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Maurice Vanderpol
I was born in Amsterdam, Holland on July 12, 1922 on the second floor of a house that belonged to my maternal grandfather, Opa Simon (OPA is Dutch for grandpa) and grandmother Oma Griet (short for Marghariet).) We lived there with my grandparents for about a year and a half and then moved with them to a better area in a fairly new part of Amsterdam. Oma Griet and my mother ran a millinery store in the house where I was born.
During the 19th century rough diamonds were discovered in South Africa. Amsterdam
became a main center for the diamond industry. A new labor market developed there
consisting of skilled labor that processed rough diamonds that looked like real rocks
into the finished ones you see in jewelry. Jewish citizens who had been barred from
membership in occupational guilds now founded a diamond industrial guild. While my
whole ancestral family had been working in various aspects of this industry, my father
decided to take a big step ‘up’ and became a diamond merchant. Once he started doing
well selling his precious wares to jewelers, he told my grandmother, his mother-
What I remember about that second house was the swing in the back; one of those square
swings for small children with bars on all sides. I also remember that my grandfather,
Simon, kept chickens there in the small city garden in back of the house. He picked
up the eggs every day which was fascinating to me. Opa Simon always kept a dog which
my grandmother grudgingly tolerated. Once, so the story went, he brought home a Saint
Bernard dog, the big type of dog that is used to find people lost in the snow in
the mountains. My grandma was very upset with him, but big-
When I was 6 years old we moved to a nicer neighborhood with my maternal grandparents still living with us. It was a really large apartment with two floors, called a ‘lower’ house with a ground and a second floor with two stories above, the upper house with a separate stairway all the way up. Oma Griet, observed Orthodox Judaism with some flexibility. She was a very nice grandmother who knitted all our clothes. The knitted underwear for boys was designed by her with a holon in the front and a flap in the back that you could unbutton and open for necessary use. I proudly went to school and in gym had to take off my outer clothes and put on my gym clothes. My mother, who had purchased them, did not realize that girls wear different gym clothes than boys. Imagine my embarrassment when I stood in front of my classmates of boys laughing at my outfit!
A very important issue in my childhood was the fact that my father and many other
‘diamantairs’ raveled to Antwerp, Belgium every week, leaving home on Monday pm
and returning on Friday pm. That meant that he was basically not available almost
4 days a week and also had to rest from his travels when he returned home. I missed
him dreadfully and the older I got, the more I realized what a gap that created in
my formative years. No wonder that one of my fondest memories were the Friday nights.
All day Friday my mother would cook and would work cleaning the home together with
our live-
My
father worked on Saturday and Sunday in Amsterdam in the diamond exchange because
on Saturday, the Christian merchants were there and on Sunday, the Jewish merchants.
So he worked seven days a week really. Friday nights were special because the family
would gather. I have very fond memories, particularly the earlier part, because
Oma Griet, would play the piano and my father would sing songs in Dutch, English,
French and German. We knew all those languages because we learned those languages
in school, starting with French in the 4th grade, adding German in 7
In Holland, Saint Nicholas, our Santa Claus, does not come on Christmas,
but on the evening of the fifth of December. It is a non-
The
most significant night of the year in Holland was New Year’s Eve; it was totally
different from the noisemaking festival that is celebrated in the US usually out
on the town. The celebration was more like Thanksgiving. We celebrated in homes with
my extended family, primarily my mother’s. The lights would be turned off at five
minutes to midnight and we would silently and privately reflect on the year and then
at midnight, we would turn on the lights and toast in the New Year, followed in the
typical Dutch fashion with a sumptuous and festive meal.
