The Sisters of Auschwitz

by Roxane van Iperen

  Everyone is already busy. Jaap immediately dived into the shed, where he found enough material and tools to start his own studio. Mother is cleaning the windowsills and has set the kitchen door wide open; an ice-cold current of air dispels the mouldy smell of wood and damp – the house had been empty since the end of summer.

  Janny gives Fietje a kiss, puts on her coat, walks outside and is transfixed. In front of her is a lawn as large as a park, with tall shrubs, birch hedges, stately trees, voluminous rhododendrons and circular flower beds. She looks around, astonished.

  Seats of wood and worn iron are scattered about, some green with moss and half overgrown, others clean, used relatively recently. She discovers bird boxes hanging in various trees above her head, an empty run further down.

  The garden at her feet slopes down. She had not realized the house was on a hill and snorts at her own slow mind; The High Nest. The villa is enclosed by wild heathland and woods. In the middle of the lawn is a gazebo, square with a pointed roof and large windows all around. Lien is standing there with the three children all wrapped up in hats and scarves. Janny waves and walks towards them. Robbie has already spotted her, an ear-to-ear smile appears on his face. Janny presses her lips on his forehead, caresses Liselotte and Kathinka on the head, and steps beside her older sister, their shoulders touching.

  ‘Gosh,’ Janny says.

  With their backs towards the gazebo they stare at The High Nest, elevated above its surroundings by the earth.

  ‘Good, isn’t it?’ says Lien.

  Janny can only nod. Their situation is too precarious to be cheerful, but they could not have been luckier than this. With her chin, Lien points at a place behind the villa.

  ‘The next house is a few hundred feet from here.’

  Janny scans the surroundings but cannot see any roofs or other signs of human presence. Lien turns around, gesturing towards the back of the garden with her hand.

  ‘When you keep walking that way, you get to the sea.’

  Janny raises her eyebrows, tilts her head.

  ‘The sea?’

  ‘Or whatever is it called, Ijsselmeer or something. Water, in any case.’

  They snigger.

  Janny thinks back on their journey the night before and tries to orientate herself.

  ‘So, Huizen is over there . . .’ She points to the left of the house – rugged heath with dots of trees. ‘And Naarden is over there . . .’ She gestures to the right – trees as far as her eyes can see. Right at that moment, Jaap’s head pops out of the shed, his glasses on the tip of his nose, a dazed expression on his face. The sisters laugh.

  ‘Hey!’

  Janny quickly covers her mouth with her hand, but Lien says reassuringly, ‘No one can hear you here.’

  In Bergen there were neighbours, passers-by, soldiers quartered near them; there was always a reason to urge others to be quiet, to get the children inside as soon as one of them started crying.

  Japie comes running towards them, a heap of stuff pressed against his chest.

  ‘Look what I found!’

  He opens his arms to show them his treasure. A claw hammer, trays with nails, a cigar box, rope, tarpaulin, electrical cables with split ends, a receiver with curled wire – but no phone. In Janny’s perception it is junk, but she knows not to say that out loud. Her brother’s eyes are glistening.

  ‘The whole shed is full of stuff – you must come and see it! I’m going to start with a radio and then I’ll make something for the kids, all right?’ And off he goes, his trousers slipping down from his skinny bottom as he runs.

  The sisters discuss what needs to happen in the following days. Janny has a few errands for Mik and won’t be around in the daytime. Bob will start working in Weesp immediately, so it is up to Lien and Eberhard to explore the area and do the shopping for everyone.

  While talking, they circle around the children like shepherds around their flock, watch them play in the forest, their cheeks all rosy. The house disappears from sight as they leave the lawn, wandering deeper into the forest garden until all they can see are the claret-coloured shutters, glistening through the trees.

  Robbie dives into a heap of leaves and throws two handfuls on his sister’s head. Liselotte screams with laughter. Kathinka takes the shortcut, diving head down into a heap before Lien quickly pulls her out.

