The Righteous: The Unsung Heroes of the Holocaust

by Gilbert, Martin

  Tina’s greatest fear was that she would not rescue enough Jews.29

  Joop Woortman and his wife Semmy not only took a Jewish girl into their home, but were active in the rescue committee which Joop had established. This committee found foster homes, hiding places and false papers for many other Jewish children. Arrested in July 1944, Joop is thought to have died in Belsen. After his arrest, his wife took charge of the committee’s work.30

  Juliette Zeelander, in hiding in Holland at the age of four, recalls an incident after she had been placed with a Christian family. ‘I had to change my surname to theirs, mine was a Jewish name. I knew I had to hide my identity. It was instilled into me what my new name was. But one day, I must have been about five and a half years old, I went shopping with the lady of the house. I see myself clearly in front of a display cabinet, with a lady in black, me looking up, and the lady asking me in a friendly tone, “Dear, what is your name?” And I said quite cheerfully: “My name is Juliette van Tijn, but my real name is Juliette Zeelander.” Neither adult responded, but I realized that I had said something not right. I think as a little child I put this lady’s life in danger several times. I mean real danger.’31

  Violette Munnik took three-year-old Robert Krell into her family home in The Hague. Her friends often visited, ‘and to all of them’, Robert’s interviewer, André Stein, later wrote, ‘she told the truth about her new houseguest. A quiet conspiracy therefore followed to hide the boy’s true identity from outsiders: what is amazing is that he was not betrayed. Robbie and the Munniks were most fortunate that the neighbourhood wove a net of secrecy around them, safeguarding them from the authorities’—and from a well-known collaborator, a member of the Dutch National Organization, who lived across the street. Violette Munnik’s husband Albert would bring home wood and busy himself making toys for his new ‘son’ who had arrived at his new home without any. ‘Robbie’s favourite was a wooden dog that moved its legs and wagged its tail, which he has to this day. And when he was finished making toys, Albert would sit Robbie on his lap and read to him. Or he would sit at the piano and play simple melodies he had taught himself.’ Indeed, writes Stein, Albert Munnik ‘was a man of many talents, and he put all of them to the task of cheering up the little boy who had been forced to live in captivity without the company of friends.’32 Robert Krell adds: ‘My new ten-year-older “sister”, Nora Munnik, spent her after school hours teaching her little Jewish brother to read and write.’33

  ‘I was five years old when my parents turned me over to strangers in Amsterdam,’ Lore Baer recalled. ‘This couple could not keep me because they were of mixed marriage and neighbours became suspicious when they suddenly had a five-year-old child. They brought me to North Holland where the underground placed me with a very caring family. I lived with the Schouten family for two years from 1943 to 1945. I used an assumed name there, and even went to a Catholic school.’34

  Cornelia Schouten was in her mid-twenties when she took the five-year-old into her home and made her part of the family. ‘I really think she thought of me as her child and was heart-broken when my parents came to claim me after the war,’ Lore Baer wrote. ‘The feeling was mutual.’35

  Remond Dufour and his family gave sanctuary in Aerdenhout to five-year-old Bernard Geron, whom they brought up with their own son, as if the two boys were brothers. After the war Bernard was reunited with his father and his own brother; his mother had not survived.36

  In his introduction to the Netherlands volume of Yad Vashem’s Lexicon of Righteous Among the Nations, Dr Jozeph Michman writes of ‘entire groups of helpers’, including a group of teachers at Alkmaar and The Hague, and a team of tax experts in Maastricht, who undertook to divide among themselves the task of providing the various facilities needed in order to maintain Jews in hiding: identity cards, means of transport from hiding place to hiding place, food supplies, and, in case of emergencies, trustworthy doctors and other specialists, such as those who could construct hiding places. ‘The going into hiding which forced enervating passivity on the Jews demanded constant activity and vigilance on the part of their helpers.’37

