by Marcel Prins
My father’s clothing store was called Hirsch and it was very well-known in Amsterdam: Hirsch on Leidseplein, a major square in the city center. Before the war, people used to come to Hirsch from all over the Netherlands. Twice a year, the salesgirls would call the regular customers: “There’s a new collection. Would you like to come in and see it?” It was a very fashionable store.
I understand that my father didn’t want to leave: The business was very important to him. Running away felt like betraying the business he’d worked so hard to build up and the family he’d done it with.
Hirsch & Co., c. 1947
Soon after the war broke out, in June or July 1940, my father’s brother, who was also a member of the management at Hirsch, made an anti-German speech at the store. When he told us at home that he was going to do it, my mother tried to stop him. “Arnold, you mustn’t do that. There’s no point. It’ll only turn out badly.” But Uncle Arnold did it anyway. He gave his speech in front of the entire staff, some of whom supported the Germans. The next day, the entire management was arrested: Uncle Arnold, my father, and the co-owner, Robert Berg. This was right at the beginning of the war, and my father and Robert Berg had said nothing themselves, so they were released after three weeks. A few months later, when the measures against Jews became stricter, there’s no way that would have happened.
My mother went to the headquarters of the German secret police to try to get Uncle Arnold out. She was in the lion’s den, and that was obviously a huge risk. I should add that my mother was a very beautiful woman, and she made quite an impression on the Germans. One of the men even said, “Sind sie sicher, dass Sie Jüdin sind?”(Are you certain you’re Jewish?)
My mother replied, “Hundert Prozent sicher.”(One hundred percent certain.) There was little they could do to help her, but strangely they didn’t arrest her and they just let her go home. Uncle Arnold was sent to the Buchenwald concentration camp, where he was “auf der Flucht erschossen” (shot during an escape attempt) that same summer. The Germans often used that excuse. It actually meant that the person had been murdered.
A few weeks later, still in the summer of 1940, someone rang our doorbell at ten o’clock in the evening. My mother’s brother, who was living with us at the time, went to see who was there. He shouted through the door and asked who it was.
“We have a letter for Mr. Kahn,” came the answer.
“Just put it through the door,” said my uncle.
“Can’t do that,” they said. “It’s too big.”
So my uncle opened the door. They pushed their way into the house, shooting as they came. “It’s a raid!” my uncle yelled.
My mother immediately locked the door of the front room. I was in the bathroom off the hallway, so I had heard everything, and I didn’t dare move a muscle. My father, who knew where I was, wanted to come to me. “No, no!” my mother cried. “They won’t do anything to her. It’s you they’re after.”
After about five minutes, I started screaming. I was terrified. They smashed the windows in the bathroom door. I put my hands over my eyes. This is the end, I thought, as the glass shattered and fell all around me. Now they’re going to drag me out of here and shoot me dead. They saw me standing there, in the corner of the bathroom. I was fifteen, but I was pretty small for my age. They did nothing, just as Mother had predicted.
They shot everything in the hallway to pieces, and then they ran back out of the house and it was silent.
That raid had a huge impact on us. We really thought they were going to murder my father — and those men were Dutch, not Germans. The next day, the police came, the Dutch police, but they just walked around the place for a while and picked up a couple of bullets. There was nothing else they could do. It was over; it was all over for us. I felt so powerless. No one did a thing to help us.
A few days later, we went to stay with the Boissevain family. They were Hirsch customers who had a hotel in Beekbergen, in the countryside. We stayed there for a few weeks until we felt that things had calmed down a bit and we could return to Amsterdam.
My father went back to work. It was pretty quiet for months, until one afternoon sometime in 1941, when my parents were visiting a half-Jewish friend who lived around the corner from us. The Germans must have seen my parents go into the house. According to the German race laws,24 someone who was half-Jewish didn’t count as a Jew. And it was forbidden for Jews to visit non-Jews, so my parents were arrested. My father was first sent to prison in Amsterdam and then to Westerbork. My mother dug her heels in. “I am not going,” she said. “I have two children at home, two young children. I refuse to go.” It may sound incredible, but it somehow confused the Germans. And so they let her go home. My mother was a difficult woman, and she used to complain about the most trivial things, but the war brought out the best in her: She had to fight for her family, and she realized that other people could rely on her.
The major raids began in 1942. The situation became very dangerous for us. Anyone could be picked up at any moment. But we didn’t dare go into hiding, because we were scared that they would send my father to “the East” as punishment. At the time we didn’t know exactly what that meant, of course, but it was clear that it was a terrible fate.
Thanks to our neighbor, Mr. Saarloos, we were able to stick it out in our own house for a long time. When the Germans no longer allowed Jews to go shopping, he did it for us. There were some NSB members living across the street, so he threw the groceries over the fence at the back of the house.
Saarloos, who worked for the police, warned us one day: “The Germans are coming for you tonight, because they want your house.” We had no choice. We moved immediately and went to stay with Ang van Slooten, a Hirsch employee who did a great deal to help us. We were able to stay there for only a few weeks, as Ang’s husband found sheltering three people very difficult. My mother was scared someone would betray us, and so she decided we should leave.