I was named after my paternal
grandfather, Opa M, short for Moses. Because my parents were very French oriented,
they called me Maurice. My grandfather had three daughters who were my aunts on my
father’s side. One I never knew; the other two who lived with their parents I knew
very well. My grandmother Oma Hein (short for Henriette) died in 1929 of cancer,
and it was the first time I saw my father cry. We couldn’t go to the funeral because
children were not allowed to attend. I remember my other grandmother’s funeral in
’31. First of all there was the coffin in the house with the minyan, the 10 men who
did the praying. There was a sea of flowers. People were buried from the home, Jewish
or otherwise, the coffin was put on a hearse, with friends and family walking behind
the hearse to the end of the street and then closest family and friends would get
into the various coaches or cars to stop at the synagogue. I still have an image
of seeing my mother crying her heart out as her mother’s coffin was driven away with
the men only, to the cemetery for burial. According to the orthodox Jewish custom,
women were not supposed to go to the cemetery. I can still see her standing there
and I remember what she looked like, what she was wearing, crying bitter, bitter
tears seeing her mother, whom she loved so much, go away. I was not allowed to go
because I was too young.
Opa Simon, who lived with us, was a more difficult person, but he was a very handsome
guy. Any Nazi ‘Aryan’ would have been jealous to look like him. He was a tall man,
blond hair and my mother, while she was not tall, was also blond and blue eyed like
my brother and I. (My daughter, too, has the same features.) It was a very interesting
situation since my wife had very black hair and very dark eyes. Opa Simon would fix
things for us, he was a tinkerer, and I am embarrassed that we did not really express
our appreciation for all the ways he helped us. In one memory I see myself as the
5 year old boy whose Opa made a little cabinet for toys out of an old orange crate
for me. Opa Simon died during the war from cancer, but still had a ‘normal’ death
with a funeral because it was just before the persecutions started.
My parents only
had a sixth grade education, but both spoke three languages: Dutch, French and English. My
father was familiar with Dutch literature and would recite parts to us parts which
I still remember to this day. The first trade union of any kind in Holland was the
one for Diamond workers. It was not only to improve their lot in terms of housing,
but particularly to improve and make available adult education. So there was a lot
of pressure on my brother and me to be the first and to be the best in school and
also to stand up for ourselves.
Since I was a little boy, Opa Mo would pick me up
at my home every Saturday morning and would take me to his home by streetcar. As
I am writing this history, now as an old man, I am ever more impressed how much these
early experiences influenced me in my later life.. I was the eldest grandson in the
family and could do no wrong. At Opa Mo’s Oma Hein I would love to play at the sink and
Opa surprised me one day by bringing me a little enamel water kettle that I played
with for some time. As I grew older I continued my visits and appreciated him in
a different way. Opa Mo lived in the old Jewish neighborhood. He was a very strong
person, physically like my other grandfather; they were physical fighters and you
could not push them around. But with me, he was totally tolerant and we talked and
he told me about his background, gave me examples of what happened with his father
who was a fanatic Orthodox Jew who, on the Shabbat while praying in the synagogue
when told that his other son had died, wouldn’t start to mourn until nightfall. I
felt that he was fully accepting me and I didn’t have to perform for him. He made
fun of himself which nobody in our family did very much. He would take his false
teeth out and make a mouth that looked almost like a fish or the Portuguese fishermen
on a painting in our home. I have a very lively memory of the stories he told me
especially the ones about growing up in a very religious family, rebelling against
the severe rules by which an orthodox Jew was supposed to live. He abandoned the
religious dictates and became an atheist. This trend has been passed on to my father
and to me in turn. In fact one, of my most vivid and ‘proud’ memories is going to
lunch on Yom Kippur with my father and grandfather while my mother was fasting.
It
was my parents’ goal in life to make things better for us, especially to have a good
education. I was also very close to my brother and still am. I am two years older
then he. I was always rather serious and duty bound. As the oldest son, I took the
place of my father who was away on business so much. This fact played a very important
role in my and my brother’s life. My mother took her role as a parent very, very,
very seriously culminating during the Holocaust when she was to save my life. I was
very protective and took care of my brother because he was easily frightened and
was often sick. But I was the older brother, the ‘man in the family who never had
any problems’. I took that role very seriously.
Growing up, we moved to ‘better’ neighborhoods
where most of my neighbors were not Jewish. I missed the old neighborhood which
was so different from where we now lived. My father was an atheist and he had absolutely
no interest in Orthodox Judaism. My mother wanted me to be bar mitzvah and I was.
