Ajax the Dutch the War Read online

  On Friday evenings the Jewish vendors would turn their carts upside-down, sing socialist and Jewish psalms, and then, if they had enough money, go home for Friday-night chicken soup. On Saturday the streets were littered with chicken bones tossed out of windows. It was back to work on Sundays, when gentile shoppers from all over town thronged the Jewish market on the Quarter’s Waterloo Square. Rembrandt, a resident of the Quarter, had shopped at one of its predecessors; the market that stands on the square today, selling junk to tourists, is its heir.

  Dutch gentiles seldom gave the Jews any trouble. Many Christians lived in the Quarter themselves. There was some country-club racism (a few posh establishments like the rowing club De Hoop barred Jews as members), and every now and then a newspaper or a politician would have a dig at the “Israelites,” but mostly the Jews felt at home in the Netherlands. They were tolerated. “At present [our] people live peacefully in Amsterdam,” Rabbi Uziel wrote as early as 1616. Many of the families he had known were still there in 1940 when the German soldiers marched in.

  The Germans turned the Quarter into a ghetto sealed with barbed wire. Jews were taken from their homes in alphabetical order, then collected and registered in the Hollandsche Schouwburg theater, which stands on the street that runs behind my friend’s gallery. Almost every adult who entered the theater ended up dead in Poland, but some of their children survived. When a tram stopped outside the theater, blocking its entrance from sight, students would smuggle kids out of the building in rucksacks, boxes, potato sacks.

  These children—one of whom became mayor of Amsterdam; another, legendary masseur of Ajax—would be hidden in a crèche on the other side of the road. Later they were moved to safe houses. Some of them passed through the room in which I worked.

  So little does Amsterdam change that the trams stopping in front of the theater today bear the same numbers and run the same routes as they did sixty years ago. Writing this book in Amsterdam, I often felt as if I were living in a ghost town. Most of the buildings of the Quarter are still standing, and some of the old Jewish shop names, like Apotheek de Castro, are preserved on façades. The Portuguese synagogue from which the philosopher Spinoza was expelled by his orthodox co-religionists is still there, but other things have changed since World War II. The slums that surrounded the synagogue have made way for two-lane roads, which in this city of the bicycle have the feel of vast highways. Nearby, on the rubble of Jewish homes, stands the new City Opera. But the main thing that has changed in the Jewish Quarter is that the Jews are gone. Three-quarters of them were killed by Hitler. No other community of people in Western Europe suffered as much destruction in the twentieth century. The Quarter, with its Jewish monuments and virtually unused synagogue, is now a sort of open-air museum with through traffic.

  That we know so much about the people who lived here—how they spoke, shopped, had fun—is thanks mainly to the innumerable memoirs of the survivors. That so many have been written is because of Jewish tradition: what happens to you when you die is vague and uncertain, there may not be a heaven or hell, and so the dead live on only in the memory of the living. Hence the dozens of memorial books, of which the most important is called, simply, the Memorboek. But in its 862 pages there is barely a word on soccer.

  Before the war the Quarter supported five little Jewish soccer clubs, neighborhood teams, but most of the Quarter’s inhabitants only dreamed of playing. Sometimes a pair of soccer boots all the way from England would hang outside the large Melhado store. Then passing kids would murmur, “If I’m ever allowed to play soccer. . . .”The game was expensive, and on Sundays many boys in the Quarter had to work in their fathers’ market stalls.

  All Dutch soccer was amateur until 1954, but even before the war Ajax was one of the clubs at the top of the tree. Its ground lay just a couple of miles east of the Jewish Quarter, but few inhabitants of the Quarter could imagine actually playing for Ajax. To do that you needed a soccer suitcase and clothes, which had to be washed every Sunday evening because you couldn’t represent Ajax in muddy shorts. All that was unaffordable. The few Jews who were Ajax members before the war were wealthier people from merchant families rather like Anne Frank’s, people who lived outside the Quarter in the richer neighborhoods of Amsterdam-South. But many people in the Quarter supported Ajax, whether they could get to the ground on Sundays or not.

  Ajax usually denies any connection with Amsterdam’s pre-war Jews. The club’s historian Evert Vermeer told Het Parool newspaper in 1999, “The supporters of Ajax’s opponents used to arrive at Weesperpoort Station, where there were a lot of Jewish street vendors. So they would say, ‘We’re going to the Jews.’ But the club itself didn’t have a Jewish culture at all before World War II.”

