembly of “over five thousand.” During that visit, and another in 1913, Abdu’l-Bahá stayed at WTP’s home in Bristol.^[14]

After being wounded during the fighting between the British and the Turks in the mountains around Jerusalem in early December 1917, WTP, then a lieutenant, was transferred to British Intelligence as he was “temporarily incapacitated for active service.” By February, he was Director of Occupied Enemy Territory Administration, based in Cairo. In March, British troops were preparing to move against Haifa, which was occupied by the Turkish army. WTP learned the Turkish commander-in-chief intended to kill “Abdu’l-Bahá and those around him should the Turkish Army be compelled to evacuate … and retreat north.”^[15]

As “Abdu’l-Bahá’s imminent danger became more and more alarming,” WTP raised the matter with different British generals and the new British Governor of Jerusalem, but “None of them knew anything about Abdu’l-Bahá” and couldn’t be persuaded to act.^[16] Tempting court martial, WTP bypassed his superiors and strict censorship requirements and used his own connections to send an urgent, uncensored message to the British Cabinet.^[17] Not only was “a Cabinet despatch … sent to General Allenby instructing him to ensure the safety of Abdu’l-Bahá and his family and entourage so soon as the British Army captured Haifa,” but a related requirement for information about “the Bahá’í Movement” was passed to WTP “for action.” In June 1968, WTP recalled that he was part of a “chain which saved A.B. and his family from death” and, in 1969, the Secretary of the National Spiritual Assembly of the Bahá’ís of the British Isles stated: “The place of Major Tudor Pole in the annals of the Bahá’í faith will rest chiefly on the part he played during 1918 … whereby Abdu’l-Bahá’s life was spared.”^[18]

Yet WTP also tells of “Another incident of those times … worthy of record” that seems to suggest he was not the only actor working to protect Abdu’l-Bahá and that some redundancy to ensure that end may have prevailed. “More than once in the presence of Abdu’l-Bahá I was able to glimpse the extent to which he could see the future.” So begins the chapter in WTP’s Writing on the Ground, in which this other incident is related.

I was told by a reliable witness that before the fall of Haifa, Abdu’l-Bahá was discussing the British campaign with those around him. He then predicted that, contrary to the general expectation, the taking of Haifa and the walled town of Akka would be achieved almost without bloodshed. This prediction was borne out by events. He also stated that the Turks would surrender the fortress town of Akka (supposed to be impregnable) to two unarmed British soldiers. The facts so far as I was able to gather turned out to be as follows:

After our entry into Haifa, the front line was pushed forward halfway across the Bay of Akka, and outposts were placed in position on the sands of the Bay some five miles from Akka itself. Akka was believed to be filled with Turkish troops at this time.

Very early next morning two British Army Service men, who had lost their bearings in the night, found themselves at the gates of Akka, believing erroneously that the town was already in British hands. However, the Turkish rearguard troops had been secretly evacuated some hours earlier, and the Mayor of the town, seeing British soldiers outside the gates, came down and presented them with the keys of the town in token of surrender!^[19]

“The basic principle enunciated by Bahá’u’lláh,” WTP stated in Writing on the Ground, “is that religious truth is not absolute but relative, that divine revelation is a continuous and progressive process.”^[20] WTP heeded Abdu’l-Bahá, who once told him: “Do not desert the Christian fold but strive to bring it into the light of the Bahá’í principles as set forth by the Effulgence who was my father.”^[21]

In The Silent Road, WTP notes: “One of the great purposes inspiring the Bahá’í Faith is to bring about unity and brotherhood between all religions, with the desire to establish a universal faith…” Following Abdu’l-Bahá ‘s death, WTP wrote a private memorandum of December 1921 in which he recalled sitting beside Abdu’l-Bahá at Ramleh “while he spoke of the essential unity of all mankind. There were Christians, Jews, Moslems, Parsis, Hindoos and Freethinkers sitting around him on that occasion, one and all united with the same faith and aspiration.”^[22]

Text copyright © 2024 Patrick S. Wolfe
All rights reserved.
Short segments may be quoted with due attribution.

Readers of this essay may also be interested in Wellesley Tudor Pole and the Big Ben Silent Minute

