by Marcel Prins
Westerbork transit camp, c. 1943. On the left, a train carrying deportees has arrived.
When we arrived at Westerbork, we were taken to a large room, where lots of people were crammed in together. My father was worried that they’d find the diamonds he’d hidden on himself. He thought children wouldn’t be searched, so he asked me to hide the diamonds in my underwear. I didn’t want to do it, and I thought it was a really strange thing to ask. I have no idea what he actually did with the diamonds.
We were in Westerbork for three weeks. Then we heard that we had to go back to Amsterdam. I had no idea what was going on. We’d left in a cattle car and now we were returning to Amsterdam on a regular train. And my father didn’t explain to me that we were going back because he’d been placed on a list of important diamond merchants. That meant he’d been given a Sperre, a temporary exemption from deportation. He rarely explained anything to me. I became angry about that later, when I had children of my own.
“Why did you never tell me anything?” I asked him.
“You were too young to understand. That’s why I didn’t tell you anything,” he replied.
My sister was in hiding with Mark, her husband. They were living at a friend’s house but, after just a few weeks, the friend said, “You’ll have to leave because we’re going on vacation.” They quickly looked for another place to stay. Mark’s mother found somewhere, but the address proved to be unreliable, and someone gave them away to the Germans. They ended up in the Hollandsche Schouwburg, where the Germans found our details in her address book. So my father, mother, and I were picked up again, because the exemption from deportation was automatically withdrawn if someone in your family had been labeled as a criminal, which happened to people who were caught trying to escape or hide. We were taken to the Hollandsche Schouwburg as well. Like many other children, I ended up in the kindergarten on the other side of the street. Some people from the resistance tried to help me go into hiding. They pulled me through the hedge into the school next door and someone said, “We have a good address for you.” I put up a fight. “I don’t want to go!” I yelled. I was scared that my parents would be punished for my escape. The next day, when I went to see my parents during visiting hour, I found out that they knew about the escape attempt.
“What’s wrong with you?” they said. “You could have gotten away, couldn’t you?”
“But I didn’t want to go.”
As they were “criminal offenders,” Sel and Mark were kept far away from my parents inside the Hollandsche Schouwburg, somewhere on a balcony on the third floor. We only got to speak to her once. When she was in the sickroom with a bladder infection, the Germans gave us permission to visit her briefly. She told us that someone had offered to help her escape and that, like me, she’d refused because she was scared it would put others in danger. So both of us had chosen not to escape. Soon after that, she was deported with Mark — first to Westerbork, and later to Auschwitz.
“Prisoners” in the yard at the Hollandsche Schouwburg, 1942
My parents and I made it out of the Hollandsche Schouwburg. I still don’t know how. There was probably some bribery involved. When we got back home, the tension between my parents increased. My mother thought my father should have done more for Sel, that there must have been something he could have done. She thought he’d waited too long.
On the morning of September 29, I was walking to school at around eight thirty. Halfway there, I bumped into Mrs. Van Woerkom, who had been renting a room in our house. She was delighted to see me, and she hugged me really tight. “Lies, Lies, are you still here? There’s been a raid in your neighborhood.” She ran back home with me. It turned out that the Germans had missed our house. They’d simply forgotten about us.
She practically had to force my parents to go into hiding. “You absolutely have to leave. Now! You can’t stay here even one more night.” She knew a woman called Mrs. De Swaan who lived on Stadionkade, and was sheltering a number of Jewish children. She went to her and told her it was an emergency.
Mrs. De Swaan said we could go to her house right away, but that we couldn’t stay there, because she was expecting more Jewish children. So Mrs. De Swaan got in touch with Uncle Hannes. My mother had such a terrible shock when Hannes Boogaard came to the house, with his scruffy clothes and his stubbly chin. The plan was for him to take me on the bus to a hiding place. “I’m not sending my daughter away with him,” said my mother. “That’s simply not going to happen.”
“I won’t sit next to her on the bus,” said Uncle Hannes. “I’ll sit at the back, and Lies will be right up front. I won’t have anything to do with her.”
I went with Uncle Hannes. I was leaving home for the first time — and I found it very difficult. I was really worried about my parents too.
At Hannes Boogaard’s farm, he gave me the place of honor. “You come and sit here beside me.” He comforted me and tried to cheer me up. Later he showed me a whole bed full of children, all of them in hiding. “You see why you can’t stay here?”
Uncle Hannes’s son Teun took me to another address nearby. When the people came to the door, they were really indignant. “Who’s this you’ve brought?” they said. “We asked for a girl of at least seventeen, didn’t we? We want a housemaid, not a little girl.”
“I’m sure she’ll be perfectly capable of helping around the house,” said Teun.
Although I’d never done any housework before, I played along. “I’m good at peeling potatoes and good at cleaning,” I said. They let me stay. I was given a tiny little bedroom and had no contact with the only other child in the house. They made me work as their maid and they really made me work hard: In addition to my daily chores, they wanted me to dust and wax all of the furniture once a week. That meant that everything had to be moved — and it was all so heavy! I used to cry myself to sleep every night.
