The Righteous: The Unsung Heroes of the Holocaust (40 page)

Eelkje Lentink-de-Boer had been betrayed. She was sent to Ravensbrück concentration camp, where she was subjected to callous medical experiments, which left her 90 per cent paralysed.
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Another of those whom Eelkje Lentink-de-Boer had helped save was Selma Klass-Aronowitz, who later recalled how, at the beginning of 1943, her parents ‘started looking for a hiding place for me first. Mrs Eelkje Lentink-de-Boer, who was working for the underground, got a place for me and they told my parents that I would be brought to the southern part of the country with a childless couple, Mr and Mrs Hein and Jeanne Oolbekking, in the city of Heerlen. After that my parents found a place for themselves in a small hamlet. I remember staying with my foster parents who were very good to me. My foster father was a chief mining engineer. They had a big house and did everything for me to make me happy. In that little town where I was there were about thirty Jewish children brought for hiding by several families.

‘One day, at the end of 1943, the Germans got on the trail and decided to round up all the Jewish children in that village. My foster father, however, got notice beforehand, and took me away. Fifteen minutes later the Germans came in and asked my foster mother where the Jewish child was. My foster mother said she didn’t have a Jewish child, but they started to interrogate the maid, and the maid got scared and told them there was a Jewish child. They took my foster mother to a concentration camp; but I was very happy after the war to hear that the Germans let her free after a year in the camp.’

Hein and Jeanne Oolbekking tried to get another place for Selma, and found one with a Catholic family in Venlo. ‘I was brought to Mr and Mrs Jan and Tinie van Dyk. He was a tailor. They had one daughter, my age, and they wanted very much to have more children, but couldn’t get them. They were very good to me. In some way or another, during the transfer from my original foster parents to the other foster parents’ home, I lost all memory of my real parents. My second foster parents were very religious and they told everybody that I was a relative; and only the church knew the truth.’

Selma’s grandmother and her uncle were both hidden in Amsterdam by a young woman, Willie Dhont, from March to December 1943, ‘at which time they were discovered by the Gestapo. My grandmother and uncle were sent to Auschwitz and perished there. Because my parents were on the same list, the Gestapo tried to get from the girl my parents’ hiding place, but the girl kept saying she did not know.’ Willie Dhont and Selma’s parents survived the war.
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The parents of Gerda and Doris Bloch did not survive: from Westerbork they were deported to Theresienstadt, and from there to Auschwitz. The two girls were first given sanctuary by the Van Lohuizen family, resistance leaders in the town of Epe. Eventually Gerda went to live with the family of Reverend Adriaan and Ank Faber in Kampen, while Doris was taken to the farm of Carl-Johann and Helene Derksen in Lobith-Tolkamer in eastern Holland. For a time the Derksens also sheltered a young Dutchman who was in danger of being sent to Germany for forced labour, as well as two Allied airmen who had been shot down.

