The Righteous: The Unsung Heroes of the Holocaust (41 page)

Remond Dufour and his family gave sanctuary in Aerdenhout to five-year-old Bernard Geron, whom they brought up with their own son, as if the two boys were brothers. After the war Bernard was reunited with his father and his own brother; his mother had not survived.
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In his introduction to the Netherlands volume of Yad Vashem’s Lexicon of
Righteous Among the Nations
, Dr Jozeph Michman writes of ‘entire groups of helpers’, including a group of teachers at Alkmaar and The Hague, and a team of tax experts in Maastricht, who undertook to divide among themselves the task of providing the various facilities needed in order to maintain Jews in hiding: identity cards, means of transport from hiding place to hiding place, food supplies, and, in case of emergencies, trustworthy doctors and other specialists, such as those who could construct hiding places. ‘The going into hiding which forced enervating passivity on the Jews demanded constant activity and vigilance on the part of their helpers.’
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Based at their isolated house near Bilthoven, Henk Huffener, his sister Ann and their younger brother Joep helped smuggle Jews to Switzerland, and later to Spain. Early in 1942 Henk was introduced to Loekie Metz, a young Jewish woman who was staying at a Zionist kibbutz at Loosdrecht farm, many of whose members were young Jewish refugees from Germany. ‘In March 1942 a tip came that they had less than a month to fold up the kibbutz and get out. The Germans were very fond of the idea of “way folk”, as they were then called—young people going up country, hikers and bikers.’ So Huffener and others would go unnoticed as they cycled through the countryside, accompanied by one or two members of the kibbutz. It was an audacious and dangerous mission. On one occasion Huffener was stopped by German soldiers while escorting an obviously Jewish-looking girl who spoke no Dutch. He kissed her, explained to the Germans that they must be off or they would be in trouble with their parents, and got away with it.’
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A Dutch Christian Socialist, Joop Westerweel, who headed a group of twenty like-minded Dutch patriots who smuggled Jews from Holland across Belgium and France to Switzerland and to Spain, helped all the remaining seventy members of the ‘kibbutz’ at Loosdrecht farm to escape when, in August 1942, they were warned that their deportation was imminent. Westerweel’s group spirited them away to safe havens throughout Holland. One of those safe havens, the Roman Catholic village of Sevenum, was hiding several hundred Jews in the village and surrounding farms by the end of the war.

Westerweel’s wife, Wilhelmina, and their two daughters, also actively participated in the work of rescue. One day they were caught on the Belgian border. Wilhelmina was sent to the concentration camp at Ravensbrück, where she survived the war. Joop Westerweel was sent to Vught concentration camp in Holland, where he was tortured for several months, and then killed.
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It is estimated that Westerweel and his group smuggled as many as two hundred Jews out of Holland into France, including the seventy Palestine pioneers.
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The Streekstra family hid a seventeen-year-old Jewish girl, Katow, on their farm in Friesland. Wybren Streekstra later recalled: ‘She stayed with us for the whole winter. She never came outside in the daytime; it was too dangerous, and she looked too Jewish. At different times we would get a signal that something was going to happen. It was night and curfew, but I knew the fields and creek, and I had long rubber boots. I took Katow on my back and carried her over the creek. Then I would take her across the fields to a place where we could sleep in the straw. Just before it got light in the morning we went back home. This happened ten or fifteen times. You know, you don’t really sleep on those nights.’
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Those in hiding knew that they could not expect leniency or reprieve if they were discovered, either for themselves or for those who had taken them in. Thea van Oosten, whose parents took in a Jew, Joop Schijveschuurder, wrote to him after the war: ‘What a risk my parents took by taking you into our home. I never asked them why they had done so. It just did not occur to them not to help people in need. It was a deed of neighbourly love. It was not just to sabotage the Germans.’

Joop Schijveschuurder, who together with his brother Loek was saved by several Dutch families, wanted to put the facts of such rescue activities into their true perspective, writing in his memoirs: ‘I have to get the following off my chest. Of the approximately 25,000 Jews who were in hiding in Holland, 16,000 survived in their hiding places. The rest were betrayed or found…If one betrayed Jews, one was paid five or 7.50 Dutch guilders.’
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For every Dutch person who helped a Jew, there was another seemingly ready to betray the rescuers.

Typically for Jews in hiding, in Holland as elsewhere, several families and individuals enabled Joop Schijveschuurder and his brother to survive: among them the Van Oostens, the Ides, the De Graafs, and Marius Beerman, a Dutch plainclothes policeman (known as Bob) who had warned of an imminent arrest and deportation in Haarlem. ‘We were phoned by the Germans that they were going to arrest Jews in the Wagenweg,’ he later recalled, in a letter to Joop Schijveschuurder. ‘I raced like a hare to the address they had given, and warned the people. When the phone call about you came, it was already late in the evening, I raced by bicycle like mad to the Wagenweg: we banged on the door, and I must have called, “It’s Bob.” I went in myself to help you. My partner warned me at a given moment. When we heard the German motors in the distance, we rode back to the station by a roundabout way.’ Bob’s partner was never seen again.

