The Other Schindlers

by Agnes Grunwald-Spier

  Jaap is extremely modest about his achievements and will not be called a hero: ‘I hate the inappropriate word “hero”. This is an example of the debasement of human values which makes common decency heroism!’129

  Why did I do it? Because it was the only normal thing to do. One can’t sit and watch when people are in mortal danger even when you do not know them. While working we got to know more and more Jews and many became friends. Yes, it also became more risky. If the landings at Arnheim in September 1944 (when the German collaborators fled) had happened two weeks later, we would have been caught, as we found from the papers after the war. But we were saved and that is all I can say.130

  After a long and fruitful life, Jaap regards the work he did saving Dutch Jews as the time ‘when I was most useful’:131

  It is an important thing in my life to feel that I was useful somewhere … that I did not live just to enjoy myself. Nothing else I ever did was as important. A friend of mine said to me that the war was the time he really lived. For me, it was the time I lived the most intensely.132

  Jaap seems to have a feeling for individuals rather than causes:

  I don’t know whether I am an humanitarian. I must confess that I don’t get exited by a flood in India or an earthquake in Iran, as tragic as these events may be. But I will automatically help an individual or family, as both my parents always did. My father, being an advocate as I was, had a more general influence on me.

  As to South Africa, I was never involved, nor in Holland or here, in any organised politics. I might, however, have influenced some individuals. Sixty years have passed but sometimes I think what happened during those train transports to the extermination camps. All I can do is try to forget.133

  When asked about his actions he was humble: ‘Why did I do it? How could you not do it? If I see you drowning, I would get you out. Any decent person with the imagination to do something to help would have helped. If you did not help, you were not decent.’134

  On 29 May 2003 Jaap was honoured at Yad Vashem where, in the Remembrance Hall, he was recognised as a Righteous Among the Nations. He had travelled with a group of fifty South African Jews on a solidarity mission and they planted fifty trees in the South African Memorial Forest ‘Golani Junction’. ‘Apparently Mr van Proosdij was overcome by emotion at this ceremony which for him represented the incarnation of an oppressed people into a sovereign nation.’135

  John/Jaap Schoen (1923–2007). John Schoen’s family provide a similar example of humanitarianism as they brought up their children to be kind to everyone and help people. John grew up in Geldermalsen, about an hour by train from Amsterdam. His father was a supervisor on the railways and they lived near the station:

  My father always helped people, every night we had people come to the house wanting a job and my father gave a lot of people a job on the railways. During the war we had a lot of people coming from towns wanting food, my mother always gave food to these people.136

  John was born on 26 July 1923. John said his parents were very loving and charitable, but not religious. He said he had a happy family life. John was 21 when in July 1944 his parents were approached by a beautiful young woman from the Dutch Underground. She was aged 20 and John admitted he really fancied her and escorted her back to the station later.137 She had come from Amsterdam to ask John’s parents to look after a little Jewish girl aged about 5. At the time, John’s brother Joost, known as Joop, was 10 and his sister Trijntje, known as Tiny, was 15. They all knew Suze was Jewish and that keeping her was very risky. However, she looked more Indonesian than Jewish. If the Nazis had found out about Suze, the whole family could have been sent to a camp, but they agreed to keep her.138

  John told me that when Suze’s family were rounded up by the Nazis, she must have been at a neighbour’s home because she escaped. John also said the family members were all sent to Auschwitz and gassed. He says that understandably she was very disturbed when she first arrived at their home and cried a great deal: ‘At first Suze woke up during the night to shout for her mother and father, and was also wetting the bed, but being so young, she accepted my mother as her mother. She loved my mother very much, so did my mother.’139

  John has said that his parents had joined the Underground because they were opposed to the German invasion of Holland, and also because of the Nazis’ persecution of the Jews. They were involved in sheltering Allied airmen, using a hidden radio and a printing press to pass on vital information.

