The Righteous: The Unsung Heroes of the Holocaust
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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
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.19
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.20
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.21
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.’22
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.23
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.24
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 caugh
t; 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.25
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.26 At social gatherings, she stole people’s identity cards, which the underground turned into life-saving documents for Jews.27 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.’28