1. https://news.bahai.org/media-information/brief-history/ ↑
2. Wellesley Tudor Pole, Writing on the Ground, with commentaries by Walter Lang, Neville Spearman, London, 1968, 140. ↑
3. W. Tudor Pole, The Silent Road: In the Light of Personal Experience, Neville Spearman, London, 1960, 77. Gerry Fenge, The Two Worlds of Wellesley Tudor Pole, Starseed Publications, Everett, WA, USA, 2010, 53. ↑
4. Wellesley Tudor Pole, Writing on the Ground, 139. ↑
5. Ibid., 146. ↑
6. Ibid., 142. ↑
7. Ibid., 147-148. Tudor Pole, The Silent Road, 77. ↑
8. Wellesley Tudor Pole, Writing on the Ground, 148. Tudor Pole, The Silent Road, 77. ↑
9. Wellesley Tudor Pole, Writing on the Ground, 148. Tudor Pole, The Silent Road, 77. ↑
10. Wellesley Tudor Pole, Writing on the Ground, 148-149. Tudor Pole, The Silent Road, 77-78. ↑
11. Fenge, 55. ↑
12. Tudor Pole, The Silent Road, 78-79. Writing on the Ground, 149-150. ↑
13. Tudor Pole, The Silent Road, 75-76. ↑
14. Fenge, 56, 59 (Bristol), 63 (1913), 100 (five thousand). Tudor Pole, The Silent Road, 77 (“twice my honoured guest”). ↑
15. Fenge, 85, 94. Wellesley Tudor Pole, Writing on the Ground, 152. ↑
16. Ibid., 152, 153 ↑
17. Ibid., 153 (urgent, uncensored). My Dear Alexias: Letters from Wellesley Tudor Pole to Rosamond Lehmann, edited by Elizabeth Gaythorpe, with a Foreword by Rosamond Lehmann, Neville Spearman, Jersey, 1979, 206 (British Cabinet). ↑
18. Wellesley Tudor Pole, Writing on the Ground, 153 (Cabinet despatch, Bahá’í Movement, for action). My Dear Alexias, 206 (chain). Fenge, 97-98. ↑
19. Writing on the Ground, 157-158. ↑
20. Writing on the Ground, 141. ↑
21. Paul Fletcher, Light upon the Path: The Unpublished Writings pf Wellesley Tudor Pole, Chalice Well Press, United Kingdom, 2015, 226. ↑
22. Tudor Pole, The Silent Road, 75. Fenge, 100 (December 1921 private memo). ↑

by Patrick S. Wolfe

^[1]  “The most powerful practices that define our lives are driven by dopamine hits, not deliberate choice.” So writes John J. Thatamanil, professor of theology and world religions, in his provocative essay, “How do we define ‘none’ when it comes to religious tradition?” (Faith Forum, Times Colonist, Feb. 17, 2024, p. D8).

He highlights “the distinction between practices we choose and practices that are imposed on us, practices we passively absorb.” He suggests that “practices around money—spending and buying, saving or not saving”—may be “the practices to which we are least attentive.” He notes that market practices and “consuming what those who control our phones want us to consume” are suggestive of an “effective religion of capitalism.” Citing a 2023 Fortune article, he advises that Americans daily check their smartphones 144 times and spend almost 4.5 hours on them, a 30% increase over 2022.

“If we are no longer in control of what we practice, we no longer determine who we are becoming,” Thatamanil observes. “We have been hacked by addiction experts, video game and social media designers, and advertising algorithms that can hook us with the thrill of buying and consuming.”

The good professor is holding up a mirror for us and providing an opportunity for self-reflection on what we see.

A week earlier (Feb. 10), The Globe and Mail ran an essay, “The Sound of Silence” by Michael Harris (p. O9), that addressed some of Thatamanil’s themes. The internet’s bias, Harris writes, “is the privileging of noise over signal. A lean into scattershot content with no interest in the salience of one thing or another.” It bathes us “in input from marketers and strangers, from automatons and loudspeakers and every kind of constructed cacophony that blurts and belches.”

Sadly, Harris adds: “We believe that real attention and library-level focus are fond antiquities and—worse—we believe that, if we could actually turn inward in some miraculous return to silence, there’d be nothing there of real value.” As a statement of being lost and what is ascendant, this echoes Thatamanil’s conclusion that we are less consumers of social media than we have been consumed by it.

While it is important to be able to surf the tsunami of technology, it is at least equally important to rest comfortably on the beach reflecting, perceiving and integrating in order to determine what is best for us as individuals and how we might selectively use that technology within the larger practice of how we consciously choose to lead our lives.

Harris puts it this way: “silence leaves room for the development of a rich interior life, for daydreaming and the formation of an identity independent of the hive mind. Our personalities mature in the empty spaces that allow them to self-reflect; we discover what we really think or really feel when inputs hush and we can sit a while with what we’ve already received. In this way, amid doses of quiet and stillness, the self coheres.”

As the Dalai Lama has observed: “Happy people build their inner world; unhappy people blame their outer world.”

An author and historian, Patrick S. Wolfe lives in Victoria, British Columbia.

1. This essay was originally published Wednesday, February 28, 2024, on the Times Colonist “Spiritually Speaking” blog. ↑

 

by Patrick S. Wolfe

^[1]   I’ve long believed that a key responsibility is to support and encourage both ourselves and others. Such support does not turn a blind eye to bad behaviour; rather it seeks, through thick and thin, to positively reinforce the best selves in ourselves and others. Such support is an expression of personal agency.

But to bless others is to take things to another level. Blessing invokes beneficent forces from other realms. There is a prayer and a mantra I know that, when switched from the first to the second person, becomes a blessing: “May you be peaceful and aware, open to engage with love and power with what the world brings to your doorstep.”

The notion of everyday people blessing others first impressed itself upon me when I viewed a 30-minute talk by Dr. Rachel Naomi Remen called “Becoming a Blessing,” which is available online.^[2] “You can become a blessing,” her rabbi grandfather told her when she was a little girl. “Once we are blessed,” she says, “we are blessed forever.” Whether one, as a sojourner on Earth, accepts this lovely statement depends, among other things, on whether one subscribes to the efficacy of blessing.

