Lecture: Bernard Wasserstein, the Ambiguity of Virtue: Gertrude van Tijn and the Fate of the Dutch Jews.

The book touches on some of the central moral-historical issues of the twentieth century. Gertrude van Tijn was a German-born social worker who served from 1933 to 1941 as secretary of the Amsterdam Jewish Refugees Committee. From 1941 to 1943 she headed the emigration department of the Nazi-appointed Jewish Council in Amsterdam. In May 1941, with Nazi approval, she flew from Amsterdam to Lisbon in an attempt to negotiate the departure from occupied Europe of large numbers of German and Dutch Jews. She then courageously returned to Holland where she continued her work until her arrest, with other leaders of the Jewish Council, in September 1943.

The Ambiguity of Virtue tells the story of Van Tijn’s efforts to organize Jewish emigration from Nazi territory. The book discusses the methods that she deployed, while facing difficult moral choices, to enable thousands of Jews to escape with their lives. Some called her a heroine; others denounced her as a collaborator. The lecture will raise crucial questions about German policy towards the Jews, about Jewish reactions to the Nazi menace, and about Dutch, American and British responses to the genocide of the Jews. In part, Wasserstein’s intent is to rebut the simplistic picture of the Jewish councils presented in Hannah Arendt’s still-influential Eichmann in Jerusalem, seeking to understand van Tijn’s conduct and objectives in the context of the time, and to reach a balanced view of the ‘ambiguity of virtue.’