Hidden Like Anne Frank

by Marcel Prins

  For my mother, who inspired me to start this project

  — M.P.

  CONTENTS

  TITLE PAGE

  DEDICATION

  FOREWORD

  NETHERLANDS MAP

  THE STARS HAVE GONE AWAY: RITA DEGEN

  THREE PIANOS: JAAP SITTERS

  I’LL GO FETCH HER TOMORROW: BLOEME EMDEN

  NUMBER SEVENTEEN: JACK ELJON

  MY FATHER’S STORE: ROSE-MARY KAHN

  THANK GOODNESS THEY WERE ALL BOYS: LIES ELION

  WHERE ARE THE JACKETS?: MAURICE MEIJER

  UNCLE HENK’S CHILDREN: SIENY KATTENBURG

  AUNT NELLY: LENI DE VRIES

  AS LONG AS YOU GET MARRIED: BENJAMIN KOSSES

  OLDER THAN MY FATHER: MICHEL GOLDSTEEN

  JACQUES: LOWINA DE LEVIE

  JOHAN VAN DE BERG’S IN LOVE WITH LENIE VISSERMAN!: JOHAN SANDERS

  YEARS OF TEARS: DONALD DE MARCAS

  THE HIDDEN CHILDREN TODAY

  GLOSSARY

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  FOR MORE STORIES

  ABOUT THE AUTHORS

  COPYRIGHT

  This book tells the stories of fourteen people who had to go into hiding during World War II because they were Jewish. Adolf Hitler, the leader of the Nazi Party in Germany, believed the Jews were the cause of all evil in the world. So they had to be destroyed. My mother was considered to be a part of that “evil.” But she was one of the lucky ones: She was hidden, and she survived.

  At that time — summer 1942 — she was nearly six years old. Even as a little boy, I was curious about the story of her time in hiding. She told me what had happened. The exciting parts and the times when she had been scared or sad made a particularly strong impression on me.

  Later, when I started to look into the experiences of other people who went into hiding, I found out that their stories were all very different. And that many of the people who went into hiding had not survived the war, because someone revealed their location or the Nazis found them during raids. About 28,000 Jews were hidden in the Netherlands. Roughly 16,000 survived and 12,000 were caught or betrayed in hiding. The most famous example is, of course, Anne Frank, whose diary has been read by people all over the world.

  But what did going into hiding actually involve? Where did you go? How did you know who to trust? How did you find money to pay for your hiding place? What did you do when you were frightened? These are the kinds of questions that I asked men and women who are old now but who were young boys and girls during the war. You can read about their experiences in this book. The first story is my mother’s.

  There is a website accompanying the book: www.hiddenlikeannefrank.com. There you can see more photographs, watch short animated clips, and hear a part of each person’s story as it was told to me. You can also learn about other young people who went into hiding, whose stories are not included here.

  In this book, we’ve included a map at the beginning of every chapter that shows the places in the Netherlands where that person went into hiding. Sometimes it was only one address, but it was usually several locations. One of the people in this book hid in more than forty-two different places! There is also an interactive map on the website, where you can click on a dot on the map to hear and see the story that happened in that place.

  Read, look, and listen!

  Marcel Prins

  Rita with her mother, Bertha Degen-Groen, c. 1939

  In 1939, when I was three years old, my father was called up for the army. The camp was located near the Grebbe Line, which was an important point of defense. My mother and I went there on the train twice to visit him. He was out there with a group of soldiers, all of them in uniform, and I remember thinking how strange they looked. They were living in a large farmhouse. Mom and I were allowed to stay overnight in a separate room. I thought it was kind of fun.

  When the war broke out, my father’s regiment had to march toward the Grebbeberg, a hill that was in a strategic position. There was heavy fighting, and lots of men were wounded and dying. My father realized it was going badly, so he grabbed his bike and rode back to Amsterdam. He arrived in the middle of the night, without his rifle and his kit bag. He must have gotten rid of them somewhere.

