by Marcel Prins
At one point, some Germans were housed in the minister’s home. They were there to build bunkers, not to track down Jewish people, but I was still terrified. They often used to come into the kitchen with some chickens or a rabbit. The maid and I would prepare it for them. But I refused to eat any of it: I didn’t want to eat anything the Germans had caught or shot. The minister thought that was ridiculous. He couldn’t stand my attitude. He said it would be dangerous for everyone if I refused to eat the food the Germans had brought. That was nonsense, of course. The Germans didn’t eat with us, so there was no way they could see I wasn’t eating their food.
I was so scared when we were living with the minister that I went to see a local doctor. I assumed that, like everyone else in Bergum, he was a good man, not a collaborator. I explained that my sister and I were sleeping in a garden room at the minister’s house. “If the Germans ever raid the house,” I said, “can we try to escape through the garden and come to you?” He said that would be fine. I was looking for a refuge, even though we still didn’t have a clue what was happening to Jewish people in Germany and Poland. We thought you had to work very hard and they didn’t give you enough to eat, so that if you died it was of natural causes. I wrote and told my father how scared I was in that house. Six months later he replied to say that I shouldn’t be scared, but also that it made no sense not to eat their chickens. He said I shouldn’t worry so much. That was a big disappointment. I wasn’t able to talk to my sister about my visit to the doctor or about my fears. She was four years younger than me, after all. I felt so lonely.
Looking back, my fear was understandable. It wasn’t my refusal to eat “German” food that put us at risk. The minister himself was the real danger. Every Sunday he preached from the pulpit about what had been said on Radio Oranje40 that week, even though it was strictly forbidden to have a radio, let alone listen to Radio Oranje. And he talked about us, about the girls who were living in his house because of their sick mother.
It’s hardly surprising that the minister and his family eventually had to go into hiding themselves. That meant that we had to leave too. My sister went with a teacher from Bergum to the island of Schiermonnikoog, where the woman had been born. She was going back to teach there. My sister had a good time on the island. The teacher, Aunt Martha, became a mother figure for her.
A woman from an organization that helped people to find hiding places took me on the back of her bike to a minister in Drachten. A month later, the same woman took me to stay with a young farming couple, where a Jewish boy was already in hiding. He was two or three years older than me, and his name was Bram. When the farmer went to bed, he would say, “Why don’t the two of you stay here for a while?” On one of those evenings, I was introduced to sex. It was terrible. I didn’t like the boy at all, but I did it anyway. I felt so guilty, particularly because I was still thinking about Jacques, the boy from the Jewish School. I knew he’d been deported and that it was by no means certain that he was still alive, but I was ashamed because I had betrayed my own feelings. When it became dangerous to live with the young couple, I went to stay with an older farming couple in Jubbega. They had five children. The youngest, an unmarried daughter, still lived at home. Before the war, they’d been so poor that the farmer worked in Germany on weekdays. His wife was a sweet little old lady with a bent back. Summer and winter, she did the washing at four o’clock on Monday mornings, outside, on an old-fashioned washboard. They had never had much food, they had no comforts, and they had to work like dogs, but during that last winter of the war, when people from the west came knocking at the door to ask if there was anything to eat, they always had something to spare. They would shake their heads in amazement and say, “How is it that those city folk have no food?” They had a cow and a pig by then, so they were no longer as poor as they had once been.
Someone might knock at the door at any moment, and they were terrified that I would be discovered. “Go! Get out of sight!” they would shout when they saw anyone approaching in the distance. So in the daytime, I was only allowed to sit in the barn. It was a big, tall barn that they used for hay. I sat at a table by the door and I read. I left the door to the barn slightly open, for the fresh air, and to let in some light. I was allowed to stretch my legs a little in the evening, and I used to go for walks along the canal.
At night I shared the daughter’s bed. She worked in a library and she brought home all kinds of books for me. So I sat there in that barn, reading books in German, English, and French. It seemed like a good idea, as I knew I’d have to go back to school at some point.
I stayed in Jubbega until the end of the war, and I even started putting on weight while I was there, because all I did was sit around. The place was never raided by the Germans, and I was able to control my fear. After the war though, it was so hard for me to cope that I didn’t even think to thank the family. I still feel really bad about that. They’re long dead by now of course, and their daughter’s most likely passed away too.
I celebrated liberation in Friesland, in the town of IJlst, with Bram (the boy hidden at the farm) and his parents. The Germans had gone, which was wonderful, but I didn’t have much to celebrate, and certainly not with Bram. I still went back to Amsterdam with him later though, to my old flat, which was empty. I was even engaged to him for a while, because our parents said we should.
I can’t remember anything about my reunion with my parents and my brothers. My father asked for a divorce immediately after the war. When I heard, it was as though the floor beneath me cracked right open, like an earthquake. During the war, I thought that everything would be better later, at home and all over the world, and that we would all work together to build a new society. The divorce dashed all of those hopes. I felt completely alone. That feeling lasted for years.