  If there were any institutions in Amsterdam that didn’t have a Jewish culture before the war, they were the NSB (the Dutch Nazi Party) and the churches. The rest did. “Amsterdam is the city of the Jews and the cyclists,” wrote the Prague journalist Egon Erwin Kisch shortly before the war. And the big soccer club nearest the Jewish Quarter was Ajax. Vermeer writes as if the Jews on one of those pre-war Sundays had stared dumbstruck at the gentile fans, thinking, “These Christians must be crazy,” as if soccer were a goy pastime like eating the body of Christ or riding horses.

  When Ajax men do concede the club had Jewish fans, they always give the same explanation. As Wim Schoevaart, the clubs nonagenarian archivist, told me, “Jew people like something good, and so they enjoyed going to Ajax.” Joop Stoffelen, a former Ajax player who seemed ashamed of the club’s Jewish links yet served soccer journalists as an unofficial historian of the Jewish Quarter, once said, “Whenever people called Ajax ‘a Jew club,’ I had my answer ready. I’d say, ‘Do you know why Ajax has so much support among the Jews? Because they know what’s good and tasty.’” Even Bennie Muller, Ajax’s half-Jewish captain of the 1960s, told me, “Jews are people who like entertainment. They went to the theater, to the casino, gambled, and soccer was entertainment, too.”

  The moment you hear the explanation, you want to reject it. Do only Jews like what’s good and tasty? Do gentiles prefer the bad and unappetizing? But when you reflect on the joyless Calvinism of the pre-war Netherlands, you see they might have a point.

  Whenever Ajax denies its Jewish links, or tries to apologize for them, it is denying people who have been murdered. It is important to reconstruct a random Sunday in the Jewish Quarter before the war.

  To find the few Jewish fans who remember those Sundays, you either have to fly to Israel or cycle south from Amsterdam’s Museum Square. Riding out of town along the Beethovenstraat, you pass the neighborhoods where the remnants of Jewish Amsterdam live: here and there a menorah on a windowsill, a shop with a Jewish name, or a passer-by with olive skin and curly black hair. Not many, of course.

  In a flat around the corner from the Hilton Hotel where John and Yoko held their bed-in for peace, eighty-seven-year-old Hans Reiss leads me to his office. There is a computer and videotapes (one of them of Ajax) and a Harvard University pennant that turns out to be more than a souvenir. Reiss has done well for a Jew from the wrong generation: born in 1912 in the Sint Antoniebreestraat, the street where Rembrandt went bankrupt in 1656 and Reiss’s father later ran one of the many Jewish drapery stores. Reiss began going to Ajax with his father in 1921, when he was nine years old.

  On Sunday mornings before the war, pretty girls would stand outside the Jewish textile shops to lure in the gentile customers. The wares were laid out on the street as if in an oriental bazaar. Reiss says, “Sundays were top days. So my father wanted to leave the shop as late as possible. He knew exactly when the tram came. My father had been going to Ajax since he was a boy. Soccer lovers. Passive, though. That generation didn’t play, itself. The ground was unimaginably far away. All the way outside town. But there was an excellent connection to the Jewish Quarter.”

  At quarter past one in the afternoon, Reiss and his father and dozens of other people would cram into a little tram that trundled to the Weesperplein Square. Anyone wanting to cover that distance today would walk or cycle, but in the 1920s it felt like a long way: you were going to the very edge of the Quarter, and in those days people were not fit.

  Reiss says, “On the Weesperplein there was a little steam tram called ‘the Murderer from ’t Gooi,’ and it went to Ajax. It left every half-hour. So at the Weesperplein people would always storm it. They would be sticking out on all sides. Extremely dangerous. Almost all those people were Jews.” At half-past one, Reiss and his father would fight their way on board.

  “Amazing that you still remember it after seventy years,” I remark.

  “It was my youth, wasn’t it? I lived in the middle of it all. Until 1931. The tram would puff along for a while, and then stop because the locomotive’s water reservoir had to be refilled. And that tram often caused accidents, and so it was popularly known as ‘the Murderer.’ But there won’t be many mouths left that can still tell you that.”

