The Righteous: The Unsung Heroes of the Holocaust (39 page)

Later, Frère Luc de Bisshop, the Brother Director of the Institut St Nicolas in Anderlecht, took in the two brothers, registering them as Catholic students. He alone knew that they were Jewish. Martin Glassman later recalled: ‘The Institut permitted students in good standing to exit Saturday afternoon and re-enter on Sunday evening. This created a need for a secure place for one night. Uncle Arthur forbade us to come to his house for fear of being denounced by one of his German tenants. Soon after the start of the school term, a spinster lady named Bile Durant became the liaison between our uncle and us. She visited us frequently, brought us clothing, school supplies, sweets and some pocket money. She would also take us along to her residence. Her sister, a physician, was married to a Jew of Russian ancestry who was also a physician. Their names were Drs Alechinsky, their offices and residence were on rue Franz Merjay 43. We were given frequent shelter at this location. Summer vacations presented special problems because of the lengthy period during which the school was closed. During that long recess the Alechinskys permitted us to use their summer residence, the “Maison Rose” in the village of Sauvagemont. During those stays, Mademoiselle Durant would be our guardian. She would keep us busy with house chores, learning English and freehand drawing. In the fall we would resume our classes.’

Betrayal led to the arrest of Arthur Hellman. He was taken to the Gestapo fortress at Breendonk, tortured, and executed on 28 February 1944. He was thirty-seven years old. But his young nephews, Martin and Gary, were in safe hands. When Allied bombing raids led to the closure of the Institut, ‘Mademoiselle Durant came to the rescue by securing us shelter in a Boy Scout camp in Momignies near the Franco-Belgian border. The camp shared facilities belonging to Trappist monks who generously provided this shelter for young men irrespective of origin to escape forced labour for the Germans. By the end of August the Germans had sustained heavy casualties; they requisitioned the facilities for their wounded and ordered us out within twenty-four hours. For the remainder of the occupation I was hidden in the Alechinsky residence, Gary in an orphanage until our liberation on September 3, 1944.’

Martin Glassman adds: ‘It should be noted that there were many anonymous individuals who gave aid and comfort who wished to remain nameless or whose encounter was too brief for any introduction. I’ll give you two examples. An Italian seamstress who at one time had been an employee of my uncle, spent hours in the street of his residence to intercept me should I go near the premises to warn me of his arrest. On one of the many religious holidays when I needed shelter, I was put up in the plundered offices of a physician who had been arrested for her activities with the resistance. I remained several days in the basement of the premises. My food was brought to me nightly by a Spaniard who himself was a wanted man because of his anti-Franco activities.’
⁴²

Cirla Italiaander was eight years old when her father Jaap was deported: he and all four of her grandparents were killed at Auschwitz. Her mother gave her into the care of a Christian couple, Jean-Louis and Betty Liem. The first thing the child had to do was to change her name to something less foreign: she became ‘Suzy’. Then she was carefully coached in what she must do if the Gestapo came. ‘There was a procedure we were to follow. I would pretend to be deaf and dumb and not speak whatever happened. We had no secret hiding places, but when Madame Liem’s brother visited, we stayed upstairs; we were fed in advance and the brother and sister-in-law and their children didn’t know. I was told “Suzy, don’t make a noise because so-and-so is visiting.”’

Recalling that during the Allied bombing raids against German military targets in Belgium, Madame Liem would pray, Cirla commented: ‘I must say, when she made the sign of the Cross, I felt God would protect me. Her actions were guided by the knowledge that we were human beings and God would not approve of the Nazis. She was a very devout Catholic and felt that nobody should be killed because of race or religion. She took it on her that it was her mission in life.’
⁴³

Cirla remained in hiding with the Liems for eighteen months. After the war, she and her mother emigrated to Britain.
⁴⁴

Any act by a non-Jew, no matter how small or incomprehensible, could be the critical one in the story of a Jew’s survival. Three-year-old Susan Preisz and her mother had been taken to Gestapo headquarters at the Avenue Louise in Brussels, ‘amidst a crowd of Jews of all ages’, the young girl’s cousin Walter Absil later wrote, ‘some crying, others praying. A scene straight out of Dante’s Inferno.’ What happened next was as life-saving as it was unexpected: ‘A tall SS officer approached the grilled door, he asked in a loud commanding voice “to whom does this child belong”, pointing at little Susan. Susan’s mother gathered her child in her arms: “To me,” she managed to say. “Come with me, Jewess,” ordered the officer. He supplied the trembling mother with a pail, brush and water, ordering her to wash the stairs leading out of the cellar. This done, he ordered her out of the building. Holding her child, blinking at the bright sunlight filtering through the canopy of the tall chestnut trees lining the avenue, she walked slowly home.’