My father carried the expense of the service and the big celebration that followed. It
was a big deal. I remember studying ‘Jewish lessons’ with other kids and being teenagers
and finding a lot of what we were told about Judaism rather strange. We just laughed
and made fun of the whole thing. We would meet at somebody’s home. The first teacher
was a lady who wore low cut dresses. We were adolescents and every time she bent
forward, we would look in and we would gleefully talk about it. We didn’t take the
whole thing very seriously. The preparation for the bar mitzvah service was more
serious. The service was very impressive but some of the women were very upset that
they had to sit separately upstairs behind bars. Then my Opa Mo, who had the honor
of raising the Torah and showing it to the congregation, almost dropped it, but somebody
caught it before a calamity occurred. I also remember that I was quite tall and
the rabbi was quite small and I had to bend through my knees so he could bless me.
Then there was a big party with lots of presents, but the most important present
was brought by Opa Mo, the aforementioned little kettle. He had it bronzed (my grandmother
had died in the meantime), and, as is customary in Holland, it was filled with red
carnations. I remembered the little kettle even though it looked a little different. It
was such an ordinary little kettle, but it carried such important memories for me.
Later
in the thirties, the deterioration set in the Weimar Republic-
I also remember that one of the German boys
in my class in high school would get up and stand at attention whenever the teacher
came in. We all were looking at him, totally amazed at what he was doing and why
he was doing it. We didn’t understand it because the Dutch in general are unceremonious.
We don’t say prayers; we don’t say anything to honor the flag or the queen. We just
sit down and start work. There were a lot of funny things going on in school with
teasing the teachers and other shenanigans. So we denied that anything was threatening
us. However, at a certain point I remember in 1938 my parents, my brother and I
sat down together and talked about whether we should leave. How serious was the
danger? My mother said: “Well my family is here and why don’t we wait until the
kids are finished with school...” So we stayed.
In August of ’39, my brother and I went to the south of England on a bicycle tour,
staying at youth hostels. On the day we were coming back, World War II broke out
when Germany invaded Poland and England declared war. My father moved heaven and
earth to get us back to Holland. I don’t know what would have happened if we had
stayed in England.
On Friday the 10th of May 1940, very early in the morning in darkness
the Germans started bombing and invading Holland from the East. They were moving
very rapidly into and through our country. We, in Amsterdam on the west side of
the country were considering going to a harbor on the North Sea about 30 miles away
to get on any boat to cross to England to escape, but we had no means of private
transportation. Many, who tried, found the Germans machine-
The first thing I remember
hearing on that infamous day in May was the air raid alarm’s ominous howling, anti-
I went back to high school, took final exams, and graduated in June. Prince Bernard,
the son-
That first year I wanted to enroll in Amsterdam University to study medicine and
I was admitted. (In Europe Undergraduate college does not exist; you go from secondary
school straight to the University to study a profession). At the same time I had
to make up courses in biology, math, physics and chemistry because I did not have
enough credits to go on in the Medical School. I am amazed to remember doing this
mostly on my own with books on the subject during a time of such stress! At the end
of that academic year, I took the state exam on those missed subjects, passed all,
and then a month later, passed the exams of the first year in Med School. After
the pre-
In
the early months of 1941 the first anti-
At that point much more serious things
started to happen. As a result of the anti-
A
prominent German was shot and killed. As a reprisal, the SS police suddenly invaded
the Jewish rowing club on the Amstelriver. It was a Saturday afternoon and there
were many Jewish boys and young men there whom were arrested…hundreds of them. They
were sent to the concentration camp, Mauthausen, a quarry where they were put to
‘WORK’. Three months later most families received a card saying that their son had
died of pneumonia. We were all familiar with Mauthausen at that point. As time went
on the raids arresting Jewish boys and young men at their home or in the streets
became a regular routine. The chief of police needed to be included in this effort
because the Germans needed his officers to do the dirty work. That was a blessing
in disguise. When the chief of police was notified by the German Command that they
needed the police force for the action, he in turn would call a group of his friends
who then called many Jewish families with sons to tell them to get lost to avoid
their arrest. My brother and I would get the call and 2 women friends of the family
would receive us in their apartment for the duration of the danger. We would stay
a few days. That was the beginning of the hiding.
