by Marcel Prins
“It wasn’t difficult,” I said. “The door was open.”
“Yes, we don’t lock that shed. You can stay in the house with us today, but make sure the farm workers don’t see you. You’ll have to leave when it gets dark.” I understood that he didn’t have the courage to take a Jew into his home, and at least I had a chance to sleep that day. I was able to warm up, and he gave me some food to take with me.
Then I went back to Nieuwe Pekela, to Hayo Kampion. He was a Jewish man, but he was married to a non-Jew, and so he was left alone. I knocked on the door, and Hayo answered. “Ah, come on in, son. Everyone’s been saying you’re in England.”
“If only! No, I’m still here.”
Kampion gave me some new clothes, which had belonged to his unmarried brothers who had already been taken away.
Another series of addresses followed. Finally I found myself with the Beuker family in Stadskanaal, a town just south of Nieuwe Pekela. They made me very welcome.
“You can milk and feed the cows, and work with the machines during the daytime.” They gave me a decent place to sleep. I hadn’t had it so good for ages.
A week later, the residential part of the farm buildings was requisitioned.36 It wasn’t so that Germans could live there but for NSB members who had come back from Germany. They’d hoped that the Germans would welcome them, but no one wanted them. “We’ll board up a corner of the attic for you,” said Beuker. “It may be for just another three weeks. By then the Germans will have lost the war.”
I was up in that attic for fourteen days, in a wooden box that they’d built along the slope of the roof. It was dark up there, and I had a bucket to do my business in. One evening they came to fetch me. The NSB people were out for the evening, so I could have a wash and eat with the family. At dinner I said to them, “I can’t stand it up there any longer. I want to leave.”
“If you really want to go, I know an address for you. I’ll go ask right now.”
Fifteen minutes later, he returned, “Get your bike and your things. I’m taking you to the Drenth family. There’s already a Jewish family there: a man, a woman, two children. You know them.”
The Drenth family’s house
The Jewish family staying with the Drenths turned out to be another uncle of mine, who was there with his wife and two children. I knew them well. But it wasn’t a warm family reunion. They immediately made it clear that I wasn’t welcome, that I was an intruder in their world, a room of just over two hundred square feet, which they would now have to share with me, night and day. After only a few days, we had an argument about the lessons he was teaching his children. It was nonsense. He was teaching them half German, half Dutch. We were both really angry, but then his wife said, “Nico, just let him do it instead.” So I started teaching the children math, Dutch, geography, and history, using schoolbooks that one of the Drenths’ daughters brought home from her school.
One evening, Mr. Beuker came to the house. He showed me a letter about the children of the uncle I’d been on the run with at first. They had to leave the place they were staying in Amsterdam. The money had run out. It was almost impossible for them to get hold of food and drink. “What should I do?” Beuker said.
“You’ll have to ask Drenth,” I said. “He’ll know how to handle it.”
Beuker went into the back room to discuss it with Drenth. I followed him, because I wanted to see what would happen. Father and Mother Drenth looked at each other and nodded. “You just bring them here.”
Well, that really upset the uncle who was already there. He said there wasn’t enough room for so many people, it was too dangerous, etcetera, etcetera. Until Mother Drenth looked at him and said, “These are your brother’s children we’re talking about.” That shut him up.
Other people came to stay at the Drenths’, including my sister, who had been hiding in henhouses with my parents, out in the countryside. But there was a raid and my parents were picked up. We never saw them again. My sister had been able to make a run for it just in time. She had a very good set of false papers that said she was a maid. She soon found it too cramped in that small space with us. She didn’t look very Jewish, and so she was used to going wherever she pleased. She left us and went out to work for various families instead.
Bennie’s parents with his sister Rebekka in the town of Voorthuizen, where they hid in a henhouse. They were betrayed in August 1943.
At one point, there were fourteen of us sharing those two hundred square feet. There were only two beds in the room, so at night we put sacks of straw and blankets on the floor. We got up early and kept to a strict schedule for washing and dressing, and we tidied the room before we went to bed so that it wouldn’t become a complete chaos.
Every morning Drenth used to fetch two big buckets of water from the canal that ran past the house. The farm had no electricity, no running water, and no indoor toilet. We washed ourselves with water from the canal in a bedroom with a washbasin and an old-fashioned jug. During the daytime you couldn’t go to the bathroom because you had to go through the whole house. We used a bucket instead. When the chairs were arranged around the table and everyone had washed, then we would each have a slice of bread for breakfast.
The Germans never raided the farm. They didn’t become suspicious because Father Drenth had come up with a clever plan. He saw an advertisement in the newspaper one morning from a NSB office that was looking for a junior clerk.
“You’re going to apply for that job tomorrow,” he said to Lammie, his eldest daughter. Then he went to see an old friend of his, an NSB member with whom he still got along well. “Listen,” he said, “could you explain to the people at the NSB office that my daughter has to have that job? She doesn’t have any work, and we’re not going to be able to manage at home for much longer.”