  In September 1944 parts of the Netherlands had been recaptured by British and Canadian troops and they launched Operation Market Garden which was intended to retrieve the rest of the country. The mission failed and the film A Bridge Too Far portrayed the story. As a result, a general railway strike was called to disrupt German transports and 90 per cent of the workers supported the strike. Anyone who participated in the strike was in grave danger of being arrested with the risk of death. Therefore, as John’s father still worked for the railways they had to leave their home and go into hiding in Asperen, a small town near Geldermalsen. That hiding place housed the print shop where work was done for the Resistance.140

  It should be remembered that the strike led to dreadful repercussions: the Germans had to bring in their own railway workers to get the trains working and therefore decided in October 1944 to forbid the importing of food into the Netherlands. Food rations were reduced from 1,400 calories a day in August 1944 to 1,000 calories in December, and by April 1945 it was down to 500 calories. This winter is known as the ‘Hungry Winter’ and people were so desperate for food that they were eating tulip bulbs.141 Ria Sanders, who was born in 1926 and lived in The Hague, sent me her recollections of that time. She told me that people ate sugar beet which was normally considered cattle food, and tulip bulbs which were quite nice sliced and fried like onions, but when the power stopped they couldn’t cook even if they had food. She said all rabbits, cats and dogs disappeared at that time.142

  Whilst the Schoens were staying in the printing shop, they were nearly betrayed by a Nazi infiltrator, who they thought was also in the Resistance, and asked them to do some printing. A little while later the house was raided by three men with guns who forced their way in asking for a boy of 20. His father said there was no such boy there. Jaap was hiding in one of the two attics, shivering with fear and cold in his pyjamas. Apparently, the ‘Gestapo did not sense that our little girl, the only brunette in a blond family, was Jewish’. They asked Suze what was in the cellar and she said there was nothing but mice. Jaap said:

  My mother Anna Johanna started to laugh, to the annoyance of the Gestapo, who told her to put her hands up or they would shoot her. My mother said ladies don’t do things like that, and refused. We were very frightened, but they didn’t shoot her. They went away, and we were safe for another day.143

  Apparently they checked the other attic, so Jaap was not discovered. Jaap recorded that the boy in question was caught eventually, sentenced by a court of two judges and, after digging his own grave, was shot.144

  The sheer absurdity of the Nazis’ methods of control was exemplified by the Dutch being forbidden to grow orange flowers in their garden because they were interpreted as a sign of loyalty to the Dutch queen as head of the House of Orange. John’s father allegedly dug up all their marigolds and put them on the compost heap, only for John’s mother to rescue and re-plant them. He said: ‘She showed great courage throughout the occupation.’145

  It is significant that John has recorded that all his parents’ friends had Jewish girls to hide. Significantly, more Jewish girls were saved all over occupied Europe simply because circumcised Jewish boys were easily identified and were therefore a more risky proposition.146 John Schoen specifically told me there were no Jewish boys hidden in his village.147

  John has said his parents had no Jewish friends themselves because their home was not in an area in which any Jews had lived. However, he has commented that most people in Holland ‘have always kept the Jews in high esteem. Soon af
ter the Germans went to Holland, we saw the Jews wearing the Jewish cross, but as time went on, we saw less and less of them. We knew they were sent to the gas chambers.’148

  He has written of becoming aware that Jews were disappearing and seeing them being transported:

  One of the trains packed with Jews on their way to a concentration camp stopped at our village station and I will never forget their faces – full of despair.

  There was an immediate reaction – all the onlookers on the platform rushed to buy all the food on the snack trolley to hand in through the train windows to the poor souls.149

  Suze became extremely attached to the Schoens and maintained contact with them even after she moved to America. In 1953 Suze came back for Tiny’s wedding,150 and she visited Anna Schoen in Holland every year until Anna died. Suze married a Jewish policeman, Arnold Brown, in 1956.

  John visited Suze in Florida in the mid-1990s and said: ‘It was wonderful to see her again, to know that she had had a long and happy life.’ She had two daughters, Arleen Rose (1959) and Diane Kitty (1963), but died of lung cancer in May 1999 aged only 60, after suffering for five years. Arnold still maintains contact with John Schoen and has said:

  I met Suze in Connecticut in 1953 and we were married three years later. We used to talk a lot about the war, and she told me about how her family had been taken to the camps, and how she had escaped, sheltered by Jaap and his family.