In the years after the war, I became curious about all of my old classmates, particularly Jacques, but I was always too scared to try to find out what had happened to him. It wasn’t until thirty years later that I went to the Hollandsche Schouwburg in Amsterdam, where the Jewish people who died in the war are commemorated on the walls. I discovered that Jacques had been gassed in Sobibor, almost immediately upon arrival.
Johan Sanders, c. 1942
When the war broke out, my father was visiting Paris on business. The weather was beautiful, a glorious summer’s day. It was impossible to believe that there was a war on. As we had no telephone and nobody knew exactly what had happened to my father, the strangest rumors started making the rounds. People were saying, “Oh, Gerard Sanders, he’s run away to Spain.” But by May 14, we heard that he had made his way back to The Hague, having walked and hitched all the way from Paris. Escaping to Spain hadn’t even occurred to him. He was too much of a family man. A few days later, he arrived back home in Enschede.
I come from an orthodox family, and we observed Jewish laws at home. My father was important to our whole family and community. His brothers, sisters, aunts, and uncles all saw him as a man you could rely on when you needed help or advice. On Shabbat we went to the synagogue and then our relatives would come back to our home or we would go visit them. We had to walk, because it was forbidden to ride a bike or drive a car on Shabbat. I never really enjoyed the thought of going to synagogue in the morning, followed by lunch with the family. “Just go,” my mother used to say. “You’ll look back on it fondly when you’re older.” It turned out that she was right. I miss those days even now.
The first major roundup in Enschede was on Sunday, September 14, 1941. We were warned in advance, and so my father was able to avoid capture. On that day, 105 young men from Enschede and the surrounding area were taken from their homes and imprisoned in the school gym. I saw them inside the building. I knew a few of the men, and I was able to pass on messages to some of the families and tell them that their father or their son was at the school.
The next day, all of the men were deported to Mauthausen concentration camp. The first reports of deaths came only two weeks later. O
ne man was “auf der Flucht erschossen” (shot during an escape attempt), while another had caught typhus, and yet another had apparently died of pneumonia. In reality, they were forced to work themselves to death. Two months later, they were all dead. Every single one of them. We knew that because the Germans informed Sig Menko, the chairman of the Jewish Council in Enschede.
As a member of the council, my father went with the chairman to the monthly meetings of the Jewish Council in Amsterdam. At one meeting, Sig Menko stood up and said, “Gentlemen, we can give our people only one piece of advice: Go into hiding.” The meeting was immediately suspended.
“We will not discuss that subject here,” they said. “The words go into hiding are not part of our vocabulary.”
So then Menko said to my father, “Sanders, come with me. We are leaving this meeting, and I will never return. You may come to Amsterdam as often as necessary, to observe. And that will be all. In Enschede we will do what we must, but we will resist whenever we can.”
As my father worked for the Jewish Council, he was given a temporary exemption from deportation. Many of my father’s acquaintances would come to Enschede on the train, walk to our house, which was near the station, come in through the front door, stay for two or three nights, and then disappear through the back door to an address where they went into hiding. It was all coordinated with Reverend Overduin’s resistance group. I thought it was so exciting, a real adventure.
We were actually very curious to find out what would happen when we had to go into hiding ourselves. We knew that we’d have to live in some stranger’s house and do as we were told and eat whatever food happened to be available. The food was sure not to be kosher, which is what we were accustomed to. By then, my sisters and I were the last Jewish children in Enschede. The others had all gone.
On the afternoon of Friday, April 9, 1943, the time finally came: We were taken to the home of a family of strangers. That evening someone collected us from the house. I stayed the night with the Overduin family and my sisters went with another family. The next morning we were all put on the train to Arnhem, about sixty miles to the west. My two sisters traveled in a different train car with the woman who was accompanying them, and I sat elsewhere in the train with a man. When we reached Arnhem, my sisters and I took the bus to another minister’s home. We didn’t stay there long: That afternoon I was told to take the bus to Veenendaal, twenty more miles to the west, where I was to stay with the Van Schuppen family, who owned a well-known cigar factory, Ritmeester Cigars.
When I went to bed that night, I found a sweater in my suitcase with a Jewish star on it. I tried to pull off the star, but there was no point. The fabric beneath it was much less faded than the rest of the sweater, so you could still see the outline of the star. We had to throw the sweater, star and all, into the fire.
During my stay with the Van Schuppens, I was brainwashed: I was no longer Johan Sanders but Johan van de Berg from Rotterdam, where I had lived on Mathenesserlaan. My mother had died during the bombing of Rotterdam, and my father was unable to take care of me.
On Monday evening, April 12, a Mr. Van Dijk came for my sisters. An hour later, Mr. Van Engelenburg came to fetch me and I went into hiding as Johan van de Berg. From one day to the next, I became part of a Christian family. The husband was a night porter at Ritmeester Cigars, where he worked until midnight. There was so much to get used to: my new family, the smell of the house, and the fact that I, an eleven-year-old, had to sleep beside a boy of five, when I’d never shared a bed with anyone before. Every day my foster parents made me play old maid and board games with the little boy, who was called Gert, until I’d had it up to here with old maid. I still detest games like that even now.
