Mr. Monday and other tales of Jewish Amsterdam

148 Air. Monday and Other Tales of Jewish Amsterdam

When, in 1933, the Nazis assumed power in Germany, he was asked by the British to assume his old job of counterespionage. His special job was educating people who were to smoke out spies.The training programme went something like this:

Oreste pretended to be a spy caught by the service and his pupils had to try to unmask him. In doing so, they had to pay special attention to secret methods of passing information. During the period he worked for the British, it was suggested to him that he should apply for naturalisation. He could become a British subject if he wanted to. But he said no.

"Why did you refuse?" I asked him once.

"Because Holland is my Mother Country," he replied.

I remember that at the time I considered this expression "Mother Country" rather strange. We talked to each other in Dutch of course, and in that language we say "Vaderland", which means "Fatherland". I thought that his "Moederland" (Motherland) must be a slip of the tongue.

When World War II finally broke out, Oreste happened to still be in England. He was eager to play his part in the big show because he hated the Nazis like the plague. He hunted everyone down against whom the slightest suspicion existed and carried out this job with a zeal and energy that surpassed by far a normal sense of duty, even in spy-hunting. And he practically never failed.

If Oreste Pinto said "I don't like the looks of that chap," you could count on it that sooner or later he would get his man and unmask him as a spy. This was demonstrated in a remarkable way in the case of Jan Gerrit Bronkema.

I heard that name for the first time when I met Oreste