“The brain isn’t the highest human function,” says Dr. Remen, a pioneer in integrative and alternative medicine. “The highest human function is shrouded in mystery. It’s the soul.”^[3] In my belief only a small part of the soul resides with us; most of it is at home in the spiritual realms. I also believe that one of the greatest opportunities of life is to discover one’s soul and to align one’s personality with it, leading to contact, ongoing centring through the potential for communication, guidance and partnering, and to deep-felt companionship.

This interpretation of the soul is a slight variation on some insightful ideas about creativity. In The Artist’s Way, Julia Cameron writes: “If you think of the universe as a vast electrical sea in which you are immersed and from which you are formed, opening to your creativity changes you from something bobbing in the sea to a more fully functioning, more conscious, more cooperative part of that ecosystem.” Author Elizabeth Gilbert adds that: “Ideas are … non-embodied spirits that want nothing more than to be made manifest…. you choose to or not to enter into collaboration with them, and to contract with them. That’s a … really holy decision to make.”

During the spring of 1940, when “it seemed as if Britain stood alone and unprotected against overwhelming forces of [Nazi] evil,” an initiative called the Silent Minute was launched. Big Ben striking 9 p.m. became the signal for “a daily moment of united prayer and silence [to] create a channel between the visible and invisible worlds through which Divine help and inspiration could be received.” After the war, a staff officer with German Intelligence commented, while under interrogation: “…you had a secret weapon for which we could find no counter-measure and which we did not understand, but it was very powerful…. you called it the ‘Silent Minute’.”^[4]

We can all broadcast through our souls into wider consciousness specific blessings for a more just and peaceful world, e.g.: “I ask blessings for Gaia. I ask blessings for Mother Earth. I ask blessings for humanity and humanity’s capacity to grow in wisdom, and to grow in wisdom quickly, and that growth in wisdom to include the knowledge and understanding that wisdom must be acted upon and applied, especially in terms of effective stewardship of the global and local environments upon which all people and creatures depend, and in order to minimize death and destruction from global warming.”

About two thousand years ago, the Hindu mystic Patanjali observed: “When you are inspired by some great purpose … dormant forces, faculties and talents become alive, and you discover yourself to be a greater person by far than you ever dreamt yourself to be.” Of course, that seed of light you represent is synergistic, deriving power (reciprocal agency) from the wholeness to which you are connected.

Text copyright © 2024 Patrick S. Wolfe
All rights reserved.
Short segments may be quoted with due attribution.

An author and historian, Patrick S. Wolfe lives in Victoria, British Columbia.

1. A shorter version of this article was published in the Times Colonist, Saturday, January 27, 2024, D8, under the title “To bless others is to take things to another level.” ↑
2. Rachel Naomi Remen, M.D. – Becoming a Blessing↑
3. A Works & Conversations interview by Richard Whittaker with Dr. Rachel Naomi Remen, August 21, 2019. Redistributed by DAILYGOOD, Sunday, October 16, 2022 – https://m.dailygood.org/2022/10/16/the-soul-of-medicine/ ↑
4. Patrick Wolfe, “Wellesley Tudor Pole and the Big Ben Silent Minute,” – https://staging.patrickswolfe.com/2019/11/07/wellesley-tudor-pole-and-the-big-ben-silent-minute/ ↑

 

by Patrick S. Wolfe

“Be careful, online scammers becoming more sophisticated,” was the headline of an Aug. 16, 2023, commentary in my local newspaper. It reminded me of the time, in 2012, when I met “Wrenly Dalgaard,” a scammer who was supposedly from Sweden. Boy, did he put on a show! He even included a poem. His performance was right up there with Paul Newman and Robert Redford in “The Sting.” The only trouble with this comparison is that, by extension, it incongruously casts me, the innocent, deer-in-the-headlights victim, in the role of the movie’s mobster villain, played with scene-chewing ferocity by Robert Shaw. The upshot: some movies about elaborate grifts are poor facsimiles of real life, and as that headline says: Stay alert for scammers!

“Large, self-contained 1-bedroom suite,” my Craig’s List ad said. “Must be quiet, considerate and have good references.” In short order I had an inquiry from Wrenly who used the novel email ID abundantmeans@gmail.com

He said he was 27, from Gothenburg, and a non-smoker who rarely drinks. “I’m coming to resume work as an IT Infrastructure Analyst for the next couple of years in Canada…. I look forward to your positive response.”

I replied that I’d be happy to show him the suite at a mutually convenient time.

“I look forward to coming over to Canada alone on Sept. 15 but I’ll be resuming work officially on the 24^th of Oct.,” Wrenly wrote the next day. “My employer will be sending you payment for the first month and/or deposit. Also my shipper will be shipping my car and other personal effects before I move into your place…. If this is ok with you, kindly mail me back your name to make out the payment in & your address to have it sent to. I will be off to see my sick mum in the hospital who is due for surgery soon. You can call me anytime on Skype i.d. abound.abound.”