  Even though my wife has died, I still talk to Jaap on the telephone from time to time. It’s a kind of bond between us that no amount of time could erase. Without the Schoens, I would never have met and fallen in love with my wife, and I would not have had the wonderful life I was privileged to share with her.151

  When I spoke to Arnold Brown, he told me that Suze had been moved from place to place by the Underground, and although the time she spent with the Schoens was very happy, she was very traumatised by her experiences. She did not tell her daughters about those times.152

  John joined the Dutch army in June 1945 and for part of his training was stationed at Wolverhampton Barracks in 1946. At a local dance he met Pamela Cox and they were married in February 1947. In May 1947 he was sent to serve in Indonesia until 1950, when he came back to England to set up home with his wife and worked at the local Co-op. They had three children – Christopher (1952), Peter (1955) and Gerard (1959). In 1966 the family moved to Cardiff and John became manager of the food hall at the David Morgan department store; he worked there until he retired in 1984.153

  Sadly, John Schoen, my original informant through the CCJ, died on 8 May 2007 aged 83.154 His son Peter has provided some additional family history, and Peter’s cousin Ed van Rijswijk, Tiny’s son, has provided remarkable information about Suze’s story and the work of the Dutch Resistance. He has traced the family’s history back to around 1700. Arleen visited Ed in March 2009 when he told her about the research on her mother’s family: Suze’s parents were Samuel van der Bijl (born 23 October 1908) and Alida Hamerslag (9 January 1911) whose children were Bernard (16 November 1931), Kitty (3 February 1933) and Suze (14 January 1939). All five of them were born in Amsterdam. The family were arrested at their home there, Ruyshstraat 98 II, on 20 June 1943. About 5,500 people were arrested that day in the city as a result of a big razzia (a round-up of Jews – similar to Aktion).155 Ed explained:

  In the case of 20th June 1943, a whole section of Amsterdam was sealed off, nobody could get in or out and all the people that lived within that section were taken from their homes. They had to leave their houses with minimal baggage and lock their houses. Housekeys had to be given to the Germans. Later on all the furniture was taken from these houses and most of it disappeared to Germany. The people had to gather in nearby squares and from there were taken to nearby railway-stations in trucks or trams. The people that were [there] on this day, more than 5,500, went directly to the Westerbork Camp.156

  Westerbork was a Dutch transit camp in the north-east Netherlands. The Dutch Jews were either sent there or to Vught. They were then moved to the Sobibor extermination camp in Poland on 13 July 1943 and killed on 16 July 1943. John thought they had gone to Auschwitz, which is understandable as often the victims’ true fates and destinations were not known until after the end of the war, and by then he was in the army. Over 110,000 Dutch Jews were sent either to Auschwitz or Sobibor and some other smaller camps; 75 per cent of these Dutch Jews did not survive.

  Suze was saved by a Resistance group called NV-Groep (Naamloze Vennootschap) which was based in Amsterdam, also on the Ruyschstraat. It was part of a network of four groups that rescued Jewish children. They were organised by a German Jew called Walter Süsskind, a former employee of Unilever who lost his job because he was Jewish. He was put in charge of a deportation centre which was opposite a kindergarten and Süsskind devised a scheme for smuggling Jews through the kindergarten. Over eighteen months he saved over 1,000 children and many adults. Unfortunately, he and his family were sent to Auschwitz where he died. It is believed he was perceived as a collaborator due to the relationships he developed with the Nazis to divert their attention from his activities; he was attacked by Dutch Jews in the camp. His life has been celebrated in a film, Secret Courage.157

  The members of NV-Groep had to ask around to find foster families. One of the members, Annemarie van Verschuer, described how much she hated the task: ‘I always found it frightening … I found it more frightening than taking the children from Amsterdam to Heerlen, for you never knew how the people would react. And like a door-to-door salesman you had to persuade people to take in a child.’158

  There is some confusion in the paperwork as to who brought Suze to Geldermalsen on 19 June 1944. It is believed it was Truus Vermeer. She was a daughter of the Vermeer family based in Brunssum, in the south. Her whole family was involved in the Dutch Resistance and worked closely with the NV-Groep.