My only comfort was my friendship book, which accompanied me throughout the whole war. It starts with happy little poems and pictures, when life was still good. My uncle was the first to write in the book, in January 1940, a few days after I received it. He was followed by other uncles, aunts, and friends, all the way up to the middle of 1942. The poems were nothing special. Boys would write something like, “Oh, say, take a look, my name’s in your book.” One Jewish girl wrote, “To every child that is born the Lord gives a guiding light, to lead them and to comfort in the darkness of the night.” They were clichés that we copied from one another, but during the war I became very fond of them.
One day someone from the resistance came to our door. “The child has to leave. Right now. They’re doing a roundup.” With my apron still on, I jumped onto the back of his bike. When we reached the town of Hillegom, he said, “I have a surprise for you.” He’d taken me to the place where my parents were staying, with the Ten Hoope family.
“Listen,” said Mrs. Ten Hoope, “the child can’t stay here. All I have is a place in the attic, but there are rats and mice up there.”
“I’d rather put up with mice and rats than have to leave,” I said. My parents agreed. They wouldn’t let me go. Upstairs in the attic, I could constantly hear scuttling noises, but I wasn’t scared. I was just relieved that I could stay there and be with my parents.
We spent most of our time upstairs. Occasionally we were allowed downstairs. When there were unexpected visitors, the family used to chase us into an old-fashioned closet under the stairs, where we stood and waited, huddled closely together, until the visitor left, which was often a long time. It was pretty cramped in there. What was really amazing was that their little boy, who wasn’t even three years old at the time, used to call to us, “Uncle Co, Aunt Bert, you can come out now.” He was so small, but that little boy still knew exactly when to keep quiet and when he could tell us to come back out.
We had to leave that place too. The family sold homegrown tobacco, which was absolutely forbidden. They thought someone had given them away, and so the police might arrive at the door at any momen
t. We went to a new address in Hillegom, which we had to leave in a hurry when someone was arrested for smuggling and our address was found in his diary. Panic! There was no new place for us to go. We didn’t even have false identity cards, but everyone called me Lies Evers, and I wasn’t allowed to say my own name.
In desperation, my father just walked into a hotel, where he explained the situation to the hotel owner and asked for a room. The man let us stay, on the condition that we behaved like regular hotel guests and didn’t hide away in our room. So we ate in the dining room, like everyone else. It was all going fine, until one day an SS officer sat down at the table next to ours. We were so anxious that we could hardly eat a bite. We didn’t dare look at him, but just stared down at our plates. Nothing happened. He just paid, and he left. I’m still proud of my father for having the courage to go into that hotel.
Around ten days later, the resistance found a new place for us, with Mrs. Wisse, a widow with two daughters who were in high school. I used to borrow books from them so that I could read and learn something. Mrs. Wisse was a seamstress, and my mother used to help her with hems and seams. She spent every day in Mrs. Wisse’s sewing room, altering countless hems and seams.
In the evenings we were allowed out into the yard for some fresh air. We used to walk around in circles for exercise and to stay warm. There was a large container of rabbit food in the middle of the yard and, as he walked past, my father would run his hand through the food and take some. “Mmmm,” he used to say. “What a delicious meal!” He made a big joke of it, but he was simply hungry.
One day, when we were in our room upstairs, my father said, “Take this piece of paper and keep it somewhere safe. There’s an address on it for a man from the resistance. We’re going to hand ourselves in.”
I was astonished. “What’s going to happen to me?”
“You can stay here. You’re in good hands. We’re going to turn ourselves in, so we can be in Westerbork with Sel.”
I headed downstairs with the piece of paper in my hand. Halfway down the stairs, I started screaming and Mrs. Wisse came flying, “Whatever’s wrong?”
I told her what was going on and handed her the piece of paper. She was furious with my parents. She really yelled at them. She finished by saying, “This is not going to happen!”
Although my parents didn’t hand themselves in, I’ve never been able to get over that incident. How could they even think of leaving me behind?
During the war, I clung to the idea that Sel would escape again, because everything had gone so well for her the first time, back at Muiderpoort Station. She was out there somewhere, I thought. Maybe she’d found a place to hide in Germany. “I’ll never let them catch me,” she’d said.
My parents argued a lot during the months at Mrs. Wisse’s. My mother still blamed my father for not having done enough for Sel, and my father felt that wasn’t fair.
“I can’t take this arguing any longer,” Mrs. Wisse said one day. We had to leave. She thought it was becoming too dangerous. That’s what she said. In reality, there must have been another reason, because after we left she took in another Jewish family.
We moved in with the Pos family next, where some other people were already hiding. That was nice, particularly for my father, because he could discuss the war with them. This was the winter of 1944. There was a famine, but there was also hope that the war was coming to an end.
We stayed there for a number of weeks, until Mrs. Pos said to my mother, “There’s something I need to say to you. This is difficult, but I think you’d better find another place to stay.”
“Why?” said my mother.