Sometime in early 1942, signs appeared
in public places and parks announcing “Prohibited for Jews,” “No entrance for Jews”. We
eventually couldn’t walk on the sidewalk, or use the streetcar, a popular way of
transportation since only few people owned cars. We also had to hand in our bicycles.
Things started getting pretty rough and I had to drop out of the secret medical school
because of all the raids on Jewish young men and boys. In order to be exempt from
deportation, for a while, I was able to get a job as an aide in an institution called
‘The Jewish Invalid House’ . There were also a number of other young men who had
been studying medicine working there. That was one way to postpone any deportation.
I had a special stamp on my identity card that allowed me to walk there and back
every day. It was at the other end of the city. Working there, I was suddenly involved
with the Orthodox Jewish establishment and so I learned a lot of Jewish customs and
religious life. I was becoming more and more a victim who kept trying to survive,
mentally and physically, against enormous odds that became more threatening as time
passed.
In the mean time my father, my mother’s brother and his wife who lived in Antwerp
and had a car available, were able to escape the onslaught of the German forces
and eventually had found a place in a small isolated village in unoccupied France. They
were given a nice house, and helped by the mayor of the town. When my uncle suddenly
died, he was buried in the family tomb of the mayor. We were able to stay in contact
with them via a dentist in Switzerland as follows: We would write the dentist in
Switzerland a card with a message in sort of family code, always talking about us
in 3rd person as if it was not about us but about someone else. He in turn would
put the letter in a new envelope and sent it on to my father. We did the same in
return. After my uncle died and the future looked bleak in terms of surviving there,
my father and my aunt, who was severely depressed after her husband’s death, decided
to go on. They went to Casablanca and then to Cuba where they were put in a camp. They
took my father’s stock of diamonds away. After a year they were liberated. The
authorities returned all my father’s confiscated possessions. Family and friends
in New York helped him to get a Visa and with my aunt arrived in New York City in
1943. By then we were in hiding and lost contact. It was an ancient truth among
the Jewish people who had so many times been exiled from countries where they lived,
that one should have saved some gold or diamonds in case of extreme need. Since my
father’s business was in diamonds he had given my mother beautiful jewelry on very
special occasions. Nothing else, especially money, was worth anything. As life became
a more serious challenge, she would sell stone for stone and in that way we were
able to keep going. And things became more serious and threatening.
By now the deportations
had begun on a large scale. In Holland many Jewish families had been living in many
places, including small villages for a long time and they wore the local costumes
to Amsterdam so that the Germans would have them all together better to organize
them for deportation. Jews were moved from the so-
When
I was still in The Hague, I was invited to a party (if you can believe that!) where
there were several of my friends from Amsterdam including the one who gave me his
identity card. The party took place in the upper 2 stories of a 4 story building.
There was a door to the apartment on street level and, once inside, you walked all
the way up to the 3rd floor. We were told that if the bell rang, we should be quiet. If
my friend’s mother sounded the alarm, she would cough and we should go to the roof
and go over it to the house next door where the neighbors had offered an escape route
in case of trouble. Then we could go down the stairs in that other house and out
on another street. Well it did happen. In the morning the bell rang and we were
heard her cough and I went up the roof, climbed over to the roof next door. The
first place I found myself was in a bedroom with a couple who were still in bed. They
looked at me as if I was an apparition, but they had consented to be used in that
fashion. I quickly mumbled thanks and ran downstairs out into the street where,
of all people, I met my friend Egon van Blommesteyn, the friend who gave me his identity
card .Then we walked together in that street with exactly the same identity card,
with the elbow scar, same birth date. That shows you a little bit of our foolishness,
sort of adolescent kind of behavior denying the danger.
