In Europe

girls and spun them around while the crowds laughed.
    A large part of the city was finally closed down; even the stock exchange was shut. Rumours were flying about a strike rolling across the country, people had stopped working in Haarlem, Utrecht and the Gooi region as well. The police sympathised, and either refused to intervene or did so only much too late. Pamphlets were being spread everywhere:
    Save the Jewish children from Nazi violence, take them into your homes! Be unified, be courageous! Strike! Strike! Strike!
    Amsterdam's February Strike was a unique gesture of solidarity with the Jews. And within Nazi Europe, it was a case of unheard-of rebellion. The Germans responded immediately: the
Generalkommissar zur besonderen Verwendung
, F. Schmidt, sent two regiments of the SS Death's Head Division to Amsterdam and the Zaan, there was shooting everywhere, a number of strikers were arrested, eighteen members of the resistance were executed and the leaders of the strike – most of them communists – went into hiding. Within a few days it was all over. On Saturday, 1 March, Goebbelsnoted in his diary: ‘Calm completely restored in the Netherlands. Schmidt got his way, with the help of measures I proposed. I urgently advised him to clamp down. Which he did. We must show this gang of Jews just how big and sharp our teeth are.’
    That is all the attention he devoted to the matter. We will therefore never know whether there was any truth to the stories that circulated after the war about Hitler flying into a wild rage, and about plans to deport the Dutch and Flemish populations en masse to the Polish province of Lublin. The Dutch would be replaced by ‘sturdy young German farmers’, and would, in turn, introduce a healthy injection of Germanic blood to Poland.
    In fact, plans
did
exist to deport some three million Dutch people to Poland, and to relocate an equal number of Germans in Holland. Had the war turned out more favourably for the Nazis, in other words, millions of Dutchmen and Flemings would have undergone the same as countless ethnic Germans from Lithuania, Estonia, Poland and Bessarabia. And, in a worse scenario, the Dutch and the Flemish would have met a fate little better than that of the millions of deported Poles.
    From Berlin's Ostbahnhof I took the train east, and now I am travelling through rolling woodlands and fields full of poppies and cornflowers. It is a warm afternoon, the train rocks through the countryside, the girl across from me sleeps a deep and peaceful sleep. White villages slide by, the houses have big, brown wooden barns, then another half-hour of cornfields. We pass a lake, with people fishing and camping on its shores, cattle lolling beneath a clump of trees. In the fields the farmers are mowing, their chests bare, wagons piled high with hay, they are obviously in a hurry, for there is thunder in the offing.
    The station where I must change trains probably once played a central role in a well oiled iron machine, but today it is overgrown and rusty. A long coal train trundles by. The station restaurant sells greasy pastries. There is a computer game there that gives you three minutes to kill hundreds of Arabs with conspicuously Semitic noses. You can hear them, too: Aagh! Ooef! Gnuhuhuh! The sound of someone having his throat cut electronically.
    Later that evening, past Lublin, a cool wind blows into the compartment. We pass a brook, a factory, kitchen gardens and orchards, the airsmells of grass, hay and coal-fired stoves. In 1941, this part of the country was given the title ‘General Government of Poland’, and was to be the gigantic laboratory where Nazi theories about
Blut und Boden
,
Volksgemeinschaft
and
Untermenschen
would be put into practice for the first time, where the majority of death camps were concentrated and where, afterwards, the ethnic Germans were to be resettled.
    The train's final stop is Zamość, the birthplace of Rosa Luxemburg, a Renaissance town in south-east Poland. It is already dark in the big market square, there are almost no street lights, but from the pavement cafés comes the murmur of dozens of beer-drinking tourists. Zamość was built by an enthusiastic Polish chancellor as a small ideal community in accordance with sixteenth century Italian norms. The pink and light-blue houses miraculously survived the war, and look today much as they did when the Italian master builders finished them in 1605. The centuries of poverty and grime that lie