For most of the time Doris Bloch lived openly, under the assumed name of Dorothea Blokland, but her hosts prepared two hiding places in the event of a raid. One was behind a wall in their home, the other in the hayloft of the barn. Doris remained with the Derksens until the end of the war, when she learned that her parents had perished in Auschwitz.
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Aart and Johte Vos hid several Jewish families in their house on the outskirts of Amsterdam. At one point there were thirty-six Jews hidden there. From under the house they dug a tunnel that led into the nearby woods, and whenever warnings came of a Gestapo raid, the Jews fled through the tunnel. These advance warnings were relayed to the Vos couple by a personal friend—the local Dutch police chief. All the Jews hiding with them survived the war.
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A Dutch district nurse, Sister Ewoud, gave a place to hide to Steffi Tikotin, a nineteen-year-old German Jewish refugee from Dresden. Sister Ewoud sheltered her Steffi two and a half years, until the hiding place was betrayed; she was then given haven by Thames Commandeur, a widower with six daughters and a son. ‘They treated me as one of the family,’ she later wrote. ‘It restored my faith in humanity.’
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The father and stepmother of a future Dutch Minister of Foreign Affairs, Max van der Stoel, also saved a Jewish life. When a round-up was feared to be imminent in Rotterdam, Hetty van der Stoel took an infant boy, Micha Wertheim, into her home in the village of Voorschoten, near The Hague. Her husband Martinus was the village physician. They explained the sudden arrival of a baby with the story that he had been left as a foundling on their doorstep. Hetty van der Stoel later told a friend how, one day when she was strolling in the street in Voorschoten with the toddler, walking past a group of German soldiers, she overheard one of them saying: ‘There goes Frau Doktor, with her Jewish little boy’—whereupon she deemed it prudent to leave her home for a while. The infant Micha survived in her care.
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Marion van Binsbergen was a student social worker when Germany invaded Holland. In 1941 she was arrested and imprisoned for seven months after German police raided a gathering at a friend’s apartment, where the students were listening to Allied broadcasts and making copies of what they heard for distribution. In 1942 Marion was working in a rehabilitation centre when the director asked her to take home a two-year-old boy, Jantje Herben, the son of a Jewish couple who were about to be deported. She kept him in her home for several months, until she was able to find a safer shelter for him outside Amsterdam. Later that year she witnessed a brutal deportation action at a Jewish children’s home in Amsterdam; and from then on she made rescue work her priority. Among the many Jews for whom she found shelter were Freddie Polak and his three small children. She moved them into a house in the country that was owned by a woman friend. At first she joined them only at weekends, but in 1943 she moved there full-time in order to take care of the children while their father worked on his thesis.

One night the house was raided by German and Dutch police. At the time of the raid the Polaks were hiding in the basement, and escaped detection, but when the Dutch policeman returned alone a short time later, the children were upstairs. To prevent them from being taken away, Marion van Binsbergen shot and killed the policeman with a revolver that a friend had given her. She fled, hid and survived the war, as did those for whom she had found a hiding place.
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Also in Amsterdam, Tina Buchter, a twenty-year-old medical student, her mother, Marie Buchter, and her grandmother, Marie Schotte, hid more than a hundred Jews on the top floor of their family home in Amsterdam, in groups of five at a time. In an interview given to her local newspaper in the United States, fifty years after the first deportations from Holland to the death camps, she spoke of how her best friend in Amsterdam was a young Jewish woman who worked as a cook in an orphanage. That young woman, her sister and her brother-in-law became the first people Tina and her mother hid.

Tina Buchter and her mother spoke to each other only once about what they were doing, and its dangers. ‘We’re hiding people. There are posters all over the city announcing the
death penalty
for helping or hiding Jews. Do you know we can be killed?’ the mother said to her daughter. ‘Yes,’ the daughter replied. They never discussed the matter again. ‘We knew we couldn’t just stand by while Jewish people were killed,’ Tina later reflected.

The goal was to shelter Jews and move them from one sympathetic home to another. Some were then smuggled to neutral Spain and Switzerland—walking, for three months, at night; others were sent to homes in the remote Dutch countryside, where there were fewer Dutch police and even fewer Germans—and more food. Those in hiding spent their days and nights as quietly as possible on the top floor of the Buchters’ home. ‘We talked to our Jewish friends and we stayed with them to try to make their terrifying lives just a little more bearable,’ Tina recalled. When the Gestapo came, eight times, searching for Jews, mother and daughter insisted that they were hiding no one. Despite repeated searches, ‘not one of the more than one hundred Jews hiding in our house was caught; three were caught outside.’

Tina and her mother appeared to have a friend in the Gestapo headquarters, who often telephoned before a Nazi raid to warn: ‘You’re going to have visitors.’ This gave the Jews in hiding time to escape to other homes. Tina never discovered the identity of the caller: ‘I just know he helped us a great deal.’ If the friend did not telephone, the Jews were saved by a special bell that connected the first and second floors to the Jewish hiding place on the third floor. When the Germans rang the front door bell, Tina and her mother rang the second bell—and the Jews on the third floor left the house through the back doors and back windows to the roof. If there was no time to leave, the Jews would crouch in a tiny secret attic compartment that had been built by a carpenter who was a member of the Dutch underground.
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On nine occasions Tina was arrested and interrogated: once she was thrown against the wall by the Gestapo interrogators until she was nearly unconscious. She betrayed none of those whom she had helped.
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At social gatherings, she stole people’s identity cards, which the underground turned into life-saving documents for Jews.
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She also obtained the release from prison of a Jewish friend, Dr Abraham Pais, by pleading in person with a high Nazi official. Pais later became a distinguished nuclear physicist, and the biographer of both Niels Bohr and Einstein.