House in Veenendaal where Johan hid with the Van Engelenburg family
Although I was much older, Gert saw me as a playmate. He’d always been an only child, but now he had a big brother. In spite of our enforced relationship, we developed a strong bond, which is still intact even now.
I didn’t look particularly Jewish, so I was allowed to go outside and play. The house was on a canal. There were all sorts of little boats on the water and it was great fun to rock around in them. The very first day, I went flying into the water. Headfirst into the duckweed! I had to go straight back home. All I could say to my foster mother was, “Well, that’s one way to dive into hiding!”
She just started laughing and said, “Johan, you shouldn’t have gone on those boats, and you shouldn’t have been rocking around in them.” She treated me like her own son. Every week, she used to put a twenty-five-cent piece in my piggy bank and give me ten cents to buy candy.
The street and canal facing the Van Engelenburgs’ home, c. 1937
After six months with the family, I found that I was covered in nasty sores. I felt really miserable, but I obviously couldn’t go to the doctor. No one could understand how I’d gotten the sores, but they decided that they’d have to treat me themselves. First they made me eat yeast, which they got from the baker. That didn’t do any good. Then my foster mother’s sister — the only one outside the immediate family who knew I was Jewish — came up with an idea. The boy’s never eaten pork in his entire life, she said. Perhaps he’s allergic to it. So they stopped feeding me pork, and the sores went away.
The Van Engelenburg family took me everywhere with them, on visits to their relatives and even to church on Sundays. I went to a Christian school as well, where I had to memorize a psalm verse every week. In church, you always had your psalm book with you. And two peppermints to suck. That’s where I first heard stories from the New Testament.
The family used to pray before eating, “Lord, bless this meal, amen.” I had always worn a keppel41 on my head during prayers. So instead, I used to cross my hands and cover my head. I was so used to doing it that it had become a habit. The family never noticed, because they had their eyes closed, but I would never have done it if there were strangers at the table.
My sisters, who were in hiding nearby, went to the same school as me. I saw them every day in the school yard, but I couldn’t talk to them because no one was allowed to find out that they were my sisters. Whenever I had the chance, I used to give them the cards that I received from my teacher as a reward for reciting my weekly psalm without any mistakes. What was I going to do with them? I thought my sisters might like them. They were a lot younger than me.
Every day I walked to school with my foster brother. One time we saw my sisters on the street. We were walking in one direction and they were going in the other. I was so happy that I couldn’t stop myself. “You see those girls?” I blurted out to little Gert. “They’re my sisters!” His eyes nearly popped out of his head. He never forgot what I’d told him, but he never revealed my secret. That was the only time I ever let my mouth run away with me.
We spent a lot of time playing out on the streets. I remember, when I was about twelve, I sometimes used to wink at my sisters. So there was at least a little contact between us. But once one of the boys laughed and said, “Ha-ha, Johan van de Berg’s in love with Lenie Visserman!” Of course there was no way I could explain that Lenie was my sister.
I stayed with the Van Engelenburg family throughout most of the war, until the beginning of August 1944. One day, during vacation, we were out in the fields as usual, when a local farmer, Squint-Eyed Ot, came striding up to us. He was cursing away and said we’d been walking over his land and had let his chickens out. We’d done nothing of the sort. Then he said to some other people, “That boy who’s staying with Van Engelenburg, I’m going to make sure he gets taken away. He’s not normal, if you know what I mean.” In other words, he’s Jewish.
That lunchtime, I found out that my foster mother’s sister had already told them about the farmer’s threat. They didn’t want to run any risks, so they immediately went into action. After lunch, my foster father put me on the back of his bike and took me to the Van Schuppens so that they could find me another place to hide. That same evening, I
went to stay with a childless married couple, where I became invisible for four or five weeks. I had to stay inside, and I spent whole days reading. But they couldn’t borrow too many boys’ books from the library, because people would have noticed. I learned how to clean vegetables and roll cigarettes when I was staying there. I spent a lot of time alone in my bedroom. I couldn’t even stand at the window, because the people in the house next door were Nazi collaborators.
Fortunately, at the end of August, I was able to leave and go somewhere else, where I was allowed outside. It was a boarding house in Wageningen. I didn’t realize at first, but I later found out that other Jewish people were hiding there too.
I clearly remember September 17, 1944, the day of the airborne landing at Arnhem.42 We sat watching soldiers fall from the sky on the other side of the River Rhine, with weapons, bicycles, and crates of ammunition. We thought the war was almost over then, but we were wrong. There was lots of serious fighting near Arnhem, and large numbers of people had to evacuate the area.
I was taken from the boarding house and ended up staying with Reverend Boer, a Protestant minister from Bennekom. Until the end of the war, I moved from place to place with him and his family. Of the couple’s six children, only the eldest had survived: Jacob, a boy my age. He was extremely well behaved. One afternoon we raided the homemade plum jam supplies in the basement. Later, when his mother put the jam on the table, Jacob started crying.
“Jacob, why are you crying?” his mother asked.