Now, there was one incident I remember very well. My mother used to fast on Yom
Kippur. The first Yom Kippur we were separated, I decided to take the risk to go
and see her where she was in hiding. She was in Amsterdam where I eventually ended
up. With my false identity card as cover, I traveled to Amsterdam taking different
interurban streetcars instead of the train to avoid being checked by the Nazi police. I
arrived at the street where my mother was staying, at dusk and rang the bell. But
nobody answered the door. I rang three times. When there was no answer, I thought
there was something very wrong and I left. I don’t remember where I stayed that night,
but I felt terrible …very lonely and terrible. When I got back to The Hague, it
turned out they hadn’t hear the bell and everything was okay. When I had to leave
The Hague, I joined my mother in Amsterdam where I stayed the longest, about two
years. My brother stayed in The Hague for the duration.
In Amsterdam the woman who
hid my mother and me was elderly and unmarried. She used to be the housekeeper for
my great aunt, Oma Griet’s sister. This great aunt, Leen, (pronounced ‘Lane’ from
Helena) and another woman who was a close family were also hidden there. The woman
who hid us, Tine (pronounced ‘Teenuh’) Hoitzing, was a very religious Dutch Reformed
Protestant. She considered it her duty to save ‘the old people of Israel’ – this
was before there was the modern state of Israel. In Holland, we were called Israelites,
not Jews. Tina had a small tenement apartment on the third floor of a five floor
building in a lower-
Tine also had a brother
who visited her every single day and who was not to know that we were hidden there.
He would ring the bell and we would have time to disappear. But when someone failed
to close the door to the street, her brother would just walk up and not ring the
bell. If he had found out about us, he would have immediately insisted that she
get rid of us. He never found out. She would keep him talking in the hallway while
we were slipping out.
We built a hiding place in the middle room behind a false wall
of made of cinder blocks. How we did that I will never know! There was a pushcart
in the street with all the materials on it that were being taken upstairs. I don’t
know what people thought we were doing! But we built it. You went to the back panel
of a clothes closet in the front room, pushed the panel, and
entered into the hiding
place through the opening. The shelter was about a foot wide and six feet long and
the four of us could stand there next to each other. And then the panel was pushed
back in place. We never had to use it although one time it was very close. The
Nazi police were raiding every block of our long street, starting at the other end.
We were the last block and they gave up without searching our block.
At a certain
point the Germans required everyone to hand in their radio so as to prevent us from
tuning in to the London BBC. Tine had refused to hand in hers. We put the radio in
the hiding place on a little shelve high on the wall. I had learned English enough
to understand what they were talking about. I listened to that radio every day, several
times a day. At first the signal was faint. The radios at that time required a big
antenna wire and that was not possible. The Germans has some kind of electronic detection
instrument which they used in cars cruising through the streets to detect anyone
who was using a radio with antenna. There was a wire hanging down from the radio
serving as antenna. One day I, for some unknown reason, put the end of that wire
in my mouth and suddenly the volume increased to such a degree that is could hear
every word spoken so far away. That enabled me to hear the allied news because the
German news or the Dutch news,
was all worthless, all doctored. Now we could tell
other people the latest Allied news. I would stand there with the antenna in my
mouth, my body serving as an antenna. Much later in 1944 the electricity was cut
off, I couldn’t use imy radio anymore. I rigged up a ‘crystal receiver’ which did
not require electric power and was made up of a red copper coil antenna that I would
hang up.
To pass the time, I was reading, reading. In the morning we’d pick fleas
out of the blankets because in Holland, in Europe, you have specific fleas that jump
around on people. They hide in blankets at night and if you didn’t pick everyday,
you would be covered with bites. I tried to learn Russian. Tine had a young nephew
who needed help and I tutored him. He knew who we were. His father had been an
officer in the Dutch army, now a prisoner of war in Germany.
