The Other Schindlers

by Agnes Grunwald-Spier

  Henk found hiding places for many Jews, including the Da Costa family and Bep and Mani Aalsvel, who were temporarily sheltered in the family home:

  When a Jewish boy of Austrian origin, whose alias was Jan Boon, needed an operation, Henk rented a cart and took him to the city of Utrecht, where he was treated by, of all people, a surgeon with German sympathies. The enterprise was very dangerous since Jan spoke very little Dutch.50

  Henk and Joep needed money and ration cards to look after their charges. Joep raided distribution offices and:

  Henk made welfare collection rounds, calling on wealthy Jews in hiding such as Kurt Leipziger, who owned a cinema in Berlin, Eddy Salm, a former publisher from Amsterdam and the philosopher Wolfgang Frommel. To Henk these eminent Jews represented not only a source of money but also a wonderful underground university.

  Henk was arrested in Arnhem in March 1943 while visiting some of his kibbutzniks in hiding there. He was only arrested for minor offences and eventually found himself as a slave labourer in Germany. He got out in a poor condition. He was anxious to return to his underground activities and some friends gave him the key to their empty apartment in Amsterdam. It appeared that a young Jewish violinist and his wife had taken refuge there. They had no food and no ration cards, so could not buy anything. They were so desperate that they said they wanted to kill themselves. Henk promised to help them, but when he woke up the next day, he found he was too late. He was inconsolable and this led to a nervous breakdown. He was prescribed pills and told to rest but, as the Germans were after him again, he had to go into hiding.51

  Henk is among those whose desire to help minorities in trouble continued after the war. He was upset at the racism he came across in London when he first arrived there in 1950, when he was helping a colleague sell African art. Later, in 1972, he helped Chilean refugees, and he also helped West Indians living in Notting Hill through the 1970s who were suffering from the ‘Sus’ laws. He set up a Legal Defense Association (LDA) ‘whereby families would contribute 50p per week to be guaranteed access to a solicitor in case of arrest and charge’.52 However, Henk himself saw at first hand the racism and prejudice in post-war England; as a result of being seen attending the meeting to create the LDA, at ‘a friend’s posh Kensington house with West Indians and Africans’, within minutes of leaving he was stopped in Kensington High Street by an unmarked police car. He was accused of stealing from cars and his was searched. ‘In the boot of my car they found a piece of worm drift-wood which was called an offensive weapon and so was my umbrella.’

  He later set up an arts centre called Atlantis in a disused church in Bruton, Somerset, for people of all races – including West Indians, Africans, Jews and a variety of continentals – which he ran for about ten years. He wrote: ‘They all contributed to the culture of this nation.’53 He added:

  [It was] intended as a meeting place for Guildford staff who had not been reinstated, studio spaces for postgraduate art students and musicians to further their careers, also as a social centre for local pensioners. Socials, concert (classical, chamber, orchestral) and theatre. 36 Students spent time working there. The facilities were free.54

  He encouraged the late Maria Sax Ledger in her painting.55 A group called Treatment recorded in his studios there from 1981–85. They thanked him on the sleeve of their record Cipher Caput in 1993, with the words: ‘Back Cover Montage: Henk Huffener – Who also deserves our eternal thanks for the energy and magic we found lying long ago in Atlantis, Bruton – Thanks to his accommodation then.’56 Philip Hardaker, the sculptor, had a studio there during 1980–85 and told me he remembered Treatment, who had played at Glastonbury. He said there was a rather primitive recording studio in the basement of Atlantis which different groups used, and when Glastonbury first started lots of them stayed at the centre which was quite nearby. Tenants only had to pay for the utilities, but some people abused Henk’s generosity. There were lots of different people there including weavers, a guitar and mandolin maker and photographers:

  As he was a painter and a creative practitioner he was also a great supporter of young artists. I will always remember him as being one of the most generous and supportive patrons and one of the funniest men I have ever met. He had a great spirit and a passion for life that was infectious to all around him.57