Walter Absil went on to ask: ‘What caused the miracle? Did the officer see his own child in Susan’s face? No one will ever know.’ Susan Preisz and her mother survived the rest of the war in the Belgian countryside, ‘helped and hidden’, Walter Absil writes, ‘by those brave people risking their lives without hesitation. Other countries had some righteous humanitarians helping under extremely dangerous conditions, but the Belgians and Danes, above all of the German-occupied countries, behaved as real civilized Europeans.’
⁴⁵

Walter Absil was himself saved from deportation by a Belgian family who adopted him, and then by Belgian resistance fighters in the forest.
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THE PRINCIPALITY OF
Luxembourg was overrun in May 1940 as German troops moved through it to conquer Belgium. Two of its citizens had worked to save Jews, but neither had been active in Luxembourg itself. One, Abbé Mat, had carried out his acts of rescue in neighbouring Belgium; the other, Victor Bodson, in neutral Spain.
⁴⁷

After describing the deportation of 674 Jews from Luxembourg between 1941 and 1943, the historian Ruth Zariz writes: ‘Luxembourg became
judenrein
(“cleansed of Jews”) except for a few Jews who had gone into hiding or were married to non-Jews. Once the deportations started, the chances of Jews being saved were poor. The country was small; it had a relatively large German population; the Luxembourgers were indifferent to the fate of the Jews, and while there were few instances of open hostility or informing, neither were there many efforts to hide Jews or otherwise help them.’
⁴⁸

Indifference, even betrayal, constitute many of the stories that emerge in every country; but in every country there are also many examples of risk and rescue; even tiny Luxembourg had Abbé Mat and Victor Bodson, albeit beyond its borders.

B
Y
1
JANUARY
2002, Dutch citizens had received the second largest number of Righteous Among the Nations awards given by Yad Vashem in Jerusalem: 4,464 in all, second only to Poles.
¹
This reflects the courage of many individual members of a small nation that was itself suffering the rigours of German rule. It was a nation which had a tradition of religious tolerance going back to the time when it rejected the Inquisition, and welcomed many thousands of the Jews who had been expelled from Spain in 1492. Wartime rescue efforts were also remarkable because Holland, ruled for almost five years by a Reich Commissar responsible directly to Berlin, contained a significant element in its social fabric sympathetic to the Nazi ideology. As a result, compared with Belgium’s nearly 50 per cent, less than 20 per cent of Holland’s Jews managed to find hiding places during the war, and many of these—including Anne Frank and her family—were betrayed. Of Holland’s hundred and forty thousand Jews when war broke out (including twenty thousand refugees from Germany and Austria), a hundred and seven thousand were deported to their deaths.

The first test of Dutch reaction came on 22 and 23 February 1941, after Dutch fascists who attacked Jews in Amsterdam were met by a vigorous Jewish self-defence, during which one Dutch fascist was killed and a German policeman injured. In reprisal, the Germans seized 425 Jews, mostly youngsters, who were later deported to Buchenwald and Mauthausen concentration camps, and murdered. In reaction to the arrests, what the Dutch Jewish historian Louis de Jong has called the ‘powder keg of indignation’ against German occupation and Dutch collaboration ‘was full to the brim’. The Dutch Communist Party called a general strike for February 25. The personnel of the Amsterdam municipal tramways, writes de Jong, ‘set a fine example and within a few hours the strike was more or less general. It continued for two days. When as a result of indiscriminate shooting nine Amsterdam citizens were killed and forty-five wounded, and when, moreover, the Germans threatened serious reprisals, the workmen returned to the wharves and factories and the shopkeepers reopened their doors.’

De Jong goes on to ask: ‘Does the history of the Diaspora offer another example of a non-Jewish group protesting against the persecution of Jews living in their midst by carrying out a general strike? Without doubt, patriotic sentiments played an important part in the strike movement, but one would fail to appreciate the true importance of this magnificent manifestation if one did not find the strongest motives in human sympathy and in indignation caused by the brutal behaviour of Jew-hunters.’

On 2 May 1942 the Germans ordered all Jews over the age of thirteen to wear a yellow star on their clothing. Louis de Jong notes that there were a few cases, ‘altogether perhaps several dozens throughout the country—of non-Jews expressing their protest by wearing the Jewish star; some of these were imprisoned, others were sent to the concentration camp of Amersfoort. It was much more general to sympathize with the Jews in ways which did not attract the attention of German or Dutch Nazis. The Jews had been branded.’
²

A turning point for the Jews of Holland came on 14 July 1942. That day a special issue of the Jewish weekly newspaper contained an ominous notice, based on information provided by the Gestapo: ‘Some 700 Jews have been arrested today in Amsterdam. Unless the 4,000 Jews who have been assigned to labour camps in Germany report this week for transportation, these 700 hostages will be sent to a concentration camp in Germany.’ The notice was signed by the two chairmen of the Jewish Council of Amsterdam.