“You sound like you would make a good tenant, but we should meet each other via Skype before coming to an agreement,” I told Wrenly. I gave him more information about my home and the suite and reiterated the type of tenant I wanted. I provided my Skype ID. Then I added: “I hope your mum isn’t too sick, that her surgery goes well and that she makes a quick and full recovery.” I also tried to connect with him via Skype, but I needed his phone number. “Wrenly, I’ve sent you a Skype invitation,” I said in another email. “What is your phone number in Gothenburg? My phone number in Canada is 250-123-4567.”

“I have added you on Skype so we can talk,” Wrenly wrote back. Not long after, we were chatting on Skype. Although our conversation had a jumbled quality, I attributed it to Wrenly’s accent and imperfect English. He was also clearly worried about his mother. I felt I’d done my due diligence. I sent him another email providing my address so he could send me the first month’s rent.

“My employer has sent payment,” he wrote back the same day. “This is the first time I will be traveling to North America…. my shipper will be getting in touch with you regarding shipping of my car…. His name is Matthew Peter and he’ll contact you by email.”

Two days later he sent another email. “I haven’t heard from you. Hope all is well? Let’s try to Skype today.”

“All is well here, although I’ve not yet heard from your employer or your shipper,” I replied. “Don’t worry, I won’t give the suite to anyone else in the meantime. You’ll be here on Saturday, which is only three days from today.”

Later that day I heard from the shipper whose email ID was shipitfastfastfast@gmail.com . Matthew asked for my address and advised: “I have been instructed not to commence shipping until you confirm receipt of your rent.”

I provided my address to Matthew.

“My mum’s surgery is scheduled to take place in three hours, wish me luck!” Wrenly wrote the next day. “Also you can track payment on www.canadapost.ca with tracking :7218809007643724. Here’s a poem for you below, hope you like it.”

His poem’s eight very earnest stanzas included the following:

Canada, oh Canada
what hast thou done with me
I feel thou whispers in my soul
I wish to be with thee

I see your children playing
out on a frozen pond
at snowball fights and slapping pucks
a magic way beyond

Mem’ries of the days gone by
engraved into my soul
return to you I will some day
it’s always been my goal

“Yes, very definitely good luck to you and your mom!” I replied later that day. I understood from our Skype conversation that it was major surgery; the possibility that his mother might not survive had crossed my mind.

“The unimaginable thing I feared most has happened to me, my mum passed away!” Wrenly informed me the next day. “I am extremely distraught, I can’t believe this can happen! My mother is the catalyst behind all my present achievements and I have been highly dependent on her…. Why did she have to go? This shouldn’t be happening to me, not now. I told my employer…. He made a mistake of sending you my shipper’s (Matthew’s) money along [with] your payment, instead of sending it separately. I’m so confused and depressed. What do we do now?”

“Steer steady and true, Wrenly. You will get through this. I am so sorry to hear about your mom,” I told him. I added that I had that morning received a cheque for $3300 from Marchand Electrical Company Ltd. “If you provide me with your shipping company’s name and address, I would be pleased to send them a cheque covering your shipping costs.”

“Peace be with you, Wrenly, and courage and resolve,” I concluded. “You and your mother are in my thoughts and prayers.”

Sometime later I received a tearful phone call from Wrenly. He sounded shattered and absolutely bereft. I tried to be supportive. After the call I remember wondering how he would cope.

Wrenly’s next communication, an email which arrived an hour or two later, was considerably less emotional. “It’s just so hard knowing I won’t hug, kiss and see my mum again, never again. She was an amazing woman and I believe a better place awaits her. I also appreciate all the soothing words of encouragement and how much you understand what I’m going through right now, no other future situation can be worse, unarguably…. In the midst of all the confusion I made an error and gave my employer the wrong amount for the rent which was sent to you… $2450 is meant for my shipper. I’ll have him email you now so he can give you details of how he wants the funds for him to commence shipping today as my car might be held under demurrage today because it has been at the port for a week.”

Soon after, I heard from the shipper again. “I have been instructed by Mr. Wrenly Dalgaard to commence shipping of his personal effects to his new place. Also, he instructed me to get in touch with you about the funds ($2450) you will be sending me so I can prosecute the shipping of his effects and also to give you details of how I will be receiving the funds. You will be required to send it via Western Union Money Transfer to the details below…” Matthew went on to provide an address in Jonkoping, Sweden, and to say: “You will be required to send the transfer information details to me today which include the amount and sender’s name and MTCN (Money Transfer Control Number)…. Also Western Union will be charging you to send the funds so you can deduct the charges from the funds before sending.” Matthew also sent another email that provided a long list of Western Union outlets in the Greater Victoria area where I live.

After depositing the cheque from Marchand Electrical at my credit union, I went to a nearby Safeway that provided Western Union services to transfer $2400 to Matthew (the transfer fee was another $58). I had to pay by cash or debit card (credit cards are not accepted). As the amount involved was well beyond my debit card’s limit, I had to return to my credit union to withdraw the cash. Once back at Safeway, while I stood at the Customer Service counter as the clerk completed the transaction, the thought crossed my mind: Could this be a scam? I mentioned this to the clerk. She said the thought had crossed her mind too. I resolved to do some checking before emailing the MTCN to Matthew.