  The NV-Groep were particularly involved with moving children. They moved them from Amsterdam to Brunssum and its environs, where they were hidden with families. Later they were moved to other areas such as Betuwe (Geldermalsen area) and the Achterhoek (Nijverdal area). Ed has not been able to establish what happened to Suze from June 1943 to June 1944, but he assumes she was in hiding with another family. Arleen told me that Tiny told her (via Skype) that the first family did not want to keep Suze because she wet the bed. Apparently, Tiny’s father said he did not care because Tiny, at 15, still wet the bed.159 The NV-Groep supported families hiding Jewish children with money and food cards and this involved visiting the families. It was Truus Vermeer who did this for Suze and she also checked that Suze was being treated properly.

  After July 1945, Suze spent six months with another family in Geldermalsen and then she stayed with an aunt. She was then moved to her Aunt Klara Hamerslag – her mother’s sister – who had survived the war with her two sons. She remarried, became Klara Aarderwerk, and in 1949 formally adopted Suze. The Netherlands introduced legislation in 1949 that anyone who had not returned from the war was officially declared dead. As a result, there were many marriages and adoptions and other legal issues resolved. In November 1953 the whole family, including Suze, emigrated to the USA.160

  Arleen Kennedy told me how she had known about her mother being hidden by the Schoens since she was a little girl. She wrote that in 1964, when she was 5, they went to visit Tiny in Holland and she thinks she learnt about it then. She confirmed Suze did not like to talk about the war in detail and she never said exactly what happened to her family. Arleen presumed she did not know. It was Ed’s research that gave Arleen and her sons, Craig (1988) and Jason (1990), the information about her family’s fate. As a result, Arleen returned to Amsterdam in March 2009 and, during a visit to the Jewish Museum, saw a photo display of rescued Jewish children and recognised a photo of Suze which the museum had not identified. Tiny immediately said: ‘that is Suze’.

  Arleen concluded: ‘I love Tiny and her whole family so much. They are amazing, kind, loving people. I am grateful t
o have them in my life.’161

  Notes

  1. Olympia Barczynska, letter to author, 31 August 2000. Olympia is Józef’s niece.

  2. Olympia Barczynska, Józef Robert Barczynski, biographical notes dated 2 March 2001 sent to the author, p. 2.

  3. Ibid., p. 2.

  4. Olympia Barczynska, telephone conversation with the author, 11 March 2001.

  5. Barczynska, biographical notes, p. 2.

  6. Barczynska, letter to author, 31 August 2000, p. 3.

  7. Ibid., p. 4, and e-mail of 6 January 2010.

  8. Barczynska, biographical notes, p. 2.

  9. File No 5846 on Józef Barczynski at Yad Vashem.

  10. Barczynska, e-mail to the author, 6 January 2010.

  11. Milton Gendel, e-mail to the author, 29 December 2003.

  12. Vivo Vivanti, ‘The Righteous are not Forgotten’ in Shalom (the Journal of the Jewish Community of Rome), No 12, December 2002, p. vi of insert. Translated by Phil Jacobs of Nottingham, January 2003.

  13. File No 9707 from Yad Vashem’s Commission for Selecting Righteous Among the Nations, 2002.

  14. Ibid.

  15. Ibid.

  16. Ibid.

  17. Duchess Clotilde Capece Galeota, e-mail to the author, 6 November 2002.

  18. Milton Gendel, e-mail to the author, 27 February 2003.

  19. Vivanti, ‘The Righteous are not Forgotten’, December 2002.

  20. Ibid.

  21. Edith Hahn-Beer, The Nazi Officer’s Wife (London: Little Brown, 2000), p. 151. Apparently, Plattner did this several times so he must have thought it was the right thing to do. He was responsible for checking the papers proving racial background of anyone who wanted to get married: telephone conversation with Edith’s daughter, Angela Schluter, 4 July 2003.