by Marcel Prins
“Johan and I have already eaten some,” he sobbed. But fortunately she didn’t punish us.
I had to play games with Jacob too. We usually played chess, and when I won, he went down into the basement to cry. We never became real friends, but I still had to share a bed with him. He always used to slide over to my side of the bed. One evening, I found a hatpin, and when he sprawled onto my half, I jabbed him with it. “Mommy, Mommy, Johan stabbed me,” he yelled.
My first foster mother walked from Veenendaal to Renswoude a few times to visit me. One evening she arrived on the doorstep unexpectedly, and I was allowed to spend a few hours alone with her. I have such wonderful memories of that day; the two of us had formed a special bond.
When the Germans took over the rectory where we were living, we had to leave once again. As we traveled to our new temporary home, we saw more and more Germans trudging along with bowed heads, on their way back to their homeland. Soon after that, liberation came. Finally I could stop being scared.
A few days after liberation, my first foster father, Uncle Gert van Engelenburg, came up to me in the street. We’d kept in touch, and he knew where to find me.
“Johan, I’ve come to fetch you.”
“To fetch me?”
“Yes, I have some news for you. Your mother’s returned.”
He lifted me onto the back of his bike and cycled to Veenendaal. As we approached the house, he gave me a nudge. “Look, here comes your mother.”
She was older. I was older. We wanted to hug each other. I tried to hold her. She tried to hold me. But it felt very different from what I’d been dreaming about for so long. The two of us walked together to the house where my sisters were staying.
Some other people had moved into our house, which was next to the factory where my father had worked. They stayed there and it was October 1945 before we were given another house to rent. That was when we were really reunited as a family, but still missing my father. My sisters and I had gone into hiding on April 9, 1943, my mother on April 11, and my father on April 12 — a day too late. Apparently someone had betrayed him. Still we hoped for months after the war that he would return, that he might have escaped to Russia. That was until the Red Cross confirmed that his date of death had been registered as February 28, 1945. He was last seen in Gross-Rosen, a concentration camp in Poland.
We had nothing left and had to go looking for our furniture and the rest of our belongings. One day, Mother remembered that my father used to have a cow. During the war, he’d asked a farmer who worked at his factory to keep the cow in his barn in exchange for milk from the cow three times a week. My mother asked the farmer what had happened to the animal. “Oh, yes, that cow,” he said. “It died. But what a pity your husband didn’t come to stay on the farm himself, because then you’d still have him.”
When my foster mother went into a nursing home many years later, Gert, my foster brother, had to clear out his parents’ house. He asked me, “Is there anything you’d like to have as a keepsake?”
“Yes, there is,” I answered, “but I don’t dare ask.”
“Ask away.”
“The clock,” I replied.
“Well,” he said, “the clock’s going to the home with my mother, but when she passes away, then it’s yours.”
She died a few years later. After the funeral we went back to the nursing home for a bite to eat and a cup of coffee. Gert went to her room, took the clock from the wall, and handed it to me.
The clock used to hang in the living room of the house in Veenendaal where I spent most of my months in hiding. I slept in the room above, and I could hear it through the floor. The sound of ticking used to make me feel safe. And now that clock serves as a permanent reminder of the darkest days of my life.
Donald, January 1940, just before the war
All of my grandparents died long before the war. Fortunately they didn’t have to live through it. My mother’s father was a dealer in rags, metals, and animal hides. My grandfather De Marcas had a cake bakery in Zwolle. My father didn’t like baking, so he went to Germany to learn about the men’s fashion industry instead. He took over a clothing store in Leiden around 1930.
There was such warmth in our family home. My mother raised me so gently. We cuddled a lot. My mother was a very small woman, which had made the birth difficult, and so I remained an only child. She often used to sing to me and accompany herself on the piano. She would sing me to sleep while I made little noises in my crib. I wanted to join in with the singing.
I wasn’t as close to my father. I hardly ever went to the store, and when I played there I had to keep quiet. That was difficult, because I was a chatterbox. It was an elegant store and his customers included the mayor and the city council of Leiden and professors from the university. “That lady laughs just like a goat,” I once said about a customer. My father immediately dragged me out to the back of the store.
The store stayed open in the summer months, so my father and mother always took separate vacations, and I used to stay with a friend of my mother’s, where I suddenly had a new brother and sister and two lovely dogs, boxers. I always enjoyed going there.
I remember the atmosphere just before the war. It was very threatening. My parents often used to go with friends to Noordwijk. They sat there talking, outside a bar by the sea. It was 1939. I didn’t understand what they were talking about — I wasn’t even six at the time — but I could feel the worry, the fear.
My bedroom in Leiden was next to my parents’ room. There was a small window in the door between our rooms, and I could hear them through it as they discussed the news on the radio on the morning war broke out. The war made me aware for the first time that people felt Jews were different. The war is what made me Jewish.
The Jewish school Pieterskerkhof in Leiden, 1943. Donald is the second from the right.
I felt the full force of the threat when my father had to close down his business. Soon after that we had to leave our big house on the Botermarkt in the center of town and we moved in with the Moks, another Jewish family in Leiden. They had a small garden, where I was allowed to grow marigolds and cress.