At home, I searched online for “Shipitfastfastfast.” Top of the list of results that came up was the “Moron’s Blog – I WAS SCAMMED!!!” The more than 60 comments posted there quickly revealed that Wrenly and his accomplice(s) were a busy bunch using the same approach and often identically-worded emails—including the same poem, the sick mother, her pending surgery and death, and Wrenly’s distraught phone call—to try to dupe landlords mostly in B.C., but also in Ontario, Quebec, Alberta and, in one case, the Netherlands. They’d been at it for at least eighteen months. By my count, Wrenly had used at least nine other aliases and his shipper, Matthew, had used three others. Moreover, while Wrenly and his alter egos have claimed to be Brits and Spaniards as well as Swedes, the fraudulent cheques from his alleged employers appeared to always come from Ontario.

I had a near miss. I never provided the MTCN to Matthew (or whatever his real name is) and I got my money back. Western Union even refunded the $58 transaction fee, but they also said some fraudsters are able to collect funds sent to them without having the MTCN.

In many ways the scam was sophisticated and psychologically adept in how it manipulated me. But looking back there were any number of clues that could have alerted me that things were not legit: Wrenly’s second and all subsequent emails used a different email address than his first inquiry; he twice claimed he was traveling to Canada “to resume work” but later said it was his “first time” coming to North America; he never provided a phone number despite my request; he didn’t provide a picture or video link when we Skyped; when I asked him if he was going to work at the university close to where I live he didn’t answer, nor did he reply when I inquired if his travel plans were going to change due to the death of his mother; in one of Matthew’s emails, Matthew Peter became Peter Matthew; and, finally, why would he be moving to Victoria when Marchand Electric, his supposed employer, was located in Ottawa?

I wasn’t thinking of Wrenly when the phone rang the next morning, but it was him. It was Sunday, the day after he was supposed to arrive in Victoria.

“I haven’t heard from you. Is everything alright?” he asked.

“I’d like to know what your real name is,” I said.

“Why are you asking that?” He sounded dumbfounded—an actor to the very end.

He stayed on the line a few moments longer before hanging up. I can still hear the click followed by the dial tone. The show was over and Wrenly was gone.

The price of admission for landlords like me to the Wrenly show is the time it takes us to post our ads on Craig’s List. Of course, at that juncture we are unaware of the pending show or the possibility that we might find ourselves underwriting its cost to the tune of thousands of dollars. So, if you’re a landlord, beware the “Wrenly Dalgaards” of this world.

Text copyright © 2023 Patrick S. Wolfe
All rights reserved.
Short segments may be quoted with due attribution.

An author and historian, Patrick Wolfe lives in Victoria, British Columbia.

 

 

by Patrick S. Wolfe

The hate-fueled genocide of the Holocaust is such a fundamental event in the annals of civilization that people connected to the Nazi perpetrators are often automatically deemed guilty by association. But if you scratch the surface of the situations of people with such connections, you are quickly confronted with complexity of one or both of two types. First, the enormous coercive power exercised by the Nazis to bend people to their will and to enforce compliance with their evil ends. Second, the multiplicity of circumstances at numerous locations across Nazi-controlled Europe.

The debacle in Canada’s Parliament on Sept. 22, 2023, when Yaroslav Hunka was recognized by the Speaker of the House of Commons, Anthony Rota, as a Ukrainian and Canadian “hero” and received two standing ovations before it became known that Hunka had served as a teenager with the Nazi Waffen-SS Galicia Division is an illustration of this guilt by association and the frequent complexity of such situations.^[1]

The SS was declared a criminal organization by the Nuremberg Tribunal in 1945 and 1946.^[2] The Galicia Division has been accused of war crimes. A large but uncertain number of its members came to Canada in the 1950s. Efraim Zuroff of the Simon Wiesenthal Centre maintains “the unit’s history has been reconstructed to erase or minimize links to the Nazis.”^[3] Yet, the 1986 report of the Deschênes Commission of Inquiry on War Criminals in Canada stated that mere membership in the Galicia Division is insufficient to justify prosecution.^[4]

This tangled web allowed Irwin Cotler, former Canadian Justice Minister and Attorney General, in a lengthy Oct. 1, 2023 interview with CBC Radio, to call Hunka “a Nazi war criminal” and to later stress in the same interview that for action to be taken against him it would have to be demonstrated that he was knowingly a part of a criminal group that participated in war crimes.^[5]

During the interview, Cotler also emphasized “astonishing” revelations made by the Deschênes Commission. For example, in the aftermath of the Second World War a “cabinet committee … quashed Orders-in-Council to deport Nazis from Canada at the same time as it adopted Orders-in-Council to keep Jews out.” Cotler said Canada has “a shameful track record” and he joined many others in calling for an end to “the ongoing impunity” by releasing the redacted second part of the Deschênes Commission report,^[6] which concerned allegations against specific individuals.^[7]

I would like to know if Jan Jürgen (John) Petersen was one of the people against whom allegations had been made. Earlier this year, I published a biography about him, A Snake on the Heart: History, Mystery, and Truth – The Entangled Journeys of a Biographer and His Nazi Subject (Iguana Books).

