Astonishing: The Rescue Story of the Sephardic Community in Amsterdam

Amidst the unimaginable disasters of the Holocaust, we recognize various rescue stories.

We have no way to understand why this terrible catastrophe happened to our people. But we do have a way to see the hand of Hashem even there.

One of the fascinating rescue stories is that of the Sephardic community in Amsterdam.

With the Nazis' entry into the Netherlands, they began, as was their way, to count and list the Jews, to plan their destruction.

A famous Jewess who hid in Amsterdam was Anne Frank. She was captured due to betrayal and sent to a concentration camp. Her diary was published and became a classic depiction of the horrors of the Holocaust.

However, there were two communities in Amsterdam. In addition to the large community of Dutch Jews from long ago, numbering about 120,000 Jews and who had grown significantly after the pogroms in Poland, as Jews sought to emigrate to the West to countries with more tolerance (the Netherlands was a Protestant country and considered tolerant), there was also a Sephardic community, descendants of Conversos who had emigrated to Amsterdam. The community numbered about 4,300 people.

With the Nazis' entry into the Netherlands, they placed a Wehrmacht soldier in Germany named Hans Georg Calmeyer. Calmeyer was not a great righteous man, but divine providence planted the idea in his mind to save the Sephardic community of Amsterdam. He gathered all the birth and lineage documents from the Sephardic community and "altered" them so they would ostensibly prove that the entire Sephardic community of Amsterdam consisted of pure Christians with no connection to Judaism. He sent the dossier to Berlin and, in the meantime, delayed their deportation to the concentration camps.

Unfortunately, he did not delay the deportation of the Ashkenazi Jews to the concentration camps. As we said, he was not a great leader of the generation.

But his plan regarding the Sephardim partially succeeded. The dossier he sent to Berlin caused significant headaches there, and the response was delayed, and in the meantime, thousands of Dutch Sephardim escaped the Nazi-occupied borders. When the answer finally came, over a year later, stating they should be annihilated, almost no Sephardic Jews remained in the Netherlands. Through his actions, close to four thousand people were saved, and for this, he was recognized as Righteous Among the Nations.