During that time, we tried once to go into hiding, with a carpenter. My parents used to call him Mr. Wood Glue. We camped out in his badly lit attic. Within two weeks, my parents couldn’t put up with it any longer, and we went back to the Mok family.
One night my mother woke me up. There was an NSB member standing in the doorway to my bedroom. They took us from our beds and drove us to the police station in Leiden, where we found lots of Jewish friends and acquaintances. Then we went to Hollands Spoor station in The Hague, where the train to Westerbork was waiting for us.
We were fortunate that my father had been persuaded to set up a Jewish Council in Leiden a few months before, in the hope of helping his fellow Jews. When we were standing on the platform, he said, “Don’t get on that train. I’m going to look for the man in charge.” The man’s name was Fischer. They called him Judenfischer, the Jew Fisher, because of the way he went after Jewish people.
“I’m the head of the Jewish Council in Leiden,” said my father. “I need to return to my post.”
“Ihr Gesicht gefällt mir nicht,” (I don’t like your face) said Fischer, who had had a drink or two. But still the train left without us.
Now we knew we had to go into hiding. “You can go to my brother, Meindert Zaalberg,” said Aunt Truus, a woman who sang in the same choir as my mother. But Aunt Truus had to work hard to bring my parents around. They didn’t want to go into hiding. My father was convinced he could still help other people. Finally they agreed, and we took our suitcases and went with Uncle Meindert to his pottery in Leiderdorp.
Uncle Meindert was in the resistance. They did target practice at his place and would shoot at the piles of peat that he used to fire the pottery kilns. My parents had two small rooms upstairs in their house, which was next door.
One evening Uncle Meindert came and sang to us and accompanied
himself on the guitar. He sang Dutch words to the tune of “Hatikvah,” which later became Israel’s national anthem. I had never heard the tune before, and I found it very moving.
Uncle Meindert was a passionate and religious man. “We have a wall around our house,” he said, “and no one will get through it.” There was such strength in the way he said it. I really admired him. In spite of his belief that we would be safe, he was still very aware of any threats. When he heard rumors that there was going to be a raid in our neighborhood, he took Father and Mother to his summer cottage in Noordwijkerhout. Uncle Meindert was right: There was a raid, but they stopped at our neighbors’ house.
I had already left by then. Uncle Meindert thought it was better to split up the family, so that if there was a raid, they wouldn’t get us all at the same time.
My first address was with Reverend Dijk, also in Leiderdorp. I used to go back to stay with that family whenever I needed another change of address. After I’d been there for a few weeks, Uncle Meindert arranged for me to stay in Breda with the wife of a high-up military man who was a prisoner of war in Poland. She gave me a warm welcome, but her children found it more difficult. What kind of strange boy had come to their house? And why wasn’t he allowed outside?
From my room, a beautiful front room on the first floor, I could look out onto the street. Some children were playing hide-and-seek, and others were jumping rope. I felt so homesick, and I wrote long letters to my parents. Uncle Slothouwer, our contact person in the resistance, used to deliver them for me.
Later I went to stay with the Marijnissen family, who lived close to the Belgian border. Uncle Toon Marijnissen was a gamekeeper who was in charge of a large estate. Aunt Net and Uncle Toon had one child, little Jantje, and a dog, Max. Uncle Toon hunted poachers, but he did just as much poaching himself. We ate lots of rabbits and hares. Although I didn’t look typically Jewish, Aunt Net thought it was a good idea to bleach my hair. She did it in the kitchen. I had to stand on a stool and hang my head in a bowl, while Aunt Net soaped me up. We waited for the stuff she rubbed into my hair to soak in. Then she rinsed it out under the pump and I had light-brown hair.
Donald with the Marijnissen family, 1943
I also had chores to do. Every two days, I had to walk over a mile with a jug to a neighboring farmer to fetch milk. The farmer had two daughters, who were very fond of me. They gave me all kinds of good things to eat. Another of my jobs was picking grass for the rabbits every day in the field behind our house.
Uncle Toon and Aunt Net had lots of friends. They used to have card game evenings, and people would wander in and out of the house. It had been drummed into me that I wasn’t allowed to talk about where I came from. But their close friends must have known I wasn’t a family relative but a little boy who was in hiding.
I slept in an attic room with a small window. When there was a storm and I was scared, I was allowed to sleep in between Aunt Net and Uncle Toon. I had a good life there, although I missed my mom and dad. We wrote long letters to each other, but nothing remains of them now. We had to burn them or tear them up after reading them.
Unfortunately I had to leave that place. There was a very talkative priest in the village and he liked to chat with me — and with everyone else. After ten months there, Uncle Toon and Aunt Net, who were closely involved with the resistance, thought it would be safer for me to move to a new address.
Uncle Slothouwer picked me up and took me back to Reverend Dijk in Leiderdorp. Before eating, I used to make the sign of the cross. I’d picked up that Catholic habit from the family I’d been staying with. It made the family laugh. A little Jewish boy sitting at the dinner table with a Protestant minister and crossing himself before eating!