  Henk had told Philip about his work in the Resistance but obviously found it painful to discuss. He told him about when he was arrested and worked in a U2 factory, where he sabotaged the parts he was making. Henk told him he came to England after the war because in Holland many of the people who had collaborated with the Nazis were still holding high office. He and his wife Margaret had three children – Guy born 1952, Clare born 1955 and Josephine born 1961. Unfortunately, Guy and his wife Gabriele died in September 2001, having contracted cerebral malaria in Malawi, and both died on their return to Germany. Philip concluded by saying how much he missed Henk.58

  After the war, Henk received the Resistance Commemorative Cross. Henricus (Henk) Huffener was recognised by Yad Vashem as a Righteous Among the Nations on 23 July 1998 and was honoured in London on 3 February 1999. In his speech on that occasion, the Israeli Ambassador unusually commented on Henk’s post-war work:

  After the war, Mr Huffener wanted to help the victims of the Nazis and went to great lengths to find useful work in this area. He eventually worked as a psychologist with UNESCO in Paris until 1950. After coming to England and marrying his wife Margaret, he owned and ran a Cultural centre in Somerset helping young people with their careers.59

  Henk was modest about his achievements. When asked why he risked death to save strangers when so many others did not, he said: ‘I had Jewish friends. It’s difficult to say. I’m a bit odd in that I love cultural diversity.’60 Sadly, Henk died in 2006, but the words of HE Dror Zeigerman at the Israeli Embassy will last for eternity: ‘You are a shining light amidst the darkness of the Holocaust, your stunning bravery is a testament to all humanity.’

  Claire Keen-Thiryn (1924–) was a young girl living in Brussels when she became involved in her parents’ Resistance work. She said: ‘Like so many resistance workers, we became involved with the Jews, unwittingly as it were, but so many of us did.’61

  Claire regarded her family as very ‘establishment’ as her father, Eleuthere Thiryn, was a professional soldier, an officer in the Belgian army. He had served throughout the First World War without being wounded and afterwards he became a lecturer at the Military College. Her mother went to England as a refugee during the war and stayed for four years in Bexhill. Claire’s brother Louis was born there in 1918. The experience made her parents liberal anglophiles. Claire recalled that she and her brother begged her mother to vote for the Nazis in 1936, when women first got the vote. They felt it was the beginning of a new period, with the right-wing government of Belgium sweeping with a new broom.62

  Claire thought Jews were well integrated in Belgium, as in France, because of the influence of the French Revolution which gave Jews equality of citizenship. She spoke of her mother ‘visiting the only Belgian Kosher restaurant with her Jewish best friend and commenting that she had eaten Kosher food as though it was exotic. Claire herself knew there were Jews at her grammar school but she did not know who they were until they and a teacher disappeared after the invasion on 10 May 1940.’63

  Claire’s father was put in charge of the Ministry of Food, which rationed food for everyone in the area around Brussels known as Brabant. He was in constant contact with the Nazis and had to feed their troops. It was in June/July 1940 that the family joined the Resistance and almost immediately a Jewish couple in their fifties or sixties came to live with them. The man had been in the army with her father during the First World War, so this may have been a matter of loyalty. They stayed only six months and Claire believes they had an escape route out of Belgium. She knew the couple did not eat with the family – perhaps they ate only kosher food, as the man often went out.

  In November 1940 Claire’s family
suffered a catastrophe when their wealthy grandmother, who had been a great hoarder, was forced to hand over to the Nazis her collection of gold and antique coins. She died of shock shortly afterwards and at that point the family became determined to act as intelligent resisters. Claire’s brother Louis became actively involved in the Resistance with a woman they knew as Madame Hardy. She was a British woman working with MI5 or MI6. Louis worked with Madame Hardy to prepare for Allied landings:

  Claire said she did not know anyone who worked in the Resistance who was not helping the Jews as well. They were pro-Jewish. Her family resisted because of her father’s fight in WWI and he saw this as a continuation of the war. Her mother saw it as anti-German rather than anti-Nazi. They hid British airmen and someone who had shot a soldier and had been condemned to death. They were already living on the fringes of illegal activities and hiding the Jews was part of the anti-Nazi activity.64

