Written by Adrienne Smith

Jan. 14, 2015: In the spirit of auld lang syne, and because I haven't been anywhere lately, I thought I'd take a trip down memory lane and describe a trip I took with my two youngest children twenty or so years ago.

It was the summer of my discontent. Money was in short supply, but I had to go somewhere. Somehow I convinced myself that, despite years of staying at the crème de la crème Gritti Palace in Venice, lodging at a pensione there might be "quaint" and an "experience."

The children were too young to protest, so off we went, combined with stays at other equally modest hotels.

I selected a place called Pensione Seguso in the artsy Dorsoduro section of Venice. Its locale, near the Peggy Guggenheim Collection, seemed opportune.

We arrived by train, took a vaporetto to the stop nearest the pensione, and lugged our heavy suitcases up, over, and down several intimidating bridges.

Arriving at our destination, we found the lobby slightly dark and depressing, but, hey, this was part of the experience.

We were shown to our triple room, two beds and a rollaway, a nice size but sparsely furnished in, what might be called by some, Salvation Army rejects. In some version of a lottery, my 10-year-old son won the cot. Tired from our suitcase lugging, he plopped down on the bed and instantly became an Italian version of an Oreo cookie as the head and foot sprang up to enclose him. We instantly extricated him in what I view as a family version of renaissance.

It was now time for the dinner included in our hotel rate. Walking into the dining room, looking left and right, we found ourselves surrounded by a bevy of what appeared to be impecunious and depressive English widows. No problem. Sitting at our assigned spot, we nibbled on the tiny Wonder-Bread-like rolls we were given.

Our first course, an ersatz pâté, had more in common with Spam than I care to remember. The rest of the meal was a blur, perhaps because of the copious amount of wine I drank in an attempt to see the bright side of our adventure.

After dinner, we repaired to our triple, only to be greeted with gulping sobs emanating from an apartment directly across from our room. A couple was having a furious fight. Being a naturally curious bunch, the kids and I crawled guerrilla-style to the window, and from either side, looked surreptitiously over to our querulous neighbors. To our surprise, we saw that it was the man who was weeping so piteously. Only in Italy!

Having had our share of excitement for the day, and enervated by the Venetian summer heat, we threw open all our windows and fell into deep sleep.

We awoke with what appeared to be triple cases of the measles. We had all been attacked by an army of very inhospitable mosquitoes.

Enough was enough!

I instantly dialed the number of the glamorous Cipriani hotel and secured a reservation, at no small price, for the night. Out of a desire not to offend the proprietors of the Seguso, I decided to keep our room for the full length of our contracted stay.

Arriving at the Cipriani at eight in the morning with little more than the shirts on our backs, I'm sure we were taken for unusually ugly Americans. But we were given a pleasant room, and the children proceeded to frolic merrily in the Olympic-sized pool for the rest of the day. We stayed until the latest possible moment the next day, returning to the Seguso for only one painful last night, hermetically sealed in our room.

At the very least, I feel that The Guinness Book of Records should take note of us for having booked, perhaps, the cheapest and most expensive rooms for the same night in Venice, truly a remarkable feat!

Note: In the interest of fairness, I must report that the aforementioned pensione has apparently undergone extensive renovations since my visit. However, I do not plan to make another visit to confirm this detail.

Pictured here: Pensione Seguso in Venice.

Photo by Adrienne Smith

Written by Adrienne Smith

Dec. 24, 2014: The Anne Frank House is the third most visited museum in the Netherlands, surpassed only by the Rijksmuseum and the Van Gogh Museum. The house where she, her family, and others hid for two years was visited by more than 1.2 million tourists in 2013. Anne's story, The Diary of a Young Girl, has been published in 70 different languages.

But the story of the Netherlands and its Jews during World War II is a far more complicated, perhaps less inspiring, story than Anne's experience would suggest.

When the Nazis invaded Holland in May of 1941, they were greeted with a political vacuum since Queen Wilhelmina and high-up government officials had already decamped to London before their arrival. What was left was a highly organized but leaderless bureaucracy.

The Germans, and Hitler himself, looked with favor on the Dutch people, seeing them as "superior" and as potential future citizens in an expanded Reich. As a result, instead of installing their own military government, the Nazis left the Dutch one in place, which was tasked with taking orders from their invaders.

At first, the Dutch people hoped for the best. Life continued somewhat normally. But for Dutch Jews, who had lived in practical separation from their Christian brethren before the war, worrisome mandates began to seriously impact their world. They were prohibited from working in the civil service, compelled to wear yellow Star-of-David badges, given identification papers stamped with large black Js, and required to register their businesses and themselves as Jews.

It was almost impossible for Jewish denizens to avoid these strictures, as the Dutch had kept careful records of all its citizens, making it easy for the Nazis to identify the 1.2% of the country's, and almost 9.5% of Amsterdam's, Jewish population.

As fear mounted in the Jewish community, the Nazis ordered prominent Jewish leaders to form an organization, the Jewish Council, to maintain order among their people. These leaders hoped that the effort would ensure their safety.

In July of 1942, the Nazis ordered all Jews between the ages of 16 and 35 to report to their local train stations for transport to "work" camps. The council selected the order in which these recruits were to report. Adolf Eichmann commented, "The transports run so smoothly that it is a pleasure to see."

As was later discovered, many sent away were murdered on arrival at their destinations, and the council itself was later harshly criticized for the elitist manner in which it selected the deportees.

What was a Jewish resident of the Netherlands to do? The choices were holding the line, emigration, or going into hiding. Holding the line, as the council attempted, was not working. Emigration was almost impossible, given that the countries bordering the Netherlands were controlled by the Nazis and the North Sea was heavily patrolled. Hiding was the only real choice for many. And so, an estimated 40,000 Dutch Jews went into hiding for an average of 2-1/2 years.

Dutch citizens who secreted their Jewish compatriots took enormous risks, including possible deportation to death camps and destruction or confiscation of their homes and properties. Children of families hiding Jews had to be trusted to keep the terrifying secret and could not bring friends into their homes. Bounty hunters lurked, turning Jews and their protectors in for as little as $20 a head. Anne Frank's own luck ran out in 1944. To this day, no one knows who betrayed her.

After December of 1943, the Nazis declared Holland Judenrein, or free of Jews. And, by the end of the war, of the Netherlands' original 140,000 Jews, only 30,000 remained alive. Only Poland's Jews suffered a greater percentage death rate.

The Netherlands is doing some hard thinking about this. Commissions have been created to investigate the illegal appropriation of Jewish possessions, finding, inter alia, that the Dutch ambassador to Israel had a confiscated piece of art hanging in his office. A list maintained by the government's euphemistically entitled Central Bureau for Jewish Emigration of a staggering 310,000 Dutch collaborators has been opened for viewing, but only by family members of, or actual, victims.

The tiny Museum of the Resistance, a stone's throw from where my Amsterdam houseboat was moored, reviews the possibilities for the country's citizens during the war: resistance, adaption, or cooperation. It then asks visitors what they would do in similar circumstances. Not an easy question but a necessary one.

Pictured here: The cover of Anne Frank's The Diary of a Young Girl.

Photo by Adrienne Smith