  That afternoon the little ones are drowsy and tired from playing outside, and for the first time in months all three of them fall asleep like a log without whining. After Janny has put the children to bed, she checks in on her father. She finds him in the living room, stoking the fire to dispel the icy cold his wife let in when she was cleaning earlier that day. His fragility strikes her. He looks so different from the round, loud merchant he was in Amsterdam. The Germans took more than his freedom when they kept him imprisoned for ten days. On top of that came the journey to The High Nest, which was hard, too hard, really – his resilience has run out. She takes the log Joseph is holding and has him sit in the comfortable chair at one of the large side windows, where the view of the forest is magical.

  Before the rest of the family came to The High Nest, Eberhard had made a few trips to Naarden on his own and moved part of their belongings. The first time he also brought Herbert, whom he transferred to one of their contacts. The boy would go to a new hiding place, closer to his parents.

  Each time Eberhard approaches Amsterdam Centraal Station with his heaps of luggage, he is sweating with fear. But the influx of evacuees from coastal areas has become enormous – he can always blend into the crowds. It is a mass migration; men and women scurrying across the platforms in a daze with their children, grandparents, pets and furniture, some with a clear destination in mind, others without the prospect of an alternative address.

  The steps are overcrowded, the main hall bursting at the seams with swarms of people, branching off towards the station square. This is perfect for Eberhard, who, with his bags and suitcases, does not attract any attention. After changing for Naarden-Bussum station, it is about a three-mile walk to The High Nest – mostly through the heath.

  He had seen the piano the very first time he entered the villa, but there had been no opportunity to tell Lientje about it. Too much going on. He travels back to Naarden-Bussum station, empty-handed, on to Amsterdam, Alkmaar, the steam tram to Bergen. His last trip as a workhorse.

  When he arrives in Bergen, he finds the summer cottage empty and dark. There is a smell of bleach, the curtains are drawn. It is as if they have never lived there. Lien has left with Kathinka, Eberhard’s detailed instructions impressed on her mind.

  He locks up, puts the key in the letter box of the main house and walks to Janny’s bungalow at the other side of the deer park. There, a similar scene awaits. The home is spotless, chairs around the dining table all pushed in, not a crumb on the carpet. No trace of the little children who have been roaming around here for months.

  In a dark corner of the living room, Joseph is waiting in an armchair.

  ‘Come,’ Eberhard says, offering his father-in-law his arm. For a moment Joseph seems to have no intention to move. He has not left the cottage since they came here to hide. Eberhard takes his upper arm and helps him to get up, cross the threshold to their next shelter.

  On the train to Amsterdam, Joseph’s discomfort becomes more and more visible. His breathing is heavy and he keeps looking around. Without seeing much, really; his last eye surgery failed and, despite his jam-jar glasses, he cannot tell the difference between a soldier and a coalman. It makes Eberhard nervous, but he cannot reassure the old man without giving both of them away.

  As the train enters Amsterdam Centraal Station, night falls over the canals. The crowds have dissolved; the platforms are mostly deserted. Eberhard thinks of the mutes underneath the stairs and prays Father will hold his own. On the platform, Joseph briefly hesitates before the familiar arrival sign of his beloved city; Eberhard believes he might wiggle free to walk home, down the canal towards Weesperstraat, tur
n left, through the front door, straight to his own comfortable chair. He can find the way with his eyes closed. Eberhard tightens his grip around Father’s upper arm, but there is no need. Joseph turns around and follows him in silence to the next train.

  The last part is the hardest. When they walk out of Naarden-Bussum station, they are welcomed by a rain shower. No cloudburst, but the type of steady rain you hardly notice until suddenly your coat has become heavy and is sticking to your skin. Both of them are exhausted and Joseph is taking small, unsteady steps. But Eberhard is in no hurry – this is their last journey. All that matters is arriving, even if it takes them all night.

  At first they pass well-lit living rooms, people on sofas, people walking to the kitchen, unaware of being watched. Carefree people. As they leave the town centre of Naarden, houses thin out and the lights appear at larger intervals. The street is dead quiet, only the soft thrumming of raindrops on asphalt follows them, washes their footsteps away. Joseph’s spectacles have steamed up and water is running from his forehead, over the glass, onto his cheeks, but his gaze is fixed on the ground as he lets his son-in-law guide him.