  Based at their isolated house near Bilthoven, Henk Huffener, his sister Ann and their younger brother Joep helped smuggle Jews to Switzerland, and later to Spain. Early in 1942 Henk was introduced to Loekie Metz, a young Jewish woman who was staying at a Zionist kibbutz at Loosdrecht farm, many of whose members were young Jewish refugees from Germany. ‘In March 1942 a tip came that they had less than a month to fold up the kibbutz and get out. The Germans were very fond of the idea of “way folk”, as they were then called—young people going up country, hikers and bikers.’ So Huffener and others would go unnoticed as they cycled through the countryside, accompanied by one or two members of the kibbutz. It was an audacious and dangerous mission. On one occasion Huffener was stopped by German soldiers while escorting an obviously Jewish-looking girl who spoke no Dutch. He kissed her, explained to the Germans that they must be off or they would be in trouble with their parents, and got away with it.’38

  A Dutch Christian Socialist, Joop Westerweel, who headed a group of twenty like-minded Dutch patriots who smuggled Jews from Holland across Belgium and France to Switzerland and to Spain, helped all the remaining seventy members of the ‘kibbutz’ at Loosdrecht farm to escape when, in August 1942, they were warned that their deportation was imminent. Westerweel’s group spirited them away to safe havens throughout Holland. One of those safe havens, the Roman Catholic village of Sevenum, was hiding several hundred Jews in the village and surrounding farms by the end of the war.

  Westerweel’s wife, Wilhelmina, and their two daughters, also actively participated in the work of rescue. One day they were caught on the Belgian border. Wilhelmina was sent to the concentration camp at Ravensbrück, where she survived the war. Joop Westerweel was sent to Vught concentration camp in Holland, where he was tortured for several months, and then killed.39

  It is estimated that Westerweel and his group smuggled as many as two hundred Jews out of Holland into France, including the seventy Palestine pioneers.40

  The Streekstra family hid a seventeen-year-old Jewish girl, Katow, on their farm in Friesland. Wybren Streekstra later recalled: ‘She stayed with us for the whole winter. She never came outside in the daytime; it was too dangerous, and she looked too Jewish. At different times we would get a signal that something was going to happen. It was night and curfew, but I knew the fields and creek, and I had long rubber boots. I took Katow on my back and carried her over the creek. Then I would take her across the fields to a place where we could sleep in the straw. Just before it got light in the morning we went back home. This happened ten or fifteen times. You know, you don’t really sleep on those nights.’41

  Those in hiding knew that they could not expect leniency or reprieve if they were discovered, either for themselves or for those who had taken them in. Thea van Oosten, whose parents took in a Jew, Joop Schijveschuurder, wrote to him after the war: ‘What a risk my parents took by taking you into our home. I never asked them why they had done so. It just did not occur to them not to help people in need. It was a deed of neighbourly love. It was not just to sabotage the Germans.’

  Joop Schijveschuurder, who together with his brother Loek was saved by several Dutch families, wanted to put the facts of such rescue activities into their true perspective, writing in his memoirs: ‘I have to get the following off my chest. Of the approximately 25,000 Jews who were in hiding in Holland, 16,000 survived in their hiding places. The rest were betrayed or found…If one betrayed Jews, one was paid five or 7.50 Dutch guilders.’42 For every Dutch person who helped a Jew, there was another seemingly ready to betray the rescuers.

  Typically for Jews in hiding, in Holland as elsewhere, several families and individuals enabled Joop Schijveschuurder and his brother to survive: among them the Van Oostens, the Ides, the De Graafs, and Marius Beerman, a Dutch plainclothes policeman (known as Bob) who had warned of an imminent arrest and deportation
in Haarlem. ‘We were phoned by the Germans that they were going to arrest Jews in the Wagenweg,’ he later recalled, in a letter to Joop Schijveschuurder. ‘I raced like a hare to the address they had given, and warned the people. When the phone call about you came, it was already late in the evening, I raced by bicycle like mad to the Wagenweg: we banged on the door, and I must have called, “It’s Bob.” I went in myself to help you. My partner warned me at a given moment. When we heard the German motors in the distance, we rode back to the station by a roundabout way.’ Bob’s partner was never seen again.

