In retrospect, Marcel Möring turned out to be in his gloomy, impressive May 4 lecture, live on TV and printed the next day in NRCto have been too positive.
He drew attention to the fact that the Jews could be taken from their neighborhoods without protest from “the neighbors.” “But the most important question remains unanswered: why were we suddenly no longer neighbors? When did we become reptiles, rats, cockroaches? How could we have been taken from our homes in front of our neighbors and into the silence?”
Yet he saw one exception in the Dutch cities: Coevorden in Drenthe. “A local shopkeeper shouts the whole thing together: that it is a shame that people are being taken from their homes.” Möring uses that courageous shopkeeper a few more times in his text – a rhetorical stylistic device that works well. His closing sentence: “If we want to be a human being among fellow human beings, we must be able to imagine ourselves as the other and, if necessary, be that shopkeeper in Coevorden.”
Even while listening to this speech I wondered: what happened to that angry shopkeeper? Did he realize the enormous risk he was taking on the street? It seemed unlikely to me that the military and police officers present would have turned a blind eye to his protest. Unfortunately, Möring did not elaborate on this in his speech.
Inquiries in Coevorden taught me that the situation was different. Via the Coevorden Synagogue Foundation I came across Dr. Dirkje Mulder-Boers, a historian who has written about Jewish life in Coevorden, among other things. According to her, it could only be one shopkeeper: Comprecht Sanders, a Jewish photographer, who had a shop at 29 Bentheimerstraat in Coevorden. Möring thought it had been a gentile who of his own accord took to the streets to defend his neighbours. In reality, Sanders and his wife had been taken from his home on the night of October 2 to 3, 1942, and taken away with other Jews from the area.
That Sanders vented his anger so openly was understandable: a year earlier his eldest son had already been arrested and deported (and later killed). Sanders and his wife were deported to Westerbork and from there to Auschwitz where they were murdered on October 12, 1942: Sanders was then 59 years old, his wife Marianna 61 years old. Shortly before he was taken away in Coevorden, Sanders had managed to place part of his photographic property with the neighbours.
Dirkje Mulder-Boers’s reading was confirmed to me by Johan Sanders, a grandson of Comprecht and son of one of the two sons of Comprecht who survived in hiding.
Marcel Möring admits that he was mistaken. He had relied on one source, an amateur historian who had consulted police records.
My rather wry conclusion must be that even that one exceptional neighbor, found by Möring, did not exist. Compright Sanders was not a neighbor who cared about the fate of his neighbors, he was a victim himself and he wanted to openly oppose all the injustices that were done to him and other Jews. That’s why he yelled.
A version of this article also appeared in the May 10, 2023 newspaper.