The Other Schindlers

by Agnes Grunwald-Spier

  He concedes his life was pleasant enough as he was not aware of shortages, but he had no knowledge of how the Klerks managed these matters when everyone had ration books. He only played with Emmy Willemsen, the Klerks’ granddaughter, who was three years younger than him and with whom he stayed in touch.77 Sadly, she died in January 2006.78 Apparently Henri was passed off as a nephew whose parents had been killed in the German bombardment of the city of Rotterdam in the early days of the German invasion. Many people died at that time and many ‘hidden’ children were explained away in this way. Only in 2001, Els told him that when she had taken him for a walk one day with Emmy in her pram, someone had asked her whether he was, by any chance, a Jewish child. She had replied: ‘Oh no, he is a nephew.’

  Even after Henri had been returned to his parents, at least one shopkeeper had enquired whether that little boy had been a Jewish child.79 This curiosity about his presence must have created anxiety as the Klerks could have been betrayed by nosy neighbours at any time. However, he was not physically hidden and recalls playing in the back garden from where he watched the trams go by. He also went out shopping with his ‘aunt’. He remembers playing in the part of the house used as an office and so the staff and the visitors would have seen and been aware of him.80 He remembers visiting one of Klerk’s employees with his ‘aunt’ on one occasion. It was only just round the corner and the house overlooked the sidings of Arnhem railway station and he enjoyed watching the trains. Although nothing unusual happened, he remembers the Klerks talking about it and deciding not to do it again.

  When I asked him about how risky this must have been, he said anyone could have gone to the Nazis; in fact, many did and just supplied an address. A Jewish life was worth 7.00 guilders which is what was paid to the informer. Henri was not sure what this was worth at the time but in 1961 £1 equalled 10 guilders.81

  In September 1944 they were evacuated, prior to the battle of Arnhem featured in the film A Bridge Too Far, to Harskamp, a hamlet 20km away, and were liberated by the Canadians on 17 April 1945. As the war was over, the Klerks wrote through the Red Cross to the last known address where his parents had hidden. Fortunately, they too survived to claim their ‘baby’ – now 5 years old.82 Apparently, when Henri saw his mother again, he recognised her and said: ‘You stayed away a very long time.’83

  Henri’s conclusions on the Klerks’ motivation, following discussion with their daughter, are these:84

  Firstly, they were religious people who were prepared to look after me for humanitarian reasons. Secondly, the Nazis had forbidden Freemasons to be active. That in itself would have been a good enough reason for my foster father, a dedicated Freemason, to act contrary to their dictats.85

  Henri proposed the Klerks and their daughter and son-in-law to Yad Vashem, for recognition as Righteous Among the Nations, which was awarded on 10 April 2000 in the synagogue in Arnhem.

  I was quite unaware of the Nazis’ obsession with Freemasons until I looked into Henri’s story. The Nazis regarded all Freemasons as allies of the Jews, and both were regarded with suspicion by right-wing bodies in Germany and France from the 1840s. The infamous publication The Protocols of Zion linked Jewish and Masonic conspiracies arguing that Freemasons were in league with the ‘Elders of Zion’. In Sweden the notorious anti-Semite Elof Eriksson from 1932 focused on the Freemasons ‘as the Jews’ main associates and vehicles of propaganda in their quest for world dominance’.86 When the Nazis came to power they created an anti-Masonic museum. Members were ordered to leave their Lodges, and those who had not done so prior to the Nazis’ rise to power on 30 January 1933 were not accepted into the Nazi Party, and some were sent to concentration camps. In September 1935 all Lodges were forced to dissolve themselves and property was confiscated.87

  The fall of France in June 1940 led the German Foreign Minister, Alfred Rosenberg, to raid Masonic premises; documents were seized and Lodges were looted. On 1 May 1942 Hermann Göring, the most powerful Nazi after Hitler, said:

  The struggle against the Jews, the Freemasons and other ideological forces opposing us is an urgent task for National Socialism. It is for this reason that I welcome the decision of Reichleiter Rosenberg to establish special task forces whose job it will be the safe keeping of all the documentary material and the cultural assets from the above mentioned sites.88

  This loot was confiscated by the Soviet forces in 1945 and only returned to France after the collapse of communism in 1990, following their discovery by an American researcher, Kennedy Grimstead. In total, 750 boxes of material were sent from Moscow to Paris by lorry in December 2000.