John was a member of the Dutch SS who, after coming to Canada in July 1952, became a British Columbia foster parent and social worker. Like his younger brother, Constant, John was a policeman with the SD (Sicherheitsdienst), the SS’s Security and Intelligence Service. Both were imprisoned as Nazi collaborators after the war, as was their younger half-brother, Wim Kempen, who managed a sheep farm in Ukraine for the Germans for part of 1943. The three brothers had a Dutch mother, but John and Constant, who had lived on Dutch territory all their lives (with the exception of John’s first ten months in British North Borneo), were German by virtue of their father, who died in 1918, being German; Wim’s father was Dutch. These familial complexities only deepen when they intertwine with those of the five-year Nazi occupation of the Netherlands. Although Wim became a “supporting” member of the SS in early 1944, he likely did this to obtain a measure of protection from other pro-Nazi elements;^[8] he went into hiding in December 1944.^[9]

Another element of this complexity is Barend van Leeuwen, who was a friend of the three brothers’ family. Van Leeuwen not only hid two Jews in late 1942 and 1943, he also distributed food to other Jews in hiding. Wim helped him do this.^[10] Wim also married Van Leeuwen’s daughter in 1944. Meanwhile, John and Constant, in their roles as SD policemen, had been involved in the roundup of the Jews in 1942 and 1943, John in The Hague, Constant in Rotterdam. Constant admitted this in all five of the statements he gave to the Dutch authorities while he was imprisoned as a collaborator. “I had to choose either to take part in the raids on Rotterdam or serve at the front,” he said in his statement of November 26, 1946. “I chose the latter because I did not agree with those raids.”^[11] This decision meant leaving his wife, who was seven-months pregnant, and their eighteen-month-old son, as well as putting himself in much greater danger than if he had remained in Rotterdam. He was sent to the Russian front where he was badly wounded.

When John told me his story in 1976, he admitted to being in the Dutch SS but not to participating in the Holocaust. I only discerned this fact several decades after his death in 1988. The circumstantial evidence is overwhelming. It was because of this past and his fear of being identified and prosecuted as a war criminal that he said he never left Canada after he was let in. This claim was not precisely true; he did travel to the Seattle area for social work training, circa 1964. On the other side of the ledger, there is this, written by Van Leeuwen in a letter of June 17, 1951: “I experienced that Mr. Jan Jürgen Petersen as a S.S. man has taken our side totally during the war. He knew we had Jewish people with us at home, and where others were, he helped us in our work, when possible, he also knew where most of the Jewish furniture was stored.”

The Nazis brought multiple means to bear to support their priority of annihilating the Jews, which was arguably even more important than winning the war. This sounds ridiculous, but the Nazi ideology was based on hatred of the Jews and an alleged Jewish international conspiracy, notions which themselves, in retrospect and notwithstanding the widespread antisemitism of the time, are ridiculous. In late 1940, when government departments, educational institutions and local authorities in the Netherlands were directed to dismiss their 2,000 Jewish staff members, the related Nazi decree was based on the “action of world Jewry against the occupying authorities.”^[12] If world Jewry was so powerful, surely it would have intervened to prevent the Holocaust, surely it would have been able to mobilize more countries than just Denmark to take significant actions to protect their Jewish citizens. When hatred makes the ridiculous plausible, evil triumphs.

During the roundup and deportation of the Jews in the Netherlands, food was used to support the process. Due to a large workload and limited staff, traffic police and detectives could work overtime escorting Jews to the Westerbork concentration and transit camp in the northeast of the country; it was the last stop before the extermination camps in the east. “It was very worthwhile to take on those extra duties, not only because of the money, but also because on return to the station in Utrecht you were given a bag with well-filled sandwiches,” observed one man who volunteered for the duty. “All of that at a time when anything was very useful and when food had become scarce.”^[13] The people taking advantage of these “opportunities” were engaged in what Hannah Arendt termed “the banality of evil,” meaning, in the words of philosopher Judith Butler, “the way in which the crime had become for the criminals accepted, routinised, and implemented without moral revulsion and political indignation and resistance.”^[14]

While winning compliance through soft measures like overtime and food was one approach in prosecuting the war and the Holocaust, the Nazis’ hard measures were a truer reflection of their attitude of “for us or against us,” which applied to the general population as well as to their enemies. If German soldiers were ambushed or killed or one of their officers was assassinated, and the Germans could not find those responsible, they would execute ten or so randomly selected men from the street or town in question or arrest all the men and deport them to labor camps in Germany. This reflected Hitler’s policy “to retaliate like for like or worse.”^[15] Moreover, innocent citizens were held as hostages to deter attempts to kill Nazis. If such attempts occurred, hostages would be murdered in reprisal. When Hanns Albin Rauter, the head of the SS in the Netherlands, was almost killed in a resistance attack in March 1945, Heinrich Himmler, Reichsführer of the SS, ordered the execution of 500 people.^[16] The same retribution philosophy prevailed at Westerbork where a standing order required that ten “residents” be added to the next available transport to the east for every one that escaped.^[17]

