by Marcel Prins
The parents nearly always started to panic. “What should we do?”
“You have until four this afternoon to decide,” I would say. “I’ll come back then.”
At four o’clock I would go talk to them again. “What did you decide?”
Most of them wanted to keep their children with them. “We’re young and strong,” they used to say. “We can take care of our children ourselves.” If they decided to leave the child behind, they would say, “Make sure he ends up somewhere he can have a good life, with kind people.”
“We will,” I used to say. “We’ll make sure everything’s all right until you come back.” And that’s what I believed.
We did something similar with babies that were registered, but that was more difficult. When we heard that the family was to be deported that evening, one of us would go to the parents and ask the same question: “Do you want to take your baby or leave it with us?” And again I would go back at four o’clock. If the parents wanted to take the baby, we would wake the child at nine in the evening, give it a bottle and take it to Mom and Dad. If the parents decided to leave the baby with us, I’d say, “I’ll come at half past nine and instead of your baby I’ll bring you a doll, wrapped in a blanket. If anyone wants to take a look at it, you have to say it’s sleeping.” In a daze, the parents would nod and then, later that evening, they’d climb into the truck with a doll in their arms.
So then the children were in hiding with us in the kindergarten. Sometimes we would put the babies into bags and carry them to people from the resistance, who found places for them to hide. We used to give them a spoonful of wine so that they would sleep. Older children escaped via the teacher-training college, which had a backyard adjoining the kindergarten’s.
The director of the teacher-training college was in on the operation. He’d cleared out a classroom inside the college and put in a number of beds where the children could sleep. The resistance would then come to collect the children from him. The resistance members went into the teacher-training college through the front door with everyone else. Students were going in and out of the building all day long, so no one paid any attention. They just had to pick the right moment to walk back out with a child. Strangely, none of the students ever noticed that anything unusual was going on.
Other children “disappeared” when we took them out for walks. We would go out with a group of children to a nearby street, Plantage Parklaan, where someone would be waiting to take one of the children into hiding. When we were almost there, I’d take the child aside, point at the man who was waiting, and say, “That man over there is your uncle, and he’s going to take you to a farm.” I just used to make it up. Then we’d walk back, and I’d return to the kindergarten with one child fewer.
It usually went smoothly, as the Germans rarely checked how many children had left and how many returned. But we always had a lookout, and when there was a German at the door who might have been counting, someone used to give me a sign. I’d signal back with my hand: one child gone, or two. The lookout would race upstairs, and some children would come tearing back down. They’d already be jumping up and down on the doorstep before the German could start counting properly. All told, at least five hundred children went into hiding via the kindergarten.
As I was walking down the steps with a group of children one day, a courier entered the building. He was wearing a star and an armband with a number from the Jewish Council, which showed that he was temporarily exempt from deportation. That armband also functioned as a permit to be out on the streets after the curfew.33 We saw each other only briefly that time, as I was taking the children to their parents across the street. In the weeks after that, I saw the man more often. His name was Harry. There was a spark between us, and we fell in love. Harry tried to cycle by the kindergarten as often as possible, and he spent all of his free time with us. He also helped to smuggle children out sometimes, and he played games with them to keep them calm.
We got married on June 28, 1943, in our old rags because we’d taken our good clothes somewhere else in case we decided to go into hiding. But I didn’t want to do that yet. I didn’t want to abandon the children.
On July 26, 1943, when Harry had been living with me up in the attic of the kindergarten for just a few weeks, the Germans emptied the place for the first time. Suddenly there was a bunch of trucks at the door, with Dutch police and Germans, who had a list of the names of the staff members, including our boss, Mrs. Pimentel. I was able to snatch a piece of cake and bread from the table before we were taken to Muiderpoort station, from where the train to Westerbork would leave.
