LIKE THE PEOPLE who speak it, Dutch is a precise language. There are terms to denote the specific turn of a tulip petal, words for differing depths of winter ice on Holland's canals. The language of the Lowlands may also be the only one in the world with a specific verb for the systematic looting of a house: pulsen. It is derived from Abraham Puls & Sons, the name of the notorious Amsterdam moving-van company that Nazi-directed Dutch police employed to pillage and empty the homes of the 140,000 Jews of the Netherlands who were forced into hiding or shipped to their deaths during the Nazi occupation.

No Jewish community in Western Europe suffered more during the Holocaust than the Jews of Holland. Out of a prewar population of 140,000 (including 15,000 refugees from Nazi Austria and Germany), barely 15,000 Dutch Jews survived the four years of Nazi terror. A lucky handful escaped the death camps by fleeing before the invasion. But most of those who survived the war in Holland did so by hiding with the help of a network of brave countrymen who risked their own lives for the sake of others - usually total strangers.

The heroism of Holland's savers is legendary: the anonymous volunteers who waited outside the internment center at Amsterdam's Hollandsche Schouwburg theater to catch children literally tossed over the wall in a frantic last-minute attempt to save them from deportation; the underground railroad of workers, housewives, students, and clergy who passed fugitive Jews from one to the other, then sheltered them in attics, in basements or in the case of the smallest children, raised them as their own; the brave souls like the gentle Miep Gies who at enormous risk to herself and her own kin helped hide three Jewish families, among them a young girl named Anne Frank.

But Holland's Anne Franks were few in number, and even the twelve-year-old diarist whose notebooks came to symbolize the Holocaust ultimately was betrayed by a Dutchman. For every Dutch Jew saved, ten others were shipped to their deaths for lack of neighbors willing to help - or for the abundance of those eager to collaborate and collect the seven-guilder reward the Germans offered per hidden Jew. Other Dutchmen and -women took their rewards from the Nazis in kind. Within hours of their arrest on August 4, 1944, the hiding place of Anne Frank and her family was ransacked and looted- some say by her Dutch neighbors, others by the Dutch-owned, Nazi-hired Puls moving company.

"This country took care of very few Anne Franks,'' says Dutch economist Victor Halberstadt, himself a hidden child during three years of the war. "The government did not protect us during the war. And when those of us who survived came back, the government was not particularly interested in us.''

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For the Jews of Holland, the Holocaust and widespread Dutch inaction in response to it was a brutal awakening. For centuries, the Netherlands had been the New Jerusalem, the European continent's only truly safe haven for Jews. While Spain and Portugal enthusiastically burned Jewish "heretics'' at the stake, the State of Orange cautiously opened its gates to them. By the sixteenth century, Holland had become one of the rare nations in Europe to allow the sons and daughters of Israel to thrive and live in peace within its borders. The first to come were Marranos from Spain and Portugal, Sephardic conversos suddenly able to return to the faith of their fathers in Holland. Groups of Jews from Germany and Eastern Europe soon followed. Six months after the Batavian Republic was established in 1795, Jews were among those granted civil rights. "Until World War II,'' says Dutch-communal leader Henri Markens, the rector of its most prestigious Jewish school, the Maimonides Lyceum, "Holland was the only country in Continental Europe that had never forced its Jews to live in ghettos.''

So free and liberal was the atmosphere in Holland that its Jews became an accepted part of the landscape, thriving religiously, financially, and culturally and living in a climate that produced Baruch Spinoza and inspired Rembrandt to use the elders of the Jewish community as the models for his biblical paintings. Artifacts at the Jewish Historical Museum in Amsterdam attest to the richness of life they enjoyed: a playful painting of a family of eighteenth-century Sephardic grandees, a tulip-decorated silver Hanukkah menorah, a delicate Torah crown of inlaid gold from Utrecht, and volume after volume of learned works.

By the nineteenth century, Dutch Jews held political positions and were numbered among Holland's bankers and industrialists as well as its farmers and proletariat.