We moved in with our former babysitter next. We had a really close relationship with her. I was only three months old when she came to work for the family. But her husband was also eager for us to leave. After a week, we went back to Ang’s, where Mr. Kuurman, a former teacher from my elementary school who had joined the resistance, came to fetch us. He was to take us on the train to Doornspijk, a village on the Veluwe River.
We were terrified that we would be spotted at Centraal Station in Amsterdam. My brother lifted his suitcase onto his shoulder to make it impossible for the ticket clerk to see his face. Oh no, I thought, that’s only going to attract more attention. On the train, Mr. Kuurman sat in a different car. If we got caught, he wasn’t with us.
We never saw Mr. Kuurman again, but Ang knew where we were, and she later brought my father to the place where we were hiding in Doornspijk. He escaped from Westerbork with the help of a friend of Ang’s who was a foodwaste collector.
In Westerbork, there was a roll call twice a day. The prisoners were made to stand in orderly lines, and the Germans would check their lists to make sure everyone was still there. My mother had written my father a coded letter saying that he should escape before the evening roll call by crawling under a fence and hiding until the foodwaste man could pick him up.
My father waited until the new moon, so that it would be really dark. Then he made his escape, as arranged, before the evening roll call, and ran to the agreed hiding place. As he was waiting for the foodwaste man, a patrol of Germans and military police came past. One of the military policemen saw my father lying there. They looked each other straight in the eye, but the man didn’t say a word.
The food collector found my father, hid him under the peelings, drove back into the camp, and then left Westerbork as usual by the main entrance, past the guards. Ang went to fetch my father the next day and took him on the train and on a bicycle to the place where we were hiding.
The farmhouse in Doornspijk had two large rooms. In one of them, the upstairs room, the Van Zeeburg family used to drink coffee on Sund
ays, and we spent the whole week in the other room. We hardly ever went outside, mainly because my brother thought it was far too dangerous. Sometimes my mother and I didn’t listen, and we used to sneak out to the field behind the farm. That often caused arguments, but we were too dependent on one another to allow them to go on for too long — and, to be honest, arguing helped to combat the boredom.
My mother and I slept in the big room, while my father and my brother slept in the attic. There were two other people hiding with the Van Zeeburg family, a German-Jewish mother and her son. The son didn’t look at all Jewish. He even used to go out and work as a farmhand. We had very little to do. We used to play cards and read a lot. We had lists of books from the library in Nunspeet, and we marked on the list what we wanted to read. Then the Van Zeeburg family would fetch the books for us, together with all kinds of religious books that they wanted to read themselves. After the war, one of the library staff said she had suspected people were hiding with the Van Zeeburg family. “They suddenly started asking for very different books.”
The family had a grandmother who was in her seventies. The farmer, Beert, was around thirty. He was engaged. Then there was an unmarried female farmer in her fifties and an unmarried half sister. Their married sisters used to come visit too, and they all knew that we were Jews in hiding.
The Van Zeeburgs were not in it for the money at all, but of course we all needed money to live. During our stay, we sold my mother’s fur coat and gave the money to the family. After the war, my parents gave the family a horse cart and a bell for the church tower. My brother requested a Yad Vashem medal25 for them, and they received one.
My brother made a hatch in the attic that opened into the empty space between the floor and the ceiling beneath. No one could see it because the saw cuts were exactly in the gaps between the planks. We used that space a few times, whenever we heard someone come in through the back door or the stable door, which were nearly always open.
It always turned out to be a false alarm — until one afternoon when someone from the resistance warned us that German soldiers were going from farm to farm, looking for British airmen who had been shot down. We raced to the attic and climbed through the hole and crouched down in there, listening as the Germans came into the house and searched every room, floor by floor. One time they actually walked over our hiding place. I was scared to death. That hiding place saved our lives.
One day in April 1945, our neighbor Hannes, who was in the resistance, came by and said, “The Canadians are in Elburg.” My father flew out of the house, with my brother and me right behind him. We had been out there talking for just a moment when we noticed some movement in the straw in the nearby barn. Then two German soldiers came out of the straw, dressed in uniform and fully armed.
“Back inside!” shouted my brother. “Back inside!”
“We’re not going anywhere,” said my father. “We’ve been liberated.”
The German soldiers wanted to surrender, but that wasn’t so easy. The Canadians had already reached Nunspeet, three and a half miles away, but they hadn’t yet made it to Doornspijk, the village where we were in hiding. Farmer Beert went to Nunspeet. A few hours later, he returned with a British officer, who disarmed the Germans. After all those years, it was the most wonderful moment.
The Kahn family just after the liberation, at the Zeeburg family farm
Almost immediately after the entire country had been liberated, my father and my brother returned to Amsterdam to organize housing for us. We couldn’t go back to our house on De Lairessestraat. It was full of policemen, and they weren’t ready to leave. The authorities weren’t particularly helpful. It was more than a year before we could go back to our own home. The few Jews who returned were seen as an administrative nuisance.
Hirsch had been stripped so bare that my father had to start all over again. And that’s exactly what he did. He opened a store on Kalverstraat at first, one of the main shopping streets in Amsterdam. A few years later, we returned to Leidseplein. But it was never as successful as it had been before the war.