Deportations were now
in full swing-
I
don’t know exactly when it was the last time I saw my grandfather, but I do remember
one incident that is etched in my mind. The first New Year’s Eve of the war, he,
my aunts, and a nephew were with us for the evening. While New Year’s eve in Holland
was traditionally the most important in-
Very
few people knew where we were. Some of our friends would come and bring things and
news, usually bad news about other people. That’s how it was. But we were not sitting
there shaking and crying except when there suddenly was a real reason for it that
would break down our rigid emotional control. The other woman who was there, Heddy,
had two sons. While we were in hiding, one of them was caught without a star and
sent to the camps and never heard from; the other one was shot.
One thing that kept
us going was we our sense of humor. We laughed a lot, unbelievable, but we did. And
the jokes were sort of sick jokes that were typical of the times. Example: On a
very busy street in downtown Amsterdam a Dutch woman was walking pushing her baby
in a carriage. A German officer stopped her and asked permission to pick up her
baby and hold it because he had a baby in Germany he was thinking of . To do anything
kind for
a German was a ‘no-
There was also another story
that was sort of funny. There was a saying in Germany by the Nazis: Ein Folk, ein
Reich, ein Fuehrer, one people, one country, one leader. There was a shoe shiner
and before he started his routine of polishing, he would say “Ein Folk, ein Reich,
ein Fuehrer”. Then in his customary way spit on the shoe and polish it!
Then there
were all the predictions of how soon the war would be over. Nostradamus, an internationally
known astrologist, was quoted left and right predicting the future. We were so apprehensive
about how it all would end! But then on the 6th of June 1944, I listened to my
radio early in the morning and I began to hear something about an invasion in Normandy,
something for which we had been waiting, waiting, waiting. By that time The German’s
eastern front after Stalingrad had turned against them. The Allies had also crossed
the Mediterranean Sea from Africa and had landed in Italy. But that second front
on the French side of Channel coast in Normandy was so important. I don’t know exactly
what happened to me, but for about a week I didn’t speak. I was totally immobilized. I
guess it was unbelievable that it was happening. But the worse was yet to come,
of course. By this time all the Jews were gone except the ones in hiding. My mother,
though, continued to go shopping what there was left to shop. Stores were emptier
and emptier.
June 6, 1944 was the turning point in the struggle: the Allied invasion
in Normandy, France. I heard it announced on my hidden radio and it is hard to imagine
for anyone who was not there what that news meant to us. We might have a chance to
‘make it’, to survive. By September ’44 the Allies were all over France and close
to Germany. This is also when the Supreme Commander of Allied forces was General
Dwight Eisenhower, a superb leader, the right man at the right time.
During that winter
of 1944-
At one time we learned that a
certain church was distributing potatoes. My mother and Heddy, another co-
We were never afraid that Tine would betray us although we were hearing of several
cases of betrayal for which the Germans offered money. I was a little concerned about
the sister upstairs. But we became essential to them; they would not have survived
without my mother’s successful efforts to barter for food which Tine nor the family
upstairs had the means to do. We did have some contact with my brother and knew that
he was alive and ‘safe’ in The Hague. The only thing he and his host family worried
about was when the Germans started with those V-
I also want to mention about a former
theater that became the place of deportation. Walter Suskind, a German Jew who fled
to Holland in 1938, was put in charge on behalf of the Jewish Council of doing the
dirty work for the Germans. Jewish families were brought in, their names were put
on file, and then a few days later they were told that that night they would be taken
to the trains and go to Westerberg, a Dutch concentration camp. Walter secretly arranged
with for all the children who were taken away from the parents when they arrived
to be put in a separate place across the street. When they learned who was going
to be deported, they would go to the parents and offer to hide the children. If
the parents consented, the children, small children, were taken in laundry bags and
backpacks and to the countryside where ministers in the north or Roman Catholic priests
in the south would find safe places for them. Most of the parents never came back. It
is estimated that about 1000 children were saved this way and none of the Jewish
guards or the Jewish staff were ever caught. Suskind died in Auschwitz. I learned
about this after the war. There was very little written about him.