  After walking in silence, arms linked, for over thirty minutes, a rhythmic squeaking closes in on them. They hold still. Eberhard feels a shiver run through the old body beside him. He cannot tell if it is cold or fear.

  Eberhard peers into the night, wondering if he should pull Joseph into the shrubs. Then he recognizes the sounds of steadily moving pedals grating a mudguard, of bicycle tyres hissing softly on the wet road surface. A bent silhouette passes, six feet away, without noticing them in the dark. They continue on their way with relief.

  Eberhard does not know how long it took them, but when they finally arrive at The High Nest, he can tell from their tight faces how worried they must have been. They were all sat waiting in the living room with the curtains closed. The flickering candle illuminates the deep lines around Fietje’s mouth. She gratefully takes her husband from Eberhard and gently dries his face with a towel.

  Eberhard will later confess to Lien it was one of the most anxious nights of his life. But they made it. All ten of them.

  And so begins, in February 1943, the extraordinary Brilleslijper enterprise at The High Nest – host family, hiding place, underground centre.

  Since July 1942, trains to Westerbork and beyond have been running without a pause and, everywhere in the country, Jews are looking for places to hide. In this third year of occupation, aggression stops at nothing and Nazi ideology is practised even without German pressure. As a young Dutch police officer says: ‘It’s no proper Sunday unless we beat a couple of Jews to a pulp.’

  Still, there are many non-Jewish Dutch who help others. But the relationship is always skewed. People in hiding are very aware that they eat from the supplies of their host family and they live in a space not intended for them. Children in hiding, added to an unknown family, sense they must not be difficult; the mercy of the host or hostess is a lifeline which, at any given moment, can be cut.

  Janny and Bob have officially moved to Naarden with their two children, but the rest of the party is illegal and wanted. Joseph and Fietje for being Jewish and because they should have reported in Amsterdam. Jaap because he is Jewish and worked for the resistance from his bicycle parking operation. Eberhard because he is a German deserter, guilty of racial disgrace by fathering a child with a Jewish woman. Lien because she is Jewish and connected to the disappearance of Eberhard. It is Janny’s good fortune she is not registered as Jewish – and she married her husband before the law forbade her to.

  Perfect administration and well-oiled logistics ensure that deportations from the Netherlands run smoothly. Nonetheless, the Germans become aware that large numbers of Jews are missing. About 25,000 people have disappeared; they have not reported and their present whereabouts are unknown.

  In March 1943, one month after the Brilleslijper family moved into The High Nest, the authorities call in the Henneicke Column, the men travelling the Netherlands from their Amsterdam office, to inventory the properties of deported Jews. Their new job is in line with their previous activities but brings in a lot more money – they will be hunting for Jews in hiding, at a premium of seven guilders and fifty cents per head.

  2

  The Free Artist

  Before long, the resistance spreads the news about a safe and well-hidden place, close to Amsterdam, run by two Jewish sisters. They have only just moved into The High Nest when Janny starts bringing in more people in distress. Trees Lemaire, her friend and colleague at the PBC, asks her to take in an acquaintance: Jetty Druijff, with her fiancé Simon van Kreveld, son of a well-known paediatrician. Pauline van den Berg arrives via Haakon and Mieke Stotijn. With her red hair, steel-blue eyes and Rotterdam accent, it is hard not to notice her. She goes by the name of Aagje Honing and moves in as ‘the maid’. Bram and Loes Teixeira de Mattos, two elderly friends of Bob and Janny, come to The High Nest from The Hague with their daughter Rita and son-in-law Willi Jaeger.

  And so, in the course of February 1943, the household is made up of a core group of seventeen people already. Those are joined by a steady stream of visitors seeking shelter for a short while; a few days, weeks, months. Joseph urges his daughter to be cautious, but Janny doesn’t give an inch and Joseph doesn’t really want to stop her, either; desperate times call for desperate measures. It has become increasingly difficult to find somewhere to hide; people are frightened. Janny is frightened too, but she never refuses anyone access to The High Nest, even when, at times, twenty to twenty-five people are staying in the house.

