by Marcel Prins
Selly’s drawing in Lies’s friendship book. The page facing it remains blank.
Maurice, during his stay in Bilthoven, 1944
After the war we moved into a new home in Amsterdam. We found some documents in the apartment belonging to a Mr. Maas, a fanatical NSB member who had lived there during the war. My mother took the papers to the PRA,27 which was set up after the war to serve justice on Dutch people who had collaborated with the Germans. Maas was sentenced to a few months in prison.
But when he got out, Maas rented a room from our neighbor downstairs. Lots of apartments back then had an extra attic room at the top of the house. And that was the room that the neighbor gave to Maas. So, to reach his room, he had to go up our stairs. When our mother heard him coming up the stairs the first time, she went out and said to him, “You will not walk up my staircase, because I’m not planning to clean up after any NSB member. There’s an ax waiting for you up here. If you walk up my stairs one more time I’m going to bash your brains in.”
Mr. Maas complained to the police. A few days later, a detective rang our doorbell. “Is it true that you threatened your neighbor with an ax?”
“Yes,” said my mother. “Look, there it is. I’m going to bash his brains in if he walks up my stairs. I’m not cleaning up any NSB member’s dusty footprints.”
And the detective replied, “If you promise me that you’ll take that ax away, I’ll make sure he stops using your stairs.”
And that’s what happened. He moved into a room inside the neighbor’s apartment instead. He never walked up our stairs again. My mother and he sometimes used to cross on other parts of the staircase, but she would never step out of his way. He was the one who had to stand aside.
This was after the war. I don’t remember much from before the war. But I was born in 1937, so I was only three when the war broke out. My father, Salomon Meijer, was a tram conductor in Amsterdam. The Germans immediately laid off the Jews who worked for the city, so he was one of the first to lose his job. They sent him to work in the forest near Staphorst. A group of them was allowed to come home to visit for a few days, but some of them escaped and went into hiding, so the Germans sent a second group to Westerbork as punishment. My father was part of that group.
Before her marriage, my mother, Ester Jas, had worked as a cap seamstress. After my father left, which I don’t remember, our family had no income. My mother’s eldest brother probably gave us some money now and then. My mother had foresight: We went into hiding before they really started to go after the Jews here. We first hid with my aunt, Lena Talhuizen, and we slept in her attic — but that must have become too dangerous because we weren’t there for long. My brother and I had gone into hiding without our mother. I can’t remember saying good-bye to her. She stayed in various places in the city, working for the resistance, until she got caught.
They took her to the headquarters of the Sicherheitsdienst, the German intelligence agency. At first they suspected her only of working for the resistance, until a former neighbor of ours surfaced. She told them that my mother was Jewish and mentioned in passing that she also had two Jewish sons who had gone into hiding. They mistreated my mother very badly in an attempt to find out where we were hiding. But she was truly unable to tell them anything, because she knew nothing about where we were.
They later transported her to Vught, a concentration camp near Den Bosch. On the way there, she passed through Centraal Station in Utrecht, where she spotted me in the distance, purely by chance. Later still, she was sent to Westerbork. And on September 5, 1944, the Dolle Dinsdag,28 when the Dutch believed they had been liberated, the Nazis transported my mother to Auschwitz.
I can remember a little about the period after we ended up in the Hollandsche Schouwburg for the first time. I don’t know if we were betrayed and picked up, or how we were taken to the Schouwburg. One memory that has stayed with me is the dim light in the theater and the red chairs we sat on while we waited to find out what would happen to us. They took my brother and me, along with the other children, to the kindergarten across the street, where the staff helped us to escape through the gardens, and we were taken back to my Aunt Lena’s house on Nieuwe Herengracht.
Aunt Lena was married to Eli Talhuizen, an orthodox Jewish man who had a grocery store on Waterlooplein. He’d heard that children in orphanages were not going to be deported, because they’d already been punished enough. Those kinds of rumors were often started by the Germans themselves. So my uncle managed to get us sent to the boys’ orphanage. I have no idea how long we were in there. What I remember about the orphanage is the window in the door and the steep staircase.
But, of course, on March 6, 1943, on Shabbat,29 the Germans went ahead and emptied the orphanage anyway, and we ended up in the Hollandsche Schouwburg for the second time. The following Tuesday we were taken to the Oostelijk Havengebied station, where many of the trains to Westerbork departed from.
As soon as we were on the train, while it was still waiting to leave, my brother and I started looking for escape routes. We had already looked in the lavatory — maybe that was an option. Then suddenly we heard someone shouting, “Waar zijn de Jasjes? Waar zijn de Jasjes?” Where are the Jasjes? Our mother’s surname was Jas, which is the Dutch word for coat, and a jasje is a little coat. So anyone else would have thought that the man was looking for jackets, but my brother knew straightaway that he meant us. A truck was driving alongside the train and the driver kept calling out, “Where are the Jasjes?” We squeezed through to an exit and, as the truck passed in front of the door, we jumped in.