  Evert Kwaadgras provided me with a great deal of information on Jacob Klerk’s early life. He was born on 19 April 1881 in Warder, a village in the Dutch province of Noord-Holland. He appears to have first applied to be a Mason in 1909 in Hoorn, close to Warder. He was accepted and initiated on 26 October, but at the time was living temporarily in Germany, in Essen on the Ruhr. His job was as a ‘representative of a Dutch vegetable transport company’. Evert stressed to me that Holland has always been a great exporter of vegetables, especially to Germany. Some time before 1915 he moved to Breda, and then in 1916 he moved to Arnhem. He joined the local Lodge and became a Master Mason. In 1923 he joined a new Lodge called ‘De Oude Landmerken’ and he was the secretary for many years.89 The Masons have no record of his looking after Henri:

  But that would not be the kind of thing about which to spread the word during the war or to boast of unduly after. We know that he had a sharp sense of justice. When after the war some lodge members were expelled on account of pro-German attitudes or activities during the occupation years, he took up the defence of two of them, claiming that they were being falsely accused … this would characterize him as a man who liked to be fair and square in his opinions and actions.90

  The Dutch Freemasons have no records from the war years: ‘The Nazis banned and suppressed all Masonic organisations, including ours, so in the years 1940– 1945 there were no regular Masonic activities such as Lodge meetings, and, accordingly, there are no normal records available.’91

  Kwaadgras concluded:

  Anyhow, by the time the shoa(h) got under way, the Freemasons were already a thing of the past in the eyes of the Nazis. They had already been suppressed and their possessions looted or destroyed in Germany and all German-occupied or dominated countries.92

  Henri remained as an only child, growing up with an extended family of cousins, aunts and uncles, most of whom had also survived by hiding. As a young teenager Henri joined Jewish youth groups and became involved in camps and Hebrew educational seminars. When he was 16 he started the Dutch opticians’ course in Rotterdam, after which he started working in a few practices. One of his bosses did some lecturing on a part-time basis and sent Henri to do so in his place. He realised he needed to broaden his optometry skills and applied to study in London in 1961. He stayed in London doing research and developing his skills until he became Senior Lecturer at City University. He has been involved in developing optometry courses in his native Holland and also lecturing abroad.

  In 1972 he married Dorothy who was born in Cape Town. They have two sons and two grandchildren. In the 1990s he met an old acquaintance from Amsterdam, also living in London, who introduced him to a group of Jewish child survivors. He and Dorothy are now active in the World Federation of Jewish Child Survivors of the Holocaust (WFJCSH) where Henri holds the office of vice-president. He is also involved in the European Association of Survivors.93

  Jacob Klerk died on 2 February 1953, a fortnight before Henri’s Barmitzvah.94 His wife Hendrika died on 18 July 1971. Their grandchild, Henri’s foster sister Emmy, died on 28 January 2006.95

  Robert Maistriau (1921–2008) was only 22 when, on 19 April 1943, he led a daring raid on a train carrying 1,600 Jews from Belgium to Auschwitz. His two colleagues, Youra Livchitz and Jean Franklemon, were both 25 when they set off on their bicycles with their equipment – a pistol, three pairs of wire cutters, a la
ntern and red paper. This was also the day the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising started.

  The three had cycled the 40km from Brussels to Boortmeerbeek in Flanders and used the red paper to turn the lantern into a temporary red signal to stop the train on its way east. The train was taking 1,631 Jews from Mechelen (Malines) transit camp to Auschwitz – a full list compiled by Nazi officials at Mechelen gives names, dates of birth, places of birth and occupation. It shows a great many schoolchildren were on the train.96 As soon as the train stopped they used the wire cutters to cut the doors open and encouraged people to jump out, and seventeen people did. As the guards opened fire, Livchitz fired their pistol while the other two opened another carriage and again urged people to jump. Some people on the train had been warned of the rescue and managed to cut open a third carriage and escape. A total of 231 Jews escaped, and although twenty-three died, most got away and were helped in some way by Belgians. Some, like Simon Gronowski, an 11-year-old boy, jumped once the train started moving. He walked all night and eventually approached a house with a tale of having got lost from his playmates. He was taken to the local policeman and was terrified of being handed back to the Germans. The policeman said to Simon: ‘I know everything. You were in the Jewish train and you escaped. You don’t need to worry. We are good Belgians, we won’t betray you.’