The war for me
ended on the fifth of May 1945, five years almost to the day after the Germans invaded
Holland. At eight o clock in the morning, I had heard on the radio, the Germans
surrendered in Holland. Everybody went out in the streets, with the Dutch flag,
red, white and blue flag and anything that was red, white or blue sown together. The
whole city was bathed in red, white and blue – and I walked out free. It was hard
to get used to freedom at first. Just to walk there and not have to be afraid that
you were going to be taken. The first person I ran into was a cousin of mine who
was very close to me. I did not know that he was there. But I wanted to see an
Allied soldier because I didn’t believe that all this was really the end of the horror. So
I got a bike without tires on it and started riding in the direction from which I
thought they would come. In the mean time, the new government had made a travel
prohibition because they were afraid the collaborators would flee. I was caught outside
of Amsterdam, never saw an Allied soldier, and had to stay. I was in one small town
caught in an irate mob in the center ‘tarring and feathering’ some Dutch girls who
had gone out with Germans. If I had not gotten out of the way, I would have been
trampled to death. They were absolutely outraged. I had to get back to Amsterdam. It
took another five days before we saw the first Canadian – the Canadians liberated
us. After the German surrender, we rented some rooms with another family not far
from where we used to live. The newly liberated part of the Netherlands was in ruins
and chaos in every way imaginable. The Government in exile in England returned to
the home-
My father, now in New York City, had asked some of his younger friends who were serving
in the Dutch brigade to find us. And they found us! They brought us food! It was
incredible. My father and my aunt then sent each one of us eleven pounds packages
of food and clothes every week. Cigarettes were the highest valued trade currency. And
we partied – we partied. We didn’t know who would be coming back from the East! We
did give our name to the agency where people who came back from camps would report
so that in case relatives came back, they could find us. And indeed at one time
at three in the morning, the bell rang and there at the door was my cousin (the doctor
who made the scar) with
his wife and two little boys who were not their children,
but whose parents had been killed in Bergen-
The same professor who had founded the
secret Jewish medical school reopened his anatomy laboratory while the university
was still closed, and I went back to school. We had to dissect bodies while the
electric power was still off and there was no refrigeration. I don’t want to go
into details, but you can imagine what that was like. I passed my exam in a year
that would allow me into clinical medicine. I then was notified by my aunt who had
traveled with my father that he had died due to a brain hemorrhage in New York before
we ever had a chance to see him again. We had talked to him once on the telephone
on the newly repaired transatlantic cable. My brother and I wanted to come to the
United States on an emergency visa but there was no place to be had on an airplane. The
airplanes were very small and few. As luck would have it, two people had cancelled
and we were able to get on an airplane to New York and arrived on a hot June day. In
LaGuardia Airport there was no air conditioning at the time and we were wearing our
heavy woolen European suits. One never, never, took off their jacket, under any circumstances,
till they went to bed. Even at home you didn’t take off your jacket. So we sat
there sweltering.
My aunt received us in New York and that was the beginning of a new life, first with
despair. We didn’t know where we would start. I tried to get into medical school,
my brother tried to go into the diamond trade. We failed miserably. I wrote to every
medical school in the United States and Canada and it was no. All the veterans came
out of the service with the GI bill and all colleges and universities were heavily
over-
I had an immigration
visa but if I wanted to stay here permanently, I needed to have an immigration visa!
My brother (who was having the same problem) and I had to go to Mexico and re-
In 1946, right after the Nazi-
We started our
married life in New York with me as an intern in an ancient City hospital and after
2 years I was drafted as a physician in the US Army with the rank of 1st Lieutenant
(I was not a citizen yet). I spent two years in the US Army during the Korean War,
as a doctor and as a psychiatrist. . I chose to become a psychiatrist because Boston
University Medical School was very avant garde in terms of teaching psychiatry. Our
son had been born in New York. I was sent to Missouri in the Ozarks and my wife and
son joined me there. Life there was quite a culture shock for us. When my tour of
duty was completed, we decided we wanted to live in Boston to complete my psychiatric
training and start my practice and clinical affiliations.
