This is the story of a family that sheltered four Jews in Haarlem during the Nazi Occupation in World War II. The whole family – parents and six children – were honored by Yad Vashem after the war.
The father was put in a concentration camp for another "offense" and he died there.
Holland for centuries was a magnet for Jewish traders and intellectuals because of its religious tolerance and economic opportunity.
In 1900, Amsterdam was home to 51,000 Jews, about half of all the Jewish residents in Holland. It was called the "Jerusalem of the West" (of Europe).
In the 1930s, an estimated 30,000 more German-Jewish and Austrian-Jewish refugees fled to Holland because of growing Nazi sanctions against Jews. Holland had been neutral in the First World War and was expected to remain so. It was viewed as a safe haven, like Switzerland. Hitler promised that Holland he would never invade them.
Despite his promise to challenge Holland's sovereignty, Hitler invaded Holland without warning in May 1940. Jewish people in the cities were trapped.
From the beginning of the Occupation, Dutch Jews were subjected to increasingly severe sanctions. They were first banned from certain occupations and were progressively isolated from public life. Starting in January 1942, some Dutch Jews were forced to move to Amsterdam’s Jewish ghetto. Others were directly deported to Westerbork, a concentration camp near Hooghalen–originally built in 1939 by the Dutch government as a temporary shelter for Jews fleeing Nazi persecution in other countries
Westerbork became a hub for transit to the Nazi death camps for all Jews, Dutch and expatriate. Deportation of Jews from the Netherlands to Poland and Germany began in June 1942 and lasted until September 1944. From Westerbork, 101,000 Jews were deported–57,800 to Auschwitz, 34,313 to Sobibór, 3,724 to Bergen-Belsen, 4,466 to Theresienstadt. Most of them were worked to death, starved or gassed to death in these camps. From other locations like Vught in the Netherlands, 6,000 Jews were deported to concentration camps in Germany, Poland and Austria (such as Mauthausen).
The best-known Dutch Holocaust victim was Anne Frank, who with her sister Margot died from typhus in March 1945 in Bergen-Belsen. Anne Frank's mother, Edith Holländer Frank, was starved to death in Auschwitz. Only Anne Frank's father, Otto Frank, survived.
Hiding and Rescue Efforts in Holland
Members of the Dutch underground found hiding places for an estimated 25,000-30,000 Jews, of whom 16,500 survived to 1945. An estimated 7,000-8,000 Jews fled the Netherlands during the war, often on the Dutch-Paris line, headed for Spain, the United Kingdom, and Switzerland.
As a prominent example of the many people who helped Jews and others escape Holland, Dutchwoman Geertruida (Truus) Meijer Wijsmuller is credited with saving the lives of 10,000 Jewish children and others hunted by the Nazis. She survived the war and received a "Righteous among the Nations" award from Yad Vashem. In brief, she organized
- The first train transport of 600 Jewish children from Vienna in December 1938–an outcome of direct and brave negotiations with Adolf Eichmann, and
- The last ship out of Holland, Kindertransport, on May 14, 1940, with 74 children on board.
- Many rescues in between those two.
Dutch people received the largest number of awards from Yad Vashem for saving Jews relative to their population–5,200 awards as of 2013. Poles were given 6,100 awards, but the Polish population is larger–the Dutch received one award for every 1,800 people, twice as many as the Poles, who received one award for every 4,300 people. Only the Dutch received as many as three Yad Vashem awards for groups or organizations. The three groups were:
- The February Strike (February 25-26, 1941) organizers, involving perhaps 50,000 strikers, protesting deportation of Jews from the Netherlands
- The village of Nieuwlande in the province of Drenthe, where the whole population took part in hiding Jews.
- The so-called "NV" (Naamloze vennootschap), the anonymous partnership in Utrecht that rescued and hid about 600 Jewish children, all of whom survived the war.
Bob and Sonia Boissevain, Hiders of Four Jews
Robert Lucas ("Bob") Boissevain, Sr. (1895-1945) (NP 74) was the third child and third son of Charles Ernest Henri (Eh Ha) Boissevain (NP 69), the eldest son of Charles Handelsblad Boissevain (NP 67).
[PHOTO CAPTION:
Robert Lucas Boissevain (1895-1945) (NP 74). See photos at end.]