Usually I slept in a bedroom with the eldest son, but one night I was allowed to have the room to myself. Late that evening, two shadowy figures appeared in the darkened room: It was my parents. They were still hiding at the nearby potter’s workshop. They’d come to visit me, and the minister had made sure that we’d be alone.
“Hello, Auntie.” That’s what I said to my mother. It was how I’d been taught to greet any woman who came to visit. My mother was really sad that I didn’t recognize her immediately, but she didn’t let it show. We sat and talked in the dimly lit room. I can’t remember if we had a cuddle, but I do remember saying good-bye. Then they went back to their own hiding place.
A few weeks later, I went to stay at the boys’ orphanage that was run by the friars in Tilburg. I took the name of Jan van den Heuvel, after the square in the center of Tilburg, De Heuvel (the hill). There were three other children in hiding among the forty orphans: one Jewish boy and two brothers whose father was in the resistance.
Monastery and orphanage where Donald stayed in Tilburg
Next to the boys’ orphanage was the monastery, where the friars lived. Most of the forty men worked as teachers, and three of them were responsible for running the orphanage. Although we were posing as orphans, the friars knew that we were in hiding.
Occasionally, one of the orphans would notice that I was different. “Why does Jan never take communion?” one of them once asked. Another one said, “Why does Jan never have to confess?” You had to be Catholic to go to communion and confession.
I went to church so often that I knew exactly how the services went, and I always noticed when one of the altar boys made a mistake. I prayed and begged to be allowed to become an altar boy. I loved the drama of it all. But you had to be baptized to be an altar boy.
Otherwise, I joined in with daily life at the orphanage, just like everyone else. I helped to set the long tables, ate with the others, played with them, and went on vacation with them to Veghel. I didn’t want to stand out, so I became very good at fitting in.
There was just one radio in the orphanage. I often used to listen to the radio with Brother Gaudentius, the head of the orphanage, especially after October 1944, when Tilburg was liberated. We used to sit in his room. Brother Gaudentius was a rather plump and messy man. He always smoked cigars, and the ash used to fall down onto his stained habit.
I listened so eagerly to that radio. We’d been liberated, but the rest of the country was still under German occupation. We heard about a famine, about a Hunger Winter. What did that mean for my parents? Sitting there in that room with Brother Gaudentius, I was very aware of the war. But I didn’t talk about it with my friends at the orphanage. Ever. Those months were terrible. I remember feeling so insecure and how frustrating it was that I couldn’t be with my parents even though we’d already been liberated.
The four hidden boys at the orphanage in Tilburg (Donald is on the right), 1944
After liberation, life in the orphanage changed completely. Some British soldiers were housed in the monastery. We celebrated Christmas with them, and for the first time in my life I ate plum pudding. We also learned English songs, which I really loved.
My time in hiding didn’t come to an end until the rest of the Netherlands was also liberated, on May 5, 1945.
It was another month and a half before my father came for me. Strangely, I can’t remember anything about our reunion. Or about the journey back to Leiden on the train. Or about seeing my mother again. I do remember that we weren’t allowed to go back to our own house at number 17, Botermarkt. It had to be vacated. And fumigated. While we waited for that to happen, we stayed with a cousin of my mother’s. We listened to the radio at her place, to the people from the Red Cross reading out lists of Jewish people who had been murdered. It turned out that all of our relatives except for two cousins had been killed. What followed was years of tears. A whole lifetime. That war will not be over until I take my last breath.
It wasn’t easy to rebuild my relationship with my parents. I’d been responsible for myself for so long that I found it hard to have parents who wanted to be involved in my life. Discovering that their entire family had been massacred also created a distance between us. They were locked away in their grief. They had to work really ha
rd to get the store up and running too. That was no easy task: My father was fifty-six, and the business had been completely ruined. Even the wood paneling had been burned as firewood.
In the fall of 1945, he opened the doors again and many of his former clients returned. Other customers said, “Mr. De Marcas, we’re sorry, but your competitor was so helpful during the war. We think it’s the right thing for us to stay with him.”
Father was able to deal with the pain better than Mother, who was never as affectionate as she had been before the war. She was troubled by nightmares for years. She used to dream about the concentration camp where her only sister was murdered along with her husband and children. The war destroyed the mother I had known.
1. Jewish Council (German: Judenrat): administrative organizations that the German occupiers ordered Jewish communities to set up to manage Jewish affairs. The council had the task of carrying out some of the measures that the Germans imposed on the Jews. Anyone who worked for the Jewish Council was temporarily exempted from deportation. Thousands of people were involved in the work of these organizations.
Many Jewish people resented the council members, particularly the leaders, for following the orders of the occupying Germans, and they thought the exemption from deportation was unfair, but a lot of Jewish Council members secretly tried to help others whenever they had the chance.
2. raid: a police or army action to find people and take them into custody.
3. mixed marriage: usually a marriage between two people of different religious backgrounds or nationalities. In this case, a marriage between a Jew and a non-Jew. Generally, Jews in mixed marriages were not required to report for deportation, and their children did not have to wear stars on their clothing to indicate that they were Jewish. They did, however, have to obey the other rules that the German occupiers had made for Jews.