  In 1943 Madame Hardy asked the family to look after two young Jewish girls from Antwerp, whose father was a diamond cutter. Their older sisters had been taken by the Nazis to work in a brothel in a concentration camp. Claire said that all the concentration camps had brothels, as the Germans believed that men worked better if they had sexual satisfaction. The two girls were known as Fadette, who was 13 or 14, and Yvette, who was 17 or 18. Only Fadette lived with them; Yvette was based somewhere else but was in and out visiting her sister. They could not have them both because there were lots of airmen in the house as well. All their friends had Jewish visitors who were moved around in case the Gestapo called.

  Fadette was a very quiet girl. She ate with the family but hardly spoke and spent most of her time in her room. She was obviously very frightened. Claire thinks her mother was in another house somewhere. Claire’s father knew the girls’ real names and that after the war they went to Tel Aviv. They were the only members of their family to survive.

  Both Louis and Madame Hardy were eventually betrayed by a man thought to be a friend – Prosper De Zitter. He was born in Flanders and had been a soldier in Canada. It appears he offered his services to the German Embassy even before the occupation. It has been calculated that he was responsible for the betrayal of several hundreds of members of the Resistance, Allied airmen and escaped POWs by leading them to safe houses in Belgium and France and then sending them to Paris by train, where they were picked up as soon as they left the station. Both he and his accomplice, Flore Dings, were sentenced and shot on the same day, 17 September 1948.65

  When Claire first told me about her brother she said that the mysterious Madame Hardy was arrested in January 1944, was sent to Mauthausen to be gassed at once and was listed as a Belgian hero. The wonders of the internet have now enabled me to find out that Madame Hardy was very influential in organising escape lines, Resistance work and hiding evaders. Although she was known as Edith Hardy in the Resistance, she was born Edith May Bagshaw in 1899 in Aston, Birmingham. Her father was a grocer and she was the fourth of five children – all the rest were boys. She served in the First World War as a member of the Women’s Army Auxiliary Corps in January 1918 and then in the Women’s Royal Air Force. On 11 December 1919 she married a Belgian gentleman by the name of Van-den-Hove in Birmingham Cathedral. He was 29 and she was 20.

  The next that is known of Madame Hardy is following the invasion, when she was married to another Belgian, Felix Hardy. Whatever her activities, she was arrested at home on 26 January 1944 for assisting the enemy – she was a member of the Service de Renseignements d’Action (SRA), the general name for intelligence services. She was sent to Saint-Gilles prison in Brussels, which was the normal destination for members of the Resistance, and stayed there until 21 July 1944 when she was sent to Germany. Apparently she arrived at Ravensbrück camp, which was mainly for women, on 30 December 1944 and then on 7 March 1945 she was sent to Mauthausen camp, where she was gassed on 15 March 1945.66 Claire told me that after the war her Belgian husband came to see them and told them Edith had been Jewish. This seems unlikely given that her first marriage was in Birmingham Cathedral, but she may have converted at some point.

  Louis was sent to the Dora-Mittelbau camp in the Harz mountains, which was established in 1943 as a sub-camp to Buchenwald. Sixty thousand people were sent there, of whom 20,000 perished. The labour camp Dora is not as well known as many of the other Nazi camps. Its horrors were described by one of its inmates, Guido Zembsch-Schreve, a member of the Special Operations Executive (SOE). He arrived in late 1944 and described the fear he and his chums felt when they discovered where they were: ‘a labour camp so secret that it rated a “Nacht and Nebel” (“night and fog”, or top secret) classification, meaning that the only way an inmate could be permitted to leave there was by way of the crematorium chimney’.67 The inmates were forced to produce V2 missiles for the Germans.68