  My father always liked to know exactly what was going on, so he found a job with the Jewish Council,1 which had been founded in 1941 on the orders of the Germans to represent the Jewish community in the Netherlands. My father was on guard duty when one of the first groups of Jewish people was transported out of Amsterdam. What he saw made him decide to send me into hiding right away. My parents went into hiding that same week. He had already arranged hiding places for all of us, not just for the immediate family but also for his parents and for all of my mother’s brothers and sisters. But they never made use of them. “It won’t be as bad as all that,” they said.

  Soon after my parents went into hiding, their house was “Pulsed,” or cleared out. The Germans had given Abraham Puls and his company the job of emptying the houses of Jews who had gone into hiding or who had been rounded up during a raid.2 We were lucky: Our neighbors, who were good people, had a key to our house, and they took everything they could carry and hid it for us. After the war, we got back our photographs, a set of cutlery, a figurine, and a clock.

  The first address where I went into hiding was in Amsterdam, at my father’s boss’s house. He was Jewish but his wife was not. Mixed marriages3 of this kind seemed relatively safe at first, but it was still risky for them to take in and hide a Jewish child. It was around this time that I began to realize I was Jewish, without really understanding what that meant.

  Before the war, our family had been all kinds of things: vegetarians, followers of holistic healing, and atheists. Of course, we had traditions. We had plenty of them, in fact. We ate matzos at Passover, and my mother would bake gremsjelies, a special Passover cake made from matzos, raisins, almonds, and candied citrus peel. We owned a menorah, a candelabrum used in Jewish worship, and we used to light candles. My mother also used a lot of Yiddish expressions, but that was just normal for me.

  What was not normal was having to leave kindergarten about three months after the war started. The little boy who lived next door was also Jewish, and the same thing happened to him. So we just went back to playing together again, as we had before we started kindergarten.

  I began to get a better understanding of what it meant to be Jewish when my foster parents started discussing my birthday. When I went into hiding, I was five and it was months before my sixth birthday, which I was already looking forward to. My foster father, Walter Lorjé, said, “If anyone asks how old you’re going to be on your next birthday, you have to say five. Never tell them you’re almost six.”

  I thought that was awful. I wanted to be a big girl. “Why not?” I asked.

  “When you’re six,” he replied, “you have to wear a star.”4

  I knew that you didn’t want to have that star on your clothes. My mother had had to wear a star, and it was a nuisance. I was five and I didn’t fully understand what it meant to be Jewish, but I could sense that there was something wrong with it. That feeling grew stronger by the week, especially when the raids started and conversations were often about who had been rounded up and who was still around.

  The Lorjé family, who had taken me in, had three children. The eldest, Wim, was fifteen. We sometimes used to play together with his toy cars. That always made me so happy, because it meant that I could do something with another person for once. I didn’t get to play with friends, saw none of my family, and didn’t go to school. I was very eager to learn, but no one taught me anything. Their daughter Marjo had made me terrified, not of the Germans but of beetles, spiders, dirt, and all kinds of oth
er imaginary dangers. I didn’t dare to flush the toilet anymore because I thought all kinds of things would come whooshing out of it.

  Whenever Aunt Loes, a cousin of Mrs. Lorjé’s, came to visit, I had to go out to a nearby playground. Aunt Loes was married to the man who managed the family’s stationery store. Mr. Lorjé was Jewish, so the Germans had handed over the management of the store to Aunt Loes’s husband. He was called a Verwalter in German, an administrator. Aunt Loes often used to visit the house to discuss the stationery store. If I happened to bump into her, I’d been told to say I was Rita Houtman, who lived across the street. I had to go out and stay in the nearby playground until the coast was clear, and then someone would come for me.

  But one time it was different. Aunt Loes had said she was coming to visit, so Marjo took me to the playground. As she left, she said, “Aunt Loes won’t stay long. You can come home at six.” Of course, she should never have said that.

  In the playground, there was a slide and a merry-go-round that you had to push yourself. I didn’t do that. There were also a couple of swings and a seesaw. But you can’t seesaw by yourself, so I didn’t do that either. I just sat there with my little pail and shovel in the wet sand of an enormous sandbox. All of the other children had gone to school. I just sat there alone in the playground, which was surrounded by a tall chicken-wire fence. After a while, I began to feel cold and thirsty.