  Maistriau told of one woman who asked him what she should do as she looked around in the dark. He said to her: ‘Madame, Brussels is that way, Louvain is that way. Sort it out for yourselves. I’ve done all I can.’97 Jacques Grauwels and his friend had jumped from the train and, whilst waiting for a tram, worried that their filthy appearance would draw attention to them. They chose to wait on the stairs to escape quickly if necessary:

  And then something happened that Jacques Grauwels would never forget as long as he lived: ‘The workers had probably noticed that there was something up with us both, that we had some sort of problems. As though in response to a silent order, they circled us both on the platform so that we were protected against prying eyes.’

  Another couple limped into a church and told the astonished priest that they were Jews who had escaped from the train to Auschwitz and they had no money. He gave them a 50-franc note, said ‘God bless you’, and told them how to get to Liège, where they had a relative to help them.

  None of the escapees were betrayed by a Belgian – L’honneur des Belges.98 Marion Schreiber attributes ‘national modesty’ as the reason no one knows how much the Belgians helped their Jewish neighbours. Additionally, she comments that her book has had little media attention in France and the Netherlands, ‘countries which have trumpeted their resistance past while being rather less open about their collaborators’. She puts it down to jealousy.99

  Maistriau did not speak English and I asked a bilingual secretary to visit him on my behalf, which she did on 2 August 2004. He told her that although he claimed in the book that he was bored with his job, he had actually been ‘drilled’ against the Germans since he was 5 years old. His mother’s first husband had been a Jew and was in the French army. After he died in the First World War, she married a Belgian who was a doctor in the Belgian army.100

  There is a tendency in the UK to look at the Low Countries as one homogeneous area. This is particularly incorrect when it comes to Jewish rescue in the Holocaust:

  Four thousand children like myself survived the Holocaust living under false identities with families, in boarding schools, monasteries and children’s homes. Sixty per cent of the sixty thousand Jews living in Belgium at the time were not deported because they were able to escape the clutches of the German racial fanatics with the help of neighbours, friends and strangers.101

  In fact, more Jewish children were saved in Belgium than any other occupied country. Why? One answer is given by Steve Jelbert. He suggests that Belgians, unlike the Dutch, were bitterly anti-German having experienced ‘brutal German occupation in World War I’.102 He also suggests that Belgians have a strong individualistic streak: ‘Given to unforced bourgeois individuality (it was, after all, the home of Surrealists such as Delvaux and Magritte), the strength of its civic society hampered the Nazis’ attempts to carry out their murderous policies.’103 He concludes that ‘the Belgian bourgeoisie of the era apparently recognised themselves by lifestyle and culture, the idea of discrimination against minorities who clearly share the same values clearly contradicts the core beliefs of their civic society’.104

  When deportations first began in 1942, the patriotic underground newspaper La Libre Belgique urged its readers to show Jews support: ‘Greet them in passing! Offer them your seat on the tram! Protest against the barbaric measures that are being applied to them. That’ll make the “Boches” furious!’105 The bureaucrats played their part too, in spite of the posters warning against helping the Jews, and some were discovered and punished:

  In all the city halls and council houses there were officials who quietly issued additional food cards for people’s relatives who had supposedly been bombed out, or whose nieces had suddenly turned up out of the blue. There were city officials who gave the Resistance blank forms to which only the false name had to be added and the right passport photograph glued. And then there were postmen who intercepted letters addressed to the Gestapo and the war commands if they suspected they might contain denunciations. They opened the envelopes, warned the people denounced in them and delivered the letters two days late, to give them time to go into hiding. ‘Service D’ – against defeatism and denunciation – was the name that the members of this group gave themselves. They probably saved 5,000 people from being handed over to the occupying police.106