  At five to two Reiss and his father would join a cluster of Jews in the little covered stand of Ajax’s “Wooden Stadium.” On those Sunday afternoons in the 1920s Ajax would generally kick off with ten gentiles and a Jewish outside-right from New York. “Eddy Hamel,” Reiss remembers. “Tall boy, black hair combed back. Not a product of the Jewish Quarter. He was what you might call an idol. Eddy Hamel, I can still see him before me. Quick, and he had a very good cross. Something like David Beckham now. Ach, it was all different then. The speed of Eddy Hamel is a snail’s pace now.”

  After the match Reiss and his father would return to the Quarter by “Murderer.” From beneath his Harvard pennant he says, “And you’d think we could then go home eh? But no. In the Old High Street there was a cigar shop, Swaap. On Sundays he had a big board h
anging outside with all the soccer fixtures written in chalk. We’d be there at half-past four. The first results only began coming in from five o’clock. Every time a result came in, Mr. Swaap would walk outside with his piece of chalk and write it on the board. The place was black with people. If you went into the shop to buy a cigar you’d hear the result before the others, because Swaap was a good businessman.

  “In the evenings, the first and only Sunday soccer paper would appear, the Cetem. ‘Read the Cetem!’ the vendor would shout, I can still hear him say it. ‘Read the Cetem!’ People would fight for the papers. There was a short report of each match. When you had the paper you took it home and the whole family would read it.”

  I remark that for at least some of its life the Cetem also printed regular news.

  “That’s possible,” says Reiss, “but we were very narrow-minded.”

  As the Cetem was produced on Sunday, day of the Christian Sabbath, it was written, printed, and sold mainly by Jews. In the evening the vendors would stream out of the Quarter into the rest of the city. “Read the Cetem! All results!” Since the Dutch world for “results” is the same as the word for “rashes,” “Get the Cetem!” became a popular curse.

  Five issues of the Cetem—or bits of those issues, anyway—survive in a box in Amsterdam’s city archive. Together the remnants tell the story of “the only newspaper on Sunday evening.” Founded by Simon Weyl in 1923, it really did have all the results, as well as some rather perfunctory match reports: a Feyenoord–Ajax match on January 20, 1924, is covered in just 138 words, in which only one of the four goal scorers is named. Is this what people fought over?

  That edition also includes a news report from Berlin: “20 Jan. (Own tel.) Stresemann yesterday received representatives of the foreign press. On this occasion he answered them concerning Poincaré’s latest speech.” At issue was a row between Germany and France and Belgium about reparation payments for the Great War.

  The entire Cetem of November 25, 1928, survives. The front page has news (“The Fall of Stresemann”) and inside there is a lot of sport. Holland has beaten Switzerland 4–1, and the Cetem publishes a picture of the Swiss team in their suits. Yesterday we snapped the Swiss Eleven on their arrival at Amsterdam’s Central Station, announces the caption. And then the fantastically redundant addition: Above you will see the result.

  But the Cetem was more than just results. On March 17, 1929, the newspaper reveals:FOR THE WOMAN:

  The Ideal Man

  Of whom the real woman

  Is in awe

  Need not be an

  Adonis.

  No Cetems remain from the 1930s, but the very last issue of the newspaper, dated March 19, 1944, is in the box at the city archive. The Cetem has shrunk to tabloid size; Simon Weyl is no longer on the front page, nor is Stresemann. The main story is datelined “from the headquarters of the Führer,” and headlined “Soviets Thrown Back in Various Places.” There was still sports news (Amsterdam–Rotterdam 3–3), but they weren’t fighting over it in the Jewish Quarter any more.

  The paper continued as the Zondagavondblad (Sunday Evening Newspaper) and seems to have disappeared in 1950, by which time almost all the original journalists and vendors and many of the readers were dead. Reiss was lucky. The boy from the Jewish Quarter had left for Harvard on a scholarship in January 1939. He had known Europe was in danger since Jewish refugees from Germany had begun moving into Amsterdam-South telling terrible stories. Reiss studied economics at Harvard, enlisted in the U.S. Army, and returned to Amsterdam after the war to take over his murdered brother’s firm. Some Jews still went to Ajax after 1945, but no longer on the Murderer from the Quarter.