The truck belonged to Mr. Grootkerk, our aunt Lena’s neighbor. His transport company delivered supplies for the trains. Grootkerk had heard from Lena that we were on the train. As he was making his delivery, he’d gone looking for the Jasjes, the jackets — for my brother and me. Grootkerk kept the goods for the train on the passenger seat in his cab. There was a large space beneath the dashboard, where we had to hide beneath a sheet of brown tarpaulin. If we squatted down, we fit just fine. In total, Grootkerk helped sixteen children escape from the trains that way. The guards never noticed a thing. They knew Grootkerk, and they just waved him on when he left the site.
Soon after our escape, some students from Piet Meerburg’s group30 took us to Utrecht. We stayed in the basement of a house at first, where it was so dark that we had to have the lights on even in the daytime. There was a small window near the ceiling, and if we looked out we could see legs walking past — not shoes, not upper bodies, just legs. And that’s what we looked at all day long.
After that we ended up with some elderly people who thought we were children from Rotterdam, which had been bombed flat. The front room of the house had a view of the street. On the birthday of Mussert, the leader of the NSB, there was an NSB flag hanging outside the old folks’ home across the street. My brother said, “Someone ought to shoot that flag to ribbons.”
“Why’s that?” they said. “Don’t you think it’s a nice flag?”
A few days later, they asked my brother to fetch something from the dresser. My brother, who could already read, spotted a copy of Volk en Vaderland in the drawer, the weekly newspaper for NSB members.
A man used to come by occasionally to check up on us. He was from the resistance, but only we knew that. My brother told him about the flag and the magazine. The elderly couple were quiet people and maybe they only supported the NSB as a political party, but the resistance still thought the situation was too risky. They split us up after that. I went to stay with the Protestant Borg family, who made me kneel and pray on the cold linoleum beside my bed every night.
They kept a braid of their dead daughter’s hair by my bedside, which I thought was kind of nasty. One of the sons was mentally handicapped. He adored me. I think they were probably aware that the little boy they had taken in was Jewish.
The people at my next address definitely knew I was Jewish. They built a peat bin31 in the attic for me to hide in. Whenever the bell
rang, they chased me upstairs, and someone would lift me into the peat bin. It was a cozy fit. As soon as I was sitting down, the lid went on. Then they would lay some blocks of peat on top. There were also peat blocks piled up around the walls of the bin, so that it looked as though they had a large supply of peat. That address was just a temporary hiding place as well. Even with my peat bin to hide in, it was still too dangerous.
Then some resistance members took me on a steam train to Bilthoven. It was a warm day when I arrived, sometime in August 1943. I didn’t need to hide when I got there. My new family didn’t even mention a hiding place. They let me have the run of the garden of their big house. The family had three children, two boys and a girl who was a little younger than me. The children accepted me immediately and let me play on their bikes and their Autoped.32 Finally I was with an affectionate family and I had friends to play with.
Maurice (on the far right) celebrating his birthday in Bilthoven, 1944
My new foster mother, Zus Boerma-Derksen, was part of a resistance group that had carried out various attacks on the railroad line used by the trains to Westerbork. When a traitor was found in the group, they asked her to shoot the man dead. She did as she was told. Then she made a run for it, but she was arrested and sent to prison. She was released later because witnesses had described a woman in her early twenties and she was thirty-four at the time. She was small and slim, so she looked younger.
A high-ranking German officer lived in the house opposite ours. He used to hold big parties there, and we’d watch the men in open-top cars going up the driveway. We were actually in the lion’s den, but it never caused us any problems.
There were lots of people in hiding in Bilthoven. The local resistance had destroyed the municipal register, which listed everyone who lived in Bilthoven, to make it possible for people to take on new names. Now that the register was gone, no one knew who lived where, so all of the residents had to report for a new register. This was a wonderful opportunity for people like me to change our names and become regular citizens of Bilthoven. I became Ries Boerma, and I was part of the family.
The Boermas welcomed me into their family. We all used to go on day trips sometimes. One time we went on the train to Woerden. I can still remember changing trains at Utrecht Station, where trains left for destinations all over the Netherlands.
On liberation day, my foster brother and I stood and watched as the Canadians drove into Bilthoven. The soldiers put up their tents in the gardens of the big houses. We thought it was wonderful, and we wandered all over the place, enjoying the chaos that reigned in those first few days after liberation. There were all kinds of ammunition piled up on Rembrandtlaan, whole cases full. I went along and picked out some bullets for my foster mother. I stuffed handfuls of them into my pockets. And we found some signal flares that belonged to the Canadians. My elder foster brother was technically minded. He cobbled together a flare gun and we used a hammer to set them off. They made a beautiful fireworks display.
My mother survived Auschwitz. The Germans transferred her to the labor camp at Liebau, where she worked in a factory that made tank tracks. That was her salvation. The chance of survival was far greater there than in Auschwitz. She was liberated by the Russians.
One day, my mother’s brother came to fetch me. It was peach season, and my uncle bought four peaches for my brother and me. They cost ten guilders, which was a lot of money back then. When I saw my mother, I just said, “Hello, ma’am.” She was really sad that I didn’t recognize her right away. I felt relieved when my uncle took me back to Bilthoven at the end of the day.