A seventeen-year-old Dutch girl, Edith van Hessen (later Velmans), later wrote that it was this declaration that ‘galvanized’ her older brother Jules into action. ‘He had come to the conclusion that the only thing to do now was to “dive under”—i.e. to assume a new identity—before the dreaded summons arrived for him. He convinced Father and Mother that they should let me go too.’
³
Edith van Hessen was fortunate that a Dutch couple, Tine and Egbert zur Kleinsmiede, ‘had been following the predicament of the Jews with mounting dismay. They lived in Breda, a provincial town in the south of the country, with their only child, Ineke, who was four years older than me.’ Tine zur Kleinsmiede, or ‘Mrs z K, as I called her, was in her mid-forties. She was a formidable, proud, attractive woman with prematurely white hair and a determined set of the jaw. Her husband was fourteen years older, big, bulky and jovial, a retired high-school headmaster. They seemed nice, serious and thoughtful people. I immediately felt at ease with them. It was decided that very evening. The z Ks would take me in.’
⁴

In Amsterdam, Anne Frank’s family had gone into hiding on 9 July 1942, when her sister Margot received a call-up notice. The Van Daan family, with whom the Franks shared their hiding place for three years, went into hiding with them five days later. Those who helped the Franks and the Van Daans included Miep Gies, who acted as a go-between with the outside world, providing the family with information and going on errands for them. When the family first arrived at their hiding place, it was Miep Gies who, Anne Frank wrote in her diary, ‘took us quickly upstairs and into the “Secret Annexe”. She closed the door behind us and we were alone.’
⁵
Almost exactly a year later, Anne Frank wrote: ‘Miep is just like a pack mule, she fetches and carries so much. Almost every day she manages to get hold of some vegetables for us and brings everything in shopping bags on her bicycle.’
⁶

On 14 July 1942 an official declaration warned that any Jew who did not respond to the summons for forced labour would be arrested and sent to Mauthausen concentration camp. The same punishment was in store for any Jew who was caught not wearing a star or changing residence without notifying the authorities. From everywhere in Holland, Jews were sent by train to the detention camp at Westerbork, close to the German border. From there, starting on 15 July 1942, they were deported by train, some to Auschwitz, others to Sobibor, and murdered.

Non-Jewish families throughout Holland risked their own safety by taking Jews into their homes and pretending they were Christians, thus keeping them safe from deportation. One of the most daring and committed rescuers was Johannes Bogaard, a devout Dutch Calvinist farmer in Nieuw Vennep. Towards the end of 1941, after his father had been detained briefly by police for his public condemnation of German anti-Semitic policy, Johannes Bogaard resolved to do all he could to rescue the Jews. He began travelling to Amsterdam, Rotterdam and other cities to find Jews in need of protection, and to bring them back to his farm. As the number of Jews on the farm increased, he dispersed them among the farms of his brothers and other Calvinist friends in the area. On his frequent trips to the city he also obtained money, ration cards, identification papers and other necessities for the Jews in hiding under assumed Christian identities.

In addition to hiding Jews, the Bogaard family also hid members of a Dutch resistance on a nearby farm, in a series of underground bunkers. In autumn 1944 a Dutch policeman accidentally discovered these hiding places and was shot and killed by the resistance. In response the SS raided the farm. Most of those in hiding managed to escape before the raid, but thirty-four adults were captured and seven others were murdered in a nearby forest. Willem Bogaard, Johannes’s son, escaped during the raid, taking twenty children with him. They hid in a nearby canal until the SS had gone. Despite the arrests, Johannes Bogaard continued his rescue mission. It is believed that he saved more Jews than any other single Dutch rescuer.
⁷

In Amersfoort, Jan Kanis not only took in several Jewish families to his home, but found places of refuge for large numbers of Jews, both children and their parents. He also procured ration cards for those whom he had placed in hiding. Arrested by the Gestapo, he betrayed none of those whom he had helped to hide. While he was imprisoned in Dachau for a year and a half, his wife Petronela (Nel) Kanis took over his work of rescue.
⁸

The hostility that could be found towards Jews in Holland made hiding much more difficult than, for example, in neighbouring Belgium, and the work of the rescuers that much more risky. The Austrian-born Victor Kugler, who hid Anne Frank and her family in Amsterdam (he appears as ‘Mr Kraler’ in her diary), later recalled the moment of betrayal, what he called ‘that terrible day’ of 4 August 1944. ‘On that fateful Friday, while working in my office, I heard an unusual commotion. I opened my office door and saw four policemen. One was a uniformed Gestapo man, the other three were Dutch.’ One of the Dutch policemen was a notorious collaborator who was executed after the liberation.
⁹