We were there until midnight, and no one knew what was going to happen. Suddenly there was an announcement that “Frau Cohen vom Kinderhaus” (Mrs. Cohen from the children’s home) should make herself known. Surrounded by SS men, I had to climb into a truck. Until that night I hadn’t been scared, but then, there, at the station, I was terrified. What was going to happen to me? We stopped at Frederiksplein, where they made me get into another vehicle. At one in the morning, we raced across a completely deserted Amsterdam. They dropped me off at the kindergarten across from the Schouwburg: “Und jetzt sind Sie Direktorin,” they said. “And now you’re the director.” It was insane. I was far too young to be in charge. Fortunately a much older colleague of mine also came back the next day and she took over the management instead.
Later I heard from Harry, who had been away when the kindergarten was emptied, that he had gone to look for me. He’d said, “Either I’m getting her out of there or you can transport both of us together.” But he couldn’t find me because I was already on my way back to the kindergarten. Luckily he went back to the kindergarten too, where we found each other again.
We continued our work at the kindergarten until the morning of September 29, the day before Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year. At that point, the kindergarten was almost empty. There were hardly any Jews left in Amsterdam and we knew it was only a matter of time before we would be deported ourselves. So we decided to go into hiding. Harry and I left in the early hours. On foot. It turned out that we had left just in time. The Nazis emptied the kindergarten for the last time that day. They dissolved the Jewish Council and sent all of the staff members to Westerbork.
We’d only just set out when someone came cycling past. We saw him look back over his shoulder. It was before eight and there wasn’t a soul around. I wasn’t even allowed to be out on the street before eight. Harry had his exemption, so he was all right. We walked on, but suddenly the man was standing there in front of us. He was a Dutchman who worked for the Sicherheitsdienst, the German intelligence agency. He was dressed in civilian clothes, not a uniform. The man glared at us and asked where we were going.
“Just out for a stroll,” said Harry. “We have to get to work soon.”
“Identity cards.”
Harry handed him our own old ID cards.
He studied them carefully and then returned them. “Make sure you’re at work in ten minutes.”
As soon as he had disappeared from sight, we walked on to our first safe house. We went the rest of the way in silence, terrified that we would be stopped again.
When we got to the house, we cut the stars from our clothes. Then we rang the doorbell and the door opened. Without our stars, we headed upstairs, to the De Swaan family.
That same day, Mrs. De Swaan’s gardener, Hannes Boogaard, came to fetch me. We traveled to the Boogaards’ family farm in Nieuw-Vennep, about twenty miles south of Amsterdam, first on the tram, and then on the bus. The family took in so many Jews that the bus driver even used to announce, “Jews for Boogaard, this is your stop!” It was a bad business. Many of the Jews who were hiding on the farm were betrayed.
Boogaard’s place was teeming with people. There were around sixty Jews staying there. Harry had also arrived there by then, and that evening Hannes took us on his bike to a houseboat on the Lisse canal. I saw cows and grass and meadows for the first time in ages. Up on
that dike, on the bicycle, I felt free. It was wonderful. Briefly, we were safe from the worry that the Germans might pick us up at any moment.
We saw the houseboat in the distance. There was a man standing in the doorway. It was Kees van Tol. “You’re bringing me more Jews?” he asked Hannes when we stepped off the bike. “I can’t take them. We’ve just had a raid.”
“You have to take them,” said Hannes. “I can’t take them back with me either.”
There were huge bunches of gladiolus in the living-room window. I asked if they’d had a party.
“No,” said Van Tol. “It’s to make sure no one can peer inside.”
There was no clean water, no light, no gas. We slept on a wooden bench that night. Just before we went to bed, he brought us his own sheet, and he also gave us a chamber pot.
As there had recently been a raid and the Germans nearly always returned to the same address one more time, he told us that we’d have to go out through the window and into the canal if his dog started yapping. He said the dog never barked, but no sooner had he left than the dog started barking away. So we hid in the water, clinging to the edge of the boat. False alarm. The next morning, Van Tol took the dirty chamber pot, rinsed it in the canal, rowed to the opposite bank, fetched some water from the pump, rowed back, and said, “Here’s some drinking water for you.”