That period in hiding was terrible. It was the worst time of my life. Nothing that has happened since has done anything to change that.
I wanted to move on, but it’s been impossible. A few weeks ago, I had to apply for a new passport, as the old one had expired. My cleaning lady said, “Why don’t you just get one of those identity cards? They’re cheaper and you never go on vacation outside Europe these days anyway. A passport’s no good to you.”
“Yes, it is,” I replied. “I need to be able to escape.”
Lies Elion, shortly after the war
My father was a diamond merchant. There were a lot of Jews working in the diamond industry. My parents also had plenty of Jewish friends and acquaintances, but my father thought it was very important for us to be just like everyone else. He didn’t celebrate Jewish holidays, and he didn’t talk about Judaism. In fact, I didn’t know anything about Judaism until one day a friend of mine said, “Hey, you’re Jewish, aren’t you?”
“Jewish, Jewish … What does that mean?”
“My parents think you’re Jewish.”
So I went to my parents and asked them.
“That’s right,” they said. “You’re Jewish.”
“And what’s Jewish?”
“We’re Jewish and our parents were Jewish and so on. So you’re Jewish too.”
I still didn’t understand.
We could tell that the war had broken out from the plumes of smoke above Schiphol, the airport near Amsterdam. Our house was full of panic, threat, fear. What were we going to do? Although he was naturally pessimistic, my father discouraged any reports of bad news, and he got furious when someone said that the war might go on for a long time.
On May 15, we attempted to escape to America by ship. Someone stopped us on the way to the port and said, “The last boat has already gone. You should turn around.” My mother was actually relieved. She found it hard to leave her belongings behind.
At the beginning of the war, not long after the Netherlands had surrendered, a boy from our neighborhood said, “I can’t play marbles with you anymore because you’re Jewish. My mother doesn’t like it.” I was really upset. My parents thought it was terrible. They went to speak to the neighbors, and I never played marbles with that boy again. “Make sure you stay away from him,” said my mother. They never spoke about it again after that.
In 1941, all Jewish children were made to leave their schools and go to a special Jewish school. I didn’t feel at home there among all those children with traditional Jewish backgrounds. I couldn’t read Hebrew, and I knew nothing about Jewish holidays.
To learn more about Judaism, I went to a special class every week where I studied Hebrew. In my first lesson they told me, “You’re holding the book wrong. Books in Hebrew start at the back.” Every week, in the days leading up to my Hebrew class, I used to feel completely miserable. I was the odd one out wherever I went, whether it was with Jews or non-Jews.
More and more children disappeared, including my best friend, Gertie van Berg, with whom I walked to the Jewish school every day. In 1942, I received a farewell postcard from her: “We’re on our way to Poland.”
My sister, Selly, was seven and a half years older than me, and she soon realized that we were in serious danger because we were Jews. As we were washing the dishes one day, she said, “I’ll never let them catch me, because I’m dead if that happens. I’m going to do whatever it takes to keep out of their clutches.” And then she said, “If we survive and you have children, you should name one of them after me, and I’ll do the same. So my daughter will be called Lize Marie, and if you have a daughter you can call her Selly.” I must have given her a funny look — I was only ten at the time.
The threat was coming closer. But our father didn’t want to go into hiding. He didn’t want to put other people at risk.
A lot of Jews were made to move to Amsterdam, so Uncle Dolf, my father’s brothe
r, came to live with us, along with his wife and two daughters. One day, Uncle Dolf was told to report to the headquarters of the German security police. He didn’t go. I noticed that he gave everyone a kiss at breakfast. Then he went out and jumped into the river. His suicide left a huge impression on me. Everyone at home was devastated.
In June 1943, there was a roundup in our neighborhood. The Germans announced their arrival through a loudspeaker. Then some men in uniforms forced their way into our house. We were taken on the tram to the sports field at Olympiaplein. It was only a short ride. There was a woman in front of me with a baby on her lap in a travel crib. “Look,” said my mother. “Such a little one. How terrible that they’re deporting even babies.”
We waited on the sports field for what seemed like forever. Finally they took us to Muiderpoort train station. There were lots of Germans there, walking up and down the platforms, with their guns and dogs. Suddenly my sister said, “Listen, Lies. I’m about to make a run for it. I’ll dash between the train carriages, and then I’ll disappear. Don’t say anything to Mom and Dad, not a word. You mustn’t tell them until the train has started moving.”
I was scared to death. She’s going to get shot, I thought. I’m going to hear a gunshot at any moment. But nothing happened. They made us get on the train. It wasn’t a regular train car but the kind that’s normally used to transport animals. We just stood there, waiting and waiting. Then my mother started to panic, “Where’s Sel? Where’s Sel? Lies, do you know where Sel is?” I didn’t tell her Sel was trying to escape until the train started moving. I found out later that she’d managed to hide behind a platform. Then she went to her boyfriend Mark’s house. Later, in Westerbork, where the train was heading, we received the news that Sel and Mark had gotten married. We knew then that she must have gone into hiding. If you wanted to go into hiding together, you had to be married or you’d never find a family that would take you in.