  It has been estimated that about 200,000 Belgians were in the Resistance, many motivated by strong anti-German feelings resulting from the First World War. Robert Maistriau was perfect Resistance material.107 He was desperate to help damage the Germans because of their 1914 atrocities:

  It wasn’t just that everything the Belgians had saved by careful husbandry – food, fabrics or coal – was going to Germany. Now young people were going to be forced to work in German factories to keep the wheels of Hitler’s arms industry in motion. Around this time, Robert found himself thinking about his father. A military doctor, and originally an ardent admirer of German culture, with its poets, musicians and philosophers, he had lost all his respect for the German nation in the First World War, at the Front at Yser. He considered it particularly barbaric that during their invasion in 1914 the Germans had set fire to the precious library in Leuven with all its irreplaceable books and manuscripts. ‘In one way and another,’ Maistriau recalls, ‘we young people were opposed to the Germans even before the second World War.’108

  The hatred felt for Germans in Belgium was confirmed by Bob Whitby, the son of an English major and Belgian mother, who, aged 19, was interned in Belgium in 1940. He said: ‘We were very frightened because my mother had told us about the First World War, the cruelties and so on’.109

  Paul Spiegel wrote:

  Belgium is Germany’s unknown neighbour. And that is particularly true as regards the chapter of resistance and civil disobedience against the Nazi regime in Belgium … These Belgians risked imprisonment or even transportation to a concentration camp because they were infringing the laws passed by the German military administration, according to which any help for the persecuted Jews was to be considered a serious crime.110

  Another explanation of Belgium’s success is based on their willingness to disobey. ‘The Belgian police dragged their feet, railway workers left doors of the deportation trains open or arranged ambushes, and many Jews found hiding places.’111 Whereas in Holland, where 20–25,000 Jews went into hiding, half of them were discovered ‘no doubt through the efforts of professional and occasional informers’, it is significant that ‘of the ten thousand Jews who survived in hiding, about seventy-five per cent were foreigners – a percentage that testifies to the unwillingness of Dutch Jews to face reality’.112

  In 1939 the population of Belgium
was 8,386,600 and 1,537 have been recognised as Righteous Among the Nations (see Table 2 in Appendices). Perhaps the most remarkable rescue case I came across was of Gisele Reich, who in 1941 was at Malines awaiting deportation to Auschwitz with her parents. Her father was deported first and Gisele, aged 5, who suffered from a lung complaint, was waiting with her mother. A German officer took pity on Gisele and asked her mother if anyone would look after her. She must have mentioned their neighbours, the Van de Velde family, who were a devout Christian family. The Nazi telephoned them and they immediately agreed and came at once to collect her by car; they took her into their family even though their eighth child was imminent. The father was a chef in a hospital kitchen. Gisele lived with them until she was married. She had children and grandchildren of her own, but unfortunately had been severely traumatised by her experiences. Her son, Willi Buntinx, put the Van de Velde family’s actions down to genuine neighbourliness, and had never told anyone about the story until Rose Marie Guilfoyle told him I had asked her to see Robert Maistriau.113

  Maistriau was then very frail, with poor sight and mobility. He told Rose Marie about his childhood and his family’s anti-German attitudes. He also revealed that he now felt he has been given less credit than was his due as it was he alone who actually opened the doors to the train on 19 April 1943. He claims Youra Livchitz was frightened when he saw a German officer close to the train who might have recognised him and disappeared. Robert was also upset that Youra seemed to have been given the credit for leading the event – especially in the Washington Holocaust Museum.114

  Of the three, all were subsequently arrested for other matters. Livchitz was caught months later and was shot as a ‘communist’ in 1943. Maistriau was arrested in March 1944 and sent to Buchenwald but ended up in Bergen-Belsen where he was liberated in April 1945. Franklemon died in 1977. Maistriau was recognised as a Righteous Among the Nations in 1994 and died on 26 September 2008 aged 87. The attack on the twentieth convoy was historic – it was the only time in occupied Europe that Resistance fighters liberated a deportation train.115