Being and Belonging: Benno Premsela, Joop Voet and Sandor Baracs and the Holocaust in Occupied Amsterdam

Abstract

Benno Premsela, Joop Voet and Sándor Baracs were Jewish men, citizens of Amsterdam, who came to age in prewar Amsterdam, survived the Holocaust by going into hiding and became important and well-known spokesmen, for different public causes, in the immediate postwar years. Following their individual trajectories from the late 1930s until the late 1940s, this essay investigates the social habitat and social interactions of these three men in the Dutch capital just before, during and directly after the Holocaust. The focus is on their emotional reactions to the accumulative restrictive orders in the course of the Holocaust and, more specifically, on the impact of the dramatic events on their feelings of belonging and on their perceptions of their community. Exploring the little-studied domain of emotions, this essay sheds light on their tactics to survive, their networks of rescue, their circles of identification and disidentification and their postwar response to the Holocaust. The three microhistories present significant differentiations and complications of our knowledge. They illuminate the strength of the ties with their prewar circles of identification, only to loosen in the phase of the deportations, and only in the case of Joop Voet. They also produce important counternarratives of the dominant narrative in literature of “double victimhood” of Dutch Jews in the afterwar period. Their dissociation from the postwar Jewish community of Amsterdam, a community of victims, should be related to their choice for political activism and public engagement.