  What Ajax had meant to these people was best explained to me by Abraham Roet, a Jew who left Holland for Israel in 1946. I met him in his house outside Tel Aviv. On Sundays before the war Roet and his brothers, dressed in jackets, ties, and berets, would be taken to Ajax by their orthodox father. Roet, who still owned an Ajax season ticket in Tel Aviv told me he never saw Ajax as a Jewish club. That wasn’t the point. Rather, Ajax was the place where Jews and gentiles met. At the stadium you found poor Jews, rich Jews, middling Jews, in a sea of gentiles all shouting for the same club. It was a melting pot, and that may have been one reason why Roet’s father took his boys along. “I think it was part of our education, that we were part of the Dutch people.”

  A Jew at Ajax felt himself part of Amsterdam. He was protected there. When the swastika flag was raised above the stadium for a game against Admira Vienna in 1938, and the Viennese players gave the Hitler salute, the Ajax fans whistled furiously and some walked out of the stadium. Understanding pre-war Ajax helps make sense of Amsterdam’s “February Strike,” when for a day and a half in 1941 much of the city’s working population downed tools in sympathy with the Jews. The gentiles knew Jews from school, from the market, from the stands at Ajax. The February Strike was the only gesture of its kind in Europe in World War II.

  3

  A FRIENDLY SALUTE

  International Soccer in the 1930s

  It was during the 1930s that soccer became politics. So much came together in that low, dishonest decade: the rise of Hitler and Mussolini, the brewing of war, the discovery of propaganda, and soccer’s emergence as a mass passion on the Continent. All this gave international matches a meaning they had never had before.

  It was the first decade to feature much international sport. Germany’s tally of ninety-three internationals in the twenty-five years before Hitler remains low, even if you take into account their troubles finding opponents in the years after the Great War. Only in the run-up to the 1928 Olympics did the national team acquire a coach, Otto Nerz, and he was unpaid. As manager of Germany, Nerz continued his other pursuits, which included taking a medical degree. In the Weimar years, he presided over a shockingly bad team. A draw at home against Scotland in 1929 aroused euphoria, and two years later Germany was thumped 6–0 by the Austrian “Wunderteam.” The Austrians, unlike the Germans, were professionals.

  Yet by the end of the 1920s soccer was ceasing to be a marginal activity for rich people. As the Continent recovered from the Great War, as transport improved and people continued moving to the cities, as the hours they worked in factories fell, they began playing soccer. In France the number of registered players trebled to about a hundred thousand between 1921 and 1926. In Germany and Italy big stadiums were built, and newspapers launched sports sections. Italian fans even began traveling to away matches. In 1929, Mussolini’s government created a national league.

  The Fascists had taken time to come to terms with soccer. Hitler, Mussolini, and their henchmen were born too early to have grown up with the game. It bothered them that soccer had been invented in England, and Mussolini’s government initially tried to interest people in a new Italian ball game called volata. Many Fascists found the very idea of soccer offensive: eleven young men skipping around in shorts, kicking a ball in competition with eleven others, when they should have been working together at something more manly.

  To the early Nazis, sport could have only one purpose: breeding soldiers. “Give the German nation six million bodies impeccably trained in sport,” wrote Hitler in Mein Kampf, “all glowing with fanatical love of the Fatherland and raised in the highest spirit of attack, and a national state will make an army of them in less than two years, if necessary.”

  Using sport to train future soldiers seemed a particularly shrewd idea in a country where military service was forbidden under the Treaty of Versailles. The Nazis were not the first Germans to enthuse over Wehrsport, or “defense sport,” a catchall label for pursuits like marching, man-to-man combat, and hand-grenade-throwing competitions. Hitler’s government made PE the most important subject in schools, to be taught at least five hours a week. Pupils who showed “a lasting fear of body care” were to be expelled from school.

  This was no time for fun and games. The Nazis in their early years took sport terrifically seriously. An SA man could write in the journal of the Eintracht Frankfurt sports club in December 1933: In the spirit of the unknown SA man, who subordinates himself in a self-sacrificial and dutiful manner, who does not ask for acclaim or criticism, who always wants to be more than to seem, who in all his actions has his eye on just one thing: on Germany, nothing but Germany, I wish to assume my task as Führer of the sport community Eintracht. . . .