  Though every slave labourer had a German soldier at his elbow, more than half the V2s made in Dora misfired; so badly had they been built. Zembsch-Schreve’s own team was once visited by Wernher von Braun, who spotted at once that they were saboteurs; they were all instantly shot by von Braun’s Gestapo companions, except for Zembsch-Schreve, who had taken the precaution of standing back against the wall behind the gunmen, where he was overlooked.69

  Claire’s brother died on a train in 1944 aged 27, whilst being evacuated from camp Ellrich which was near Dora. There the prisoners performed the:

  same work but … things were much tougher. He [Louis] survived illness thanks to his friends, but weighed only 48 kilos in the end. Ellrich was evacuated, some by foot and almost all died and by train. Loulou [Louis] was in the train and that transport was also lethal: those who survived the lack of food and drinks were eventually machinegunned by the RAF and that is how Loulou died. All 186 who died with him are in an unmarked grave in Dreetz on the railway line between Hamburg and Berlin.70

  Dora camp is not very well known and a former inmate, Freddie Knoller, has suggested that this is because Wernher von Braun was in charge of the scientific work being done there. After the war, both America and Russia were fighting for supremacy in missile technology and when von Braun became an American hero, it was inconvenient to remember his work in Dora and all its associated horrors.71

  Claire has said that the family heard of Louis’ death in July 1945 and that her mother died of a broken heart in 1950. I found Louis Thiryn listed with thousands of other Belgian political prisoners as No 60511, and listed as a ‘maler’ which translates as a painter on a prisoners’ website.72

  Claire’s family, like so many others, paid heavily for their involvement in the Resistance, with the death of her grandmother, the premature death of her mother and the murder of her brother. However, it is impossible to know how many people were saved by their Resistance work. Claire and I appeared on BBC Radio 4’s Woman’s Hour to talk about her story and other Holocaust rescuers on 6 January 2005, and she participated in the national Holocaust Memorial Day event in Cardiff in 2006 and was introduced to Tony and Cherie Blair.

  Jacob (1881–1953) and Hendrika (1889–1971) Klerk. Henri Obstfeld, who now lives in London, was left with a couple called the Klerks in Arnhem in 1942 when he was 2½ years old. He stayed with them until he was 5. He does not know how contact was established with the Klerks and neither did their adopted daughter Els Willemsen, with whom he was in regular contact until she died in January 2003 aged 87. She was married in 1942 and the Klerks, who were then in their fifties, were left with a large, virtually empty house. Jacob Klerk was an estate agent and insurance broker, with an office at home. He was a dedicated Freemason, having been initiated in 1909, and he became a Master Mason in 1920. In 1932 he joined a new Lodge in Arnhem and was its secretary for many years.73 He was also an elder of the Baptist church. His wife was called Hendrika. Henri has assumed that his parents made contact with them through the Freemasons, although his own father was not a member.74

  Henri’s father originally came from Krakow, now in Poland, but lived in Vienna from 1910 to 1925. He move
d to Amsterdam in 1925 and gradually all his family joined him. He became a shoe designer and eventually took over the family slipper business with his brother Simon. He married Henri’s mother in 1933. Her family had lived in Holland since before 1800. Henri was born in April 1940 and a month later the Germans invaded. Gradually, life became more difficult for Jews as restrictions on their activities were increased. In 1942 the Jewish Council was ordered to arrange for Jews to be chosen for work in the East, and the Obstfelds received call-up papers for Henri. Not surprisingly, his parents were alarmed when they realised that their 2-year-old son had to present himself with a rucksack, clothing and food for a few days, in order to be sent off to work in the East. They immediately took him to his Uncle Dolek’s whilst looking for somewhere permanent to leave him.75

  Henri has described how initially he was taken by train to Arnhem to meet the Klerks:

  Apparently, I was most taken with the pictures on the Delft blue tiles which decorated their toilet. Having returned to Amsterdam, my mother started to tell me frequently that they would have to give me away for a while, but they would come back for me later. Some time later, we went to Arnhem again, to visit the Klerk family. While I was kept busy with the picture-tiles in the toilet, my parents left quietly.76