Abel Herzberg

Abel Jacob Herzberg (17 September 1893 – 19 May 1989) was a Dutch Jewish lawyer and writer, whose parents were Russian Jews who had come to the Netherlands from Lithuania. Herzberg was trained as a lawyer and began a legal practice in Amsterdam, and became known as a legal scholar also. He was a Zionist from an early age, and around the time of the outbreak of World War II he attempted to emigrate with his family to Palestine. During the war he remained active in Jewish organizations until he was interned, with his wife, in Bergen-Belsen concentration camp, where his legal background and status as a legal scholar (which made him desirable to the Nazis in a possible exchange for Germans abroad ) earned him a seat on a prisoners' court. After their captors moved them from Bergen-Belsen, he and his wife were later liberated by the Soviets and made it back to the Netherlands, where they were reunited also with their children. He continued his legal practice in Amsterdam, though he traveled to Palestine and was offered an administrative position in newly-founded Israel.

Herzberg had written a play before the war, and in Bergen-Belsen he began keeping a diary. After the war he began a career as a writer, his first publication, Amor fati, being a collection of essays on life in Bergen-Belsen. In 1950, he published a history of the persecution of the Jews as well as his diary of the camp; he is one of the earliest historians of the Holocaust.

Law school and Zionism In 1912, Herzberg took up law at the University of Amsterdam. He was conscripted at the beginning of the First World War but could have avoided military duty owing to his Russian citizenship. As a result of his father's prompting, he served for three and a half years, and was stationed in Purmerend. During this time he became more involved with Zionism, particularly after the Balfour Declaration. He had joined the Dutch Zionist Student Organisation (NZSO) in 1912, and served in a number of administrative functions in Zionist organizations, including editorship of the NZSO's magazine, Hatikwah.

In 1918, Herzberg obtained his doctoral degree in law from the University of Amsterdam, and in his dissertation posited that the Jewish people should have a homeland in Palestine. He settled in Amsterdam to practice law, became president of the local chapter of the Zionist union, and in 1922 became a Dutch citizen, giving up his Russian citizenship. He married Thea Loeb, whom he had met in the NZSO, in 1923. In 1930 he joined the national board of the (NZB), and the next year became editor of their magazine. From 1934 to 1937 he served as the organization's president,

In Germany, Wilhelm Spiegel, the husband of his wife's sister, was shot by Nazis on 12 March 1933, which confirmed Herzberg's forebodings of the growing danger to European Jewry. In the play Vaderland (1934), he alludes to the murder of his brother in law and warns of violent Nazi antisemitism and the state of denial felt by many German Jews. The play features a Jewish medical professor at a German university who refuses to accept the reality of the murderous antisemitism of the new regime until he is warned by a Polish Jew , but is murdered before he is able to flee the country. German Zionist Kurt Blumenfeld invited Herzberg to move to Palestine in 1938, and he and his wife did indeed travel to Palestine and spent a month there in early 1939, but did not emigrate; Herzberg said in a later interview that they did not have the funds to acquire residency in Palestine.

While his two oldest children emigrated to Palestine, Herzberg himself did not, even though he was displeased with the situation in the Netherlands. It seems that in part his work and the family's financial situation kept him in Amsterdam; after the foundation of the country of Israel he traveled there and was offered a position in the country's administration (Peretz Bernstein, Minister of Trade, was a friend), but declined, unhappy with the work and the state of the country. He gave legal counsel to Abraham Asscher and Cohen, who were indicted by the Jewish Council of Honor on charges of collaboration as wartime leaders of the Jewish Council. He returned to Israel for de Volkskrant during the Six-Day War in 1967, but by the turn of the decade had become more critical of the country; he positively loathed the government of Menachem Begin that followed the Likud victory of the 1977 Israeli legislative election. ('For a spoonful of soup') consists of recollections from his career in law; a reviewer noted a memorable passage: "What has always stayed with me more than this is the image of an old judge who experiences the practice of law, in which he grew old, as something quite banal when he is forced to answer a human voice".

Herzberg was awarded the Constantijn Huygens Prize in 1964 and the P. C. Hooft Award in 1972 (his daughter Judith won the Constantijn Huygens Prize in 1994, and the P. C. Hooft Award in 1997). Since 1990, an annual lecture (organized by Trouw and the discussion center De Rode Hoed in Amsterdam) commemorates Herzberg and his legacy of Jewish humanism.