We couldn’t stay on the houseboat at night, as the risk of another German raid was too great. Van Tol told us about an island, not far away, where some of the locals had hidden a boat in a shed so that it wouldn’t be confiscated by the Germans. “I’ll lend you my rowboat,” Van Tol said, “and you can spend the night over there, on the boat. But you’ll have to go there in the dark and come back in the dark.”
As we were rowing there, we heard splashing in the water. “They’ve found us,” said Harry. But nothing else happened. We reached the island, opened up the shed and climbed into the boat. No sooner were we on the boat than we heard more splashing, and then more. Soon it was coming from every direction: splash, splash, splash. Rats! The whole place was crawling with them. We rowed over there every night for two weeks. We didn’t sleep, and after that first night we didn’t take any food with us, because that’s what had attracted the creatures. We sat huddled on the boat, holding hands, terrified that the rats would walk on us again.
Two weeks later, a young man from the resistance brought some ration cards to Van Tol’s. We started talking. He told us about his parents, his brothers and sisters, and about the Jewish people they were sheltering: a few children and an older man. He never should have told us, but his story was a stroke of good luck for us. Harry had heard that his father was hiding in a place with some young people.
“What’s the older man’s name?” asked Harry.
“Uncle Henk,” said the man.
Harry’s father’s name was Salli, but everyone took on different names when they went into hiding, so Harry took out the photograph of his father that he carried with him and asked, “Is this him by any chance?”
“Yes,” he said. “That’s Uncle Henk.”
And that’s how we found out that Harry’s father was hiding in a house nearby.
“I’ll go home,” said the young man, “and see what I can do.”
So he went home. “You’ll never guess who I just met,” he told his mother, Mrs. Breyer. “Uncle Henk’s children. They’re in a bad position, no water, nowhere to sleep.” When Harry’s father heard that, he started crying.
“Don’t cry,” said Mrs. Breyer. “We’ll go fetch your children tomorrow.”
The next evening, that young man, Piet Breyer, and his brother came to get us.
It was like going from hell into heaven. The Breyer family had a small house on the dike, about four yards by six. It was lovely and cozy inside. There were already sixteen people there: eight Jewish people in hiding and eight family members, including a son who was hiding in his own house to avoid being sent to Germany as a forced laborer. Harry’s father, whom we immediately started calling Uncle Henk, cried. Mrs. Breyer, whom we called Aunt Ant, was beaming. We all drank tea together. Everyone was in a festive mood: Uncle Henk’s children had arrived!
The Breyer family’s house, between the towns of Nieuw-Vennep and Haarlemmermeer.
Soon after we got there, Mr. Breyer, whom we called Uncle Sam, found a crack in a wall of the crawl space beneath the house. That crack was a sign from God, he said, telling him to make another space there, a secret one. The basement was only about thirty inches deep. They couldn’t dig any deeper because the groundwater would have come in. The sons worked on it for weeks, digging during the day and scattering the soil over the fields at night. We made a wooden hatch for the hole in the wall and then knocked nails into it and tied string between them. That was so we could spread cement over the hatch and it would stay in place. The hatch had a handle on the inside so that the last person in could close it behind them. It looked exactly like the wall around it. The only light and air came in through the ventilation holes at the back of the house.
At first we only slept in there at night, until the Germans started doing random searches of the local houses. Then Aunt Ant decided that it would be a good idea to split us up: five upstairs and six under the ground one day, and the other way round the next day. We all ate upstairs though, until one day the Germans came to search the house when we were sitting at the table. As usual, Harry’s father was at the head of the table and keeping lookout. We had finished eating and just as the oldest son picked up the Bible, Harry’s father cried out, “Sicherheitsdienst! Quick, hide!”