In recalling the activities of her grandmother, Tina (later Tina Strobos) has written: ‘She hid Dr Henri Polak—the founder of the Diamond Workers Union and a well-known journalist—and his wife and many others until May 1945. She is the only person I know who scared the Gestapo. On one of their visits and interrogation at her house, she said to the one interrogating her, “Did not I see you looting a Persian rug out of the Mendlessohns’ apartment next door a few nights ago?” He quickly grabbed his dossier on her and said he had to go. Imagine: she grabbed his arm and looked him straight in the eye. She showed me how! Her eyes sparkled with anger even in the retelling.’
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Tina’s greatest fear was that she would not rescue enough Jews.
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Joop Woortman and his wife Semmy not only took a Jewish girl into their home, but were active in the rescue committee which Joop had established. This committee found foster homes, hiding places and false papers for many other Jewish children. Arrested in July 1944, Joop is thought to have died in Belsen. After his arrest, his wife took charge of the committee’s work.
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Juliette Zeelander, in hiding in Holland at the age of four, recalls an incident after she had been placed with a Christian family. ‘I had to change my surname to theirs, mine was a Jewish name. I knew I had to hide my identity. It was instilled into me what my new name was. But one day, I must have been about five and a half years old, I went shopping with the lady of the house. I see myself clearly in front of a display cabinet, with a lady in black, me looking up, and the lady asking me in a friendly tone, “Dear, what is your name?” And I said quite cheerfully: “My name is Juliette van Tijn, but my real name is Juliette Zeelander.” Neither adult responded, but I realized that I had said something not right. I think as a little child I put this lady’s life in danger several times. I mean real danger.’
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Violette Munnik took three-year-old Robert Krell into her family home in The Hague. Her friends often visited, ‘and to all of them’, Robert’s interviewer, André Stein, later wrote, ‘she told the truth about her new houseguest. A quiet conspiracy therefore followed to hide the boy’s true identity from outsiders: what is amazing is that he was not betrayed. Robbie and the Munniks were most fortunate that the neighbourhood wove a net of secrecy around them, safeguarding them from the authorities’—and from a well-known collaborator, a member of the Dutch National Organization, who lived across the street. Violette Munnik’s husband Albert would bring home wood and busy himself making toys for his new ‘son’ who had arrived at his new home without any. ‘Robbie’s favourite was a wooden dog that moved its legs and wagged its tail, which he has to this day. And when he was finished making toys, Albert would sit Robbie on his lap and read to him. Or he would sit at the piano and play simple melodies he had taught himself.’ Indeed, writes Stein, Albert Munnik ‘was a man of many talents, and he put all of them to the task of cheering up the little boy who had been forced to live in captivity without the company of friends.’
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Robert Krell adds: ‘My new ten-year-older “sister”, Nora Munnik, spent her after school hours teaching her little Jewish brother to read and write.’
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‘I was five years old when my parents turned me over to strangers in Amsterdam,’ Lore Baer recalled. ‘This couple could not keep me because they were of mixed marriage and neighbours became suspicious when they suddenly had a five-year-old child. They brought me to North Holland where the underground placed me with a very caring family. I lived with the Schouten family for two years from 1943 to 1945. I used an assumed name there, and even went to a Catholic school.’
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Cornelia Schouten was in her mid-twenties when she took the five-year-old into her home and made her part of the family. ‘I really think she thought of me as her child and was heart-broken when my parents came to claim me after the war,’ Lore Baer wrote. ‘The feeling was mutual.’
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