“It’s your husband. He always looks so gloomy. We can’t stand the sight of his miserable face any longer.”
That was a real blow for my father. It was impossible for him to change his face. The gloominess was all part of his character, and it was also the situation, of course. He couldn’t stand having to hide away like that.
But my mother had a bright idea. One afternoon, Mrs. Rooyakkers had come to visit, a friendly woman who lived three or four houses down. We knew she wasn’t a collaborator, because we’d been allowed to talk to her. My mother went to visit her. “I have a strange request,” she said, “and you must give me an honest answer. We’ve been told to leave, and we don’t know what to do.”
“Fine. You can come to our house. Our doors are open wide. But we have five children. Come upstairs with me. I’ll show you our supply of beans.”
She took my mother upstairs. It wasn’t much food for so many people. “This is all we have to get by with, for all of us. It’s all the food we have. Is that all right with you?”
We moved in with them. The first night, Mr. and Mrs. Rooyakkers let my parents sleep in their bedroom. “You must get a good night’s sleep,” they said.
When I visited Cor Rooyakkers many years later in the retirement home, I asked her why she took us in when there was so little food in the house. “Lots of children had measles at the time,” she said. “And I thought: If I take in that family, then perhaps God will see that my children don’t catch measles.”
It was a simple laborer’s house, with the dunes on one side and the other side looking out over the bulb fields where the flowers grew in the springtime. We ate a lot of mashed bulbs while we were there.
My father hardly ever went outside, but when the beans finally ran out, he took a wheelbarrow to a nearby farm. He let me go with him. He swapped his wedding rings for a load of wheat. We came back to the house with a full wheelbarrow, and the Rooyakkers family was delighted. My father was pleased that he could do something to help them for once.
Gradually the threat lessened and my parents allowed me to play in the dunes with the local children. “Doesn’t Lies have a funny walk!” they said the first time I went out. “And she can’t run at all.”
“Is that any surprise?” said Aunt Cor. “She’s spent years indoors. This is the first time she’s run.”
My father started teaching me. He taught me French and English. He wanted me to go to a good school after the war, the Amsterdams Lyceum. A math teacher even used to visit the house to help me prepare.
When, one morning, news of the liberation reached us, my father walked in his slippers to De Zilk, a nearby village. He couldn’t believe what he’d heard. He saw the notices nailed to the trees that said we’d been liberated, and he brought one home with him. An hour later, we were standing by the fireplace, and he said, “Lies, from now on, you’re not called Lies Evers anymore. Your name is Lies Elion.”
After those first joyful days, we went back on the boat to Amsterdam. As we heard more stories about the camps, we began to realize that Sel and her husband would never return.
When I heard the newspaper arrive, I used to sneak downstairs to see if there was any news about the camps. If I found anything, I would tear out the page and hide it. “Hey,” my mother would say, “there’s a page missing.” I didn’t want her to read about the horrors.
On Friday evenings, friends or the occasional relative who had also survived the war would come visit. There was always a strange atmosphere in the house on those occasions. We didn’t dare speak out loud about what had happened. Women would whisper behind their handkerchiefs about who had come back from the East and who hadn’t.
I often tried to make my parents feel better and to be a replacement for my sister. But it was impossible. Sometimes I used to say, “Look, you’ve still got me.”
My mother’s reaction was, “You don’t say to someone whose leg has been amputated, ‘Just be happy you still have the other one,’ do you?” She must have said that four or five times.
Nothing was allowed in our house anymore. No parties, no Sinterklaas.26 My only cousin on my mother’s side felt so sorry for me that he bought me a present once. He thought he should tell my parents before he gave it to me. “I’m coming to visit at Sinterklaas,” he said, “to bring by a few presents.”
They gave him an ea
rful. “We don’t celebrate Sinterklaas, and we don’t want you here.”
At the New Year, they went to bed extra early and left me on my own. I went in to wish them a happy New Year at midnight, but they threw me out of their room: “We don’t do that anymore.”
Only remaining photograph of the complete Elion family, c. 1936. All others were lost or destroyed.
I had five children myself. Thank goodness they were all boys. Whenever I was pregnant, I couldn’t help remembering what my sister had said — that we would name our daughters after each other if we survived the war. My mother couldn’t have coped with a granddaughter called Selly. It would have been really hard for me too.
Much later I made an imitation friendship book to help me process my wartime experiences. I wrote poems about the happy months of the prewar period and then the dark years of the war and how it really felt to go into hiding. I wrote about the sadness after the war but also how delighted my parents were later with my children and what a great comfort that was for me. I felt that I had been able to make their lives a little better by having children. The book has now become a sort of family history in verse.
It was a drawing my sister did that prompted me to create that book. She decided that she wanted to write something in my friendship book. She’d already done a drawing on one page and she was going to write a poem on the other page. She never had the chance. The drawing was a portrait of me. She asked me, “Liesje, do you think it looks like you?” and I wrote those words beneath the picture. But I left the other page blank, because that’s how it has to be. I can’t finish it for her.