She got the job, and the wages too. That office was where they planned the raids. And that’s why we never had a raid at our house. Everyone in the village knew where Lammie worked. That made them suspect that the Drenths were Nazi sympathizers, and they would never have imagined that Jews were hiding at the farm. Their suspicions must have grown stronger after the director’s wife, Mrs. Vuurboom, said to Lammie, “Your mother must often be alone at home when your father’s out at work. I’d like to go over and have a cup of tea with her. It’d be nice to chat with someone for a while.”
“Then let her come,” said Mother Drenth to her daughter. “Invite her for the day after tomorrow.”
So Mrs. Vuurboom came to visit. She was sitting no more than ten feet away from our hiding place, drinking tea. And she just kept on chattering away, even after Mother Drenth should have started preparing the food. The local farmers had seen that woman come into our house, so now everyone was sure to think that the Drenth family were Nazi sympathizers.
Everyone except for one neighbor. One sunny day she saw Mother Drenth hanging out the washing. She came over and said, “You mustn’t do that. All of those things you’re hanging up there don’t belong to just your family. There’s no need to tell me what’s going on in your house, but you need to take that washing down, because if I can see it, other people can see it too.”
Around that time, in the middle of 1943, I started getting to know Lammie better. She used to run errands for us sometimes. Once in a while she would take a list to Groningen to do shopping. We would give her some money, and she would set off with a suitcase. She brought all kinds of things back to the house.
From half past eight in the morning until midday, I kept the children occupied with schoolwork, but you had to entertain them somehow after that was finished. One day Father Drenth and I made a mouse cage out of glass and wood. But we didn’t have any mice, so Lammie went to Groningen to get some. The mice went in the suitcase, together with all the other shopping she’d done that day, including some cake. The journey from Stadskanaal to Groningen was a long one, as it was an old-fashioned slow train. And on the way back, the mice nibbled away inside the suitcase. There wasn’t a crumb left
of the cake!
On her trips to Groningen, Lammie’s old school friends beat her up a few times, as they couldn’t stand her going around with an NSB badge on her coat. When she got home, she was covered with bruises and her clothes were crumpled and torn. Her parents were too busy to worry too much about her. So we spent time together and we comforted each other. In that small space I shared, there were three married couples, two of them with children, but, like Lammie, I was on my own. I gave her a shoulder to cry on. When you’re comforting someone, you touch, and sometimes things happen. We fell in love and then we had a new problem: Lammie was pregnant. Mother Drenth thought it was dreadful, absolutely terrible. Her father had a more practical attitude. “As long as you get married later, when this is all over, it’s fine by me.”
We could hardly buy any things for the baby. Everyone knew Lammie was working for the NSB, so shopkeepers refused to sell anything to her. Finally we found one company, where the Drenth family had never spent a penny before, that was prepared to sell things to them. They bought diapers, baby clothes, a crib, and all the necessary bits and pieces, for not too much money.
The birth, on December 10, happened in the living room. The doctor, Father and Mother Drenth, and I were all there with Lammie. When our daughter came into the world, she immediately started screaming so loudly that it woke up all the children in the house. Of course they knew what was going on; they’d noticed Lammie getting rounder. We fetched them out of bed that night to show them the baby. That set their minds at rest and all five of them went back to sleep.
After the war, we got married, just as Father Drenth wanted. Our eldest daughter is now sixty-five.
May 8, 1945, Bennie and Lammie’s wedding day. Mr. and Mrs. Drenth (sitting on either side of Bennie and Lammie) with all of the Jews hiding in their home, and Mr. and Mrs. Brouwer, resistance workers who provided money and ration cards, back row, fourth and fifth from the right.
Michel with his sister Hansje, c. 1940
My father had a wholesale business selling curtain fabrics. When he was traveling, I was sometimes allowed to share my mother’s bed and do the shopping for her. It made me feel really close to her: I was the eldest son, the firstborn. My grandfather, my mother’s father, lived with us. My grandmother had died in 1927 at a relatively young age. At that time it was fairly common to take in an elderly father to live with you. But that led to conflicts, because my grandfather and my mother were strict about following Jewish laws, while my father was not. Obviously everything in our house was kosher, but there were lots of other rules as well. For example, you weren’t allowed to tear anything on Shabbat. So the mail remained unopened, and we had sheets of torn-off paper ready in the bathroom. We also had a Christian maid who turned on the lights in the house on Shabbat, because we weren’t allowed to do that either.
When my father came home, he had to adapt to his father-in-law’s religious views, which frequently annoyed him. He was far more relaxed about the rules. When he was out, he even ate pork, which is forbidden by Jewish dietary laws. On Saturdays I went with my father and grandfather to shul.37 I was making good progress in my Hebrew lessons, partly because of the cookies in the shape of Hebrew letters that we got as a reward. When my Hebrew was good enough, I was allowed to read out a section of the Talmud38 in the synagogue. I idolized my grandfather; he played a much larger role in my life than my father, who may not have been such a stickler for the rules of the faith but was still fairly strict about my upbringing. When my father came home from a business trip, he would ask me how I had behaved. And if I’d done something that was not allowed, then he would give me a scolding and sometimes even punish me.