He and his wife Helena Suzanna (Sonia, also spelled Sonja) van Tienhoven Boissevain (NP 74) hid their eldest son, who turned 18 during the first year of the Occupation and was required to report for work in Germany. In addition, they hid four Jewish people starting in 1943, when it became clear that deportation by the Nazis meant likely death. Bob and Sonia and their six children all received awards from Yad Vashem.
Bob and Sonia's Early Life and Prospects
Bob's wife Sonia was from another big Dutch family, the van Tienhovens. Sonia's mother was Suze van Hall. Both Bob and Sonia could have expected to look forward to a luxurious life, but like many other Dutch families, their fortunes were dissipated first by the Crash and the Great Depression and then by commercial competition, then Nazi confiscation of assets in the mid-1930s, and finally by the occupation of Holland.
Bob and Sonia had six children. The eldest was Robert L. (Bob Jr.) Boissevain, born June 20, 1922. (He died Feb. 14, 2017, of complications from dementia.) He was required by the Nazis to report for work in Germany the month after the invasion, but instead went into hiding in the Boissevain home for the duration of the war. The youngest children, the twins Charles and Hester, have been helping me with this chapter. They were born 12 minutes apart on April 5, 1934.
Until 1936, Bob Boissevain lived with his family in a large home at Emmaplein 2 in Amsterdam that is listed as a Monument by the Netherlands National Commission on UNESCO. The Commission says, in part (my translation from Dutch):
It is the left-hand building of a semi-detached three-building villa. It was built in 1911 in rationalist style by J. F. Steel Jr. , commissioned by I.L. Nienaber. In 1913, the pantry was converted into a garage by Steel, commissioned by W. Zweerts de Jong. In 1924 it was re-landscaped by K. Perk Flanders to create a garden and terrace masonry wall, commissioned by R. L. Boissevain. It is in the heart of Amsterdam.
Bankruptcy, 1936
Bob Boissevain followed his father into the chemical industry, which was growing rapidly in the 1910s and 1920s. In the fertilizer industry, farmers were switching to commercial fertilizers to increase their yield per acre and per hour worked. The average annual consumption of commercial fertilizer in the United States, for example, grew 65 percent from the 1900s to the 1910s, from 3.7 million to 6.1 million tons. It grew again to 6.8 million tons in the 1920s.
The German chemical industry was leading the world during this period in the development of new chemical products, including explosives but also for the dying of fabrics, working closely with financiers in New York City. I. G. Farben was formed by the merger in 1925 of six chemical companies.
Charles E. H. Boissevain and his son Bob were actively involved in the Dutch fertilizer sales company of Van der Elst & Matthes, which during 1853-1928 had a large market share of the Dutch fertilizer market, delivering chemicals mostly manufactured by German companies–i.e., by I. G. Farben after 1925.
[PHOTO CAPTION: Dr. Charles Ernest Henri (Charles Eh Hah) Boissevain (NP 69), father of Robert L.
(Bob) Boissevain, Sr.; eldest son of Charles Handelsblad Boissevain.]
After 1928, three big Dutch chemical companies worked together to intercept the sales of octopus I. G. Farben Holland–D.S.M. (Dutch State Mines), Hoogovens and Shell with its daughter
Maatschappij tot Exploitatie of Kooks Oven Gas (MEKOG). Van der Elst & Matthes appears to have been a casualty of this effort, having been misled by both Shell and DSM on one side and I.G. Farben on the other. There was a lot of backroom dealing with commercial tricks, says Charles Boissevain.
By 1935, the three Dutch companies succeeded in ousting Van der Elst & Matthes from its leading position in the fertilizer business in Holland and it eventually went bankrupt in 1936. I. G. Farben may have intended to place itself in the position of Van der Elst & Matthes, but it failed, at least until the 1940 occupation.
[PHOTO CAPTION: Bob Boissevain's first home–Emmaplein 2, Amsterdam, where he lived
until 1936, but he had to sell and move to Zandvoort when he was bankrupted.]
Bob Boissevain had to sell his Amsterdam house after his bankruptcy in 1936. They moved to their smaller summer home on the dunes in Zandvoort ("Sand-fort"), overlooking the North Sea. The house, which was called
De Duinhut, was in the family because someone won a lottery and used the money to buy the house, a story confirmed by Charles and Hester Boissevain.