Everyone flew to the basement. The plates, the pans — Aunt Ant threw them all into the sink. Then she positioned Gerrie, their disabled daughter, on top of the entrance to the crawl space. The Germans saw through that trick. They pushed Gerrie out of the way and one of the men came down into the basement. We could hear someone searching, and getting closer and closer to our hiding place. I expected the light to shine in my face at any moment. But the man didn’t notice the hatch in the wall, and he went back upstairs. We were all so relieved, but I couldn’t stop thinking about the huge pile of dishes that had been thrown into the sink. They didn’t spot them either.
Angry that they hadn’t found anything, they took the eldest son, who was called Sam, like his father, and dragged him outside. We could hear everything through the floor and we were terrified that Sam was going to be arrested or even shot.
“Where are the Jews?” they asked.
“Jews?” he said. “We’ve never met any Jews. I don’t even know what Jews look like.”
“There are Jews here. We’re certain of it. That’s what everyone’s saying.”
“So you believe gossip, do you?”
“Yes,” they said. “There’s usually some truth in it.”
“Well, it’s up to you what you do, but I’ve never seen a Jew in my life.”
Sam wasn’t taken away, and he wasn’t shot. After a while, he came back inside and the Germans left. His parents and his brothers and sisters didn’t bat an eyelid.
After that search, we must have spent an entire year in the ground. We went upstairs only to stand upright for a short while and have a wash. We had to lie on straw, which was only changed when the pigs had clean straw too. In all those months, it happened once or twice.
After December 1944, there were no more searches of the house. That was probably because after the seventh visit, Uncle Sam had asked the Dutch police where he should direct his complaint. “This is the seventh time you’ve been here,” he said. “You people have come from Amsterdam, then from Haarlem, and then from Leiden. Shouldn’t it be clear by now that you have no business here? I want to lodge a complaint because these visits are a real nuisance.” Then Aunt Ant wrote to the mayor to say she didn’t want to be disturbed again, because it should be obvious by now that they weren’t hiding any Jews.
We were never really starving. We even used to have a slice of cheese with our bread. We’d plac
e the cheese on the first piece of bread and slide it onto the second when we started to eat and we didn’t eat the slice of “sliding cheese” until we got to the last piece of bread. When people came begging at the door during the Hunger Winter, Aunt Ant called us all together and said, “How about we all eat one less piece of bread each?” she asked. “Then we’ll have some to give away.” And so that’s what we all did, including her sons, who worked on the land all day long.
On the morning of May 5, Aunt Ant called down to us in the basement: “Come out! The Germans have surrendered. You can go outside!” We crawled out of the basement, which wasn’t easy, because we all had such stiff knees. Ten minutes later, we heard shouting:
“Get back inside! They’re still fighting out there.”
“I’m not going back inside,” said Harry. “If the Germans come now, I’ll join in with the fighting.” But that didn’t happen.
“So, the war’s over now,” said Aunt Ant. “But would you mind staying here until next Sunday? I’d like us all to go to church together.”
The walk to church wasn’t easy, because our legs were out of the habit of walking. The church was packed on that first Sunday after the end of the war. We were the last ones to enter the church: the Breyer family and the eleven people who had hidden with them. The people in the congregation couldn’t believe their eyes. There were seats reserved for us in the front pew and the minister dedicated his entire sermon to Aunt Ant and Uncle Sam. For Aunt Ant, it was an unforgettable moment of glory.
I’ve often said that the time after the war was ten times worse than the war itself. During the war we were living in a kind of daze: All we thought about was liberation, and all we hoped was that we would make it to the end. There was no chance for any other thoughts.
In the weeks and months after liberation, it felt as if we were waking up and experiencing the real tragedy. Nearly all of our relatives were dead. Other people were living in our house. For a while we had to live in the storeroom at my father’s warehouse. But still I walked to Centraal Station every day to see if my father was on the list of people who were coming back. Someone said they’d seen him somewhere in Poland. But it was no good. His name appeared on the list three times — and every time it turned out to be a mistake.