Betrayal was a constant danger. Albert Steenstra was a commander in the Dutch resistance. He and his wife Louisa hid as many as ten Jews in the large attic of their home in Groningen. But then the Steenstras were forced by the local authorities to house a Dutch couple, who realized that Jews were hiding in the attic and informed the authorities. In January 1945 Germans raided the house, killing Albert Steenstra and all the Jews. Louisa Steenstra managed to escape with her daughter and go into hiding.
¹⁰

In Amsterdam, after the war, forty-six Dutchmen and women were honoured in a single ceremony for their part in saving Jews from deportation. ‘They came from Friesland in the north and from Limburg in the south, from Amsterdam and The Hague,’ wrote the Amsterdam correspondent of the
Jerusalem Post
, ‘and even more of them were from tiny villages. Some were Calvinists, some Roman Catholics and some had no religious affiliations. There were clergymen, doctors and peasants among them. Two of the women had been matron and assistant matron of a children’s holiday home and had hidden over thirty Jewish youngsters from the Nazi occupiers. The legendary “Uncle Piet,” whose real name was Wybenga and who had been the resistance leader in Friesland, was also there.’
¹¹
Peter Wybenga, a high-school teacher, saved many Jews in the northern province of Friesland, where he was an active resistance leader.
¹²

German-born Heinz Thomas Stein was an eleven-year-old refugee when the deportations began from Holland. A Dutch nurse, Hannah van der Fort, a member of the Dutch resistance, found him a hiding place, on his twelfth birthday, with the Lutjen family on their farm at Swolchen. There he worked as a farmhand, sleeping in the barn. When SS troops occupied the barn in the summer of 1944, he continued to work on the farm, slipping away each night to sleep in the nearby woods.
¹³

When a Jewish woman, Leesha Rose, published her account of the work she did with Dutchmen and women who helped Jews go underground or smuggled them across the North Sea to Sweden, Alexander Zvielli, a Polish-born survivor, wrote contrasting the Dutch and Polish experiences: ‘Except for a small gang of traitors who were carried away by German racist propaganda, the overwhelming majority of the Dutch remained faithful to their crown, church, ideals and their Jewish neighbours. They drew their encouragement from the pulpit during Sunday church services and regarded assistance to Nazi victims as the humane thing to do.’
¹⁴

Shortly after the German conquest of Holland in May 1940, Wilhelmina Willegers made a purchase from the Amsterdam shop of Coenraad Polak, a Jewish textile merchant. They struck up a conversation and, as she left, Mrs Willegers told Mr Polak to contact her if he ever needed help. Two months later he did so, asking if her offer still stood. When the violence that had broken out in Amsterdam’s Jewish quarter between Dutch fascists and Jewish defence units led to hundreds of Jewish men being sent to the camps, the Willegers family hid Coenraad Polak and a business associate of his in their home in Bussum, ten miles from Amsterdam. The day after taking them there, and without telling them, Wilhelmina Willegers and her daughter Bettina returned to Amsterdam and brought back the men’s wives.

The two couples stayed with the Willegers family for six weeks before deciding to return to Amsterdam. From there, they escaped to Switzerland, through Belgium and France. Bettina Willegers (later, Elizabeth Browne) helped them with their plans, making contact with smugglers on the Dutch-Belgian border, and then travelling there with them. During the journey, German officers boarded the train to check passengers’ papers, whereupon she accused one of the officers of making improper advances to her, thereby saving the Polaks from detection in the ensuing chaos.
¹⁵

Jan Schoumans, a non-Jew, was the manager of a Jewish-owned vegetarian restaurant in Amsterdam. While at work he met Rosa Ehrenzweig, a Jewish refugee from Germany. In 1942 all Jewish-owned restaurants were ordered to close, and Rosa feared she would be sent to a concentration camp. Jan Schoumans told her: ‘You are not going! You leave it to me,’ and provided false identification papers for her and her best friend, Temi Lowy. He then found a home in the countryside where they hid for three years while working in domestic service. ‘I took the risk,’ he said, ‘because I am a humanist.’
¹⁶

Eelkje Lentink-de-Boer was the first Dutch person to be designated Righteous Among the Nations. Living in Amsterdam during the war, she hid twelve Jews. She also helped others who were in trouble. S. Abrahams-Emden recalled how, after her husband was arrested, Eelkje Lentink-de-Boer ‘put in safety me, my sister and her husband with the family Pap in Nunspeet. But it was not safe there. After a raid by the SS, we were on the run in a wood. During this escape, we lived in this wood for two months. Mrs Eelkje Lentink-de-Boer visited us every week. One day she told me that she would be bringing me to their home, but I was afraid, because she had still twenty refugees at home. I refused to go with her. I wanted to stay by my family in the wood. After a few days I heard from the resistance movement that all the people in the house of Mrs Lentink, including Mrs Lentink were arrested.
¹⁷