Hard measures were also applied against the police and non-compliant members of the SS. According to German historian Gerhard Hirschfeld, “From July 1942 officers who had been guilty of an ‘offence’ against the occupying power, or had refused to undertake a task assigned to them, had to answer for their conduct before a special German SS and police court. This fact alone throws revealing light onto the extremely precarious situation of the Dutch police.” Another historian, N.K.C.A. in ‘t Veld, adds that many Dutch police “paid for their resistance to the Germans in front of a firing squad or by perishing in concentration camps.”^[18] Despite these dangers, there are examples of police warning “potential victims of forthcoming raids,” turning “a blind eye to forged or invalid documents” and generally dragging their feet during raids to roundup Jews.^[19] John claimed he did some of these things, and there is one instance where I tend to believe him, but we must err on the side of skepticism given his extensive history of telling tall tales.

There is little doubt that John was a Nazi—for a time. When he and Constant returned to the Netherlands at the end of 1940 following their six months of SS training in Germany, he was confident Germany would win the war. He told me Hitler was creating a broader confederation based on the idea of brotherhood and that he saw a “home for himself” in that confederation.^[20] But soon after, when he started to feel pressure to join the Waffen-SS, he apparently began to see some things differently. That August he made a mysterious return on a part-time basis to the insurance industry where he had previously worked. There is a good chance this was a covert assignment to work as a spy and informer. At the start of 1943, he further diversified his activities by joining the Schutzgruppe, a semi-military organization attached to the German army. He explained later that he played a “double game” in which he pitted the German authorities—the SS and the Schutzgruppe—against each other. He was also linked to the resistance through Van Leeuwen and another friend.

Notwithstanding this evolution of his attitude and actions, John continued to admire Hitler. Such hero worship was not unusual in the 1930s when, according to British historian Sir Ian Kershaw, Hitler was “arguably the most popular head of state in the world.”^[21] But, in 1976, John still did not want to believe that Hitler knew about the Holocaust; others, in his view, were responsible for that. If Hitler were involved, it was only because he went “berserk during the war,” he told me.^[22]

John lived wide swathes of his life in denial; he wore a shroud of falseness. Although he presented as an affable and charming man, known for his warmth and gentleness, a few who knew him best understood that his other core characteristics—his manipulativeness and mendacity—had at least as much impact on people as his positive attributes. He was given opportunities on two occasions during his adult life to face up to his duplicity; he retreated both times.

There are multiple issues wrapped up in the Rota-Hunka House of Commons debacle. By bringing attention to John Petersen—a Canadian, like Hunka, who arrived in the 1950s with an SS past—I’ve emphasized the complexity of circumstances that can accompany SS service. Yaroslav Hunka does not appear to have been a war criminal based on what has so far been published about his service in the SS, unless that service itself is the deciding factor.^[23] Petersen was a war criminal based on his participation in the Holocaust when he held the SS rank of Unterscharführer (junior squad leader). His fear of leaving Canada demonstrates his recognition of this fact. That Hunka was saluted as a Ukrainian and Canadian hero, a status that was tied to his then unknown SS service, remains a mortifying mistake.

So, how did Petersen gain entry to Canada? Probably quite easily if my intuition is correct. But I could be wrong. According to Cotler, the United Kingdom government, in 1948, “called upon Commonwealth countries—and I quote—’the time had come to bury the past’ and not to proceed to bring Nazi war criminals to justice, in part, due to changed geopolitics,” i.e., anticommunism and the newly-emergent Cold War. In 1950, the Canadian government liberalized immigration policy and established the Department of Citizenship and Immigration.  Soon after, “the government took German immigrants off the enemy-alien list…. As a result, Germans joined swelling numbers of Italians [who’d been removed from the enemy-alien list in 1947] in applying for admission to Canada.”  This is what enabled Petersen and his family to come to Canada in 1952, albeit on their second try. Their initial attempt a year earlier was thwarted when John’s son, Hans, contracted contagious ringworm, which was evident on his face.^[24]

Perhaps due to paranoia, which Petersen admitted to having in the late 1940s, he apparently conflated this delay into a baffling mystery that victimized him. He also told me that the Canadian government investigated him for two years before permitting him to enter the country, a claim for which I have found no evidence.^[25] But, again, I may be wrong. Was the truth about his wartime past known and suppressed by Ottawa since his arrival here or sometime after that? This question is one reason why I’d like to see the redacted portions of the Deschênes Commission report released.

Just as Petersen’s denial and fallacious reinventions of his past were not in his best interests, so the United Kingdom’s advice to “bury the past” does not appear to have served Canada well. It has repressed and devalued the truth. This does not help our efforts to counter rising antisemitism or the persecution of minorities around the world.

In the aftermath of the Rota-Hunka debacle, Canada’s Immigration Minister Marc Miller said, “Canada has a really dark history with Nazis in Canada.” That history includes a time when it was easier to enter Canada “as a Nazi than it was as a Jewish person,” he added. “I think that’s a history we have to reconcile.”^[26]

As Canadians have been learning from the evolving examples of truth and reconciliation in South Africa and with First Nations in Canada, reconciliation requires truth, meaning action on finding it and a firm commitment to maintaining it. The truth concerning war criminals in Canada must be revealed.

