Survivor sheds light on divisive WWII Jewish councils

Throughout the Nazi occupation of Amsterdam, and while incarcerated in two prison camps, Mirjam Bolle wrote letters to her fiancée that she never sent but hoped to share with him after the war. Yet when the two ultimately reunited she decided to leave the past behind and stashed them away. Now, decades later, she has published them as a memoir.

The result is Letters Never Sent, 18 months of diary entries and observations that experts say shed new light on one of the Holocaust’s most controversial legacies — the Judenrat, or Jewish Councils — the dark bureaucracy of intermediaries responsible for implementing Nazi orders.

They were often despised by fellow Jews as traitors, but Bolle, still lively at 98 years old, defends their actions. She says the Judenrat had little choice and yet managed to lessen the blow to the community. As a secretary for the Jewish Council of Amsterdam, she was privy to their inner workings and says they managed to save lives by staving off Nazi deportation orders.

“The Germans decided that there would be a Judenrat, we had nothing to do with that,” Bolle said in the living room of her meticulously kept old stone home in Jerusalem, where she has lived alone since her husband’s death in 1992. “The Germans did what they wanted to do. I always say that if the war had ended after two years, no one would have had a problem with the Judenrat.”

With time, however, Bolle believes they outlived their usefulness. The nearly 1,200 Jewish councils continued to enjoy preferential treatment, even as they devolved into an administrative body for the Nazis’ so-called “Final Solution,” the planned extermination of the Jewish people. For some, the burden was too great to bear. Adam Czerniakow, head of the Warsaw Ghetto Judenrat, killed himself after he was forced to deport Jews to their deaths. Bolle’s role was more limited. She took dictations, dispatched letters and was sitting in on discussions when the first mention was made of the Nazi concentration camps.