After the Invasion
From their house in Zandvoort, Bob Boissevain's family could see the air battles taking place over the sea as the Dutch army and air force initially resisted the Luftwaffe. Huge floating mines washed up on the beach, posing a grave danger to local residents. Hester Boissevain Grinberg says:
We saw many airplanes shot down, burning up and disappearing into the sea. When Bob came home it was often late and he was very tired. Often he looked grave and troubled. For some time he had already been involved in Resistance work. We never knew or were able to find out the big secrets in which he was involved.
Bob Boissevain early on in the war is believed by his daughter Hester to have engaged in underground activities such as "helping people cross the border" as well as rescuing downed pilots through networks of safe homes and transfers in small boats (Grinberg 2008, 4; 2011, 1-2).
In May 1940 Bob Boissevain gave each of his six children a little bag to take with them in case they had to flee. But Hitler's
Blitzkrieg was too sudden for such an escape.
Hitler appointed an Austrian Nazi, Arthur Seyss-Inquart, to head up the government of the occupied Netherlands as
Reichskommissar. He had been a supporter of the Nazi Party in Austria before the
Anschluss–the so-called "union", although Hitler did not offer Austria an option–in 1938. Seyss-Inquart reported directly to Hitler and worked with the SS and the Wehrmacht:
- He rounded up more than 500,000 Dutch citizens in razzia style and forced them to work for the Nazis–250,000 of them in factories and other workplaces in Germany. In a razzia, which comes via French from an Arabic word for a slave raid by Barbary pirates, a street or a block of houses would be completely encircled and each house, person and vehicle would be searched by the SS while troops kept the perimeter secure to prevent escapees. Young men were told that if they did not report to work their parents would be killed.
- He helped create the Dutch Nazi Party's Landwacht–the paramilitary organization that was allied with the police force to use traitors to maintain control of the Dutch population. These "landwatchers" inspired great fear, because the Nazis recruited children to spy on their own parents. (Hilda van Stockum shows this in the character of Leendert in her book The Winged Watchman.)
- In 1941, he banned all political parties except the Dutch Nazi Party.
Seyss-Inquart also cooperated in the genocide of Jews in Holland. He:
- Ordered the civil service to register approximately 140,000 Dutch Jews according to the Nazi protocol of identifying the number of grandparents who were Jewish.
- Collaborated in operating the "Jewish assembly camp" at Westerbork. This was a way-station to the death camps.
- Restricted Jews in Amsterdam to the ghetto.
- Assisted in transporting Dutch Jews to Buchenwald in February 1941 and later directly to Auschwitz-Birkenau.
- Sent to their deaths by the end of the war an estimated 110,000 Dutch Jews, either immediately if they resisted or in the death camps if they were not considered fit to work.
After the war, Seyss-Inquart was convicted of multiple war crimes at Nuremberg and was executed.
From Zandvoort to Haarlem
One day, says Hester, "the SS circled around our house and threw us all out forever". Soon after the invasion by the Nazis, Bob and Sonia and their children had to abandon their Zandvoort home on one day's notice. The Germans were fortifying the beach against invasion from England and they flattened the Zandvoort home.
The family moved from house to house four times in six months. They finally ended up in the large house in Haarlem where they stayed until the end of the War–Spruitenbosstraat 11 in Haarlem, about 10 miles east of Zandvoort and 25 miles west of Amsterdam. According to Charles Boissevain (email of Feb. 8, 2015), it belonged to Floris Adriaan ("Floor") van Hall, who died in 1941 in a nursing home, having been predeceased by his wife.
[PHOTO CAPTION:
The borrowed Haarlem house, Spruitenbosstraat 11, today.]
So they lived in a borrowed house. Floor's twin brother and executor, Adriaan Floris ("Aat") van Hall, father of Walraven and Gijs van Hall and eight other children, had a valid fear that the SS would take over the empty house since the children had left Holland. So he quickly moved in Bob Boissevain's family of two adults and six children.