  As soon as the church clock struck six, I picked up my pail and shovel and ran home.

  The front door was closed, so I rang the bell. Someone upstairs pulled the rope to open the door. There, halfway down the stairs, was Aunt Loes. She looked at me. “And who might you be?”

  I knew right away that this wasn’t good. “I’m Rita Houtman. I live on the other side of the street. I’ve just come to see if Mrs. Lorjé has some sugar to spare.”

  She turned to Mr. Lorjé, who was standing at the top of the stairs, and said, “Hmm, if I didn’t know better, I’d think that was Rita Degen.” Then she walked past me and out of the house.

  Huge panic. My suitcase was packed immediately, and I was taken to stay with someone in the resistance5 that night. The next day, a woman came to pick me up. “Hello,” she said, “I’m Aunt Hil. We’re taking the train together tomorrow, to Hengelo.”

  Taking the train to Hengelo. That’d be fun. I hadn’t been on a train for ages.

  “Hengelo,” Aunt Hil told me the next day, “is where Aunt Marie and Uncle Kees live. They’re very nice people. And they’re really excited about meeting you. They so want you to come and live with them. They have a little baby too, who’s not even a year old yet.”

  It was a long journey, and by the time we reached Hengelo I knew everything I needed to know. I knew what Aunt Marie and Uncle Kees looked like and that I was going to be living in a corner house with a garden, and I really believed that they were looking forward to seeing me.

  Just before we reached the house, Aunt Hil said to me, “Shall we play a little joke on them? Why don’t you sit down with your suitcase on the sidewalk at the front of the house, and I’ll go around the back? I’ll say to them, ‘I have bad news, I’m afraid. Rita couldn’t come with me after all.’ They’ll be really disappointed, of course. And to make it up to them, I’ll say that I’ve brought them a package and it’s out front on the sidewalk. They’ll go take a look and when they open up the door … Surprise!”

  I thought it was a great idea. Aunt Hil walked around to the back of the house.

  A couple of minutes later, the front door swung open. I could tell that the woman who came to the door was a very nice person. “Oh, Hil!” she said. “You were just teasing me. Rita, how wonderful that you’re here! Come in, come in. Your room’s all ready. And won’t Uncle Kees be pleased when he gets home!”

  At the time, I had no idea that Aunt Hil had actually taken me to her sister’s house. She didn’t have a clue that I was coming, and Aunt Hil had to explain to her first. I had no reason to suspect. The room was beautiful, just as Aunt Hil had said it would be. It wasn’t until long after the war that Uncle Kees told me the room had been prepared for any child who might have to go into hiding, and not just for me.

  Right from the start, I felt perfectly at home at that second address. I didn’t doubt for a moment that I was truly wanted. Aunt Hil, who also stayed for a few days, told Uncle Kees that I was a Christmas baby. “She was born on Christmas Day.” They thought that was wonderful. Uncle Kees pointed at their own baby and said, “Wim will be one when you’re seven.”

  That gave me a real shock! When I was almost six, I’d had to say I was going to be five on my next birthday, so now that I was going to be seven, I should be saying I was nearly six. I thought I was always going to have to fib and keep knocking a year off my age or they’d make me wear a star.

  “Hey, what’s wrong?” asked Uncle Kees, who could see the fear on my face.

  “You can’t say that. You have to say I’m nearly six.”

  “Why?”

  “If I say that I’ll be seven on my next birthday, then I’ll have to wear a star.”

  “You don’t have to wear a star at all,” said Uncle Kees. “From now on, your name is Rita Fonds. You live here with us. You are our little Rita-pie and our little Rita-pie doesn’t wear a star, because no one in our house wears a star.”

  So now I was one of the Fonds family, and not one of the stars. And then I thought: The stars have gone away. That made me feel so good, even though I didn’t know at the time what the stars really meant.