  Bob later wrote to Joop: ‘When later you were imprisoned in the police station in the Smedestraat, I went to fetch the keys to the cell one evening. As a plainclothes policeman, I was able to do this. I spoke to your mother in the cell, and later I phoned the duty doctor. We arranged that your mother should scream in pain. You know the result. By the way, it was not that your mother should simulate appendicitis. Dr Ruiter diagnosed an ectopic pregnancy. Your mother was not suffering from either. But on advice from Dr Ruiter, your mother was transferred to hospital, and not operated upon when there. Had it really been appendicitis, one would have had to operate; not to operate under those circumstances would have led to questions in the hospital. Even there, there were betrayers.’43

  Fifty years after the first round-ups in Haarlem, in a ceremony honouring those who rescued the Schijveschuurder brothers, the Mayor of Haarlem commented: ‘In contrast to those Haarlemers who stood by actionless, there were also officials who resisted. And then, for example, I think of the two teachers who refused to sign the Aryan document, and I think of the governors of the union of the school for disadvantaged children, who refused to divulge the names of Jewish children under their care, and consequently lost their subsidies. And I am reminded of the clerk who lost his job because he wore the Jewish star (although he wasn’t Jewish), and I think of those officials of the state, who falsified identity cards.’44

  IN THE TOWN of Alkmaar, Laurens Vis helped hide Jewish people in safe farms around the town until they could be taken to other places of safety. His son Rudi, later a member of the British House of Commons, recalled how, at his father’s funeral in 1952, ‘hundreds of Jewish people came to pay their respects.’45 In Groningen, Marguerite Mulder regarded it as her religious duty to help the persecuted. She therefore took into her home two young Jewish sisters, Vreesje and Sonia Slager, whose parents had already been deported, and arranged for them, when danger threatened, to be kept with her parents and other members of her family.46 In Rotterdam, a Protestant priest, Dr Brillenburg-Wurth, and his wife concealed and cared for a Jewish couple in the loft of his church for more than a year.47

  A member of the Royal Dutch Police Force, Karst Smit, undertook rescue efforts that marked him out as extraordinary. Only twenty-five years old in 1942, he risked his life again and again to help as many as a hundred and fifty Jews escape from Holland. With a central collecting point in the southern town of Tilburg, he and the group around him travelled with Jews from The Hague, Amsterdam and other towns, moving them south across the Dutch border with Belgium, and on to Antwerp and Brussels. From there, some went into hiding in Belgium, others made their way south to Switzerland.

  One of those whom Karst Smit helped, Gertrude Mann, had been in hiding since July 1942 at several addresses in The Hague. At the end of May 1943, he told her and a friend with whom she was in hiding ‘that he could help me to pass the frontier into Belgium and that I could so go on to Brussels. After talking this over with my friend and coming to the conclusion that Belgium was safer than Holland (true), we decided that I should go with KS. We sent him word that I was ready to go with him.’

  Karst Smit took Gertrude Mann by train—forbidden to Jews by order of the Germans—to Tilburg, and from there to a house in Hilvarenbeek ‘of a family called Vos where I hid for the night. The next morning one of the daughters brought me to a pub in Baarle-Nassau where KS told me and several other Jews, to wait for a “passeur” who would pass us over the frontier while KS (who was then a member of the frontier police) would help us to avoid German patrols. The crossing took place without any trouble. No financial conditions were asked. From Weelde in Belgium we took the tram to Antwerp and from Antwerp I took the train to Brussels. In Brussels I was given an address to hide, but as there were at least fifteen other Jews and young men hiding there, I felt that this house was a very dangerous place and so one of the above mentioned friends found another address for me to feel at home. They treated me as their second daughter and told their neighbours I was their niece. I stayed with them until the end of the war.’

  On one occasion, Karst Smit travelled to Brussels to bring Gertrude Mann money and clothes that had been given to him by her friend; and ‘in September 1943 he helped my friend to pass the Belgian frontier to meet me.’48

  After eighteen months the German secret police broke Karst Smit’s network. Its members managed to flee and go underground, as so many Jews were doing. Three were later arrested by the Germans and shot: Adrianus van Gestel, Gradus Gerritsen and Cornelius Keurhorst. Smit himself was captured while on a mission to France, imprisoned, and then sent to a number of concentration camps, among them Buchenwald and Dora. He returned to Holland at the end of the war.