The Nazi invasion on the night of May 10, 1940, changed all that. Holland, which had remained neutral in World War I and hoped to do so again, capitulated to Hitler's surprise attack within five days. Eventually the Fuhrer planned to incorporate the Netherlands into his pan-Germanic Reich, much as he had done with Austria. With that in mind (and Queen Wilhelmina in exile), Hitler ordered that a civil rather than a military government be established in the newly conquered Netherlands but under SS auspices. To maintain order, he appointed one of his most trusted lieutenants, Austrian Nazi leader Arthur Seyss-Inquart. On May 19, 1940, Seyss-Inquart became the Netherlands' Reichskommissar with five commissioner-generals under him. Ominously enough, a branch office of IV B 4, Adolf Eichmann's section in the Reich's Security Main Office, was immediately attached to the Amsterdam-based Nazi police apparatus. A Dutch administrative council was appointed by the Nazis to work in tandem with them. There was no problem finding members.

Most historians believe that the Nazis had hoped to gain broad popular Dutch support for their pan-Germanic plans. Eager, therefore, not to alarm the Dutch population, Seyss-Inquart waited until September 1940 to declare the first harsh legislation separating Dutch Jews from their Christian countrymen. At that point, Jews were systematically removed, then totally banned from holding any public office. Among the first to be ousted, Lodewijk Ernst Visser, president of the Dutch Supreme Court, who would eventually become chairman of the newly formed Joodse Coordinatie Commissie, the Jewish Coordination Committee that ironically joined Holland's Ashkenazic, Sephardic, and Liberal communities together for the first time in the community's long history.

The Germans and their growing number of Dutch collaborators soon pulled out all stops. By the autumn of 1940, Holland's non-Jewish government employees had all been ordered to sign "Aryan declarations,'' sworn statements that no Jewish blood ran in their veins. Those who refused to do so were presumed Jews under the same criteria as the Nuremberg racial laws of 1935 and summarily expelled from the Dutch civil service.

Other Aryanization measures soon followed. On October 22, 1940, decree VO189/40 ordered the immediate registration of all Jewish enterprises as well as that of any other businesses in which Dutch Jews held large shares. The administration of some 20,960 Jewish enterprises was turned over to a Nazi "Commissariat General for Finance and Economy.''

Desperate to maintain as much of their family possessions as possible, many Dutch Jews turned over assets to Christian neighbors, business partners, and lawyers for safekeeping. The safekeepers soon won the Dutch slang sobriquet bewariers, or "Aryan guards.''

"There was an unwritten understanding that [the property] would be returned after the war,'' says Dutch historian Gerard Aalders, a premier researcher of the period. "However, the fact is, much of the property was never returned, and the Jewish owners, if they survived, were unable to do anything if they could not prove ownership.''

Dutch Holocaust survivor Yohanan Heimans, who now lives in Israel, puts it more bluntly: "The property we left with the guardians was so well protected that they didn't return it to us.''

Under decree VO189/40, January of 1941 was the deadline for all Dutch Jews to register as either full Jews, half Jews, or quarter Jews. A total of 159,806 persons registered, according to Dutch-Jewish historian Jozeph Michman. Of these, 140,245 were "full Jews.'' The remaining 19,561 were halfbloeden, the children of mixed marriages.

To the Jews of Holland who shared the pedantic sense of orderliness of their Dutch-Christian neighbors, the Germans' rules were to be obeyed, no matter how odious. "The typical Dutch Jew was traditional, little inclined to fanaticism, emancipated yet keeping largely to his own kind. Above all, he was a loyal subject of the Dutch state,'' explains Socialist parliamentarian Judith C.E. Belinfante, a historian and the former directoress of Amsterdam's wonderful Jewish Historical Museum. Yet, tragically, it was this very sense of a "protected situation,'' insists Belinfante, that caused the "Jews of Holland to [tend] to be trusting of their government.'' It was that trust that "blinded them to the real meaning of the restrictive measures now enacted by the Germans.''

Not all Jews remained complacent. Young activists organized resistance within the Jewish quarter, and in February of 1941, non-Jewish workers staged a nationwide strike to protest Nazi brutality - especially in regard to Jews.

A furious Seyss-Inquart ordered the establishment of the Nazi-controlled Joodsche Raad,"Jewish Council''and on March 12 declared that Jews were not part of the Dutch people. The latter, he said, would have a clear choice: sympathy for the Jews or collaboration with the Germans.