  Rita with her “brother,” Wim, 1944

  But I still felt like there was something strange about me. I didn’t go to school, for example, but had private lessons. They said it was because I hadn’t learned anything yet and I had to catch up. I learned how to read and write in no time. I was really eager to learn, because I wanted to read my parents’ letters and I wanted to write back. It wasn’t because I was really missing them but more because I enjoyed writing. As far as I was concerned, my parents were just snapshots. I had a photograph in my room: They were my mother and father, and I wrote them letters. But it didn’t feel real at all. I never worried about how the letters actually reached my parents. Even after I’d caught up with my lessons, I didn’t ever go to school in Hengelo. Apparently it was too risky in such a small community for a new girl suddenly to turn up at school.

  There were a lot of factories in Hengelo, and the British started bombing the city in 1943. They didn’t want the Germans to be able to use the buildings. So at night we — Aunt Marie, little Wim, and I — often used to huddle together under the stairs. “Don’t be frightened,” I said to Aunt Marie. “If we die, the three of us will go together.” Uncle Kees, who did all kinds of work for the resistance, sometimes used to come and sit with us under the stairs and occasionally there was another person who was in hiding, such as Aunt Marie’s youngest brother, Remmert, who’d been ordered to report for the Arbeitseinsatz.6 Whenever the situation looked dangerous, Uncle Kees would pull up the rug from under the dining table and open the trapdoor, and Remmert would disappear beneath the floor. Then the rug went back and little Wim was placed on top of it, with his building blocks. I remember the Germans coming into the house on two occasions. They were looking for people who had gone into hiding, but all they found were two little blond children playing together.

  At the beginning of 1944, the whole family was evacuated to a house on Kwakersplein, a square in Amsterdam. It was just in time — a week after we left, a bomb fell on the house in Hengelo. In Amsterdam I was able to go to school for the first time. I was just part of the family. There were so many newly formed households that no one tried to work out exactly how all of the family members were related. I attended that school for no more than six months at most. I thought it was wonderful. Finally I was among children my own age. But they were so much better than I was at reciting times tables. I’d never done it before.

  It was in Amsterdam that I first came to understand what could hap
pen if you were Jewish. That came about because of Danny, one of my classmates, a beautiful boy with dark eyes and black curls. We walked to school together every day until, one morning, I rang his bell and his mother came to the door with puffy red eyes. She told me that Danny was staying with someone and wouldn’t be coming to school for a while. Then I suddenly realized: Was she really his mother? His name isn’t Danny Pieterse, I thought, no more than mine is Rita Fonds.

  When the Hunger Winter7 began, our school had to close: There was no heating, no food, nothing. I spent all day out on the streets, looking for something to eat. Aunt Marie fixed my long blond hair into two braids so that I would look like a perfect little Nazi girl. Around the corner from where we lived, there was a food depot next to a small Wehrmacht8 barracks. I used to go there and hang around until a soldier gave me a carrot or a piece of bread.

  When I got home, I would proudly say to Aunt Marie, “Look what I’ve got!”

  “How did you get that?” she’d ask.

  “Well, I don’t say anything to soldiers, but they always come over and start talking to me. ‘Hello there, little miss.’ Imagine if they knew who I was!”

  I used to scour the streets for fuel too. There were small wooden blocks between the tram rails that were perfect for our little camping stoves. It wasn’t allowed of course, but everyone used to take the blocks. You had to be careful while you were doing it, though, because if the Germans spotted you, they would drive up and fire their guns. I wasn’t strong enough to pull the blocks out by myself, but I was small and thin and fast, and I knew how to put that to good use. I used to sneak up behind people who were whipping out the blocks. I slipped between their legs, swiped a block, threw it into my bag, and got out of there as fast as I could.

  In the fall of 1944, before that harsh winter really began, we’d gone to stay with some relatives on a farm near Zaandam for a few weeks. We walked ten miles to get there, all the way from Amsterdam. When you’re eight years old and you haven’t eaten nearly enough, that’s a very long way to walk. When we finally arrived, it felt like we were in heaven. They even had real butter on the farm!