The large house was full of van Hall family belongings–"books, toys and clothes, which kept us busy during all those years to come in the dark days of World War II", says Grinberg. The large well-kept parlor (in Dutch, the
Pronk or "Flaunt" room) with beautiful furnishings, was from the beginning off-limits to the children (Grinberg 2008, 5). As the war proceeded and other members of the family were displaced, the room filled up with boxes and it became a storage room.
Until the end of 1943, schools continued in some fashion. However, they were a long distance away and German soldiers took away Hester's older sister's bicycle with a gun to her head, so she had to walk three miles each way. Bob Boissevain Jr. turned 18 years old the month after the invasion and from that date was hiding from
razzia recruiters at the family house in Haarlem.
Life was bad for all Dutch people during the Nazi Occupation, but was much worse for Jews in the area. A good friend of Hester's eldest brother Bob, Dick Polak, was required to wear the yellow Star of David.
In addition, Bob and Sonia had their four Jewish guests in the Haarlem house from 1943 to 1945:
- The extremely talented Goldberg family. Three members stayed with the Boissevains and survived. Two others survived elsewhere.
- The unfortunate Vecht family. Two members were killed during the war. Two survived, one by living with the Boissevains. Both died soon after the war was over.
Hidden Family #1: The Goldbergs
One afternoon in March 1943, Bob Boissevain called his wife Sonia to ask her to prepare more dinner because he was bringing "friends" to eat with the family. It was revealed later that the father was a business friend of Bob Boissevain or his cousin Jan "Canada" Boissevain or both (Grinberg 2008, 6; Grinberg 2011, 1). The friends stayed the night, and then for the next two years. After a few days of mystery, the children were introduced to the Goldberg family:
Leo (Lowske) Goldberg (1873-1957?)
Lyubova Elperin Goldberg (1881-1959)
Anya Goldberg, later Anna Ormont (1916-1988).
Many years later, it emerged there were two other Goldberg children:
Maria Goldberg Penkela in Amsterdam (1912?-1986?)
Alexander Goldberg, later Alexander Forest, in the United States (1914?-1991?)
From the files kept by the SS during the war and now accessible through the U.S. Holocaust Memorial and Museum, the records show that Leo Goldberg was born May 30, 1873 in Borstna (? writing constrained by index cards can be hard to read), Russia. His wife was Lyubova Elperin Goldberg, born September 17, 1881 in Minsk, Belarus.
[PHOTO CAPTION: Survivors–Dr. (?) Leo Goldberg (R) and Lyubova Elperin Goldberg, 1948. They lived through the Russian Revolution, the Depression and the Holocaust. Photo courtesy of the Forest Family]
They survived the Russian Revolution by leaving (1918?) for Finland. Capitalist businessmen were not valued by the Bolsheviks, so he found it difficult to operate under the Communist regime. In addition, they faced continued antisemitism long after the Tsars were dethroned. But Finland was economically depressed and the family decided to move in 1920 to Berlin. Slowly they rebuilt their lives.
When in the 1920s German money was destroyed by hyperinflation under the Weimar Republic and then Hitler rose to power, the Goldberg family decided to move yet again, to Amsterdam, where they settled in a house on Minervalaan. That is the period when Leo seems to have found a place in the Boissevain family banking and shipping business:
- Several Boissevains served on the board of the Amsterdam Concertgebouw, and attended every Thursday evening. Possibly they met there the musical Goldbergs.
- Since the Boissevain family was close to the Algemeen Handelsblad newspaper before the war, Leo's fluency in multiple languages–Russian, German, Finnish and others–might have been useful to the newspaper as a translator.
This time Leo and his family did not anticipate the swiftness of the Nazi invasion of Holland and so were caught in the Occupation and its murderous SS web. At some point their son Alexander escaped Holland and
moved to Washington and New York City. Their daughter Maria apparently married a non-Jewish man named Penkela, and thereby seems to have been saved from deportation during the war. The other three–the parents Leo and Lyubova, and their daughter Anya–survived World War II by hiding with Bob Boissevain's already-large family of eight in Haarlem.
Anya Goldberg was born in St. Petersburg, Russia on December 24, 1916 (one source says 1910). German Occupation war records indicate she had been married to G. Haimisch, presumably before the war, but was divorced. She had already published, before 1940, the novel
The 500 Wives of Genghis Khan, in excellent Dutch. She may well have been born in 1910; otherwise it is hard to understand how she wrote so well in Dutch.