Text copyright © 2023 Patrick S. Wolfe
All rights reserved.
Short segments may be quoted with due attribution.

An author and historian, Patrick Wolfe lives in Victoria, British Columbia. His biography of Jan Jürgen (John) Petersen, A Snake on the Heart: History, Mystery, and Truth – The Entangled Journeys of a Biographer and His Nazi Subject, was published in March 2023.

1. “Yaroslav Hunka,” Wikipedia – accessed 23-09-29. ↑
2. Sarah Ritchie (Canadian Press), “Rideau Hall apologies for honouring Nazi veteran with Order of Canada,” Times Colonist, Thursday, October 5, 2023, A5. ↑
3. Greg Mercer and Marie Woolf, “Hunka said in essay that he enlisted in Nazi unit to protect homeland,” The Globe and Mail, Friday, Sept. 29, 2023, A4 (“some Ukrainian soldiers linked to the division were accused of war crimes”; “the division’s involvement in war crimes is still disputed”; from “several hundred” to “as many as 2,000” came to Canada; they were screened before coming to Canada; Efraim Zuroff quote). Morgan Lowrie (Canadian Press), “Group defends Ukrainian who fought for Nazis,” Times Colonist, Saturday, Sept. 30, 2023, A12 (professor maintains “some Galician units did participate in war crimes”; another professor says the Galician Division’s actions “have been ‘whitewashed’ in Canada”; there were about 600 members of the Division in Canada at the time of the 1985-86 Deschênes Commission.) ↑
4. CTV National News (Reporter Heather Wright), “Will Hunka be extradited?” (length 2:13 minutes) https://www.ctvnews.ca/canada/how-was-veteran-yaroslav-hunka-s-military-unit-linked-to-the-nazis-1.6578579 (1:20). ↑
5. “Irwin Cotler reflects on Canada’s past treatment of Nazis,” interview with CBC Radio’s The Sunday Magazine, October 1, 2023. https://www.cbc.ca/radio/sunday/the-sunday-magazine-for-october-1-2023-1.6981577 (1:15 and 14:40) ↑
6. Cotler interview with CBC Radio, Oct. 1, 2023 – 1:28 (impunity), 1:48 (quashed), 2:55 (astonishing), 20:30 (shameful), 3:00 and 5:15 and 9:15 (release redacted second part of report). ↑
7. “Deschênes Commission,” Wikipedia – accessed 2023-09-29. ↑
8. Patrick Wolfe, A Snake on the Heart: History, Mystery, and Truth – The Entangled Journeys of a Biographer and His Nazi Subject, Iguana Books, March 2023, xxiii, 174, 241. ↑
9. Ibid., 207, 263, 307. ↑
10. Ibid., 141. ↑
11. Ibid., 194. ↑
12. Ibid., 164. In Frank van Riet’s The Jewish Guards: Supervision i8n the Dutch Gateway to Hell (Nedvision Publishing, 2022), we are told (133, 134): In a letter of March 15, 1943, Major Ynto de Boer, the acting Regional Police President for the provinces of Groningen, Friesland and Drenthe, stated that all Jews in the region had to be transported to the Westerbork concentration and transit camp in Drenthe province and that this was “the result of the decision of the Führer to put an end in Europe to the danger posed by those of the Jewish Religion, who, by means of capital, by means of Bolshevism and other underground political powers, tries to achieve world domination.” They are to be “transferred to Poland, where a large region is reserved for them.” “In reality, no Jew who does not resist is hurt at all.” ↑
13. Wolfe, 224. ↑
14. Judith Butler, “Hannah Arendt’s challenge to Adolf Eichmann,” The Guardian, August 29, 2011 – https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2011/aug/29/hannah-arendt-adolf-eichmann-banality-of-evil ↑
15. Wolfe, 156-7. ↑
16. Ibid., 296-7. ↑
17. Frank van Riet, The Jewish Guards: Supervision in the Dutch Gateway to Hell, Assen, Netherlands, Nedvision Publishing, 2022, 95. ↑
18. Wolfe, 197. ↑
19. Ibid., 196-7. ↑
20. Ibid., 170. ↑
21. Ibid., 36. ↑
22. Ibid., 39-40. ↑
23. Like John Petersen, Hunka admitted to being in the SS. Hunka even wrote about it publicly, circa 2011, for an American online magazine focused on Ukrainian war veterans. As reported in the Mercer and Woolf article in The Globe and Mail: “He talks about how under Stalin, he saw children and their families shipped away to Siberia, and later found out his aunt and uncle had also been taken. When the Galicia Division was created, many young Ukrainians jumped at the chance to fight back [against the Russians], he said.” ↑
24. Wolfe, xxi, xxi-footnote. ↑
25. Patrick Wolfe, December 2010 version of A Snake on the Heart, Vol. II, 571. ↑
26. The Canadian Press, “Rota debacle renews calls to examine history,” Times Colonist, Thursday, September 28, 2023, A9. ↑