At first we still hoped that my father was alive. My mother even went to Staphorst to see if she could find out anything about the time when my father had worked in the forest there. She also went to Westerbork. His name was on the deportation lists. We later found out that my father had been murdered on February 28, 1943, in Auschwitz. That means they weren’t certain of the exact date. If they didn’t know the date when someone was murdered, they used to put the last day of the month on the death certificate. I only have a very vague memory of my father from before the war.
The three of us went to Amsterdam. We had to go on a boat, because the trains weren’t running yet. Soon after liberation, my mother asked if I’d ever been anywhere on the train during the war. I told her about my trip to Woerden. “That was the day,” said my mother, “when I was taken away on the train. We were lining up to get on the train at Centraal Station in Utrecht, and suddenly I spotted you. It was awful to see you just walking along like that. I wanted to call out to you, but of course I kept my mouth shut, or you would have been arrested as well.”
We had nothing left after the war. I had to wear what we called kleppers, a kind of wooden sandal. Then my uncle took us to a cobbler in the east of Amsterdam, who made us each a pair of shoes — the only handmade shoes I’ve ever had. The government gave our mother coupons to buy things. But there was nothing to buy. If she heard in the morning that a particular item was going to be on sale that day, she would line up to see if she could get some. She often didn’t return until four in the afternoon.
My mother was broken by the war. Having to struggle to survive for years had made her selfish. She was only really capable of loving herself. And she was jealous of my foster mother, whom I saw more as my real mother, because she was so kind to me. My mother tried to break the bond between my foster mother and me.
In 1981, when my foster mother was seventy, we had a big celebration. She rented vacation homes for all of the children and grandchildren. We traveled by public transportation and were the last to get there. As we entered the room where the party was being held, my foster mother smiled and said, “Good. Now I have all of my children and grandchildren together in one place.”
Sieny Kattenburg, c. 1940
When Jewish students were made to leave school at the beginning of 1941, a friend of mine said, “Sieny, we’ll go to work. Let’s apply to the kindergarten on Plantage Middenlaan. They need staff there.” The kindergarten took care of both Jewish and non-Jewish children. The staff was also “mixed.”
The director, Mrs. Henriëtte Henriquez Pimentel, took us both on and we started our training. In June 1942, the raids began. More and more Jews were being picked up on the street and taken from their houses at night. Sometimes they were transported directly to a concentration camp, but usually they were temporarily held in the Hollandsche Schouwburg. There was not much space in the theater, and the Germans found the children far too noisy and troublesome, so the kindergarten where I worked was designated as the reception center for the children. All of the non-Jewish members of the staff were fired, on the orders of the Germans, and no non-Jewish children were allowed in the kindergarten. From then on, we had to look after newborns, toddlers, and older children night and day, even though we had no beds, mattresses, playpens, or baby things. The Jewish Council took care of that, and the food as well. The director nominated three girls to be responsible for the three age groups. I was given the little ones, from newborns to four-year-olds.
Sieny with a toddler in the kindergarten, 1942
I had to visit the Hollandsche Schouwburg every day, which was never designed to hold so many people. There were people sitting on the floor and on the old theater seats, and there was straw on the floor for them to lie on at night. The building stank. There were only a few bathrooms in the whole place. In the first few weeks after the Germans had taken charge of the kindergarten, the mothers were still allowed to cross the street to feed their babies. But the Germans stopped that later, and we took the children to their mothers in the Schouwburg.
Everyone wanted to get out of the Schouwburg. Whenever I took a child back to the kindergarten, their parents would stop me. “Can I come with you too?” “Please take my son away from here!” One time a boy was crossing the street with me and he made a run for it. The Germans chased after him, with their rifles drawn. And I ran after him too. If I hadn’t grabbed hold of him, t
hey would have started shooting.
At the entrance to the Schouwburg, the Jewish Council had made a reception area where people were registered when they entered the building. All of the names and addresses were written on lists, so that the Germans would know exactly who was there. Some of the council staff tried to keep as many children off these lists as possible, so that they could be smuggled out again later. It worked like this: When a family turned up with three children, they would write, for example, “Cohen family, two children.” One of those three children was now “illegally” in the Hollandsche Schouwburg. Although there were only two children on the list, we would take three across the street the next day. So now there was one child in the kindergarten who was not on any list. And as long as they were not on a list, the Germans wouldn’t miss them.
The Germans sometimes used to come and inspect the kindergarten. One time a large gang of them came stomping up the steps in their jackboots. When they were about to march into the dormitory, I stood in their way and said, “Get out of here, how dare you wake up little children!” And they left, as meek as lambs.
There were often several transports a week to Westerbork. The Germans knew exactly who was to be deported each time. It was all carefully controlled. But the director of the Schouwburg, Walter Süskind, who was a German Jew, had succeeded in winning the trust of the Germans, and he always told our boss who would be leaving that night. I would go over to the Schouwburg and take the parents to one side. “I’d like a quick word,” I used to say. “What I’m telling you is strictly confidential. You’re on the list for Westerbork. They’ll be taking you at ten o’clock tonight. But one of your children isn’t registered. Do you want us to bring the child this evening or would you prefer to leave it with us?”