Hester Boissevain Grinberg says of the three Goldberg guests: "These people argued a lot with one another–we could not understand their language."
Hidden Family #2: Dr. Jacob Vecht–"Mr. Knoppers"
The following account about the dentist Dr. Jacob Vecht is based almost entirely on one source, Charles Boissevain. I append a note on my efforts to corroborate the information with official records.
Unless they were married to Christians, Jews in Holland had just three options, as described in the previous chapter: Wait to be arrested, try to escape, or hide. None of these options was attractive.
For the family harboring an
onderduiver (hider) it was very dangerous. Many Dutch houses are too small to hide anyone. And what if someone in the house gossips about their guest(s)? For families with children, it could be impossible to be sure they would keep quiet. The same for families with older people who might be forgetful. Or families with neighbors who are collaborators, or are incorrigibly nosey and talkative or fearful.
Dr. Jacob Vecht was a Jewish dentist in Amsterdam. He was a professional and lived quietly with his wife, son, and daughter. On the Sabbath, he went to the synagogue as a faithful Orthodox Jew. At some point, he realized he was in danger and had to go into hiding.
The Boissevain children never found out how the contact was made with their father Bob Boissevain, but somehow Bob agreed to hide him in his home in Haarlem. The parents decided that a fourth person in hiding was possible. Robert Boissevain said:
If people are in great danger, then you will have to do your "duty as a Dutchman" to save them.
So, one day,
Mijnheer (Mister) Knoppers arrived–Dr. Vecht with a new name that did not sound so Jewish. Under this name, he spent the war with the family and the other three Jewish hideaways, the Goldbergs. Mister Knoppers was a silent man. The children did not realize that he was anxious about his own family. They did not know even know he was a dentist. He just was “Mister Knoppers”. What you do not tell to children, Charles Boissevain observed, has a greater chance of remaining secret.
I attempted to find Jacob Hecht's name in official Amsterdam records. I found only one person named Jacob Vecht who might have been the right one. He was born on March 19, 1887, and died on October 26, 1960. He would have been 53 at the time of the invasion of Holland by the Germans.
Bob's Resistance Work
A routine activity of Bob Boissevain was to listen with his family to Radio Orange on their radio. Even this was illegal under Nazi rules because all radios were supposed to have been declared and turned in. The Boissevains violated the Nazi laws even more because the children were involved in typing up and distributing news reports. Charles Boissevain describes how the news-collection and news-distribution system worked:
The Dutch Government and Queen Wilhelmina van Oranje were in London during the war. From there they issued a daily broadcast with radio news... about the war, but also with messages to the Dutch about what to do, like food distribution. Or what not to do, like suggestions for a strike or disobedience. Sometimes even cryptic messages were sent for the Resistance. It was strictly forbidden by the Nazis to listen to Radio Orange. Everyone had to deliver their radio to the authorities, which is what the Boissevain family did. Of course they had another radio and listened to it secretly until the end of the war. Bob Boissevain Jr. typed the most important news with an old typewriter, making six or seven carbon copies. Since he was older than 18, he was hidden and could not go out, so copies were distributed by his younger brothers Willem and Charles. Strictly forbidden and dangerous–a nice thing for boys to do.
Charles Boissevain notes that his father had spent time in public school in England and was fluent in English, had many friends in England, and served in the Navy in World War I. He was a skilled Marconi telegraph operator and could read and send messages. He would therefore have been of great value to an underground organization seeking help abroad and was the kind of person who would not refuse to serve when needed. Bob believed in DDD–"Doing the Dutchman's Duty".
In addition, Bob might have helped arrange the exit of hunted people via the
Dutch Paris Line, i.e., a train from Amsterdam to Paris. However, no one can be sure of all the details of what Bob did during World War II, because one of his superior skills was being good at not talking about it–and he died on the day of liberation when he could have started talking.
Bob's Betrayal
Bob was caught in his Resistance work in the summer of 1943 because of a betrayal that appears to have had nothing to do with his hiding Jews in his house. His daughter Hester says:
Father had to flee–we never saw him again. He was discovered, was arrested and spent ten months in solitary confinement in Scheveningen [near The Hague]. His great optimism stayed with him. It was part of who he was. He never gave up.