In the summer of 1941, as in Austria in 1938, Jews were barred from public places in Holland, from transport, parks, swimming pools, theaters, and museums - in effect, from any contact with their gentile countrymen. Jewish children were barred from Dutch schools.

These isolating restrictions coincided with the first in a long series of heavy-handed confiscations of Jewish property. The first pack of vultures to descend on the Netherlands was the Einsatzstab Reichsleiter Rosenberg - the Rosenberg Special Operations Staff, named for Nazi Party ideological chief Alfred Rosenberg, to whom the Fuhrer had given a free hand to steal whatever he deemed necessary to promote the Nazi cause. In the Netherlands, this began with choice Jewish libraries, both public and private. Among the prizes plundered: the famed Rosenthal Collection of precious books.

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As they would elsewhere, especially in France, the Nazis soon turned their attention to art and the noteworthy collections belonging to wealthier members of the Dutch-Jewish community. Hermann Goring himself made more than one trip to Amsterdam to visit the best dealers and collections and make his choices. Some of the art was legally purchased, if under duress and/or at bargain prices. But other works were simply confiscated, packed, and transported to Germany.

Later, Rosenberg's gang turned its attention to more mundane but no less lucrative prey: the household furniture and other belongings of Jews deported to the death camps. Dubbed "Aktion M''(for Moebel or furniture), it was an operation of staggering proportions. No sooner had a family been arrested and deported than one of a fleet of German-made trucks belonging to the Amsterdam-based Puls moving company would arrive and empty the apartment - that is, says one Dutch Holocaust survivor, "if neighbors hadn't gotten there first.'' According to Michman, "in a single year, 17,235 apartments were emptied of their contents, and loads totaling 16,941,249 cubic feet were crated and sent to Germany or to Eastern Europe to be divided among the ethnic German population being settled there.

First, says Hague-born period scholar and Holocaust survivor Isaac Lipchits, "they took away our radios, then our bikes, our cars, our savings, our art, our furniture. Before we were deported, they even took our backpacks and wedding rings. And at Auschwitz they finally took the gold from our teeth. It was a demonic system.''

To organize and centralize this massive plunder, the Nazis established a highly specialized banking institution with main offices near the Amstel River just around the corner from the elegant Amstel Hotel. To "reassure'' the Jews, they cynically named the depository "The Lippmann-Rosenthal & Co. Bank,'' the same name as that of a midsize, prewar Dutch-Jewish bank of impeccable reputation. In point of fact, the four-story redbrick building at 13 Sarphatistraat - which soon came to be popularly known as "Liro'' - no longer had anything to do with the original bank or its Jewish founders. It had been seized from its Jewish owners in 1940 and given to a Nazi sympathizer as a prize for his loyalties to the Reich. "Had the two fine gentlemen who founded Lippmann-Rosenthal known what their bank came to be used for,'' says Lipchits, "they would still be spinning in their graves.''

To start the financial ball rolling, the Nazis first ordered all other Dutch banks to immediately transfer "known Jewish accounts'' to the Liro. They followed in August 1941 by issuing Verordnung (Decree) 148/41, which blocked all Jewish-owned bank accounts and instructed all Dutch Jews not only to transfer their accounts and securities from other Dutch banks to the Liro but to deposit all cash holdings and checks of more than 1,000 guilders as well. The massive proceeds thus assembled were then to be turned over to the Vermoogensverwaltungs-und Rentenanstalt (Office of Property Administration and Pensions). It was this central German institute that administered the Liro's loot.

Jews were subsequently ordered to turn in gold and silver, jewelry, bonds, and insurance policies. Again Lippmann-Rosenthal was the central repository. By this time, the Nazis' Amsterdam bank was staffed with more than eighty Dutch employees, all drawn from respectable Dutch banks and other Netherlands financial institutions.

At first Jewish depositors were told they'd be allowed to withdraw up to 250 guilders per month per family of their own money from their Liro accounts. But this Nazi magnanimity soon ended. The Liro, says Lipchits, "became a bank where you could deposit but not withdraw.''