  Most of them are from the artistic scene, via Lien and Eberhard, and from the resistance, via Bob and Janny. The house is located in the heart of the Netherlands and as such a perfect stopover. Sometimes Jan and Aleid Hemelrijk bring guests, and their former Amsterdam neighbours, Leo and Loes Fuks, seek shelter at The High Nest too.

  Leo is a specialist in the Yiddish language, which he starts teaching Lien. Before the occupation, both of them were members of Sch.-Anski, the Eastern Jewish cultural society promoting Yiddish literature, art and drama. Leo was their secretary and Lien studied the songs she would later specialize in. Until the war came, Lien performed throughout the Netherlands as a solo singer, with Eberhard as her regular accompanist. Her stage name, Lin Jaldati, was from the lyrics to a Hebrew song: ‘Jalda Jaldati, Jaffa Jaffati’, ‘Girl, my girl, Beauty, my beauty’. During the occupation, performances became few and far between, and those last months in Bergen went by without any music at all. Eberhard did not have a piano at his disposal; Lien was not in the mood for singing or dancing. It would have been too dangerous at that.

  But The High Nest is like a fortress: outside it seems heavy and robust, but inside there is light and space – and for the first time in a long while, the residents feel free to live, to move. Slowly they speak out loud, laugh again. Eberhard claims the piano in the front room and spends hours on end practising complex scores, his back bent. Lien picks up her repertoire and others indulge in playing music too; Simon on the drums they found in the shed and Pauline, or Red Puck as they call her, practises the violin in the gazebo.

  At the height of the war, The High Nest must have produced more noise than all the summer holidays of the Jansen sisters combined. Sometimes Janny, after running errands for the resistance all day, walks home through the forest and is welcomed by a cacophony of sounds even before she can see the house – it is as if the trees and the animals sing for her, accompanied by the drumming sound of the earth beneath her.

  Providing for at least twenty people is not easy. Bob’s part is crucial here; he brings in the money. He leaves the villa early each morning and rides to the Food Supply Office in Weesp. On his bicycle – a privilege very few Dutch people still have; the bikes belonging to Jewish people were claimed last year and these days non-Jewish civilians are often forced to give their bicycle to German soldiers too. Everything on wheels is precious: prams, wheelbarrows, home-made cargo bike
s and unicycles. To save their bikes from being commandeered, people give them wooden wheels or put a small scooter wheel at the front – the Germans turn their nose up at those strange creations. But the mayor of Naarden gives Bob a special permit stating his bicycle is ‘required in the exercise of his duty as civil servant at the Agricultural Crisis Organisation’. The bike is invaluable and saves an incredible amount of time when they, as soon as Bob has returned from work in the afternoon, ride to the surrounding villages to buy bottles of milk and heavy sacks of rice and wheat for everyone.

  Bob’s boss is the local office manager of the Food Commissioner for North Holland, but he is a member of the DNP, so not someone Bob can take into his confidence. Instead, Bob steals coupons and waybills on a daily basis – official documents with all the stamps required for food and transport. Checks are strict; you cannot get anywhere without papers these days. Bob and Janny pass most of the documents on to Mik van Gilse or Frits Reuter, who further distribute them.

  Bob receives a salary of 150 guilders per month from the North Holland Government Office – by no means enough to cover the rent and food for everyone. Some of the guests bring in a little money, but the Brilleslijper family desperately needs more to feed all those mouths. When Mik next visits The High Nest, he has a solution from the most unlikely place – connecting the Nest directly to the largest brewer in the Netherlands.

  Mik looks forward to his trips to Naarden. The forest, the house filled with friends he can trust, like a commune of resistance in wartime. The peace and quiet do him good. Soothe him. He is only twenty-six years old and has known nothing but stress and danger. When he gets on the train at Amsterdam Centraal Station, having passed the checks unscathed, he slumps down in a compartment, which seems emptier each month, and his narrow shoulders slowly begin to relax. He is a precocious twenty-something with too many responsibilities – not unlike his dear friend Janny.

  At a young age, Mik travelled to Spain to report on the Spanish Civil War, while his brother Janrik joined the CPN. ‘Never underestimate the opponent and always remain on your guard,’ has always been their motto. Their current resistance is met with approval, and it seems more and more people are joining in. Another success is his underground society of artists with its own magazine called The Free Artist.