Bob later wrote to Joop: ‘When later you were imprisoned in the police station in the Smedestraat, I went to fetch the keys to the cell one evening. As a plainclothes policeman, I was able to do this. I spoke to your mother in the cell, and later I phoned the duty doctor. We arranged that your mother should scream in pain. You know the result. By the way, it was not that your mother should simulate appendicitis. Dr Ruiter diagnosed an ectopic pregnancy. Your mother was not suffering from either. But on advice from Dr Ruiter, your mother was transferred to hospital, and not operated upon when there. Had it really been appendicitis, one would have had to operate; not to operate under those circumstances would have led to questions in the hospital. Even there, there were betrayers.’
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Fifty years after the first round-ups in Haarlem, in a ceremony honouring those who rescued the Schijveschuurder brothers, the Mayor of Haarlem commented: ‘In contrast to those Haarlemers who stood by actionless, there were also officials who resisted. And then, for example, I think of the two teachers who refused to sign the Aryan document, and I think of the governors of the union of the school for disadvantaged children, who refused to divulge the names of Jewish children under their care, and consequently lost their subsidies. And I am reminded of the clerk who lost his job because he wore the Jewish star (although he wasn’t Jewish), and I think of those officials of the state, who falsified identity cards.’
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IN THE TOWN
of Alkmaar, Laurens Vis helped hide Jewish people in safe farms around the town until they could be taken to other places of safety. His son Rudi, later a member of the British House of Commons, recalled how, at his father’s funeral in 1952, ‘hundreds of Jewish people came to pay their respects.’
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In Groningen, Marguerite Mulder regarded it as her religious duty to help the persecuted. She therefore took into her home two young Jewish sisters, Vreesje and Sonia Slager, whose parents had already been deported, and arranged for them, when danger threatened, to be kept with her parents and other members of her family.
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In Rotterdam, a Protestant priest, Dr Brillenburg-Wurth, and his wife concealed and cared for a Jewish couple in the loft of his church for more than a year.
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A member of the Royal Dutch Police Force, Karst Smit, undertook rescue efforts that marked him out as extraordinary. Only twenty-five years old in 1942, he risked his life again and again to help as many as a hundred and fifty Jews escape from Holland. With a central collecting point in the southern town of Tilburg, he and the group around him travelled with Jews from The Hague, Amsterdam and other towns, moving them south across the Dutch border with Belgium, and on to Antwerp and Brussels. From there, some went into hiding in Belgium, others made their way south to Switzerland.

One of those whom Karst Smit helped, Gertrude Mann, had been in hiding since July 1942 at several addresses in The Hague. At the end of May 1943, he told her and a friend with whom she was in hiding ‘that he could help me to pass the frontier into Belgium and that I could so go on to Brussels. After talking this over with my friend and coming to the conclusion that Belgium was safer than Holland (true), we decided that I should go with KS. We sent him word that I was ready to go with him.’

Karst Smit took Gertrude Mann by train—forbidden to Jews by order of the Germans—to Tilburg, and from there to a house in Hilvarenbeek ‘of a family called Vos where I hid for the night. The next morning one of the daughters brought me to a pub in Baarle-Nassau where KS told me and several other Jews, to wait for a “passeur” who would pass us over the frontier while KS (who was then a member of the frontier police) would help us to avoid German patrols. The crossing took place without any trouble. No financial conditions were asked. From Weelde in Belgium we took the tram to Antwerp and from Antwerp I took the train to Brussels. In Brussels I was given an address to hide, but as there were at least fifteen other Jews and young men hiding there, I felt that this house was a very dangerous place and so one of the above mentioned friends found another address for me to feel at home. They treated me as their second daughter and told their neighbours I was their niece. I stayed with them until the end of the war.’

On one occasion, Karst Smit travelled to Brussels to bring Gertrude Mann money and clothes that had been given to him by her friend; and ‘in September 1943 he helped my friend to pass the Belgian frontier to meet me.’
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After eighteen months the German secret police broke Karst Smit’s network. Its members managed to flee and go underground, as so many Jews were doing. Three were later arrested by the Germans and shot: Adrianus van Gestel, Gradus Gerritsen and Cornelius Keurhorst. Smit himself was captured while on a mission to France, imprisoned, and then sent to a number of concentration camps, among them Buchenwald and Dora. He returned to Holland at the end of the war.

Another of the group, Josephus Cornelius van der Heijden, had been arrested together with his son Eugene while accompanying a Jewish woman and her child across the border into Belgium. He died in a German concentration camp, as did two of his sons, Marcel and Gustaaf. Such details were unknown to those rescued, even after liberation. ‘After the war it was almost impossible for our Jewish friends to trace us back,’ Karst Smit later wrote. ‘During their flight they travelled by night, so they did not know where they crossed the Dutch-Belgian frontier and they did not know the names of their passeurs.’
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Karst Smit’s brother Romke also took part in the work of the group. Sometimes he would act as a courier, collecting jewellery in Amsterdam for its onward passage to Paris. After the liberation of Paris he joined the Dutch Brigade that was formed there in late 1944, fighting in both Belgium and Holland. He was killed on Dutch soil on 26 April 1945, nine days before the Germans in Holland surrendered.

Jaap Penraat, the son of a master printer, was another Dutchman who smuggled Jews out of Holland. The route which he helped organize went via the French city of Lille, and then south to the Pyrenees and the Spanish frontier. Penraat’s original speciality was making false identity cards that enabled Jews to pass as non-Jews. Once the escape route was established, his ability to prepare false papers was tested to the utmost. Travelling to Paris, and posing as the representative of a German construction company, he persuaded the German authorities there, at the central clearing office for all work permits and licences, to issue permits for Dutch labourers wanting to work with a construction company in France, working on the Atlantic Wall defences. The company did not exist, but the papers, genuine, and with the necessary official stamps, provided a base for repeated forged permits, facilitating the rescue operation.

The first rescue journey took place in December 1942. The ten young Jews whom Jaap Penraat accompanied by train as far as Lille each had a forged ‘Aryan’ identity card that he had made for them, and travel papers to match. A second group followed within three weeks. In all, more than four hundred Jews were moved out of danger in this way.
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