Shortly before the war broke out, my father was thinking about emigrating to America. He already had the papers for the crossing with the Holland-America Line at home. But my grandfather wouldn’t hear of it, and my mother was against the idea as well. After 1940, an administrator was assigned to my father’s business, someone who took over the management of the company on behalf of the Germans. And although my father was a member of the Jewish Council and so he had a provisional exemption from deportation, he realized that we would not be safe for much longer.
When we had to start wearing the Star of David, in May 1942, my father decided to take some practical steps. He had my grandfather admitted to an old folks’ home. We thought he would be safe there — no one expected that the Germans would also send older people to Germany. Everyone said they sent you to labor camps, and we couldn’t imagine what use they might have for old people there. At the beginning of the war, I didn’t think too hard about all the things that Jews were no longer allowed to do. As a little boy, I actually thought it was exciting to wear the Star of David. Sometimes my sister and I would turn our coats inside out so that we could buy candy at a store where it was illegal for Jews to shop.
At some point in September 1942, Guus Schraven came to visit us. He was a business associate of my father’s. I don’t know exactly what they discussed, but my father said, “You’re going with Uncle Guus now, on the train. You have to go into hiding. Amsterdam has become too dangerous.” There’d been a lot of talk about hiding in the previous weeks, but it still came as an unwelcome surprise. I knew that it meant we were going to be apart. Father and Mother told me that I absolutely must not mention my real name on the train or at my new address. “From now on, your name is Maurice Jansen.” It was only temporary, and I knew that it was necessary.
I stayed with Uncle Guus in the north of Limburg for a few days and then he took me to a priest in Grubbenvorst. This priest found places to hide for lots of non-Jewish children from the west of the country, and later also Jewish children. He sent them to poor farmers who accepted money for taking in boarders. He found a place for me with the Theelens, a farming family with three children. He told them I was a boy from the city and that I’d come to the countryside to improve my health. That sounded entirely believable, as I was so skinny. The Theelens were rather doubtful at first, not because they didn’t want to take in a little boy they didn’t know, but because they thought I would feel out of place. They were just poor farmers, and I came from a well-off family. “How can we take care of a little boy like that?” they wondered.
I soon became used to life on the farm. I made friends with their son, Bert, who was a couple of years younger than me. The boys from the village were our playmates. We used to play soccer together, ride around in carts, fly kites, and hide among the tall asparagus plants. We also often used to wander over to an old ruin where we would wait in the dark to see the witte wieven, patches of mist that swirled up as the evening cooled and looked like ghosts. We ran free, as though the war were far away.
The Theelen family’s farm
The rest of my family had also gone into hiding by then. They were all in the province of Limburg, but in different places. One day, at about one o’clock, my father appeared on the doorstep, pushing a bike. The weather was fine, and he took me out for a ride on the back of his bike. I remember getting off the bike at one point and sitting with him on the roadside. He hugged me tight. I felt closer to him than I ever had been in Amsterdam. At the end of the afternoon he took me home. “I’ll be back again soon,” he said.
But, not long after that, someone gave away my father’s location and he was arrested. They took him away, and we never heard from him again.
After my father’s arrest, the priest thought he should inform the Theelen family about my Jewish background. The Germans might be able to use my father to find out the address of the place where I was hiding. “If you think it’s too dangerous to keep Maurice with you,” he said, “I’ll find a place somewhere else for him.”
“Maurice is here with us. We love him, and he’s going to stay here,” said Farmer Theelen. They knew now that they were looking after a child who was in mortal danger.
They made sure that I knew not to go shooting my mouth off to outsiders. That didn’t apply so much to the neighbors; I think they knew what
was going on. Maybe even the whole village suspected I was a Jewish boy in hiding. There were lots of other people hiding in Grubbenvorst too.
The Theelens warned me particularly about the local policeman, who was probably an accomplice of the village’s NSB mayor. In all those years, he spoke to me only once. It was at a party. Suddenly he was standing beside me.
“You’re not really Maurice Jansen, are you?”
“What do you mean?” I asked. “I’m Maurice Jansen, and I’m staying with the Theelens.”
He never asked me any more questions after that. He probably didn’t want to make himself unpopular in the village.
Even so, after my father’s arrest, they still thought it would be safer if I went away for a while, to the place where my sister was in hiding. Farmer Theelen took me there on his bike. It was still light when we left. We rode along a railroad line for what seemed like forever. I had to sit on the back of his bike for more than twelve miles, and I was freezing, because it had become damp and cold as evening fell.
At about nine o’clock, we reached the house of the Simons family. Father and Mother Simons were sitting in the living room. Mr. Simons stood up, walked over to me, held my head in his hands, took a good look, and said, “You know, I can see it. You look just like your sister.” My sister was already asleep, and they didn’t wake her up. They gave me a room in the attic, where I spent the next few weeks, almost the entire night and day.
There were eight children in the family and only the eldest two knew that I was there. In the evening, after the other children had gone to bed, they came up to the attic with my sister. That was the high point of the day. I always looked forward to it.