After all the horrors I had experienced as a Jew under Nazi occupation, having barely
survived, having lost most of my family I was left with an intense personal conflict
about my Jewish identity! When my kids began to be aware of things and were early
teenagers, I knew I had to talk with them about what had happened. My wife, who had
been in a concentration camp, was concerned about this. But I began to explain some
of the history to them. When they went on vacation trips to Holland, they stayed
with my in-
My father had died of a cerebral
hemorrhage and I know how much he cared about his family. He might have been afraid
to face us because he must have felt that he had failed us while my mother had saved
us at enormous personal risks. His death precipitated our hasty departure from
Holland to come to the US. He had been a diamond merchant here and tried so hard
to move heaven and earth for us to come to the US. As soon as he heard that we had
survived, he bought a house in Queens, New York for us to live. For my mother, it
was a horrendous loss. I think that she was of the mind that she had saved their
two sons, that was her task, and now she was going to get the rewards, in the good
sense of the word. Recently I donated money to WBUR, and there is there’s a plaque
in my mother’s honor. The whole family, my brother’s family with all his descendents
and mine were together for that ceremony. I’d been looking for a proper place for
her and finally I found it. My mother passed away in 1976, 15th of March in Belgium. She
remarried a few years after coming to the United States and moved back to Belgium
where her husband was from and had a business. So we usually visited her in Brussels
and they came here. My children got to know their grandmother, ‘Oma Stijn’, to them.
Of
course our experiences had an impact on our children. My wife and her parents and
brother having been in Terezin concentration was a very hard experience to grasp!
Our son and his wife took 6 months off from his law practice to research and write
the history of my wife’s family, including their experience in the camp. They traveled
to Holland, to Theresienstadt, to have interviews and find all the data he needed. He
had to get it, he said, out of his system. Our daughter, when she was about the
age my wife was when she was in Theresienstadt, said to her mother: “I know something
terrible happened to you during the war. I want you to sit down and tell me everything
about it”. And she did. It was the first time that she talked to anybody outside
of the two of us or with her family. Neither of my children is observant. My daughter
married a Catholic who wasn’t observant. My son married a Jewish woman who also
is not observant. I also would add that for those who think that if you have no religion,
you cannot be moral or ethical. Our kids are very ethical yet there is no religion
in their homes. They know they’re Jewish or that their mother is of Jewish heritage.
My need to emphasize these points is a reaction to the deeply-
The Little Kettle has assumed a bigger significance than it
deserves as a little, junky object! In the background story Alex, my daughter’s
eldest, was eight years old. We own a house on Martha’s Vineyard that we love and
the family comes there in the summer and even at other times of the year. That August,
my daughter and son-
And then the Germans occupied our peaceful country and they took everything away
from all Jewish citizens, everything. I did not want them to get my precious little
kettle and I hid the little kettle under the floorboards of my bedroom and nobody
ever found it. When the war was over I had survived, I was saved, the kettle was
saved, but my grandfather died and that kettle became more precious to me. I wonder
sometimes about when I’m not around anymore what is going to happen to that little
kettle. Alex asked where it was now and I said it’s always been in my office so
that I could look at it and remember what it stood for. He asked if he could have
it. I said: “Well, I’ll have to think about that. My grandfather was very good to
me and that kettle reminds me of him. I’m trying to be the best grandfather to you.
Opa Mo died but he is still very much with me. Therefore, I can try to be the best
grandfather to you. And now I want you to give me a big hug”.
When Alex turned 13
years old I packed the little kettle in very nice wrapping paper and put it in a
very nice box. I enclosed a personal letter to him in which I described what in my
mind the important qualities are in a young man, particularly a Jewish young man.
Also that I hoped he would take care of the kettle and when the time comes, give
it to one of his children. I picked him up at school. In the car I handed him the
package which he opened and proceeded to read my letter to him aloud. We hugged and
then Alex said in his inimitable way: “Let’s get something to eat”.
The kettle is
in a good place with Alex who will take care of it and what it stands for! We lost
a lot of dear ones but in important ways we survived even beyond ourselves with
our new families!