Charles says that their father had an appointment with a man in Utrecht who betrayed him. He did not even tell his wife Sonia where he was going. Charles says that his mother once told him: "If he would have told me that he was to meet this man, then I would have warned him not to. I knew that this person was not to be trusted."
Bob was taken away to the special prison in Scheveningen meant for Resistance fighters, who were treated by the Nazis as very dangerous criminals. (Today this prison is used for criminals on trial at, or after conviction by, the International Criminal Court.)
On many occasions, the Nazis would take one or more prisoners outside of this prison to be shot in the dunes nearby. Every year on May 4, the last day of the war, many Dutch people go there, to remember the war dead and the Resistance fighters. This prison had the ironic nickname "Orange Hotel" because of the noble and courageous persons held in prison, true to their country, to their Queen of Orange and to their personal beliefs.
Every autumn a special memorial meeting is called, by invitation, to remember those who were kept in this prison. The people who remember the war are now old, but new generations come to the memorial as well–the children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren of those who died. Many representatives of the government, parliament and the Supreme Court attend. Flowers are brought to the so-called "Death Cell". Charles has been going almost every year to the prison in Scheveningen to remember what went on there during World War II.
Bob was moved to the concentration camp at Vught in Holland in June 1944. In September he was moved on to Sachsenhausen in North Berlin through the end of 1944. Some time after the end of 1944 Bob was moved to the Zweiberge camp near Buchenwald west of Berlin, probably because Russian troops were getting closer to Berlin. His son Charles says:
He died April 12, 1945, the day that the camp was liberated. He was completely exhausted by torture and hunger, and deadly ill with high fever, dysentery and typhus. –CB, email of Feb. 16, 2016.
It was the day of Bob's wedding anniversary. The last available photo of Bob Boissevain is from the summer of 1943.
Bob Boissevain's Last Letter to His Wife Sonia
Bob Boissevain was transferred from the Dutch prison to a concentration camp north of Berlin, Sachsenhausen. Hester Grinberg has sent me a copy of her father's last letter to his wife Sonia at Keizersgracht 743.at Zwieberge, near Berlin. The Lager (Camp) Commandant required that the letter be written in German, so that it could be censored.
[PHOTO CAPTION: Back and front of the envelope from Sachsenhausen, north of Berlin.]
[PHOTO CAPTION: Bob Boissevain's last letter, in German, to his wife Sonia and their family. He was prisoner no. 100493 at Sachsenhausen.]
Here is a translation of the German, provided by Grinberg:
Christmas 1944
My beloved Sonia,
These days our thoughts are closer than ever. One may call me happy, since the beautiful memories of our Christmases together live inside of me.
Now the year 1945 begins. I know with great certainty that all the children love you very much, and they know why.
They are now at the age when their spirits are ready to understand abstract, intangible things.
Their minds and hearts are developing a shape and character that will strengthen them later in life and help them distinguish good from bad.
Misusing personal talents leads to instability. Our children have a big advantage in being close to such a personality as their mother, to love her and be in awe of her ability to create and preserve a positive atmosphere at home–which probably requires the greatest level of inner strength.
We remember Willem Barentsz [the Dutchman who discovered Novaya Zemlya but was forced to spend a winter there with his crew].
The dear earth soon grows
Green–not only 1945,
Sending eternally,
Blue skies from a distance.
R.L.B. [Robert Lucas Boissevain]
The last four lines are a paraphrase of
Der Abschied, "The Farewell", from Gustav Mahler's
Das Lied von der Erde. A recording of it is here:
http://bit.ly/1SDkBr8. The Boissevain family was active in forming the Concertgebouw in Amsterdam, and Mahler was popular. The conductor, Willem Mengelberg, performed Mahler's work during the Occupation, even though Mahler was Jewish.
by the Yad Vashem in Jerusalem, which takes pains to verify claims to be on the list. Why were Bob and Sonia willing to take such risks, which Bob paid for with his suffering in a concentration camp and his early death in 1945? Hester believes that her father "never forgave the Nazis" because I. G. Farben was part of the group that bankrupted him and his father in 1936.