  Another of the group, Josephus Cornelius van der Heijden, had been arrested together with his son Eugene while accompanying a Jewish woman and her child across the border into Belgium. He died in a German concentration camp, as did two of his sons, Marcel and Gustaaf. Such details were unknown to those rescued, even after liberation. ‘After the war it was almost impossible for our Jewish friends to trace us back,’ Karst Smit later wrote. ‘During their flight they travelled by night, so they did not know where they crossed the Dutch-Belgian frontier and they did not know the names of their passeurs.’49

  Karst Smit’s brother Romke also took part in the work of the group. Sometimes he would act as a courier, collecting jewellery in Amsterdam for its onward passage to Paris. After the liberation of Paris he joined the Dutch Brigade that was formed there in late 1944, fighting in both Belgium and Holland. He was killed on Dutch soil on 26 April 1945, nine days before the Germans in Holland surrendered.

  Jaap Penraat, the son of a master printer, was another Dutchman who smuggled Jews out of Holland. The route which he helped organize went via the French city of Lille, and then south to the Pyrenees and the Spanish frontier. Penraat’s original speciality was making false identity cards that enabled Jews to pass as non-Jews. Once the escape route was established, his ability to prepare false papers was tested to the utmost. Travelling to Paris, and posing as the representative of a German construction company, he persuaded the German authorities there, at the central clearing office for all work permits and licences, to issue permits for Dutch labourers wanting to work with a construction company in France, working on the Atlantic Wall defences. The company did not exist, but the papers, genuine, and with the necessary official stamps, provided a base for repeated forged permits, facilitating the rescue operation.

  The first rescue journey took place in December 1942. The ten young Jews whom Jaap Penraat accompanied by train as far as Lille each had a forged ‘Aryan’ identity card that he had made for them, and travel papers to match. A second group followed within three weeks. In all, more than four hundred Jews were moved out of danger in this way.50

  The risks taken by those who gave refuge to Jews often spanned many months, even years; but again and again the recollections of those in hiding show that they were borne calmly. Alex Meijer was hidden, together with his parents and two sisters, by a Dutch farmer and his family, for two years and eight months. Reading the diary that he kept, his future wife was ‘impressed by the integrity and ingenuity of his hosts and the good relations that existed between their two families throughout’.51

  However, for many Jews the Christianity of their hosts was a problem; an especial concern was the effect on young children, many of whom quickly became drawn into the am
bience of Christian worship. Some children found homes where religion did not become an issue. Ilana Tikotin, who was only four years old in 1942, writes of Willem and Jeanne Maurits, the first couple who took her and her three-year-old sister in: ‘They were a jolly Catholic family with (at the time) nine children, later 12. My father took us on a sunny day to their home and told us that as a treat we were to spend the summer with all those children and animals on the farm. He did not explain anything to us, but told me to be good, not to cry and to take care of my sister, who was always naughty, a lot of responsibility to give to a four-year-old girl. We slept on straw in the cowshed, which was clean and shiny and attached to their large kitchen/living room. The cows were outside in the meadows. Behind a blanket lived a family with two children (probably also Jewish, but I do not remember them). We adapted easily to the new religion and it was fun to ride to church with the other children in a horse-drawn carriage on Sunday. The pictures, the statues, the costumes, the singing, the incense—the whole show—were very entertaining. I have very warm memories of our stay there. The family risked their lives to save us, but never made us feel uncomfortable. We felt we belonged and received the same love and attention as their own children. We helped with the work, but it was like play. My parents must have believed that the war would soon be over, because at the end of October when frost set in and the cows returned we had to leave. To me it appeared utterly normal, that we had to vacate our lodgings to make room for the animals.’

  The time had come for Ilana Tikotin and her sister to move on elsewhere. ‘Most of the other families we stayed with were Protestant and we did not enjoy their religious practices at all, but never showed it. The long Bible readings after the meals were sheer torture while we had to sit still and repeat the last word to show that we had listened intently. The church too, was stark and the service long and boring. The families usually had an organ in their parlour, but we were never allowed to ‘play’ on it, it was only used for solemn Psalms. We were never told in so many words that we were a burden, but often felt it nevertheless. We had to show constant gratitude and often had to perform quite a lot of chores. For instance, bringing in water from the pump outside, whitewash the wooden shoes of the entire family on Saturday afternoons, so that they would look nice for the Sunday or rake the yard in a special pattern in preparation of the Sunday.’